Stockholm Syndrome

"It turns your skull into a cage and your brain into a rat, and the city is just a stick poking the rat all day." - Patton Oswalt

Were someone to ask me to sum up my attitude to life in a single word, I would say, "more." Time has always struck me as patently unfair, as it constantly wakes me when I am dreaming, prevents me from attending two concerts simultaneously, limits the number of conversations I can have with my friends.

New York City both exacerbates and soothes this need to experience the muchness of life as richly and often as possible. There are so many neighborhoods whose architectural oddities I've yet to discover, so many diners whose ability to make a grilled cheese with bacon and tomato I've yet to sample, so many people whose capacity for humor and wonder in the face of existence I've yet to appreciate, but the amount of stimulation I receive any given day in New York can fulfill any demand I built up while asleep. Conversely, as anyone with who exercises or ingests substances will tell you, a tolerance builds up and there is a greater baseline required before one can reach The Zone.

There are people who can see the city's flaws. They see the lumpy sidewalks, the flooded intersections, the broken bottles of malt liquor, the homeless man asleep on the subway platform, the graffitoed construction awnings, the rats and roaches and say, "this place is fucking filthy." They hear the unending babble of other people reporting the details of their sex lives or pontificating their views on the Whitney biennial, the rumble and screech of the subway erupting from the sidewalk grate, the blare of horns up and down Canal and say, "this place is a fucking cacophony of misery." They smell the clouds of cigarette smoke, of exhaust fumes, of restaurant Dumpster soaking in the heat and humidity and say, "sweet fucking Christ, Hell has actually broken out on Earth." They see the disciples of capital jabbering into their Bluetooths or the chain-smoking men on the Chinatown corners or the medallioned guineas tooling around Bay Ridge in SUVs or the tense mothers cheering at soccer practice in Prospect Park or the hipsters in their dark jeans and bright sunglasses or the pale and fat-faced Orthodox with their endless broods of little rituals and ask, "who here is not hateful?"

Me, I just chalk all the inconveniences and horror up as The Price of Admission. But I know that's not quite right. Because there's something so wonderfully honest about the city. About the way that it confirms and destroys stereotypes, forces you to confront certain realities about capitalism, democracy, authority and the primacy of day-to-day interaction over theory, and above all its focus on sharing - shared streets, shared transportation, shared parks, shared eateries, shared beauty, shared shame. Not that the city is socialist in its politics, but rather that there is constant exposure to the best and worst of what humanity can create, on both the individual and societal levels.

Another way to put this: I like having my rat-brain prodded with a stick. The response shows that the old mainframe is still booted up and working, that I have not gone somnolent and retreated behind the soothing repetitive images of a screen-saver. I can hear and smell and see and taste and even when my senses are repulsed by what they encounter, they still want more.

Moral Absolutism

"But if a man acts with premeditation against his neighbor, to kill him by treachery, you shall take him from My altar, that he may die. And he who strikes his father or his mother shall surely be put to death. He who kidnaps a man and sells him, or if he is found in his hand, shall surely be put to death. And he who curses his father or his mother shall surely be put to death." - Exodus 21:14-17

Me, I'm a pretty reasonable guy. I can negotiate and compromise, because I understand that my desire to change a situation is built upon dissatisfaction with things as they are, and while I may have a conception of the best possible way that things should be, some movement towards that goal is better to me than ideological purity and immediate total victory.

Except for the death penalty.

Two men were executed earlier this week, one in Georgia, the other in Texas. The inmate in Georgia, Troy Davis, drew international attention prior to his execution because of questions surrounding his guilt in the killing of an off-duty police officer. The inmate in Texas, Lawrence Brewer, drew an AP reporter who dutifully transcribed his last words, 'I have no final statement,' and received that publicity because of the headlines the crime for which he was convicted generated. Mr. Brewer, you see, was one of the three Klansmen who chained a black man to the bumper of their pickup truck and dragged him until his raw corpse was scattered along miles of roadbank.

With all due respect to the many activists who unsuccessfully tried to prevent Mr. Davis' execution, the protests should have centered around Mr. Brewer.

