So I've been spending a large chunk of my non-parenting time this week (which isn't that large actually, considering I'm on fulltime duty while my wife is on a well-deserved vacay) thinking about and compiling other people's thoughts on what it means to be a father, which will see fruition tomorrow, Saturday, and Sunday in a 3-part symposium for A Child Grows in Brooklyn!
I'll of course post links to the segments each day, but just, you know, a heads up.
I heard you say you look out for the feet of clay/That someone will be falling next without the chance for last respects/You feel the disappointment when heroes go down.
We all find consolation in our own ways.
Like many others, I finished the Season 5 finale of Game of Thrones deciding not to let myself be abused by it again. Like most of the same people I'll be over it by next year, when it subjects us all to its relentless destruction of everything and everyone we love.
But then, while loading up my iPod late Sunday night, I ran across Suzanne Vega's 99.9 F°, which I hadn't listened to in probably 15 years but I still consider her most underrated album. I couldn't help listening to the whole thing again, then again. On the second time around, as I was singing along to "When Heroes Go Down," I realized that almost all the lyrics seem to be addressing Game of Thrones:
When heroes go down, they go down fast/So don't expect any time to equivocate the past.
When heroes go down, they land in flame/So don't expect any slow and careful settling of blame.
It turns out I'm not the first to wonder about her connection to GoT - she doesn't watch it, but her husband does - but I might be the first to cite this song (someone else made a nice montage of scenes with Daenerys from Seasons 1-4 set to her "The Queen and the Soldier"). It's in heavy rotation during my runs this week, as I mourn the death of [too many characters to single just one out this season].
As I finish up grading and shift into summer, I'm doing some tidying and catching up. A few things:
A cupcake toast to my Convergent Media seminar!
After taking a 3-month hiatus to complete my book manuscript, I'm back on A Child Grows! Strangely, after refraining from writing directly about sports (at least in published form) for pretty much my entire life, this is my second straight piece this month on the subject.
"Strangely, having two girls has made my renewed sports-watching feel somehow new and different. I still refuse to spend more than a couple of hours on any day watching any given game, but I do enjoy using sports-watching, particularly games involving teams I’m emotionally invested in, as another window into their child-lives...This is all to say that I’m learning more about my children, about the sports I love, and about the joys of watching sports in general with every game I share with them. Here are some of the things I’ve learned."
Read the rest here! Strangely.
I'm happy to announce that the Satellite Collective's Telephone Project is now live, and the New York Times wrote a piece on it this weekend! (Oh, and I have a microfiction on the map.) Tonight's release party at the Bowery Poetry Club will be livestreamed on HipChat, if you're into that sort of thing. I'll be there in the flesh.
Here's a bit on it from the website:
TELEPHONE works just like the children’s game of the same name. Also called Operator, Grapevine, Phonebook, Ear-To-Ear, TELEPHONE is simple. One person comes up with a message and whispers it to another person. That person whispers to the next person. As the whispered message travels through it the sequence of players, the message changes, it evolves, it surprises.
In our game of TELEPHONE, we whispered the message from art form to art form. So the message could become poetry, then a painting, then music, then film, and so on. Each artist was only aware of the work of art that directly preceded her or his own. Each artist received a work and was told to translate the message into the language of his or her own art form.
This interactive, online exhibition presents 315 original and interconnected works in 18 different art forms, created specifically for this experiment by artists from 159 cities in 42 countries. And it all originated with a single message.
All hail the Royals! (The baseball team.)
On this Opening Day for every team but the Cubs and Cards (they played yesterday), I give to you an essay I wrote about my long-suffering Kansas City Royals during and immediately after their hopefully-not-once-in-a-lifetime postseason run last October. It's longish, but goodish. (But not Frank Donald Goodish.)
I am not a religious person, but I used to be. I mention this only because the closest I still come to religious experience is when I'm running. John Russell, the greatest runner on my junior college cross country and track team, once said in reply to my question of what he believed in, "Running is my religion." I think at the time he equated religion with obsession, but his reply has stuck with me decades after said it, informing my own private mythology.
