While watching the Iran-Contra hearings, I learned a very important rhetorical strategy from Oliver North. “Did you mean to leave the store with this in your pocket?” I don’t recall. “SRS had three calls about domestic abuse in your household in the last month. Is there anything you want to tell us?” I don’t recall. “Who is your father again?”
Just added to The List and the Story: Against the Eighties
I spent much of the Eighties chasing, capturing, eating, domesticating, petting, and feeding animals. My grandparents’ grey tomcat, known only as Mister Cat, and my bulldog Sassy watched over me. My Uncle Harry had a parrot named Samson, and my Uncle Mike had a mynah bird named Coco. Samson only repeated “How’s it going?” and then bit me. Coco, short for Cocaine, was acquired in a drug deal, and his phrases were “Roll a joint!” in a high woman’s voice and “Co-co-co-cocaine” in a low baritone. Every Easter my grandparents bought about 200 chicks that we would chase and fondle, and I would cut their heads off, boil them, and pluck them in the fall. The seasons defined what I fished for—spring, crappie; summer, catfish; fall, stocked trout. I spent my winters alone in my room with my kingdom of animals I’d acquired that year, keeping them in cages and aquariums and imposing my own anthropomorphic moral code on them. If a crawdad, for instance, hurt another crawdad, I would boil it alive. If a snapping turtle crawled out of the aquarium, I would cut its head off.
Just added to The List and the Story: Against the Eighties
In 1981 William S. Burroughs moved to Lawrence. His life and my family’s intersected twice. The first time, he came to my house and threatened to shoot me for chasing his beloved cats in front of his house on Learnard Avenue. He knew my name by the t-shirts my grandparents had gotten me when I became John Proctor. The second was when he took up residence at my grandparents’ bungalow on Lone Star Lake. Every day, he rowed our old boat to the center of that muddy lake and convalesced. His manager bought it from my grandpa for $29,000. After Burroughs died, that bungalow was sold on eBay for $159,950.
Digitized from "Burroughs & Son," originally published in Numero Cinq , May 2010
Just added to The List and the Story: Against the Eighties
In the summer of 1988, Frank Donald Goodish was stabbed to death in a locker room shower in Puerto Rico by Jose Huertas Gonzalez. Huertas had followed him into the shower with the knife concealed in a towel after telling Goodish he wanted to talk to him about a contract dispute. Both were professional wrestlers, and Huertas represented Carlos Colon, the commissioner of the World Wrestling Council, a Puerto Rican wrestling federation. Colon was nervous that Goodish was going to use his accumulated wealth to buy a stake in the WWC. Goodish had toured extensively through the United States and Japan, and was rumored to be looking to retire from active wrestling and invest in the Latin American wrestling market. After being stabbed, Goodish was reportedly left bleeding on the shower floor until his friend Tony Atlas, perhaps the only American wrestler at the venue, carried him to an ambulance. Goodish died during surgery, and Huertas was later acquitted of all charges by a jury of his peers. Goodish’s stage name was Bruiser Brody.
For most of my childhood, my sole aspiration was to become a professional wrestler. Central States Wrestling was my Sunday morning service, Bulldog Bob Brown and “Freight Train” Rufus R. Jones were the disciples, and Sheik Abdullah the Great was the devil with his minions the Masked Grapplers. But the traveling preacher, the baddest of them all, perhaps the most popular cross-promotional wrestler of the time, was Bruiser Brody. He looked like a modern-day Genghis Khan, and was the only force for good who could stand up to the 400-pounds-of-pure-evil Abdullah the Butcher or even the 500-pound Kamala the Ugandan Giant. I never saw him lose a match.
Just added to The List and the Story: Against the Eighties
In addition to all the List and the Story stuff, I also wrote a piece this weekend for A Child Grows in Brooklyn, on talking to kids about death and god(s). Enjoy!
I got most of my culture secondhand. "Big Bad Bill Is Sweet William Now" was David Lee Roth in Spandex before it was Emmett Miller in blackface. I knew every word Steven Tyler sang for Aerosmith, but still don't know one word Sinclair Lewis wrote in Arrowsmith. Xanadu was Olivia Newton-John in rollerskates before it was the castle that held Charles Foster Kane’s youth hostage.