No one supports the execution of innocents. However, we have an appeals process, trials by jury, lengthy sentencing hearings, layer upon layer of protection against the lethal injection of a person who does not deserve to die. What about that word, 'deserve,' though? Later on in Chapter 21 of The Book of Exodus, The LORD commands that a guy who owns an ox that has a history of swinging its head around should be put to death along with the ox should the beast gore some innocent. The Romans rather famously and unsuccessfully attempted to quell a rebellion in Judea by employing capital punishment against the ringleader. The Breaking Wheel, pictured above, was popular in France for use against those who badmouthed the aristocracy until people began questioning its brutality. That led the French royalty to develop the more humane guillotine, which gentility was tested on them. Until very recently, the United States permitted execution of rapists and the mentally retarded. Not so very recently, but recently enough, it was considered permissible to drag a black man from the back of your truck by a chain tied around his neck. Obviously, human standards of what the phrase 'deserve to die' permits have changed over time.

Which brings me to Mr. Brewer. Not to mince words, but he was a piece of shit. Very, very few people are going to miss his presence on this earth. There might even be some solace available to the family of his victim, given the knowledge that they no longer have to share oxygen with their loved one's mutilator. The problem with meting out Mr. Brewer's richly deserved punishment is that it leads to more dubious situations like that of Mr. Davis. As long as we insist on killing the worst human beings our society produces, the option will continue to exist that we execute someone who is not guilty.

Rather than protest the questionable cases, I'd like to see more people protest the executions of slam-dunk confessed killers. Organize marches with placards bearing the blank eyes of a sociopath and talk openly about how this man disgusts you but you don't want him to be killed in your name.

Just consider this. If we allow that 99.99% of the convicts who have been put to death in the United States since capital punishment was reinstated in 1976 were guilty, and frankly, given the potential for error in any system that is wholly dependent on humans for its operation, 99.99 is a generous percentage to allow, then we've killed 13 innocent people.

Context and Greatness

“Art is anything you can do well. Anything you can do with Quality.” ― 
Robert M. Pirsig


For a generalist like me, specialization always presents problems. Genre is maddening, because it somehow implies immediately lower or raised standards. Gangster movies and Westerns can be great, while Rom-Coms and Sci-Fi are limited; fantasy fiction can never be as good as literary fiction, or, even worse, mediocre literary fiction is more worthy of analysis because it shows greater ambition than even the best fantasy fiction. I actually believe these tropes, because, for the most part, they are borne out in the record. There are more stone classics in the Gangster and Western genres than there are in the Rom-Com or Sci-Fi genres. If an author has ambitions towards canonization, she will usually write literary fiction rather than fantasy. What about the exceptions that prove the rule? Does one just use that old line and write off Annie Hall or A Song of Ice and Fire? What about other masterpieces that arise from disreputable genres? Calvin and Hobbes, London Calling, The Wire, are these also rule-proving exceptions or is there something wrong with the rule?


This has been on my mind because of Mariano Rivera and Terminator 2. Mo just broke the all-time saves record. Terminator 2 just happened to be available On Demand the other night when I was bored.


Saves are probably the stupidest statistic in baseball, which is a sport rife with stupid statistics. In order for a pitcher to earn a save, he must record the last out having entered the game with a lead of no more than three runs (if he pitches a full inning) or with the tying run on deck (if he pitches less than one inning) - to put that a little more simply, you earn a save if you get more outs than you allow runs. If starting pitchers were given a reward for the same criteria, they could pitch two innings and give up five runs.


At the same time, Mariano Rivera is the greatest relief pitcher in the history of baseball and if the metric we use to rate him is flawed, that should take nothing away from the consistent and singular greatness that he has shown over the years. He is a joy to watch, because despite the fact that the service he renders the Yankees is wildly overvalued and ridiculously measured, he is the best at it. There is a grace and an economy to his performance that we associate with greatness. It is not only his success, but the ease with which he accomplishes it.


Terminator 2 should not rank very high in my esteem. It is a straight action movie, which is not a genre that produces films with interesting themes or artistic ambition. Included in the required suspension of disbelief is the good-killer-robot-from-the-future's Austrian accent. The movie was marketed to children and teenagers despite its stupefying violence. The video games based on it were pretty fucking dogshit. Danny Cooksey's insufferable mullet was given star status on Salute Your Shorts because of his three-minute appearance in T2.