Running is the time I commune with my dead. Something about the repetition and the pain and my own obsession with time and human limitation puts me into a mindspace that welcomes and is vulnerable to the ghosts and spirits and voices that I don't allow in otherwise: people I've known, writers who've spoken to me, troubadours who've sung me their songs.
This is why I love this song so much. It opens Delmhorst's album Strange Conversation, in which she uses and reacts to the words of poets and composers who have long left us. The song's opening line is a reference to Robert Browning's poetic ode "A Toccata of Galuppi's":
Oh, Galuppi Baldassare, though I never knew your name, thanks to Mr. Browning you are with us just the same...
The rest of the song quotes Browning's ode, with lines like this:
Oh but you you ghostly cricket, singing where the house has burned,...’but what’s left behind I wonder, when the kissing has adjourned? ‘Dust and ashes,’ so you tell me, and I cannot say you’re wrong, still those dear dead dancing ladies with their hair so soft and long stir a little in their slumber, every time we play your song.
Oh, and the music itself is rollicking and gay. I imagine Galuppi and Browning would approve. In fact they whispered as much in my ear on my last run.
This may be the most important song Frank Zappa ever recorded, and that's saying something. For one, it's lyrically his most mature, which is interesting considering it's from his first-ever album, the Mothers of Invention's Freak Out! (he was still developing the juvenile potty-mouth persona that would deliver such gems as "Catholic Girls" and "Don't Eat the Yellow Snow"). For another, it's remarkably prescient for a song released in 1966 - ostensibly about the Watts riots, sadly it transcribes easily into discussions of the Ferguson protests and modern police brutality.
Finally, the song itself is both a cry in the dark and a genuine work of art. Every single element, from the free-flowing rhymes and the muscular guitar riffs that somehow come off both menacing and ironic, to the strange studio effects and the driving percussive beat that shifts into another place entirely with 30 seconds left, comes together to make for six minutes to live within, get angry about, and move forward to.
Ah, threw you there, didn't I? Nothing against Journey but I much prefer the Petra (no, not that Petra) version, though I'll admit this is probably a familiarity-breeds-contempt inclination. Plus, she does this thing a cappella in a manner similar to Todd Rundgren's A Cappella, overdubbing her voice in all the instrumental parts (except, I think, for the drum track). I don't watch Glee but I hear they stole this version note-for-note, as they've been known to do to other artists. If you're into it, Haden also does the entire The Who Sell Out using the same aesthetic.
The song itself has a deceptive loneliness that belies, or at least balances, its singalong refrain. Granted, it's a brand of loneliness and despair that's peculiarly American, nursed by Geoffrey Hopper paintings and anchor chain/plane motor/train whistle escape mythology. These two things, solitude and leaving, are probably the two tropes running most represents and nurses in me.
But you don't have to subscribe to my obsessions to get this song. Just ask the millions of people who have sung it karaoke, usually in large groups (writer/editor Ross McMeekin led probably 200 people in a rousing rendition one summer at Vermont College of Fine Arts that still haunts me). Honestly, when I'm running I don't hear any of the verses, just that refrain, those ascending chords, that scorching guitar (er, vocal) solo. I haven't stopped believing yet.
I was on my way to my Saturday morning Mermaid's Garden shift, stopped for a red light at the intersection of Sterling and Flatbush drinking a coffee, when all of a sudden my coffee was all over me and the steering wheel. I looked in my rearview mirror, and a youngish woman in a leopard-print jacket was already getting out of her Jeep Liberty. As I got out, another woman rushed over from the sidewalk, over the dirty glaciers of two months of hardened plowed snow.
"She didn't mean to do it!" the woman yelled from the sidewalk. "She just slid right down that ice on the incline."
Almost on cue, I slipped on the ice as I got out of my car and fell.
