Success and Resentment

“Jerry’s not here. I don’t know who’d invite him. I didn’t. I hope he understands it goes a long way. He’s a very competitive person. I was a very competitive person. He said organizations win championships. I said, ‘I didn’t see organizations playing with the flu in Utah. I didn’t see it playing with a bad ankle.’" - Michael Jordan



Just to place that quote in context - Jordan is speaking from the lectern at the Basketball Hall of Fame, to which he is being inducted. Jerry is Jerry Reinsdorf, the owner of the Chicago Bulls. Jordan then proceeds to call out the high school coach that benched him, fellow Hall of Famers Isaiah Thomas and Magic Johnson for allegedly freezing him out of the All Star Game in 1985, Byron Russell for mouthing off about Jordan's declining offensive capabilities during Jordan's first retirement/forced exile, declaring that all of their slights metastasized with his natural competitive spirit and formed a cancerous resentment that Jordan used to stay in top form as he aged. Retired and ensconced in the Hall of Fame, Jordan decided to give everyone an honest glimpse in to the soul of the best basketball player of all time.


I loved him for his courage and honesty.


Frankly, it is clear from every single published article and most anecdotal evidence that the majority of professional athletes are irredeemable assholes, the vainest and most spiteful of the entitled jocks that preen around high school quads. This gets disguised with idiotic boilerplate quotes in those same articles about 'playing the game the right way,' 'fire in the belly' 'drive' and shitty sycophantic testimony from coaches and teammates. Athletes with self-awareness are as rare as those with candor or conscientiousness. So I was thrilled when Jordan displayed both candor and self-awareness. When he decided to stand before the cameras and confess that it was his pettiness and self-absorption that left a hole in his soul that he filled with victories, championships and transcendent moments, it was as bracing as cold salt water in the face.


That inability to settle, to be fulfilled by anything but dominance is at the heart of all success, it seems. We recoil from this truth, and rather hypocritically condemn the few people who speak it aloud. Did sportswriters criticize Jordan simply for 'lacking class' or was it because he cut close to an elemental bit of the human psyche that most of us would rather not acknowledge?


Here's David Foster Wallace on the same phenomenon in David Lipsky's horrendous cash-in Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace, which I am ashamedly devouring: "And I don't think it's any different if you're like an accountant for Andersen & Andersen, you know? Some big accounting firm and that you know four or five other junior accountants get promoted ahead of you. Or the guys who got out of law school with you make partner before you do. I mean the craziness is exactly the same."


It doesn't have to be quite so twisted and negative as Jordan or Wallace is making it sound. In The Simpsons, Homer keeps a photo of Maggie on his control panel with the note 'Do It For Her.' Meaning, work a job that he hates for an evil, wizened plutocrat. Kanye West's track 'Big Brother' off Graduation is about the friendly artistic rivalry between himself and Jay-Z. The album Watch the Throne documents that same rivalry in excruciating detail. Half the reason Orson Welles made Citizen Kane was because William Randolph Hearst told RKO Pictures that Welles couldn't.


Think of any time that you have pictured the face of an S.O. when you notify them of a significant accomplishment. Any time that you have looked at a superior at work and thought 'I could do what that asshole does twice as well with half the bullshit.' Any time you worked at a project because you knew how pleased your parents would be when you earned a good grade. Of course, it only really counts if you do something about it.


There is a difference between embracing the challenge to better oneself and the black-hearted pursuit of a brass ring, and Michael Jordan should not be used as an example to anyone of balance on the road to excellence, but his words are ignored or dismissed at great peril. It is always important not to condemn messengers, but rather the values they represent. If Michael Jordan is the messenger of Being #1, perhaps we need to reconsider whether that's worth as much as we've been led to believe.

Where's the Chicken, Where's the Egg?

"I love the dark hours of my being.
My mind deepens into them.
There I can find, as in old letters,
the days of my life, already lived,
and held like a legend, and understood." - Rainier Marie Rilke

Dreams, and the permeable layer between the conscious and unconscious mind have inspired quite a lot of ink-spilling across the decades, and for good reason. We all dream, and yet it is such a private activity. Unlike a story that I might tell from life - one with a setting that you can visit, characters that you know or whose existence you can at least verify, and a timeline that proceeds contiguous with your perception - a dream exists solely within the mind of the dreamer. Obviously, therefore, the life and obsessions of the dreamer have enormous influence on the dream state.