That's a litany of sins to have to live down, but fuck if Terminator 2 doesn't remain one of the absolute best movies I've seen. The last 40-45 minutes is basically a single sustained action sequence, consisting of three bravura setpieces (the CyberDyne break-in, the highway chase and the steel mill finale) that develop the characters, advance the plot, are clearly staged, shot and edited and culminate with the most ridiculously wonderful action movie catchphrase and pathos for the Austrian-accented-good-killer-robot-from-the-future. In addition to that astonishing third act, though, we also get Cameron's extended and relatively subtle layering of metal and machine and technology as aids to violence (think of the strangely-accented Terminator mangling the payphone to get John Connor some quarters or the T-1000 ripping apart the elevator in which Our Heroes are escaping), some fun visual puns (John playing Missile Command in the arcade, the T-1000 taken aback by the silvery female mannequin) and Sarah Connor's Vision of Judgment Day. The movie works its themes into every level and holds up to repeated viewings not because it Blows Shit Up Real Good (though truly, Shit has never been Blown Up quite so Good as it is here) but because it has compelling characters and has so much layered in to every visual that it can be analyzed as microscopically as Citizen Kane.


So is Mariano less excellent a baseball player because of his role or Terminator 2 less amazing a movie because of its genre? Well, yes, I think so. A great closer in baseball can only become great if there is a great baseball team playing in the innings prior to his entrance. Without a lead to protect, a victory to preserve, a closer loses his perceived value and aura. Mariano Rivera does a very specific job better than anyone ever, while Derek Jeter, say, does a more general job better than quite a lot of people. Nevertheless, if you were assembling a baseball team, you would pick Derek Jeter before Mariano Rivera because the job that Jeter is less dominant at is way more important than the job at which Rivera is transcendent. Similarly, Terminator 2 is the best action movie ever made, and I wouldn't dispute its inclusion on any comprehensive list of great films, but even if we grant that Cameron pulls it off in the moment, no one can step back from "Hasta la vista, baby" and not find it laughable.

A Few Brief, Not Terribly Original Thoughts on Certainty and Politics

"Particles are things, complete in themselves. Waves are disturbances in something else. We must choose one of the two ways of seeing, but as soon as we do we can’t know everything about them." - Bohr, Copenhagen

Slowly but surely I am plodding through a biography of arch-capitalist Andrew Mellon while also rapidly devouring David McCullough's The Johnstown Flood. Mellon had a small stake in the resort that was built on the shores of Lake Conemaugh, though he had no part in the construction of the dam by which the lake was created and was nowhere near the place when the earthen dam gave way and killed more than 2000 people. I haven't yet gotten far enough into either book to learn what Mellon's reaction to the news was, but if it was anything like his reactions to most events in his life, it was cold, calculating and driven almost entirely by self-regard.

Mellon was Secretary of the Treasury under Presidents Harding, Coolidge and Hoover. These three administrations remain the exemplars of laissez-faire policy and market-run national economic policy. When the Great Depression was at its height, Mellon gave Hoover advice both sound in theory and brutal in its cruelty: liquidate everything - the farmers, the soup kitchens, the navy, the stocks, maybe even the treasury itself.

Andrew and Kyle occasionally take part in online debates where their foes take positions very nearly as extreme as Secretary Mellon's. Do away with the minimum wage. It'll help small businesses. Do away with employer-based health coverage. It'll help small businesses. Do away with public schools. It'll lower property taxes. Privatize the police force. It'll lower property taxes. The people who take these positions always acknowledge that there will be a period of adjustment while the market figures out how to keep people from starving while working for less than the minimum wage, but that the waves of supply and demand will always fall into sync when left to their own devices. To borrow from the words that Michael Frayn put into Niels Bohr's mouth, I'd hate to be one of the particles that gets left behind or smashed by those waves.

What do we owe one another? Most of us conduct our everyday affairs with very little support from others. We sell our labor to the highest bidder that meets certain requirements of ethics and/or convenience. We pay our own way, using the remuneration that we receive from our workplace in order to acquire food, shelter and clothing. We are fair and polite in our interactions with strangers and obey the principle of the Golden Rule. Given that, why should we expect our society to be extra compassionate, to extend greater help than we would ask of others in our regular lives? To put it in the parlance that I see in the online debates, 'why should my tax money go to some welfare crackhead?'

