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A Few Love Songs For Rational Adults

In Music, Relationships on September 16, 2009 at 11:42 am

After that last post of fist-shaking ranting, I feel that it’s only fair for me to hold up some examples of good pop music and talk about stuff that I actually like. Pop music that doesn’t have sophomoric lyrics or stupidly naive views of human love and relationships. Pop music that’s actually good, that says something astute and interesting about the human condition (whatever that is) and turns us into better, smarter, sexier people by listening to it. There’s plenty of music like this out there. Music that doesn’t just smile at us through a haze of pot smoke and idealism about how nice niceness is, but instead links up its brain and heart into an emotionally mature, intelligent supersongwritingmachine and entertains us with flashes of brilliant melodic insight.

Here are a few examples of stuff about love and emotions and all that that seems like it was actually written by rational adults. If you can think of any additional examples, by all means speak up.

Pretty Much Anything by the Magnetic Fields

69 Love Songs is easily one of my favorite albums. If I were a character from High Fidelity, it would be on my top five list. On that list, it would have a number like “three” or “two” assigned to it. The album isn’t just great because it has songs about dancing bears and bunnies fucking, it’s great because so many of the songs that once can actually relate to. These are songs that drag love into a laboratory, do bajillions of test on it, and then publish their findings in Nature. Not many naive proclamations of how awesome stuff is, these are mostly studies of the particular.

Elliot Smith, Say Yes

While a lot of Elliot Smith’s career is a nasty illustration of Why Heroin is Bad, he was also a brilliant lyricist in addition to being a suicidal smack addict. He wrote lots of songs, but I’ll focus on the one that everyone seems to like, Say Yes.

The song’s all about vulnerability, expecting the worst, and feeling sort of weird when things actually work out. Smith finds himself in a position where he doesn’t feel like he has any power or agency. (“They want you or they don’t,” etc.) Feeling powerless, feeling like you have nothing to offer and plaintively asking for acceptance is an experience that I think pretty much everyone except psychopaths and egotistical douchebags have experienced. Say Yes encapsulates yearning, definitely, but also the pleased disbelief that things can actually be good. The lyrics seem to say “Holy shit! You’re still around? I haven’t fucked this up? Um… Wow!”

Early stuff by Liz Phair

Years ago, before she turned into an overly polished Avril Lavigne soundalike, Liz Phair was a respected, self-taught, indie singer/songwriter. Remember that? Anyway, I still like her. I even kinda like her in her new pop-princess guise. I have particular affection for Johnny Feelgood off of Whitechocolatespaceegg because it’s just so damn direct, and that’s not something you get out of pop music much (really- explicit lyrics usually aren’t). It’s a song about having dirty, rough sex with a guy who sounds like kind of an asshole, and the refrain is simply “And I liked it,” the implication being, that maybe she shouldn’t have.

Who hasn’t thought that at one point or another? (Well, virgins and Mormons haven’t.) But, for everyone who’s ever had a sexually rewarding encounter with a person of dubious character, this is the song for them.

Favorite lyric: “Moderation is a memory.” Phair isn’t proclaiming her love to the cosmos, or belting out how unrealistically transcendent it all is, she’s acknowledging her own irrational mental state. Refreshing little twist, there.

Most stuff by Dan Bern, especially Johnny Cash and Anais Nin

Dan Bern is another singer/songwriter from the nineties, and at this point in my little list I feel like I include someone slightly more current, but whatever. This is a post about good love songs, though, not hip, new music.

Johnny Cash and Anais Nin is a delightful little song about two very dissimilar people having a relationship. This sort of thing happens quite a bit- I once dated a girl who wasn’t a depressive cynic, for instance. In the song the two titular characters run grooves into each other, shape each others’ interests and experiences, and each adapts, changes, and learns something from the other. They get into what their partner is into, expand their field of experience, and generally become more well-rounded human beings. This is great! As much fun as temporarily getting lost in some superhigh love-nirvana might be, ultimately relationships ought to bring out the best in us, improve us as people, and help us experience more of the world at large. Jonny Cash and Anais Nin is a song about that- people who, instead of retreating into the maddeningly comfortable little bubble of their relationship, become partners in crime and subsequently devour more of the world because they met each other.

Also, the song has horse fucking. How could you go wrong?

The Beatles, Something

Since I spent my last post beating up on the Beatles I feel that it’s only fair that I say something nice about them now. I actually love the Beatles- I remember listening to my stepmother’s old Sgt. Peppers cassette back when I was in middle school, and it blew my friggin’ mind. I mean it. The ominous and discordant climax of A Day in the Life scared the shit out of me when I first heard it. Really! I wondered to myself what the hell was that about, what was that?

(Answer: Drugs. Lots and lots of drugs.)

But, onto the song at hand. The Beatles wrote lots of cheesy little love songs that probably took them about ten minutes or so to pound out. (I’m not exaggerating- they allegedly wrote I Wanna Be Your Man, the Rolling Stones’ first single, over lunch while Jagger & Co. watched.) Something is not one of those songs. For one thing, it was written by George Harrison, whom I always thought was a bit more introspective than Lennon & McCartney.

The reason I like Something, is that even though it is a soaring and cuddly-sounding song, it’s ultimately about uncertain about a person and relationship, but going with it anyway. There are plenty of times when people can’t really articulate why they’re attracted to a person, and when their friend asks them “So, what’s your plan with this,” the reply is “I don’t know.”

That’s the best part of Something- the big big, spiraling bridge bit is a profession of ignorance. Harrison is saying to us “Wow, I have no idea why I like this or where this is going, but damn, it’s great and I’m going to enjoy this.” The Quiet Beatle managed to write a song that was about reverie without pretense, no small feat.