Just added to The List and the Story: Against the Eighties
The Eighties were a period of change for me. For instance, my name. I started the decade John Light, but in 1982, when I was nine years old, the municipal court of Lawrence, Kansas delivered me into the paternal custody of Greg Proctor, and my name became John Proctor. They even changed the name of the father on my birth certificate. I didn't know who my father before him was, and my mother had started having me call him Dad when I was five. My new grandparents bought me t-shirts with the words “My Name Is John Proctor” broadcast across the front and back.
Just added to The List and the Story: Against the Eighties
Mike Watt, founding member of Eighties hardcore band the Minutemen, wrote a song in the Nineties titled “Against the 70’s” with a refrain of “The kids of today should defend themselves against the Seventies,” and a coda in which Watt almost wistfully croons, “Speakin’ as a child of the Seventies…” Speaking as a child of the Eighties, I’ve spent the rest of my life defending myself against them.
Just added to The List and the Story: Against the Eighties
OK, OK, so I have the first month mapped out - 21 segments, one for each weekday of September, of which there are conveniently 21.
Each weekday morn I shall add a segment, each a self-enclosed little bit that I'll reveal via the blog and then add to Against the Eighties. Some will be include sound, photos, or video, and all will be brief (generally ranging anywhere from 25-200 words). I've tried to make them so that each segment and decade has its own logic, but also works off the other segments and decades.
Enjoy, friends.
I was having dinner at my in-laws' tonight, and my mother-in-law was playing Yo-Yo Ma. I think she was trying to cleanse her palate, as I'd just been playing some Allman Brothers. Anyway, while half-listening I heard Ma playing something familiar - the haunting, beguiling sound of a Piazzolla tango.
I started on-again/off-again relationship with Astor Piazzolla through a Kronos Quartet's EP, "Five Tango Sensations," that I picked up in college. Each tango in the set is named for a human emotional state - Asleep, Loving, Anxiety, Despartar, Fear - and each has pervaded my personal mythology since.
Which leads me to a piece I wrote in the winter of 2000, my first winter in New York City. During this time I was doing a lot of staying out late and making a home of the city, mostly the free parts of it like parks, public commons, and mass transit. One sliver of that home-ness was given to me periodically on the 7 train, when I crossed paths with a blind old Argentinian fellow with an accordion who played tangos for cash. I wanted so bad to immortalize him in words - the longing in every squeeze of the accordion, the way his eyes drooped so much that he looked like he was asleep while playing, his deep baritone voice bellowing out between songs, "LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, ANY DONATIONS ARE GREATLY APPRECIATED." Then, one night, I did.
I wrote this, a sort-of poem written in loose blank verse, almost entirely while at the Queensboro Plaza train station on a brutally cold night. It's about many people and many things, but mainly it's about my early love affair with every soul of New York City. I read it aloud at many, many open mikes until, one fateful summer evening in 2001 while gallivanting across the Brooklyn Bridge with Daniel Nester and Ravi Shankar (the poet, not the sitar virtuoso), I mentioned the piece to them; Dan asked me to send it to him for consideration in his online La Petite Zine, and the rest is history.
I'd actually forgotten about the piece for the past few years, until my mother-in-law and Yo-Yo Ma jogged my memory. After digging it up, I've put up a link to it in my Ephemera section. I don't include this piece as Ephemera because I think it's ephemeral to my work in terms of content - it's actually one of my favorite pieces I've written - but because it's structurally so different from most anything else I've published.
Not much activity on the website this week - I was terribly busy hanging out on the beach with the family and reading about the Brooklyn Dodgers.
I did have some time to add to the Further Reading section, with work by Steve Almond, Jonathan Lethem, Wayne Koestenbaum, Leonard Michaels, and Joe Brainard.
OK, I just added a few more list-essays to the Further Reading section of The List and the Story for your reading pleasure, including work by Donna Steiner, Meriwether Clarke, Tim Bascom, Debra Marquart, Brenda Miller, Carol Paik, Susan Allen Toth, and Dawnelle Wilkie. Links are provides for the ones online, and links to find the ones only in print.
I still have a lot to add, but I've put up the Further Reading section on The List and the Story, dividing it into "List-Essays," "List-Books," and "Some Critical Background on Listing and Storytelling."
Much more coming, especially in the List-Essays section, but here's a taste!
OK, this is big, people. I've decided to put a years-long project I've been working on, which I'm dubbing The List and the Story, up on the website. For the last four months of this year, I'm going to entertain you, break your heart, make you feel sorry for me, crack some jokes, wax aphoristic - all for free.