I have very cinematic dreams. They almost all take place from a third-person perspective (I can see myself) and include establishing shots (a long-distance wide-angle perspective of the dream world - which is often a very wild and overgrown variation of San Francisco, but the bridges are incomplete), long tracking shots or swooping helicopter movements (q.v. any shot in a movie where the camera tracks a car from above), impossible shots (my dream perspective often likes to push through building windows, trees, airplanes and my own head) and sudden shifts in perspective (I am watching a television show and suddenly find myself in the action of the show's narrative). I stayed in a cabin for three years one night and another time edited something like six months into a variation on your standard sports movie training montage. Very often there is music, usually a song I actually know, but the source of the music is non-diagetic (the me that I am watching in the dream does not hear the music; the me that is dreaming does) and serves as counterpoint and rhythm to the dream edits (see Fincher's Zodiac and its use of "Hurdy Gurdy Man").

Certain aspects of modern life have become more rapidly and universally incorporated than others. Airplanes, automobiles, television sets, computers, skyscrapers, etc. But changing the actual nature of the dreams? How they are structured and perceived? Only film has had such a tactile effect.

Unless, of course, all those camera movements and fancy perspective switches were present all along, and it's the language of film that's been cribbing from our collective unconscious. After all, when I was six I had a dream that spread over five nights and had a title sequence. I'm pretty sure that I'd yet to sit through a miniseries.

Marcus and Me

"How fair and how pleasant you are, O love, with your delights! This stature of yours is like a palm tree, and your breasts like its clusters. I said, 'I will go up to the palm tree, I will take hold of its branches.' Let now your breasts be like clusters of the vine, the fragrance of your breath like apples, and the roof of your mouth like the best wine. The wine goes down smoothly for my beloved, moving gently the lips of sleepers. I am my beloved's, and his desire is toward me." - Song of Solomon, 6:6-10

My coming out story is pretty banal, I think. I was 16, faced with confusing and shameful feelings and while I was at summer camp I opened up and told a counselor, someone that I could both trust and not have to face in my everyday life, that I suspected I was gay.

Except I wasn't attracted to men. To my counselor's great credit, he didn't laugh in my face.

Let's backtrack a bit, because this takes some unpacking. By the time I decided to inaccurately out myself, I had dated a few girls and slept with two of them. I liked girls' hair and hips, their voices and legs, necks, eyes, et al. What I did not like was any aspect of their personalities. I found girls to be vain, superficial, humorless, disloyal, self-conscious and unpredictable. I had sex with girls and felt terrible about myself because there was never anything to say. I felt fraudulent and ashamed, pretending that I wanted to hear about internecine female drama while silently counting down the number of seconds before This Girl invited me Over to Her House. Guys, on the other hand, were open, direct, idealistic and never required displays of admiration for conversation. I loved my friends and my friends were all guys. Being 16, I still had a conception that sexuality was dependent on feeling.

I came home from camp and hung out with my friends and tried to imagine being in a relationship with any of them. They, after all, were the people that I loved and therefore should have been with. I would totally not feel like a despicable shitbag because I would never have to fake affection for these boys. The only problem was that my imagination kept failing. I looked at them and their hair was neither long nor thick enough; their hips were too narrow; their shoulders too broad; their breasts too non-existent. Plus, what would one do with a naked man? Look, I wasn't a moron, I knew what could be done, but none of those activities struck me as interesting or pleasant to pursue.

Back in school I decided to just wait and see. Maybe some guy would strike me as attractive. If I had been less of a self-absorbed misogynist moron I might have tried to talk to one of the eighty girls I thought pretty on a given day as freely as I would with one of my friends. Because the problem with my dating life up until that point was that the partners were all teenage girls. And teenage girls are awful people. Their only consistent rivals are teenage boys, but there were at least a few of them that I could relate to.

Anna and I were talking. I don't remember now how the conversation started or what was discussed. It was late in the Spring of my junior year, her senior. The days were getting longer and the school plays were done, so the only thing I had on my agenda was homework, which I never started working on before nine o'clock. So we just kept talking. To this day, I am completely obtuse on signals that girls like me, and Brett or Luis or Katy will have to inform me that someone was flirting with me after the fact. Even I had enough awareness to grasp the importance of the fact that Anna and I were lying on our backs on the hood of my car as the gloaming faded to night, still talking hours later. I never loved her with the earth-moving Hemingway intensity that I would a few later girls, but I never again had a moment's doubt as to my sexual orientation after we kissed two days later.