I’ve also always liked Lovely Rita for some reason. Nifty piano part there.

The Beatles Were Wrong! or I Shake My Fist At Naive Pop Music!

In Music, Rants, Relationships on September 14, 2009 at 9:42 pm

The Beatles have been in the news a bit recently, what with their new box set and special edition of Rock Band. It seems that the powers that be at EMI have decided to cash in on the Fab Four again for the first time in a decade or so. Maybe soon they’ll finally be on iTunes…

But that’s not really what I want to talk about. I want to use the Beatles’ momentary spot in the limelight to talk about one of their songs that I think is not only wrong, but damagingly awful. A song that is horrible not just because it’s incorrect, but awful because it promotes self-deception and a twisted view of human relationships. That song: All You Need Is Love.

Catchy and friendly as it is, I really hate this song. I hate its title, and I hate what it expresses. I hate how people quote it, and I utterly revile how it promotes a simplistic and childish view of human emotions and relationships. I also hate how it is sort of emblematic of the Beatles’ psychedelic phase. Strawberry Fields Forever is much better.

Love is not all you need. Love is not something that will solve all of your problems or make you into a perfectly, existentially satisfied human being. There is so much more to our mental and emotional makeup than a simple desire for love, just as there is more to our physical makeup than a simple desire for protein.

Mind you, I am not opposed to love. That would be ridiculous, sociopathic, and misanthropic. I’m none of those things. I am ardently pro-love. I’m all for losing oneself in a flurry of dopamine and romance. What I do think, though, is that love is a necessary, but not sufficient, ingredient for human happiness and satisfaction.

In so much of fiction and pop culture love is portrayed as the ultimate. “You complete me.” “Happily ever after.” All of that. What a horribly limited experience to pursue. That’s all you want? Someone else? That’s all it takes- the company and affection of others? What about intellectual and artistic pursuits? What about adventures and experiences? These are definitely things that are nice when shared with loved ones, but I would contend that solitary enjoyment of such things can also garner some satisfaction.

Likewise, what a horrible burden to put on your partner. If someone were to tell you, “you’re my happy ending,” “you complete me,” or “all I need is your love,” that should really freak you out. No one person is capable of being those things, of being the fount of existential satisfaction for another. People need each other, yes, but they also need other sources of meaning and affirmation.

For example: While her life is overshadowed by mental illness and suicide, Virginia Woolf and her husband Leonard had a fantastic marriage. They were intellectual partners and professional collaborators, and each of them wrote enthusiastically about their marriage. (And yes, I know that Virginia slept with ladies. I don’t think that’s a strike against their relationship, though. If anything I imagine that Leonard was totally into it.)

Despite their wonderful partnership, though, Woolf was the one who wrote A Room of One’s Own, which basically says that artists need a certain sense of personal autonomy in order to flourish. Love, according to Ms. Woolf, is not all you need.

So… there. Take that, Beatles! Me and Virginia Woolf say you’re wrong! Suck on it! And while you’re at it, most of the rest of pop music can suck on it, too! So much of it seems naive and non-lucid. Grand promises and proclamations that aren’t really tenable or applicable to real human experience. You have to do a fair amount of digging to find something that actually seems like it was written by an adult, something that portrays human emotions and needs in a realistic or poignant way.

Also, Imagine sucks. I still love Sgt. Peppers, though.

In Which I Go to Burning Man

In Burning Man, Social Conventions, Travel on September 9, 2009 at 7:42 pm

The Playa glowed like a flattened, Jesus-free Christmas tree on fire. The cracked desert was filled with noise and shining movement, fanciful creations of freaks and artists, the spitting and exploding light of a dance stage lit with flamethrowers. Despite my fatigue from the day’s drive from Eugene, I couldn’t help but be impressed with how otherworldly it was. The landscape, the lit-upedness of it all, was just neat.

I approached Burning Man with a mix of expectations. On one hand, I was very excited about going to what is essentially one of the biggest parties in the world, a vast, odd collection of all things awesome. What’s more, I was going with Seph and his very cool girlfriend L. Nifty things are always best shared.

On the other hand, my unquenchable skepticism kept acting up, bristling with reflexive spurts of ire at the hippie ethos that seems to float around the thing. (For instance, don’t let anyone ever tell you that Burning Man is ecologically friendly…) On another, third, hand I didn’t know what to expect. I would just check it out, see what was up.

Not that that’s really an option. Everything I’d read about Burning Man emphasized the ideal of complete participation, of having “no spectators.” Not in the sense that all of the art and performances were interactive, but everyone had to do something. It doesn’t necessarily have to be something huge or complicated, but walking around in just jeans and a t-shirt and merely looking at things is not in the spirit of BM. Every single person there is expected to participate in some way, get their freak on, act a bit strange, get into the mindset.

This, I found, is what makes Burning Man so neat. It’s not merely the scale of the event that’s mind-blowing. It’s not the fact that it’s especially large or in such a harsh climate, though that is a bit part of its unique appeal. The thing that makes Burning Man especially incredible is that it is a temporary setting in which different sort of social norms apply. It’s a big swathe of unstructured playtime wherein you can mess with just about everyone and everything there. For instance:

I was walking about on the Playa (that is, the dry lake bed in the Black Rock Desert on which Burning Man is held) alone one day, when all of a sudden I saw a giant slide. It was perhaps sixty feet high and twenty wide, and at any one time perhaps thirty people were either climbing up or going down the thing. At its foot were a collection of large foam blocks to break the fall of the sliders, and several people at the bottom were also chucking them at people who were going down. Of course, I wanted to slide down the thing, but I wondered: Who was in charge? Was there a line? Had a group already claimed the slide, and would I be intruding by climbing onto it? What was the etiquette and protocol? I shook of those thoughts, though, and realized that the protocol was basically “do what thou wilt,” climbed onto the thing, and slid down while going “woo!”