The woman who rear-ended me apologized profusely, and we pulled over to the side of the road in front of a hydrant and called the precinct. As I was talking to dispatch, a van rear-ended a service car in the exact same spot. Both drivers got out, inspected their respective bumpers, and made a handshake deal to go their respective ways when they found no significant damage.
Then another car rear-ended another, in the exact same spot. They pulled off to the other side of the road, and we told them the police were on their way.
Then another car slid into a parked car. We looked at the driver, who refused to make eye contact. He pulled backward then skidded away.
At this point, the parking meter attendant came walking by. She was about to give us a ticket for parking in front of a meter, but once she saw the situation she said she'd stick around with us until the cops arrived. Sensing that wasn't going to happen for awhile and seeing more of the same accidents looming, we got out our shovels from our respective trunks and started pounding on the ice while taking shifts telling cars to slow coming down the incline. This was my view:
While waiting, the group of us spent a little less than an hour preventing another accident and trying in vain to pick away the worst of the problem ice (to be honest, though, our shovels were like pea shooters in a hurricane). After the attending cops arrived, took all of our information, and filed a report, we hesitantly went on our way. I think we all wanted to stay, knowing there would be more accidents here. But then the line of sunshine that covered the north sidewalk inched its way into the street, and I think we all felt a certain relief knowing it's supposed to reach 40 degrees today and for the next few sunny days. Spring is almost here, you nasty New York City streets.
After listening to some recent segments of On the Media, one of my Convergent Media students has recently decided to do her semester research on the commodification of nihilism in media advertising. She's currently poring over my copy of Tom Frank's Conquest of Cool, beginning content analysis of various advertisements, and generally dealing with that college-age rush of discovering a philosophical system based on rejecting everything that's come before it, and the ensuing Ecclesiastical shock of finding that said philosophical system has long been defeated simply by putting a price tag on it.
This led me back to the Fugs, perhaps the most cynical "band" to come out of the Sixties folk revival. This song, from their appropriately titled First Album, is either a Buddhist chant or a nihilist tract set to music (or both), with shout-outs to folk musicology, Marxists (and Marx!), Times Square, Church, sex, etc, all punctuated with an emphatic "Nothing, nothing, nothing." On the album they revel in both channeling and lambasting Allen Ginsberg, put William Blake poems to music, and have a song titled "In the Middle of the Recording Session The Fugs Sign the Worst Recording Contract Since Leadbelly's." Inside Llewyn Davis could be a movie adaptation of this song.
Ironically, I find the sarcastic drone of the song soothing, especially on a longer run. The Nothing's reach a certain crescendo toward the end that is really something.
"I’ve always wanted, though I didn’t always know I wanted, to write more like a song than a story. I’m tempted to say Steven Church does this, but on second thought this explanation might be looking at these essays from the wrong end of the earpiece: I think he writes like I listen to a song."
After reading it recently, I had to add this one to the Further Reading section of The List and the Story. Here's what I have to say about it:
This essay consists of forty-one "introductions" to her subject, the once-lionized Eighties visual artist David Salle, based on two years of interviews between him and Malcolm and published in 1994, when Salle was forty-one years old. In the eighteenth "false start," Malcolm says, "Nothing is ever resolved by Salle, nothing adds up, nothing goes anywhere, everything stops and peters out." Besides commenting on her subject both as an artist and as a personality, Malcolm also clues the reader into how her formal choices structure the essay's meaning: in attempting to know and to report on this conflicted, perhaps disingenuous artist, the only way to approach intellectual honesty is to present him in fragments. These fragments, presumably like Salle's work (I have to confess I'd never heard of Salle before I read this essay), are the only way to accurately and engagingly present him. Or, in the words of New Yorker staff writer Rachel Aviv, "it will make you attuned to how impossible it is to ever really know someone."