You can read more about it on the Introduction, but here's the gist: Each month I'll give you a decade of my life, in list form. September=Eighties, October=Nineties, November=Aughts, and December=Seventies (in a little prequel action). I'll add in chunks a few times each week, which I'll assemble along the way until, by the end of the year, you'll have the list and the story of my life.
More soon, Lovelies.
Filmmakers Anna Sang Park & Eric McGinty, with their daughter Oona
I've been vacationing with the family on the Outer Banks of North Carolina for the last week, but I did manage to post an interview with filmmakers Anna Sang Park and Eric McGinty on A Child Grows in Brooklyn. They're currently raising funds for the final stage of post-production on their Brooklyn-set film Wallabout . Enjoy!
In last month’s summer Parks Series entry, I wrote about navigating the abundant natural water around our city with Stringbean. But let’s be honest—while a ferry trip is a pleasant diversion, the meat of our outdoor summer activities with our children involve inland water that is decidedly unnatural, whether we’re splashing in city pools, bathing in the majesty of the many fountains, or enjoying the many watery elements of city parks we’d forgotten were even there over the winter and early spring.
No playground is a playground in the summer without some water to offset the heat generated by all those shiny metal slides (for a case in point on how stifling a playground can be if the metal-to-water ratio is off, just take a hopefully-short visit to the newly redesigned Union Square Park playground at midday) and in fact many, like the sublime Teardrop Park and the overwhelming Pier 25, both downtown, incorporate outdoor plumbing so thoroughly and naturally into their architecture that you have to wonder what they do in the winter. Most of the major fountains of New York City are accessible, some (like the one at the top of Grand Army Plaza) for sitting next to and perhaps catching some spray, and others (like the one at Washington Square Park) for getting in and splashing around.
Man, I am obsessed. But in fairness to myself, these new uses of Google Maps fell into my lap with absolutely no effort on my behalf.
I found the first two in my inbox via Scoutmob. The first, Yelp Wordmap, is a new wordsourcing service Yelp provides that shows what I can only describe as "heat spots" (I hate the word "hotspots") of words people use in their reviews; the service ostensibly allows someone looking to avoid hipsters to avoid heat spots with concentrations of reviews that mention the word "hipster," or if someone is looking for an uncrowded patio he/she might want to find a heat spot of patio concentrations to increase the chances of finding one.
The other use is simpler, but maybe more wonderful. Falling Fruit maps all the known fruit trees in the public domain of urban areas, in order to "facilitate intimate connections between people, food, and the natural organisms growing in our neighborhoods." Totally taking my daughters on a fruit hunt soon.
The other, more literary use was posted to my Facebook wall by Patrick Madden, who is quickly becoming my map-essay hookup, supplier of the good stuff. This time, it's a Google-Mapped adaptation (more of a summary, really) of Steinbeck's Travels with Charley , tracing Steinbeck's (supposedly) nonfiction trip across the US with his beloved French poodle.
For my fellow map-essay nerds, this one, created by Chris George, is a doozy - a map of NYC, with place markers of many of the places photographer Weegee took his iconic shots. I found it while researching Weegee photos for my next A
Child Grows in Brooklyn piece (yes, I'm somehow working Weegee into a
parenting blog). It's a work-in-progress, but remarkably complete already:
While in Lawrence this week, I heard Mavis Staples' recent cover of Can You Get to That, and it totally made me rethink Maggot Brain (the Funkadelic album, not the decomposing organ). This is such a great song, on an album I hadn't really ever listened to much, mostly because I really hate the 10-minute psychedelic guitar jam at the beginning.
For HIGH QUALITY & STEREO: http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=8rrOdcnFbAY&fmt=18 Song: Can You Get To That Artist: Funkadelic Album: Maggot Brain Year: 1971 Label: Westbound
Besides now listening to Maggot Brain obsessively, I've also discovered this amazing cover by Nicki Bluhm and the Gramblers, from the back of a van no less:
Official Website:http://www.nickibluhm.com Like us on Facebook:http://on.fb.me/NBGs_FB Music on iTunes:http://bit.ly/NBluhm_iTunes Funkadelic - Can You Get To That - Cover by Nicki Bluhm and The Gramblers - Van Sessions 12 (Performed between Salt Lake City, UT and Denver, CO). Thanks to Jeff and Cassie Jones for selecting this song and supporting Nicki Bluhm and The Gramblers' Winter Tour 2012!