At the foot of the slide a rather large red bus was parked, blasting dance music. The driver was a big butch lesbian dressed as a Catholic priest, and a mostly naked woman lounged on the hood of the vehicle, writhing to the music. Several people were dancing on the bus’ two levels, and I wondered again “what is the protocol for getting on?” And again, I had to remind myself that it was socially acceptable to just climb on it and start dancing.

Now, it may sound like I was overthinking things in those last two examples, but such thoughts and hesitations are valid. How many times have you asked yourself “Ok, how does this work?” or “What do I have to do to get X?” We go through those thoughts all of the time in our daily lives because we want to live in a socially acceptable manner, do things in a socially acceptable way. In general we want to not be (at the least) embarrassed or (at the worst) a total sociopath. Every single day we think “What rules, spoken or unspoken, must I abide by?”

At Burning Man, several of them just aren’t there, and that is simultaneously really odd and a lot of fun. I’ve seen shiny, loud and weird before. Saturday nights in Shibuya and Sundays in Yoyogi Park provided for plenty of that. The upheaval and substitution of social conventions, though, that was the real show. There are almost no monetary transactions in Black Rock City (the temporary community where Burning Man takes place), and that changes the environment fairly dramatically. Two guys came by our camp and just gave us screwdrivers (the drink) no questions asked. A complete stranger gave me a beer. I was given a few memorial trinkets, and obliged several people who asked for hugs. It was awesome. Burning Man is otherworldly in the sense that it is a spectacle, yes, but it is also somewhere where lots of everyday assumptions don’t apply.

Because a complete narrative of what we did there would be tiresome and probably inaccurate, I’ll limit myself to some bullet points of things that I thought were awesome.

-Thunderdome!

Every year a group calling themselves Death Guild reconstructs a Mad Max-style Thunderdome at Burning Man. Just like in the movie, people climb up on the sides of the geodesic dome and shout at the two combatants who are strapped into bouncing harnesses. At Burning Man, the fighters used padded weapons, so unfortunately there as no resorting to chainsaws or spiked hammers. It was all excellent nonetheless, though, particularly in that the goth atmosphere served as an antidote to the hippie love fest that was going on elsewhere. Peace, love, forgiveness, self-expression and all that shit are all well and good, but damn it was nice to see some action. Girls in black corsets, grinding, thrashing guitars, huge shouting dudes bringing the hurt on each other. That was fun. Hippie niceness is okay, but what really got me going was the awesome adrenaline rush of regulated violence.

As much as it seemed to contrast, though, nothing going on at Thunderdome was really “against” the spirit of Burning Man. The goths and metal fans were as free as anyone else to show off what they had, regardless. The hippie ethos is very dominant, but not at all mandatory, and those who “transgressed” it were as welcome as anyone else.

There was also roller derby, which was also awesome and combat-filled.

-The Rocket!

A large, shiny Buck Rogers-style rocketship jutted up from the Playa, and via a gantry one could go inside and take a look around. The interior was a collection of space-age doodads, shiny buttons, comical alien specimens, blinking lights and screens, and a swiveling captain’s chair at the very top. The artists who’d made the rocket said to nearly everyone there that it would be taking off on Friday night.

“Really?” was the inevitable reply, “you’re going to launch this thing?”

“Oh yes,” they said with an entirely straight face, “we have a plasma engine expect to get it a good two or three feet off the ground.” I’ve got to give them credit- they got everyone talking about their installation, and what they were going to do with it. Lots of people wondered if they were serious about it all or not, and whether that thing was going to rise at all. There was no way that they could actually generate enough thrust. Costs alone would have gotten in the way. I thought for a moment that they might have buried a pneumatic elevator underneath it, but that, too, would have been a huge undertaking.

The day before the launch we were sitting around our camp doing nothing in particular when one of our neighbors, an Australian, started talking to us and the subject of the rocket came up.

“You know they’re going to launch it on Friday, right?” he said.

“Well, that’s what they say,” one of us replied.

“Yeah, well. They got this plasma engine in it. You know what plasma engines do, right? They give the finger to technology, that’s what. That’s what they’re all about. They’re going to fuck every bit of technology here. Watch out for your credit cards. They’re not going to work after that. The plasma, you know- it fucks technology. That’s why all of those Chinook helicopters have been circling around. The military is very interested in what’s going on here, all these Silicon Valley types building weird shit out in the desert. You watch. They’re going to launch that thing.”

(I’d assumed that the Chinooks were circling mainly because we were on protected federal land.)

“It has lots of vents in the side,” I said, “I think they’re just going to do a pyrotechnics thing.”

“Nah. It’s going to launch. You’ll see.”

Listening to this guy, I dearly hoped that he was being extraordinarily sarcastic and dry, though I don’t think that he was. It was my least favorite part of Burning Man, all of the people who believe in absurd things like government conspiracies or auras. The rocket, it turned out, did not really “launch” and didn’t fuck all of the technology in the area (my cards work just fine). The rockteers who built it made it the center of a sizable fireworks display, albeit one that I wasn’t able to catch for a variety of reasons. Sure, I only beat out a crazy conspiracy loony, but it still feels good to be right.

-Naked People!