Whenever a public figure is clearly in the closet, whenever the sexual peccadilloes of a celebrity come out in the ugliest possible way, I think of my younger self sitting cross-legged in an alpine meadow, looking up at a sky so pure and black that the color of the stars popped radiant against it and confessing a quality that seemed rational (I hate teenage girls and like teenage boys = I'm gay) until nature won out. I wonder at the tenacity of their self-denial and the depth of whatever fervor is driving them away from their true self. I always want to call them up and let them know that the ecstatic discarding of the self and its exultant replacement with this twin, combined soul is even better than Solomon describes.

But you might have to ignore your brain and listen to your cock.

Conquest of the Useless

"Her feet were bare, her golden hair artfully tousled, her robe a green-and-gold samite that caught the light of the candles and shimmered as she looked up." - George R.R. Martin, A Clash of Kings


Reading George R.R. Martin's fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire offers ample opportunity for the modern reader to reflect on the many advantages he has over the characters depicted. Martin writes genre fiction, and the kingdom of Westeros includes dragons and witches and wights and other elements that mark it as not from our world, but he has mentioned in interviews that the inspiration for the wars that anchor the plots of the books is England's medieval War of the Roses.

Our 235 year-old experiment in representative government is not perfect. It is barely functional on quite a few major issues these days, but it is still a marked improvement from the days when serfs hacked each other to death because their respective landlords received conflicting messages from God regarding who should be king.

The only nagging complaint I have about the books is the relentless description of the various articles of clothing and accouterments that ladies and lords happen to sport during their feasts, jousts, trysts and beheadings. It would bother me far less if any of the characters happened to reflect even for a moment on the nature of their preening and warring and religious fanaticism and political intrigue and look either inward or outward to see the bottomless hole at the center of their brinksmanship. Then again, if they had the ability to reflect like that, they probably wouldn't be leaving each other's corpses strewn about the countryside for daws to peck at.

One time Luis had an existential crisis. He told me life was pointless. I kind of laughed and said, "I know. Isn't it great?" To be born at the end of history is a great gift. We get to vote and have a say in the decisions that govern our lives. We don't starve to death very often. We figured out a decent system for keeping our feces and drinking water separated. Compulsory religious fervor is limited to the self-selected saints. We get to look at the universe very clearly, comprehensive of our poor capacity to influence or control its workings, and play the ruleless, victorless game of life hard and clean.

First Principles

"Allowing these antiquated rules to remain in place, long after the unequal treatment of American citizens has become constitutionally, morally and culturally unacceptable in the rest of our Nation... is an intolerable state of affairs which cannot be excused by hiding behind any theory of law." - Judge Juan Toruella, In Dissent, Igartua v. U.S.


When all the partisan bickering over made-up problems and bullshit non-issues that no one save a few well-heeled ideologue donors and the mentally illest among the commentariat could possibly spend time or energy concerning themselves with gets me down, I find it's best to take a step back and look at a political outrage so antithetical to American ideals that (I like to think) it must transcend party. There are approximately 5 million citizens of the United States who do not have representation in Congress. Most of them also do not have a say in presidential elections.


To put that in some perspective, the 544,270 people of Wyoming have a Representative and two Senators. The 599,657 people of Washington, D.C. have a non-voting Representative and no Senators.


Americans don't like to think of themselves as imperialists. It runs counter to the whole idea of the country. We fought a war against imperialists in order to gain independence. The main grievance that sparked that war was our status as British subjects with no say as to how we were governed. It is pretty difficult to reconcile our treatment of the citizens of Guam, Samoa, the Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C. with our republican values, however. The people in our nation's capital can at least vote in the presidential elections, but other than that they are afforded no greater rights and privileges than the residents of the Mariana Islands. Governing far-flung territories without the participation of the people who actually live in those territories is about as close to a textbook definition of imperialism as we have.