One of the things I like most about Kevin Drew as a songwriter is, He is not afraid to go there. I say that, I guess, as a warning: Listen too hard to the lyrics, and you'll find some seriously fucked up shit. But you know, and don't judge me, sometimes it is just so goddamn beautiful and artful and self-knowing. Like:
I don't love, I just fight with the violence in ourselves
Cuz it's all gonna break!
And you all want the lovely music to save your lives, we'll keep it coming, there is no lie to save your lives.
But a good running song is not about the lyrics. It's about aural propulsion. And for ten solid minutes, it does that. Like a good run, it has peaks and valleys, but it always moves, and its crescendos are positively transcendent. I could put this on repeat and run to it for hours.
(Knowing my mother-in-law is perhaps my #1 reader, I feel the need to apologize for all the profanity. Instead, though, I'll just say, They're from Toronto!) (She lives outside Toronto.)
It would be easy to assume, based on the scant activity on my blog, that I haven't been doing much with my year so far. Au contraire, mon frère. I neglected to post my resolutions early this year mainly because I didn't want to be held to account for the ones I discarded, but I will say that I've kept the two most important ones: 1) Getting back into the running habit, and 2) getting my ms in order for submission by the end of March.
The running is going well; in fact, I've been having so much fun making running playlists for my iPod that I've decided to start sharing my favorites. I think I'll call it my Pathos-Laden Running Playlist. As with my 12 Miserable Days of Christmas, I'll include the song with the option to download it for yourself on the right-hand corner of the player.
And the book! I'm feeling better every day about how it's coming together. After spending much of last year deconstructing, reconstructing, and languishing in the beautiful ruins of my disembodied sentences, I sank into a bit of a depression (writing-wise, at least) that carried into last summer. Then I got some great advice from poet/essayist Cynthia Huntington: Have a couple of people you know and trust read all the manuscript as it is right now, tell me what they see as the connections, revise accordingly, and set myself a deadline to get it done. Then move on to the next project. I got three kind and generous souls to read and comment on it in December (whom I won't name now but will be sure to include at the top of the acknowledgements if and when the manuscript sees publication), and set the deadline for myself. Hence the resolution.
Anyway, I've rewritten my About page to reflect all this; you can read it here.
Oh, and I have a review-essay of Steven Church's Ultrasonic going up on Essay Daily this Thursday - I'll post the link to that when it goes up. And I'm excited to announce that an long essay I wrote during the Kansas City Royals' postseason run will be going up on The Weeklings on Opening Day!
On my walk to the train this morning, it was 3 degrees out. I couldn’t open my mouth or my front teeth would throb from the cold. The F ran a good ten minutes later than usual, and someone had taken a big wet dump on the platform where I stood waiting for my transfer to the 7. By the time I discovered too late that the Metro North is running on a holiday schedule, which means I’ll have to pay an extra $15 for a cab in White Plains to get to work on time, all I could think was OH MY GOD I AM SO LUCKY I DIDN’T HAVE TO TRY TO FIND A PLACE TO SLEEP OUTSIDE LAST NIGHT. I’M SO GLAD I SLEPT NEXT TO MY LOVING, WARM WIFE WITH OUR HEATING-PAD CHIHUAHUA WEDGED BETWEEN US, AND THAT WHEN I GOT UP I GOT TO TAKE A BIG DUMP IN OUR TOILET RATHER THAN ON A TRAIN PLATFORM. I ONLY HAVE TO COMMUTE TWICE A WEEK, THREE TIMES TOPS, AND THE OTHER DAYS I CAN DO ALL MY WORK WITHOUT LEAVING HOME IF I SO CHOOSE, ESPECIALLY SINCE MY MOTHER-IN-LAW WAS GRACIOUS ENOUGH TO HAVE BOTH OF OUR CHILDREN OVER TO HER PLACE ALL WEEK WHILE THEY’RE ON WINTER BREAK. AND THE $15 I’M FLIPPANTLY SPENDING ON A CAB SO I WON’T HAVE TO WAIT AN EXTRA HALF HOUR OUTSIDE FOR THE BUS? WHAT A LUXURY. TO PARAPHRASE SNOOKI: FIRST-WORLD PROBLEMS. AND I STILL HAVE MY NOSE INTACT AND A GOOD OVERCOAT SO I KNOW I’M NOT IN A GOGOL STORY. WINTER WILL BE OVER SOON ENOUGH, AND MY KEEPING TRACK OF THE WEEKLY FORECAST IS A PRETTY TRIVIAL THING CONSIDERING I ONLY HAVE TO FACE THE ELEMENTS FOR A TOTAL OF LESS THAN AN HOUR TODAY.