While there were a few attractive naked people about (no, not me- I enjoyed dressing oddly) the vast majority of them were older men. I was a bit perplexed by this at first. Promises of public nudity bring with them adolescent male ideas of firm, nubile, unclad women flitting about the atmosphere clothed only in the admiration of my appreciative eyes.

Okay, I know better than that. But still…

While individuals fitting that idealized description did indeed exist, most of the nudity on display was in the form or rather unappealing, aging, graying man-butt. Talking with Joseph about this, it soon became utterly logical as to why that would be the case. Women are probably less likely to doff all of their clothing than men, what with apprehensions regarding sexual harassment and all. What’s more, most young people (I believe) don’t view nudity as an ideological thing at all. I’ve never met anyone my age who thinks that they’re making some sort of political or social point by taking their clothes off. Those kind of ideals belong to an older generation. When viewed in that light, it’s entirely sensible as to why old, gray dude-balls were more likely to be seen than perky, young lady-butt.

-Clubs!

There were two sizable dance clubs at Burning Man, and several small ones. (One of the smaller ones insisted on recitation of poetry before dispensing booze, which was fun.) The setups were amazing, all the more because looking at the sound systems, lasers, projectors, props, etc., I was very cognizant that someone carted all of that stuff into the desert, and would be carting it out pretty soon. One of the large ones, aptly named Opulent Temple, featured no small amount of fire dancers performing amidst the appreciative crowd and beneath of blanket of pulsating lasers. One of the fire dancers actually caught himself on fire, which was good for a laugh. Don’t worry. He was alright. I hope.

These clubs were not provided by the Burning Man organization. Like everything else, they were put together by participants. They obviously took a staggering amount of time and money to put together, and I wondered what the incentives were for the coordinators. The DJs, I imagined, could gain a fair amount of notoriety by playing at Burning Man, and whoever bankrolled this was in for a fair amount of return with regards to reputation and social capital. But, really, this was it. This was the biggest party in the world. If you’re going to run a dance club, if you like electronic music, this was the place to be. I could see some very dedicated rich people doing this sheerly for fun, purely because no party in any city was going to be better than this.

-The Temple

Every year at Burning Man there are two recurring large-scale art installations, both of which are burned at the end of the event. One, of course, is the Man himself. The other is the Temple, whose structure changes every year.

For a temporary structure, it was impressive, a three story high building that resembled a lotus, each panel cut in patterns that reminded me of classical Islamic art. The timbers themselves were strewn with markings, people’s written messages to lost loved ones or other such personal things, all of which would go up in flames on Sunday night. In all honesty, I was surprised at how sincere they all were. My first reaction on seeing all of the heartfelt personal messages was to write something clever, something cutting or sarcastic that would wither the hippie sentiment. Unexpectedly, though, that I couldn’t find any sarcasm or wit written on the timbers. I was surprised as well, when I actually wrote something sincere on the Temple the day before it burned. I suppose it’s easy to write something honest and heartfelt, to get it out of you, when you know that it will be immolated in the near future. It’s like confessing to a stranger, shouting to an empty room, or tearing up one’s nocturnal poetry. Not that I’ve ever done any of those things. Goodness, no…

-The Burn

Saturday night was the big event, the night that the Man would finally go up into flames. There was a brief moment of doubt, though, because of a considerable dust storm. The winds had been calm for most of the week, but that night we could hardly see twenty feet ahead of us. Tents whipped about and the whole of the Playa seemed to be a swirling mass of white and darkness. We hunkered down in a friend’s camp, set up like a bar. I had some rum, and wondered if the storm would subside at all.

It did, though, and nicely. Just before ten we made our way out onto the Playa and saw nearly the whole of Black Rock City’s population focused upon one point. The art cars were all stopped in a giant bright circle around the Man, pumping music and colored lights into the now-calm desert night. Fire dancers gyrated and gamboled in front of the gigantic wooden effigy and all about us people screamed and buzzed with an undefined enthusiasm.

Preceding the burn itself was a fireworks display made all the better by the thumping music and ambient light. People were jumping around in costumes just as they had been earlier in the week, but now there was a sense of communal anticipation and excitement. The fireworks popped, and suddenly a massive explosion of flame flung itself upwards from beneath the Man. The effigy and all of the wood around him had been licked by flames and heat, and soon the Man himself was on fire.

And he took a damn long time to burn. According to one of my campmates, who’d been to Burning Man the year before, the Man last year took only a little while to burn and fall. This time, though, he and all of the wood around him were on fire for a good half hour before everything collapsed. I was expecting a sort of final fireball or explosion, but it never really came. Instead, the Man and everything around him smoldered in the fashion of a gigantic communal campfire, falling only after taking its sweet time to burn.

Hours later, I rode a bike out to the site of the Man by myself, and walked about amidst the embers. There were people there, sitting down in a heat that I couldn’t tolerate for long, and no one was really talking. One guy did pound on a drum arhythmically, and other people sat off to the side, warming themselves against the huge, orange coals.

The fact that the Man (and the Temple) are both burned, I think, is rather essential to their appreciation. With both structures, I would have been not nearly as impressed with either of them had I not known that they’d been temporary. The fact that a group of artists and engineers can build something that they know will only be appreciated within a given time period is something that I find rather inspirational, a word that I use very sparingly.

Things are not meaningful because they are endless or immutable. They’re not significant because they’ll always be there. Things, people, jobs, relationships, works of art, conversations, whatever can be immensely important and wonderful even if they only last a couple of days. Or hours. The Man, the Temple, and indeed all of Black Rock City are gone now, and that doesn’t invalidate, at all, the temporary experience that they imparted on me or anyone else who was there. If anything the brevity makes me appreciate them all the more.