This is inexcusable. A political solution will never happen, though. The reason? Pretty simple, actually. Giving the territories statehood would throw the Senate out of any possibility of balance. One of the reasons that Hawaii and Alaska were granted statehood at almost the exact same time was that Hawaii was solidly Democratic and Alaska Republican. Guam, for whatever reason, is relatively conservative, but not to the level of Alaska. And it would only offset one of the more Democratic territories. Would the mayor of Washington, D.C. and the governor of Puerto Rico have to fight in a cage match for statehood?


What would a compromise look like, though? Could we fold the territories in to existing states (D.C. becomes part of Maryland, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands go to Florida, Guam and Samoa to Hawaii)? Probably not, given that Florida would become solidly Democratic rather than continuing to hold its status as a clusterfuck swing state and any state that absorbed a territory would immediately become poorer. Also, the distance between Guam and Hawaii is greater than that between Hawaii and Texas. Logistics would be challenging.


So what then? Let them go and become countries in their own right? Well, why not? It seems unlikely that their respective governments would become enemies of the United States. The Communist Menace doesn't exist anymore, save countries that we are indebted to. I don't have an answer here, I just know that of all the reasons I have to be ashamed of my country, this is simultaneously the most fundamental and overlooked.

Holocene

"And when we meet on a cloud/I'll be laughing out loud/I'll be laughing with everyone I see/Can't believe how strange it is to be/Anything at all" - Neutral Milk Hotel, "In the Aeroplane Over the Sea"


In his short story "Modulation," Richard Powers calls music "a need as big as lust or hunger, an urge with no reason on earth ever to have evolved. The only fundamental human pleasure with no survival value whatsoever."


I do not believe that I could survive without music. And the frivolity of the whole enterprise is, to me, what makes it so valuable. A person who was raised without religion (and quite a few of those who did have some kind of mystical education) inevitably must confront the absurdity of consciousness, of having a body, of memory and emotion. Am I a gathering of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, riboflavin, Vitamin K that has thrown itself upright and invented a language? Am I the product of a deity cum puppeteer that has crafted me in His own image and been loosed into the world without instruction or strings? Are there strings that are being pulled? If so, why am I not consulted as to the maneuvers I am to be put through? If I am the byproduct of billions of years of increasingly complex proteins, what is the purpose of my awareness of this fact? Finally, if I am simply a result of biological programming, could you run my life through a computer and get a result identical to the current response that my emotions and memories and reactions have manufactured? Because if you could, then that seems like fate, and fate strikes me as fundamentally unfair. Not just for me, but for the 99.9% of humanity that did not, like me, win the lottery of existence and get born white, straight, male, upper middle class and American in the late 20th Century.


My relationship with my own body has been fraught for most of my life. I ascribe most of the contentiousness to the fact that my body tried to kill me for no particular reason when I was nine years old. Ever since my pancreas stopped producing insulin, I have had to use my brain and centuries of work of doctors to stay alive. Over time, we have gotten to be on better terms, and I've learned to enjoy various activities that only a functioning body can participate in.


The greatest pleasure in my life is reading. The oldest pleasure is listening to music. Even before I could read, I owned a Fisher-Price turntable that I used to wear out copy after copy of An Innocent Man by Billy Joel. Specifically, the track that played "The Longest Time." The casing was white, and I believe the carousel was red and the needle arm yellow. It's been a while, but I do remember using my pudgy forearm to position the needle. The record player sat on the ground and I was able to do that while standing, so I was certainly not very old. The fatty little baby arm has been replaced with a thin, veiny, lightly freckled, longer edition. I need to bend my creaky knees in order to place a record on a turntable. The turntable and the records became a half-pound rectangle of sand and metal. The effect on me when the music plays has only increased with the passage of time, though.