This is not a snide, idle or irrelevant question. It cuts straight to the heart of the liberal/conservative divide. The liberal view of the world takes place from within the wave. It looks at how the connected particles are all moving together and attempts to strengthen the bonds between the particles so that the wave can move quickly without losing strength. The conservative point of view is that of the particle. It is whole in and of itself and sees the other particles as independent (though their movement is suspiciously uniform and wavelike), free and responsible. Both views are correct but incomplete. However, when applied to human beings and nations rather than particles and waveforms, only the liberal point of view makes allowance for this incompleteness, this uncertainty.

Because what if it's possible that a crackhead gets clean with a little assistance from the state? Isn't that preferable to her not getting clean without assistance? Suppose she doesn't get clean but continues to draw a welfare check and use it to keep herself in cocaine, baking powder and cheap plastic lighters - is that not preferable to her engaging in violence in order to feed her addiction?

Rick 'Ultimate Justice' Perry provides the best example of the individualist political view and its potential failings when taken to absolutes. Perry's assertion that every person executed by the state of Texas was deserving of death by lethal injection is ludicrous. If we allow that every single person on death row was guilty of the crime for which they were convicted, we still run into questions of what deserve means. Up until the early part of the last decade, Texas still had both people who were minors at the time of their crime and mentally retarded inmates awaiting execution. The Supreme Court of the United States had to clarify that it was both cruel and unusual to kill men with IQs of 70 who were 16 when they took part in a robbery that went wrong. Also worth taking into account is the fact that we should not allow that every single person on death row in Texas is guilty, given the state's horrid record appointing competent defense attorneys and abhominable reliance on psychiatric evaluators who diagnose defendants as sociopaths without ever fucking interviewing them.

In the photo above, you can see a large, misty white area at far left, where Lake Mead is overflowing the Hoover Dam. You can also see the large gray mass of the dam holding most of the dark blue water in place. The large misty area is the spillway, where excess water can drain without running over the top of the dam. The dam at Lake Conemaugh that spectacularly failed and wiped out the city of Johnstown, Pennsylvania way back in 1889 had an inadequate spillway that was never addressed because the men who owned it were certain that adequate precautions had been taken. They even rejected an engineer's warning that the dam would fail in event of even a large flood because the engineer had misspelled the name of the lake (and the repairs he suggested were costly). Credit where credit is due, the Hoover Dam was designed and authorized during the Harding and Hoover administrations, respectively. Perhaps Andrew Mellon had learned to see waves in addition to particles, but I doubt it. He was, after all, Treasury Secretary, so to him the Hoover Dam was just an expenditure on a balance sheet, just like crackheads are not human beings but wastes of tax allocation or death row prisoners are all monsters.

Questions and doubt are not always antithetical to action; sometimes they lead to safety, empathy, justice.

Watching a Trainwreck

"The point is that he is an insecure fuck, like all beautiful-but-handed-everything-on-a-silver-platter people. He doesn't trust anyone in this world but you. You've been born into royalty, baby. You know it. Now you just gotta be thankful and wear the crown." - Ari Gold


There's been plenty of ink spilled on the subject of how badly Entourage sucked and the bizarre leeway that HBO allowed a show that spent several seasons spinning its wheels only to arrive at character resolutions that could easily have been accomplished years before, so I'll keep this pithy.


Entourage was, at one point, a very good bit of episodic television. The first season told the story of Vincent Chase suddenly becoming an A-list actor and attempting to use his clout to produce a film with real heft. All of the problems that overwhelmed the show in later seasons were present from the beginning: Jeremy Piven was far and away the best actor on the show, and the writers gave all the best lines to his character, Ari, which only highlighted the talent discrepancy; Johnny Drama was only funny if Turtle was around, and even then, all of the humor revolved around his humiliation, which gets really old really fast; the gee-whiz enthusiasm of a bunch of blue-collar kids being handed the keys to the world quickly devolved into douchebag entitlement - but the spine of the show seemed to be the story of how celebrity can be manipulated to create art and how friendship allows you to keep your integrity amidst vapid cyphers.


Season Two quickly became The Ari Show featuring Vince and The Guys, which was fine because, again, Piven was so much better an actor than Adrian Grenier or Kevin Connolly and Ari so much more interesting than Vince or Eric. We also got many appearances by Debi Mazar and James Cameron and it appeared that Entourage had come to grips with the limits of its conceit and was evolving into a sort of movie-star version of The West Wing, where we watch the tireless professionals who go to work every day so that Vincent Chase can live in a mansion. Both a celebration and critique of the Hollywood lifestyle, if you will.