I’m back now, in Portland. The other day while I was on my bike I saw a pair of goth kids, leaning against a wall, smoking and surrounded by less radical Portlanders. Not an unusual sight. I was immediately reminded of Death Guild and their huge camp and Thunderdome setup, at home in an environment that was unconditionally accepting of whatever they thought was awesome, whatever, on some level worked. I like it that those sort of environments exist. As cynical as I might act about hippie ideals, it was absolutely spectacular being in an environment that unlimited, that unrestrained and free. If I can ever attend again (no idea if that will happen) I know that I’ll be even more into it. I’ll be bringing an art project, or at least a really nifty outfit or camp, with me. Something definitively mine, something that I can throw into that brilliant and beautiful insanity on the Playa.

More Adventures in Bad Hair

In Hair on September 8, 2009 at 5:35 pm

I am working on a rather extensive post about Burning Man, but before that, here’s a picture of me with a shaved head and beard. I like having a buzz cut, though I’ve only had it this short once before. Also, the beard is longer than the head fuzz, which is a bit odd. I don’t know if I’ll keep the beard or not- quite frankly, I think I look a little older (and vaguely pirate-like) this way.

This drastic measure was undertaken because prior to this, I had a rather nasty mohawk that I needed to get rid of. My hair was standing up on top of my head, and I had a few curved stripes in the fuzzy sides of my dome. It was neat for Burning Man, but I didn’t want to look too much like a Road Warrior extra whilst walking around Portland.

"Yes, Mr. Duke, I would like a ride! Where are we going?"

In Books on August 26, 2009 at 9:33 am

For a long time, I had a pretty good idea of what Hunter S. Thompson without ever actually reading any of his books. This was a guy who was all about drugs, guns, insanity, weirdness and of a very particular authorial voice. Maybe it’s because I grew up reading Doonesbury and was familiar with Uncle Duke. He also seems to be a sort of hero to a certain kind of hipster male, the type with whom I often associate. Whatever the cause, I felt like I knew Thompson pretty well already, knew exactly what I was getting into when I finally picked up Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas last week.

I want to say that I was utterly surprised, that there were things about Thompson’s persona and style that the general cultural effluvia hadn’t yet revealed to me. Unfortunately, I can’t really do that. I knew exactly what I was getting into, and FaLiLV is pretty much exactly what I thought it would be- a drug-loaded travel book written in an expansive, splattery style that meshes perfectly with the Ralph Steadman illustrations that accompany it.

I read the book in two days, and I think that’s a good sign, usually, if you read a book and have no idea where the pages are going. The action clips along fairly rapidly and one thing I have to say for Thompson is that he isn’t boring. He is very, very not boring. Thopson’s voice is his strong suit, his ability to inject his own brand of energy and insanity into whatever’s around him. His voice is meaty, big, and ravenous. At no point could you ever mistake it for a book by someone else, at no point is Thompson generic or anonymous. He stamps each sentence as his own.

I love authors who can do this, but they also leave me occasionally unsatisfied. FaLiLV doesn’t really have a plot. Well, it has a really thin plot wherein Raoul Duke (Thompson’s literary persona) and Dr. Gonzo (his attorney) are supposed to cover a motorcycle race and DAs’ conference, but that’s more of an excuse for the whole jaunt. Thompson gets by almost entirely sheer charisma, strength of voice, and sheer power of his prose. There’s no real drama, plot, or character development- just the sheer power of Thompson’s Gonzo Journalism.

I’m reading Tropic of Capricorn right now, and Henry Miller is much the same way. So are Joyce, Kerouac, and Woolf, for that matter. I love these authors, I love their fantastically beautiful use of words. If I could write a third as well as any of them, I’d be ecstatic. But, I want to experience books as more than just aesthetic things. I want to be intellectually stimulated. I don’t just want wonder and beauty, I want something interesting to think about.

When I read, I can’t help but look for those things. When I read Mrs. Dalloway, as much as I enjoyed it as a beautiful and wonderful work of art, I couldn’t help but think about World War One. With Thompson, I had a similar experience. I kept looking for something to think about in the book, some core idea or ideal. As much as I enjoyed the balls-out wildness, I was needed something social, cultural, and political to relate the book to.

Fortunately, I think Thompson was, too. I don’t know how drug addled he was when he wrote the book, but interspersed with all of the decadence, vomit, and weirdness, Thompson has a much larger point on the death of the Sixties. Reading the book in San Francisco, I couldn’t help but think about the Sixties, hippies, and everything radical and weird that rose up with my parents’ generation.

Thompson reminisces about his experience of the Sixties, of San Francisco, and while sitting and reading in that same city this particular passage (which I later learned is the second most famous section of the book, after the intro) struck me:

There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down to Los Altos or La Honda. . . . You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. . . .

And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting — on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . .

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark — that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.

He just summed it all up there. The Sixties were significant and revolutionary, yes, but also facile and naive. What kind of values are “Peace” and “Love,” really? Such generalities are unassailable and unformed, and one might as well support “Food” and “Water.” As much change as there was, the overall mindset of the hippies was one lacked a coherence and depth. Popular opinion did change America dramatically, but at the end of the day plenty of the old paradigms and demons were still around. What happened was social change, not ascension or mass enlightenment.