Here's what I mean: when I hear "Jumpin' Jack Flash," I am eight years old, my mother is driving on 7th Avenue towards Laguna Honda Hospital, and she and I are going back and forth - 'what's McJagger's first name?' 'Mick.' 'No, his first name.' 'Mick.' 'Not the first part of his last name, his first name.' 'Mick is his first name.' 'So he only has one name?'; when I hear "Slip Slidin' Away," there is nothing more than a flash of me reaching down into the passenger footwell and examining the cassette cover of the Paul Simon greatest hits set Negotiations and Love Songs and wondering how he could be both a private eye and a singer (he is wearing a trenchcoat and fedora for some reason); "Butterfly" and Aaron and I are parked on Huntington on a foggy morning, running late to class because we wanted to hear that last song from Pinkerton just twenty more times; I am crossing 14th Street between 5th and 6th in a cold winter night rain if "Ambitionz az a Ridah" comes on (my white boy who listens to gangsta rap phase didn't start until I left the suburbs); when John Lennon screams "I Want You," I step out of the C train and make a left to the underground entrance of the Museum of Natural History; "Shake Ya Rump" causes me to set my copy of Infinite Jest on the aluminum bench on the third base side of the Central Park ballfield that has that bigass spectator rock and take a drink of water from the fountain because it's just fucking sweltering out there.


You will have no doubt noted that I am doing something, existing somewhere in a body, in all these memories. But the pleasure of those moments, both at the time and in the present, was not where my feet were going or the chill but the miracle that was exploding in my brain. There has never been any point to music for me. I read in order to teach myself what it is to be a decent person in this world. I write because shooting my mouth off with my friends only earns me their approbation, and that rarely. Plus I can't reread a conversation filled with faux insights in later years and be embarrassed. Only writing affords that privilege. I look at paintings and photographs because I have no visual capacity, and they are mysterious and almost alien to how I conceive the world. But music? The lyrics are often banal or opaque. Of all art forms, music has the least room for originality, given that, as the Beasties tell us, there are 'only twelve notes that a man can play.' I don't think I've ever learned anything from a piece of music.


Except, of course, who I am, who I was and the enduring presence of what I can only assume is a soul mixed with all the chemicals, vitamins and minerals.

Triumph of the Unexpected

"This tube is the gospel, the ultimate revelation; this tube can make or break presidents, popes, prime ministers; this tube is the most awesome goddamn propaganda force in the whole godless world." - Howard Beale, Network


Of all the surprising twists that have appeared on my road since the time I left home, the rise of television has been the most pleasing, at least from an aesthetic standpoint. Unfortunately, the rise of television as a source of artistry and compelling stories has corresponded with the decline of movies as a robust form.


Coming out of the 1990s, movies had all the momentum. Television had a few good shows, which has been its modus operandi since the first waves were beamed out to the first rabbit ears - to invest in precisely the amount and level of quality necessary to keep us all hooked through the antifreeze commercials. There was Ally McBeal, ER, The Simpsons and The West Wing, along with a much buzzed about but little watched (by comparison) HBO show called The Sopranos. Film, on the other hand, had ambitious directors coming out of its independent scene (q.v. Quentin Tarantino, Steven Soderbergh, Wes Anderson) and Hollywood mainstays who were able to spend gobs of money producing work that was both artistically challenging and commercially successful (q.v. Steven Spielberg, David Fincher, Michael Mann). There was every reason to suspect that film was going to continue its enduring and expanding campaign to become the most popular art form the world has ever known. 1999 saw the release of American Beauty, magnolia, Being John Malkovich, Eyes Wide Shut, Fight Club and The Insider. All of those movies were made with substantial budgets and the majority of them made money. It was a wonderful time to be a cinephile.


Now that the Aughts have closed, is there any doubt that television is the more artistically fecund medium? Here's an off the top of my head list of totally amazing shit on Howard Beale's ultimate revelation from the past decade: Angels in America, Generation Kill, The Wire, The Sopranos, Deadwood, Curb Your Enthusiasm, The Office, Arrested Development, Breaking Bad, Mad Men, do I really need to go on? All tolled, that adds up to some 300 hours of funny, moral, political, aesthetically interesting and quite daring content. In order for film to equal that total, we would need to pick some 150 movies that are equally satisfying. I am aware that all of these shows (and The Sopranos most egregiously) have hours and plotlines that fail miserably. I am equally aware that many great movies devote far greater proportions of their running time to padding/bullshit than any of these series.


At the same time, it is shocking what passes for a good movie these days. Take The Town, Ben Affleck's boringly-titled paint-by-numbers Boston heist thriller that was considered by some to be a Best Picture contender. I'll allow that it was generally considered a weak year for film and that The Town has a few effective grace notes, but the fucking thing got at least a positive review from 94% of the critics who saw it. Let's do a quick checklist of The Town: is there a protagonist who wants to go on one last score before he retires? Yes; is his ability to pull off said score compromised by his reckless partner? Yes; is the structure of the movie neatly divided into three acts, with each act containing a notable heist setpiece? Yes; do the editing, cinematography and score owe a substantial debt to Heat? Yes.