Normally when a show runs off the rails, it happens fast. There may be some warning signs, but there's almost always a clear break between the high quality episodes and the decline period. To use The West Wing as an example again, there are plenty of fine episodes after Rob Lowe left, but very few after the departure of Aaron Sorkin, and even when they were good, they were good in the way that generic television is very good rather than in the way that The West Wing particularly had once been good. With Entourage, it's less clear when the descent into shittiness took place, but it definitely occurred, and no one told any of the creative team or the network that it happened for several years.


Let me try and unpack this because the third and fourth seasons of Entourage are about as strange a series of highs and lows as any television show has ever put together. 


Season Three is especially strange because HBO made the decision to air it concurrent with Season Six of The Sopranos. For anyone who doesn't remember, HBO split the final season of its most profitable franchise in two, with 12 episodes airing in late 2006 and the final nine in mid-2007. This, of course, meant that Entourage had to deliver an extra-long season and likewise split it in two. Where The Sopranos used the opportunity to take some artistic risks with its extra episodes (not all of which paid off, but kudos for trying), Entourage engaged in egregious bullshitting on its way to some foregone conclusions. Vince fires Ari and takes up with a new agent, which every audience member knew wasn't going to last because, again, Piven ran circles around the main cast and his character had motivation and stakes beyond 'if I don't get this part my ability to fuck anyone I want may be compromised.' There's some back-and-forth about whether or not Vince will get to work on the fictional movie Medellin that everyone knew was going to work out because Vince has been pursuing the role since the first season and it's clear that his character arc is going to resolve when he plays Pablo Escobar. Entourage even uses a random heart attack to remove one of the main obstacles to Vince's professional ascension rather than attempt a resolution using, I don't know, character and dialogue.


In the fourth season, however, things rebound in a strong way. The gang goes and shoots Medellin with deranged cokehead director Billy Walsh, deal with his lunacy during production, script rewrites, editing and eventually the film debuts at Cannes, where Vince is badly exposed as a mediocre actor who skates by on good looks and charm, which confirms much of what the audience has already seen. Frankly, this is where the show should have ended. If the thesis of Entourage is, as I suspect, contained in Ari's quote above, then failure is the natural resolution for these characters. Not because they deserve failure and we should wish them ill, but because they never really deserved success, but they savored the benefits, held on to one another, and now that Vince's career is in the shitter, he'll only have his three best friends and his millions of dollars to fall back on. That's not so bad.


Unfortunately, HBO continued to air Entourage for four more seasons. They weren't all bad (Jerry Ferrara got to do some nice work as Turtle and the Sloan-Eric storyline, though it could have wrapped at anytime, had a few touching/funny moments), and there are plenty of useless episodes in the first four seasons, but everything from the Season Five premiere to the series finale replays the same character beats and lacks dramatic tension. It's clear that none of the characters will ever be exposed to the consequences of an unexamined life and that all dramatic momentum is going to be derived from the question, 'will the guys still be able to afford Ducati motorcycles,' which is not an interesting motivation.


If you're curious why I watched the trainwreck continue to unfold even after it became jaw-droppingly clear that was happening, I can only point to Entourage's second and fourth seasons, which remain both funny and good, and the last nine episodes of The Sopranos, when David Chase kept mercilessly dropping the hammer and it was just so fucking great and worth those occasional down hours that he slipped in. Doug Ellin and the Entourage team had no ambition to rise to Chase's level, but I kept holding out hope that they would rise to the level they had once set and have the courage to point out that neither the emperor nor his courtiers had a stitch of clothing on. I suppose it's my own fault for believing that Hollywood was capable of honest reflection.

Midwood/Prospect Park/Lasagna/Lines in the Sand

"It's all falling indelibly into the past." - Don DeLillo, Underworld

After ten years, timelines run together. What memory edits in to immediacy may have happened hours later, or even the next day. Images and thoughts linger and get spliced together and rearranged in order to better construct a narrative. This occurred and then that came to pass before the situation resolved; in fact things were going on simultaneously and the resolution may yet be ongoing. With that caveat, this is the truth as it appears when I close my eyes and remember what it was to be 19 and heartbroken.