The drugs, of course, were part of that. Or rather, they weren’t. Duke and Dr. Gonzo spend the book in various states of inebriation. But it’s only that. Their debauchery and excess is only debauchery and excess. None of the various drugs bring them close to some kind of Timothy Leary style epiphany. Thompson even calls Leary out on that directly at one point. As much as FaLiLV may glorify or glamorize drug use, Thompson repudiates the idea that the things are a shortcut to some kind of grand cosmic understanding. To him they are depraved and perhaps enjoyable things, but, at the end of the day, simply chemicals. There is no road to Nirvana in a tab of acid or pill. There is only visceral pleasure and excess.

For this, FaLiLV stood out for me as not only an aesthetic experience, but also as a critical response to the Sixties from someone inside the counterculture. Thompson does not repudiate the hippie generation because he’s against them, his issue with them is that so much of what they believed turned out to be nothing but air. It was like a whirlwind that swirled everything about, ravaged the landscape and jostled it. But, the wind dissipated. It wasn’t solid. What’s so funny about peace, love and understanding? They’re so general and open-ended that you can’t build anything coherent on or around them, that’s what. Thompson recognizes the energy and wonder of the Sixties, but he does not pretend that there was no shortage of vacuity and unfounded idealism, innocence just waiting to be crushed.

Later, when Duke and Dr. Gonzo attend a DA’s conference, that naivete is shown in reverse. This time, it’s law enforcement who has no idea what anything means. The presentations that they attend about how to identify “dope fiends” are clueless and dated, on par with Reefer Madness. Just as the hippies and flower children see nothing but sunlight and happiness, the DAs only see whacked-out rapists, chronic masturbators, and murderous psychopaths when they look at the so-called “drug culture.” No one perceives moderation. Not even Thompson, really. The conversation is starkly uninformed on all fronts, to the benefit of no one.

I was happy to finally spend a bit of time with the father of Gonzo Journalism. He (or at least his literary persona) seemed depraved yet extraodinarily intelligent. Weird, and three steps away from ranting at pedestrians in front of a Safeway, saved by his inner articulate nature. I’ll probably revisit him- his book about the ’72 Presidential campaign is supposed to be a noteworthy political tome. Mostly, I want to hear him talk about Nixon in that stupendous voice of his.

"It Seems To Be Some Sort of Internationally Recognized Landmark…"

In San Francisco, Travel on August 23, 2009 at 3:51 pm

That Robert Frost poem is really misinterpreted. The Road Not Taken isn’t about rugged individualism or how wonderfully shiny self-expression is. It’s sort of an ironic poem, really, if you bother to read the whole damn thing and not just take the last bit and paste it on a Hallmark card.

Yet, there seems to be a certain breed of snob out there who take that shit literally, who blanch at the idea of seeing a tourist site, who shudder at the thought of going to any place that’s going to swarmed by families with cameras and baseball caps. I’ll cop to having a little bit of this attitude in me. Even as we approached the Golden Gate Bridge, a place I specifically wanted to go, my inner hipster-snob-asshole voice said “Oh god, we’re tourists now.” Once the thing reared up on the skyline, though, once the great orange towers reared up against the sky, I was duly impressed with the thing, and able to shove the annoying inner voice down into a mental oubliette where he belongs. We got out of the car and there were indeed several families with cameras and baseball caps swarming about- khaki shorts, sweatshirts, minivans.

The contemptuous arrogant bastard was safely in his damp little hole, though, and I was determined to be a tourist and enjoy it. I like being a tourist. People who say, “Oh, I love traveling but I hate tourists,” or “I’m a traveler, not a tourist,” are hypocrites. I like the sense of renewed perception that comes from being in a new venue, and I like seeing what the place has to offer. That includes places that are staggeringly famous and overrun with out-of-towners. While I do like wandering about on my own in the non-famous parts of a place (and did plenty of that in SF) there is a certain feeling of niceness that comes from going to a place that is absolutely, unmistakably famous. Iconic and symbolic. Somewhere or something that encapsulates its city, region, or country.

Every time I stood at Hachiko crossing in Shibuya, I sensed that I was somehow taking in an abreviated version of Tokyo, a kind of concentrated, focused bit of the city’s zeitgeist. I felt the same way about the Shanghai’s Pudong skyline, an image that fired rapid development into the the night sky. Chicago’s Lake Shore Drive is like that. Driving down it you think, “Yes, there are the Big Shoulders, right there. There’s the unmistakable something-ness of this place.”

The Golden Gate is, of course, a symbol of San Francisco. It’s also a symbol of everything that San Francisco represents, and that’s saying a lot. It’s also a big damn bridge. I love seeing the functionality of these places, knowing that this thing that’s a symbol of so many amorphous things is also part of someone’s daily commute. That’s great. Walking across the bridge, I loved seeing the road signs. This thing that gets imprinted on so many cheap gifts and duplicated in so much media is a living, workable thing, and you would be an asshole to try a U-turn on it.

I was sort of pleased to see, though, that there really are rather prominent anti-suicide signs on the bridge. I guess that’s one other thing that the bridge is famous for- the dramatic ejection of people and things into the San Francisco Bay. One of my high school English teachers claimed to have angrily thrown her engagement ring from the bridge. Seeing the signs though, I wondered how big a drama queen you’d have to be to kill yourself by jumping from this thing. What a cry for attention. What a final, pathetic “hey, guys- lookit me!” act. You’d have to have a weird alchemy of self-loathing and self-aggrandizement to actually do it.

I loved it, though. I loved that it was crowded and covered with camera flashes, the feeling that somehow we were participating in something significant just by walking across a sizable piece of urban engineering. I loved that it was crowded with bicycles and people shouting, plenty of people walking along and making use of this gigantic, significant and beautiful bit of metal and concrete. Yes, I thought, this is the Golden Fucking Gate Bridge and I’m experiencing it right now. I’m on it. I’m on top of this thing, that whose image I’ve seen, but now my experience is unmediated.