For the record, I like The Town. I am a sucker for location cinematography, tales of people attempting to escape the environs they were born to, fatless scripts and fine supporting performances (Jeremy Renner destroys everyone he comes in contact with here), but at the same time I like some originality along with my pathos. It says a great deal about the state of moviemaking these days when a story as trite and cliched as that of The Town qualified as the most original film I could see at the time (everything else was a remake, reboot, sequel or adaptation - also, The Town is an adaptation, but it was at least an adaptation of a novel no one had read). I guess what I'm saying is, God Bless Television? [Excuses self to shower.]

Aging Gracefully

"I used to be 'with it', but then they changed what 'it' was. Now what I'm with isn't 'it', and what's 'it' seems weird and scary." - Abraham Simpson


My mother once told me that we get two opportunities to be cool: once when we are in high school and college, and once when our kids are. Now, I missed out on the opportunity to be cool in high school. I wore corduroy trousers and listened to huge amounts of early Elton John. The closest I came to cool happened because I got a driver's license earlier than most of my friends and could afford to demand fealty of anyone who wanted a ride anywhere. Even the somewhat cool things I did, like star in plays and listen to Weezer, are rooted in pretty damn nerdy places.
I got a little cooler in college. My girlfriend during my senior year of high school bought me my first pair of jeans and my wardrobe improved considerably thereafter. I made the conscious decision to educate myself about this rap music fad that I'd heard about and expanded my zone of expertise from loud white guys to very confident black men. Still, any cool points I might have earned were offset by an innate geek factor that I am quite comfortable with and in no rush to lose. Sometime in 2003, Kel said that I was a mid-30s woman's fantasy with my sensitivity, casual cursing, leather jacket and dog-eared copy of Ulysses. To this day, I have no idea if that was a compliment or not. I have learned that women are not impressed that you know all the words to Paul's Boutique.
Not long ago one of my cousins, who is of junior college age, posted the following as her Facebook status: "Talking Shit About a Pretty Sunset." Because I am a misanthropic asshole, I had assumed that everyone under the age of about 25 had forever lost the ability to care about things that happened more than ten years ago. Yet here was evidence that the kids today were not only exposed to but actively appreciating the very coolest music of my teenage years. I should probably note here that "Talking Shit About a Pretty Sunset" is the chorus of a song with the same name from the first studio album by Modest Mouse. There were a litany of bands in high school that could earn you indie bona fides: Archers of Loaf, Afghan Whigs, The Get-Up Kids, Mogwai, Cursive, Braid, Slint, Hum, even The Appleseed Cast - but everyone more or less agreed that Modest Mouse was the gold standard. Because we were snobby little indie fucktards, we also more or less agreed that This is a Long Drive for Someone With Nothing to Think About, the aforementioned debut album, represented Modest Mouse at their pinnacle, when they were small and pure and ours.
Now that it's 2011, Hum and Slint and Cursive and even Mogwai remain dipped in amber, a sonic reminder of certain houses and turntables and cars and conversations that occurred before consequences and responsibilities curtailed our ability to indulge the idle chatter that shapes the self we will be forevermore. The Get-Up Kids went on a fucking reunion tour last year, playing their first shows in almost a decade. Modest Mouse, on the other hand, sold out to a major label, released three albums, headlined tours, and scored a single, "Float On", that was nearly as ubiquitous as "Jesus Walks" in the summer of 2004.
I'll be 30 at the end of September, which unequivocally ends my eligibility for coolness. I tried to extend my adolescence with grad school and Pitchfork, but I admit that Grampa's truism is beginning to hit home. I've yet to find 'it' scary, but I've found there are very few bands worth all the ink spilled over them these days. Bon Iver is sad and sweet, but that's what Ben Gibbard was originally for, right? Fleet Foxes have pretty harmonies and a dusty Americana, but are they very different from Harvest-era Neil Young? I liked LCD Soundsystem better when they were called New Order. The Decemberists are too clever by half. Panda Bear needs to occasionally program his drum machine faster than 4/4. Cantankerous dismissing of good music through unfavorable comparison with artists of yore is a hallmark of dotage, and while I still listen, I find that fewer things latch on as quickly and/or stubbornly as they did between 1996 and 2004. I wonder when bands are going to again be substantial in their lyrics and muscular in their music, as Modest Mouse were/are.
It is gratifying to know that people younger than I are still enjoying what I inevitably claim as "my" music. Of course, Modest Mouse has a real advantage over all the other indie rock darlings of my adolescence in that they still release material, which stimulates interest in their back catalogue. Also, they're better than any of the other bands from that time, save Radiohead. Quality always wins out in the end.
The truth is that I am not now, nor have I ever been, cool. Miles Davis is cool. Johnny Cash is cool. Sam Cooke is cool. Tom Waits is cool. The Pixies are cool. Modest Mouse is cool. I just was lucky enough to be born at a time when they were all available to me. 