 

When I woke, a breeze was blowing through my window and the sky was sapphire. There was no heat rising from the pavement and everything seemed fresh. I had just returned to New York for my Sophomore year and the weather had never been so fine. I resolved not to call Kim at all that day and took a shower.

 

My apartment was in Midwood, Brooklyn and if the Avenue I stop of the F line hadn’t been positioned directly out my bedroom window, I would have had a direct, if remote, view of Lower Manhattan. I never minded because I always got to see the city when I caught the train to go to work or class. Showered, I put on my backpack and grabbed The Brothers Karamazov, my subway reading. I stopped at the deli for a toasted cinnamon raisin bagel with cream cheese and a cup of coffee. Of all the delis I have frequented over the years, this was the only one that had a dining area, two tables with rickety chairs in the windows that fronted Avenue I. I never used them, but on that day, both were occupied by middle aged men, all of them talking to each other about airplanes and the World Trade Center. I thought it an odd hypothetical to pursue, but by that time I was used to overhearing all manner of odd conversation. You interact with so many people every day in the city that strange snippets become normal, even reassuring.

 

Up on the platform, Lower Manhattan was gone. Thick black smoke mixed with a gray-white cloud that billowed in that gentle breeze that streamed up through the Verrazano Narrows. I asked someone else on the platform what had happened, and he told me that two planes had hit the World Trade Center and one of the towers had collapsed. I laughed hysterically, and realized for the first time what hysteria really felt like.

 

“Shit,” I said. “I guess we’re going to war.” I figured that my diabetes would keep me from getting drafted and tried to make up my mind if that was a good thing.

 

When the train came, I got on to the first car. There were maybe half a dozen other people, all of us crowded up by the front door, watching the cloud get larger as the F plodded up McDonald. The conductor had his door open. I had tried to call my mother, but the cellphone wouldn’t connect. I tried to call school to see if classes were in session, but the cellphone wouldn’t connect.

 

“Are we going to be able to get in the city,” I asked the conductor.

 

“They haven’t told me to stop yet, but I ain’t going in that mess,” he said.

 

I got off the train somewhere, maybe Church Avenue, walked to the nearest pay phone and was able to tell my mother I was okay. I don’t remember anything about what was said, but I do remember that the pay phone was near my Laundromat. I considered whether I should do laundry since I couldn’t get to class, hung up and walked home. Sometime around then the North Tower tumbled to the earth.

 

All of the rest of that day is hazy, dominated by electronics, the television and the telephone. I answered calls. It felt odd having to reassure people. There was no reason that I should have been at or near the World Trade Center. I knew no one who worked or lived near the site. I was miles away. Dan Rather was crying. I wasn’t used to Rather, I had always watched Tom Brokaw on NBC, but NBC’s signal had gone down along with the towers, and I doubted that coverage was varying much network to network. The fire, the second plane, the explosion, the jumpers, the collapses, the cloud roaring through the narrow 18^th Century streets accompanied by the bleating of a thousand car alarms. The Pentagon hit, perhaps a dozen planes hijacked and flying at top speed, bearing death to unknown destinations, fighter jets scrambled, the president aloft, en route to somewhere safe even though such a place was difficult to imagine just then.

 

Emily called sometime in the afternoon. She lived in the dorms on William Street, basically around the corner from Everything. I don’t know if she was drunk when she called, but she was definitely shitfaced when she got to my door.

 

Emily. She was pale to the point of being translucent on a good day, wore her hair in pigtails and had a neo-hippie style that I never found attractive. She hailed from Vermont and we were friendly. We had taken a couple classes together and had similar politics and reading habits. It’s possible we would have become actual friends, but that wasn’t how things played out.

 

Her bottle of Absolut was about half empty and the look on her face was… I don’t really know how to express it. I’ll give terrorism this – it’s effective. She woke up when the first plane hit and grabbed her camera. She was taking pictures of Everything and she pointed her lens at the smoke and snapped a picture just as someone stepped from the burning floor out into the fresh air. She stopped taking pictures, feeling implicated, as though the negative in her camera contained something sacred and private that she had stolen with the intent of selling the image. Horrified at everything, and particularly herself, she bought a bottle and turned into that miserable skid.