One last thing- I was lucky enough to be with three friends from Japan, people with whom I was very pleased to see again. Six months ago I left, and wondered what my relationships with people there would be like in the future I wondered if the connections would hold. Here, they did. My friendships, it seems, can take a bit of abuse and estrangement, which is an encouraging, when you think about it. We looked across to the Pacific and waved to our erstwhile home. “Hi, Japan!” we said, jumping up and down with utterly appropriate overenthusiasm. Seeing them was excellent and I feel that this picture is utterly representative of them.

Bubbles!

In San Francisco on August 23, 2009 at 1:12 pm

Recently got back from a trip to the lovely Bay Area. While walking through downtown with some friends we happened upon a fountain that had been unexpectedly and frothily filled with bubbles.

Foam was pouring out of the thing and bits of it were getting carried all over the square by the winds. Kids were running after bits of it and a nearby outdoor yoga class continued on despite the artificial snow that was pelting them.

I thought for a minute “Is it supposed to do that?” and asked a nearby security guard what the deal with the fountain was. “Someone poured detergent into it,” he said, smiling. He didn’t seem bothered by it at all. Maybe the fountain wasn’t in his security-guard jurisdiction, but he seemed to be enjoying the casual vandalism as much as anyone. I wondered if the perpetrators had been inspired by that one guy who threw red dye into Trevi Fountain a few years ago.

This is why I love the West Coast. From San Francisco to Seattle there seems to be a prevailing feel for this sort of thing, this kind of verve and life. I remember reading Ecotopia in high school and encountering similar ideas in Nine Nations of North America later in college. In both cases, I thought the authors made for too much of regional differences. However, I don’t think their ideas were totally unfounded. There is an identifiable aesthetic and way of things here, one that I love and appreciate. People complain about Portland being overrun by “hipster douchebags” (a phrase anymore that is a collocation) but I know that they’re coming out here for this sort of thing- flurries of mischief and joy, with amused security guards looking on.

The Joy of Lacunae

In Epiphanies on August 6, 2009 at 10:10 pm

Late last year, I thought to myself, “You know, I really should watch the original Dracula.” This thought came pretty much out of nowhere, but I acted on it. Short review: Dracula is pretty good, except for the guy who plays Johnathan Harker. He sucks. Other than that, give it a watch.

One of the things that bothered me prior to watching it was that I was familiar with so many of Dracula‘s peripherals: Bela Lugosi in the cape, the accent, the one-liner “I don’t drink… wine.” I had read the book twice, but so much pop culture ephemera and effluvia (from Count Chocula to Anne Rice) has been influenced by the movie that I felt like I had this glaring, weird hole in my pop-culture education. So I watched it, patched up that hole, and saw where so many of the cliches come from. It felt good to do, and I’ve spent a fair amount of time filling these gaps, these lacunae, in my knowledge/experience base.

New things are easy to experience. Friends may want to go see a new movies with you, or recommend a new book. There will be plenty of buzz about a current television show, but not much about one that has passed. Older things you have be cognizant about, you have to seek out. I’ve been doing just that, and it’s fun.

For example: I recently read A Brief History of Time. The book, the title, the cover, the personage of Stephen Hawking are all instantly recognizable. It’s an icon. (That said, I think that most people would probably be at a loss to explain what the books about. Maybe they’d say “black holes” or something to that effect.) I enjoyed reading A Brief History not only because it’s a well written survey of astrophysics, but also because I was conscious of the fact that I was digging into an icon while I was reading it. Going into something whose peripherals, image, influences, and cultural place you already know is weirdly satisfying. All of the ornamentation and latticework around the book was already apparent to me, but it was ornamentation that stood on air. Reading Hawking’s book filled that in, provided a core to a cultural construct that I was already familiar with. Seeing the contours of popular culture fill out and define themselves before your eyes is a particular kind of “ah-ha!” moment.

The downside of this, though, is that once you start thinking about all of the holes in your cultural repertoire, you get into a dilemma articulated by everyone’s favorite pederast, Socrates. “As for me, all I know is that I know nothing,” said the bearded kiddie-fiddler. Socrates was exaggerating a little, but was expressing the frustration of trying to be a generalist. He was a really smart guy, but he realized that he couldn’t actually be an expert on, or know, everything. I’m not given over to to such emo-laden statements (or pedophilia) as Plato’s tutor, but I can share his feeling. Trying to be well-read, as it were, can be frustrating.

Another example: I also read Notes From Underground a while ago, and was happy to do so. This was a seminal work of existentialism and while I’m a big Camus and Sartre fan, Underground has slipped by me. It was okay, but that’s beside the point. Reading it, though, alerted me to the fact that there are huge tracts of Russian literature with which I’m unfamiliar. I don’t think it’s fair to say that I’ve “read” Dostoyevsky, given that I’ve only read one of his books.

Similarly, at the end of A Brief History of Time, Hawking has something of a lament about the distribution of knowledge in the modern world. When a Grand Unified Theory of physics is finally articulated, he says, there will probably be perhaps a dozen people in the world who completely understand and appreciate it. That, he says, demonstrates how wonderfully powerful and knowledgable specialists are, but it also demostrates the difficulty of being a Renaissance man/woman. Back in Newton’s time, says Hawking, intellectuals were expected to be conversant in a variety of topics, from mathematics to literature to biology to ethics. (To be sure, this is probably an idealized version, but let’s go with it.) That’s not the case anymore. Being really, really good at something is what get’s you places. There is no place for generalists.