AND I EVEN GET OFF-PEAK PRICING ON MY METRO NORTH TICKET.
Breeds of Misery: Complete and utter failure, codependence, the falsity of the American Dream
Best/Worst Lines:"SHANE: 'You're an old slut on junk, living there almost dead on a drip in that bed.' KIRSTY: 'You scum bag, you maggot, you cheap lousy faggot. Happy Christmas your arse, I pray God it's our last. BOTH OF THEM: 'And the boys of the NYPD choir were singing Galway Bay, and the bells were ringing out for Christmas day.'"
Who should it surprise to find out that my favorite "Christmas song" is also perhaps a scathing criticism of the American dream and a tale of irredeemable romantic woe? And by the Pogues, short for "Pogue Mahone," Irish brogue for "Kiss My Arse"? [My mother perhaps, but no one else.] Seriously, I almost cry every time I listen to this, and I feel eternally alive, and I want to wrap my arms around this cold insular city and traverse its endless grid until it's drained every ounce of being from my lifeless body. That's love.
BONUS: My buddy Rich Hartshorn sent me a great rendition by Gianni & Sarah - Enjoy!
"My wife and I have been married for going on seven years now. Our children, Checkers and Crazy Eights, are now five and two years old. Until I met my wife, I’d never had a coffee cake. Now I can’t imagine Christmas (or Thanksgiving, for that matter) morn without it. The recipe I’m about to give you has been in my wife’s family for roughly three generations now, by my estimation. Although my mother-in-law comes from Pennsylvania Dutch stock, I can’t help thinking this recipe is more a product of the 70s (we also have fondue every Christmas)."
Breeds of misery: Communal degradation, food "products," second-hand smoke
Best/worst lines: "Carve the turkey, turn the ball game on. Make Bloody Mary's
'cause we all want one! Send somebody to the Stop & Go, we need some celery and a can of fake snow. A bag of lemons and some Diet Sprites, a box of tampons, and some Salem Lights. Halelujah, everybody say cheese! Merry Christmas from the Family!"
Imagine National Lampoon'sChristmas Vacation as a song. Actually, imagine John Hughes listening to this song (it came first, after all) and thinking, "How can I make this into a movie?" Then, imagine my family watching Christmas Vacation every holiday season since 1992 and saying to each other, "No matter what happens, at least it's not this bad." And imagine me humming the chorus to this song in my head and thinking, "It could be worse."
Breeds of Misery: Lost love, cross-border romance, colonial mythology
Best/Worst Lines: "At night I wake up cold and lonely, bustin' at the seams. She haunts the early morning hours of December dreams. My Guadalupe, with big brown eyes, I wanna break the spell tonight."
In the grand colonial tradition of "Cherokee Maiden," "Squaws Along the Yukon," and "Hey Muchachita," this cautionary tale of a white man's star-crossed courtship with a native, brown-eyed little girl does not end well. Also like those songs, listening to this one always makes me a little uncomfortable. In listening to - and yes, enjoying - these songs, even ironically, am I complicit in a type of colonial superiority complex? I tend to alleviate this discomfort by reminding myself that I'm just four generations removed from this type of relationship between a white man and a Chickamauga woman, which by all accounts from my Arkansas folks was a long, happy marriage. Ah, well.