 

We ate something. I don’t remember what, probably canned soup or microwaved quesadillas. Rather reported that Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden were most likely responsible for the murder and destruction that morning. He cried some more. We cried a lot. She drank a lot. I joined her, but halfheartedly. My brother had died September 12, 1996. Kim had dumped me. I was taking classes I liked in a city I loved, but both of those things seemed tenuous at best and the closest thing to a friend that I had made in the city up to that point was the girl crying on my shoulder. I felt enough self-pity without the booze.

 

There wasn’t anything left to say or do. I knew what her experience of the day had been; she knew mine. The vodka was gone, we’d killed some beer and Rather was still crying. Or maybe by then it was local newscasters crying. Sleep was an abstraction, a thing that people did before there were fully conscious men and women plummeting to the street to escape the flames. Fucking was the thing we could do other than not talk. So we did. I didn’t feel much better afterwards, but she was able to either fall asleep or pass out. In any case, she was unconscious, and I felt envious. I don’t remember how I passed the night. She woke up and we fucked some more, maybe I read some pages about that good Christian Alyosha. At some point I thought it was getting close enough to morning that the papers might have been delivered, so I walked over to the supermarket that sat caddy-corner across the street and asked if The New York Times had come in. The clerk told me to come back in an hour or so. I went back to my apartment, fell asleep next to Emily and never read the Times’ coverage, though I’m sure it was comprehensive.

 

On the 12^th we went to Prospect Park. I probably would have stayed glued to the television and the telephone, my electronic reminders of all the reasons to stay bunkered in my apartment forever, but Emily needed to get out. We caught the F and got off at PPW and 15^th and found that everyone in Brooklyn had done the same thing. There were softball teams playing pepper on the diamonds, Lycraed yuppies on bikes, mothers with strollers, kids throwing the football around. There was also no sound. The lawns were full and you could hear every ping off an aluminum bat, every whirring flywheel on a bicycle, every slap of football on palm. Out at the end of the Long Meadow the still-billowing cloud loomed, silencing any conversation before it began. We walked, sometimes holding hands but mostly not. A tow-headed toddler stood at a chain-link fence, trying to get the attention of a family of ducks among the reeds on the other side. His somewhat older brother stood to the side with the parents, all of them entranced by the cloud, trying to read omens in its shifting shape. The younger brother obviously would have no recollection of that day in the park later on, while the elder was of an age that it seemed likely he would carry it with him, would be able to tell the story of where he was during those momentous times in the history of his city, his country. I thought of my brother, five years dead on that Wednesday, and the gulf between what he could tell about the world had he been able to speak and what I could express. I knelt beside the little boy. He looked at me, pointed at the ducks, and bellowed ‘ducks!’ It flashed in my mind that while the world in which he would be raised had been irrevocably altered, he would not have the sense memory of the terror and confusion, that whatever shape the city and country reformed into would be normal to him, and for a moment I felt better.

 

More drinking and eating and fucking that night, but by morning on the 13^th, Emily had to go back to the dorms and change clothes and we had given each other all the comfort we could. Sometime around then I confronted the sink full of dirty quesadilla plates with their film of congealed cheese, called Kim and said some unwise, youthful things about how between my brother and the towers it had been driven into my head pretty thoroughly that death worked on its own schedule and when my time came I would rather be face to face with her anywhere than a sink full of cheap plates soiled by sad microwave food in New York. I left out the feelingless fucking, though we were broken up and there was little I could do to help or hinder my cause in any case. She gently reminded me that trauma could change a lot, but that we were both in the places we had chosen, and that we had made those choices in response to the best parts of ourselves and we shouldn't let the worst of the world intrude there. 

I left the dishes where they lay, got on the train and went to the restaurant where I’d coat-checked the previous winter. The GM told me I was welcome back, and I clarified that I was interested in volunteering for any efforts that the company was organizing. That evening she and I walked over to the West Side and caught a commandeered Circle Line tourist boat down to the marina off the World Financial Center. The GM was a military brat and shared with me her desire to see some fucking bombs start dropping soon. I felt the same, and for the first time one of the real dilemmas of terrorism sunk in. Since the perpetrators had been incinerated along with the planes, whom should we bomb? The power of terror lies in its disregard of the social contract. There is no separation between civilian and military in the targeting of attacks, no coherent ideology or government to blame for the violence. It is an individual exerting his will against the most basic precepts of civilization. But because it is individuals who carry out the attacks, against what does the civilization arm itself?