(At this point, I’m getting a little self-conscious about the high-falutin’ nature of my examples, so I’ll give another: Half Life. I hadn’t played through the Half Life games until recently. I loved them as objects in and of themselves, but was also aware that I was finally getting around to experiencing a key bit of geek iconography. Back to the matter at hand…)

At the crowded, dusty bookstore where I used to work, though, I derived no small amount of joy form the stacks and piles of tomes all around me. There are too many books here to ever read, I thought, and new ones are popping out all the time. Every day. I will be reading, finding things out, until I’m dead. That’s a wonderful thing to realize. The “ah-ha!” moment, the feeling of epiphany and satori, that is the goal. I adore understanding things, but when it comes to knowledge and experience, getting is just as good as having. There will always be things that I don’t know, books I haven’t read, cultural icons that I haven’t explored, and that’s great.

Unlike Socrates who lamented his inability to know everything I say: Wonderful. I’ll take joy in the lacunae, be excited about the gaps. Intellectual and cultural completeness is simply not possible, and one would do well to enjoy that. I will always try to understand more, to patch up the holes, to reach an ideal, but I know I will never get there. Which is fine. More than fine. When I finish a puzzle, give me another, when I walk out of a labyrinth, tell me where the next entrance is, when I close a book, I go to the shelf. Gaps and holes abound. Let them. Socrates lamented his ignorance, but I don’t want to run out of ignorance to obliterate.

Verbing "Placebo"

In Conundrums, Self Improvement on August 4, 2009 at 10:28 pm

About twenty minutes ago, I had a headache. I took some pain relievers, and it’s gone now.

But I know that’s bullshit.

I know that pain relievers take longer than that to kick in, and the only reason I really feel better is because of the placebo effect. I don’t mind the placebo effect. It’s great, it tends to work okay, but I wish that I could get the results without the placebo.

Take, for instance, tea. I love tea. Every morning, I make a cup of it and drink it with breakfast, and I always feel way more awake with that initial sip of tea. But I also know that caffeine takes upwards of 45 minutes to really get going in your system, and that that little sip does nothing, really, to my body chemistry. Yet it works.

What I’d like to be able to do is tap into that feeling, that phenomena, whenever I like. I’d like to be able to trick my brain into getting the placebo effects of, say, caffeine or pain relievers without having to lean on the psychological crutch. Ideally, I’d just be able to “placebo” myself (to coin a verb) out of no where. If there is no real change in body chemistry, then you could theoretically summon up the effects without the focus, right? Could we placebo ourselves by sheer force of will?

If someone hasn’t done science about this, then they really ought to. I want to hack my brain to instantly get that “first-of-tea-okay-I’m-awake-now” feeling. It would come in handy.

Advocatus Diaboli

In Rants, Self Improvement on August 2, 2009 at 5:19 pm

Last night, I got into a rather inconsequential argument with a friend of mine, the details of which are not worth repeating here. A few minutes into the argument, I realized that I wasn’t truly behind my position. Intuitively, I knew my friend was absolutely right. I didn’t want to prove her wrong though. What I wanted, was this: I knew that she was right in an intuitive matter, but that didn’t satisfy my curiosity. I wanted her to explain her position in a more convincing and intellectual fashion, and to do so I was pelting her with a series of questions and accusations that sought to test her contentions. She did, finally, explain herself to my satisfaction, and throughout the course of the conversation I had the thought goddammit, I’m doing it again.

I am a skeptic. This is not just a facet of my character- I sincerely believe that skepticism and inquiry make us into better humans. Believing something for muddy, emotional reasons, I think, has a certain whiff of irresponsibility about it. We all do it, yes, but I believe that we have a responsibility to ourselves and others to believe things that are true, and the truth can stand up to scrutiny.

This is all well and good, yes, but sometimes it can really annoy the shit out of people. An example from my own experience: drop handlebars.

I love drop handlebars. Riding a bike without them seems a little weird, actually. But, a little over a year and a half ago, I remember railing against them, asking all kinds of questions about their utility and ergonomics and such. I was out with my ex, an avid cyclist, and I was in the market for a road bike. I said that I found the handlebars awkward and wondered why anyone would prefer them. I pelted her with questions about them, tried to poke holes in her argument about them and she, rather understandably, became extraordinarily angry with me.

What she didn’t understand, though, was that at no point did I actually disagree with her. I wanted her to prove her point. I didn’t want to get a new kind of bike just because it was “better.” I wanted the reasons for its superiority outlined to me in a coherent manner. This, however, occasionally had social costs. “Why do you always argue things that you don’t believe?” was an exasperated question often levied at me.

I try to moderate it. I really do. I know that such concerns, accusatory questions, and general poking and prodding are not everyone’s idea of a good time, and many people seem to regard my persona of a devil’s advocate as something hostile or nihilistic. It’s not. I’m not skeptical because I want to tear down people’s beliefs. Really. I’m skeptical because I want people to have a coherent outline for their positions, because I believe that such rigor improves the quality of people’s arguments and principles. My questions and criticism, I hope, are forces for good. I also play devil’s advocate with my students on a very regular basis, with great results. In the classroom, though, such a thing is more anticipated.

It’s difficult, though. Mind you, I’m not asking for pity or pats on the head as I explain this. This isn’t a fucking livejournal. I just felt compelled to shed a bit of light on this sometimes (perceived) obnoxious aspect of my personality, in light of my conversation last night. I advocate for the devil, yes, and do so with all of my abilities. But it’s not because I want him to win.