Ancient Casserole

"Here at last/We shall be free; the Almighty hath not built/Here for his envy, will not drive us hence;/Here we may reign secure, and, in my choice,/To reign is worth ambition, though in Hell:/Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven." - Satan, Paradise Lost, Book I 258-263

The older I get and the more I read, the greater evidence I accumulate to back up my long-held suspicion that no artist can create anything original. The best one can hope for is that the casserole one constructs out of the ingredients supplied by those who came before is delicious enough that nobody calls you out for reinterpretation, that the update of the classic to the present time period is convincing enough that the case for the re-appropriation is at least plausible.
In middle school, I took a fair amount of shit from the kids whose parents had that old-time religion because, well, I didn't. I found most of the attempts to convert me to be somewhere on the spectrum between amusing and intellectually stimulating. It wasn't until I found out that a group of people somewhere on the spectrum between acquaintances and friends had decided that their goal was to bring me to the LORD by the end of 8th Grade that I realized how reviled/feared I was at that school. It felt liberating and empowering. All I had to do was be myself, hold true to beliefs that came naturally to me, and I could attract attention, provoke debate and burn with the righteous passion that I admired in artists, politicians, family members and (if I am honest) those same friends I angered so.
Paradise Lost is many things, but its greatest power flows from the charismatic intelligence and pernicious questioning of Satan. Before God is seen in the poem, we are treated to fantastic descriptions of Hell and a transcript of the debate between Satan, Beelzebub, Belial, Mammon and Moloch that leads to Satan's successful attempt to seduce Man away from God. Not to sound like the Satan-worshipper I was accused of being so long ago, but the Archangel makes a decent case to my ear. Which makes sense, if I am reading Milton correctly. I, like Adam and Eve, am a creature given Free Will. Having this gift, I feel the urge to exercise it. Since Satan throughout Paradise Lost is exhorting the virtues of choice - to make something when given nothing, to fight rather than submit, to create rather than worship - I am naturally drawn to his argument. The final choice, however, is the decision to embrace the light and surrender to the inexorable fate that the Almighty has foreknown. I think I can get down with that, at least intellectually. Not because I believe in fate, but because my own experience has led me to learn from my mistakes. Although I will never be devout (famous last words?), I think there is comfort even for the reasonable and secular in God's assertion in Book III that the same Free Will that allowed Man to Fall also exposes him to the power of Grace. To put it in less religiously fraught terms, we can learn to do better using the same curiosity that gives rise to our worst impulses.
That's rather a lot of old (some might say eternal) thematic material being dealt with ably, and yet practically every writer with more than a dash of ambition has staked their reputation on the battle between the desire to test one's boundaries against the knowledge that those bounds exist for very solid reasons. What's amusing about all this to me, and what I meant about artists making casserole, is that Milton himself was cribbing heavily. I don't just mean The Bible (without which Paradise Lost is, well, lost), but the specific quote above. I'm finally reading this motherfucker with same-page annotation, and Satan's famous line about the attraction of reigning vs. serving is a double reference to two earlier works: Achilles in Odyssey, Book XI 489-491 says "I would rather be a serf in a poor man's house and be above ground than reign among the dead"; and Lucifer, in Act II of Lucifer by Joost van den Vondel (ouch) turns it around to "Better the prince of some inferior court/Than second, or less, in beatific light."
There's something about the merits of poets borrowing and stealing, isn't there?