 

These abstract concepts vanished from my mind once the boat moored in the marina. One of the towers of the World Financial Center had been punctured by a steel girder at about the twentieth floor. The beam pierced out of the structure at an angle similar to a flagpole for about fifty feet. Smoke wafted from the pile of rubble. Our job was to feed and provide beds for the emergency workers sifting through the wreckage. For ten hours I ran trays of lasagna and garlic bread and vegetables back and forth from the kitchen to the serving stations. Dead-eyed firefighters streamed on board, chewed blankly, passed out. Some skipped the blank chewing part and just passed out. I bused tables, kept water pitchers full, retrieved pounds of frozen lasagna from the ship’s walk-in refrigerators and thought of nothing save the next task I could accomplish that might help these guys get through the night. To this day, that blank ‘what’s next?’ mentality remains my favorite aspect of service.

 

Back at school, everything was abstract. The whole student body could debate politics and rhetoric and civics, but no one could talk about the personal. What was there to say? If you invoked your own feelings, you risked minimizing the greater hurt all around you. And it was all around, papered to every fence and construction barrier, every monument in every public square, the pain of the survivors and the faces of the dead. Moreover, if you talked about your opinion, you immediately ran into a simple question – what are you going to do about it? The answer, for most of us, was not much. We were going to do our reading, turn in our homework, attend our classes and later, when we graduated, do something about how he felt and what we thought about the world.

 

A couple people drew lines in the sand, though. They could deal with most of the political theory and the rampant liberal self-flagellating, but were very clear that anyone who went along with that motherfucker in Colorado’s assertion that the victims were little Eichmanns was an asshole. I saw Emily around campus a couple of times, but we didn’t have any classes together and I had made friends with Kel and Tara and other sandline drawers. I finished The Brothers Karamazov and I don’t know where the fuck she went.

Shawn Carter, Robert Zimmerman and Context in the Power of Art

"This was a shitty year before it got so much shittier, and one way it was shitty was that it was subpar musically." - Robert Christgau, Pazz & Jop 2001


Two of the best albums of the Aughts sold next to nothing on their mutual release date. That should be doubly shocking since they were also far and way the two best albums of that year. But both "Love and Theft" by Bob Dylan and Jay-Z's The Blueprint went on sale on a certain jewel-clear Tuesday in September of 2001. For obvious reasons, I delayed purchasing these CDs, but it wasn't long until I found myself down in the music department at the shitty record/electronics store whose name I can't remember that used to be on 15th Street and Union Square West before it went bankrupt and made the decision to get back on the music-purchasing-and-listening horse. It was a strange time, and I found that I kept requiring permission from myself in order to enjoy the basics of life: you have permission to take pleasure from food; you have permission to admire the forms and faces of females; you have permission to purchase and enjoy new albums by musicians whose work you have begun to appreciate.

Plenty of artists have addressed the aftermath of what happened, a few have attempted to grapple with the actual events, and many more have stuck their fingers in their ears and shouted permission to enjoy life despite everything, but Jay and Bob got the last words in before the paradigm shift. Except that we didn't hear them until after, which increased their power exponentially.

"Love and Theft" is, like most Dylan albums, an apocalyptic romp. There are a couple of ballads and blues, but most of the songs are mid-tempo or better, while the lyrics are black-humored explorations of paranoia, failure, revenge and superstition. Imagine listening to a great blues band improvising an autobiographical song cycle while floating down a flooded Southern river on a leaky raft - I know it's a lot to imagine, but that image and the simultaneous joy and despair inherent in it were Dylan's gift to me during that brutal winter. For example, here's the fourth verse of "High Water":
High water rising, six inches above my head
Coffins droppin' in the street like balloons made out of lead
Water poured into Vicksburg, don't know what I'm gonna do
"Don't reach out for me," she said, "Can't you see I'm drownin', too?"
It's rough out there. High water everywhere.
Unlike, say Bruce Springsteen with "The Rising," Dylan wasn't responding to the day's news when he penned "High Water," he was just expressing his usual laconic attitude towards the world in its sorrow and its frivolity. Yet the second line above took on prophetic dimensions in the weeks after The Falling Man and his companions. The gallows humor of the fifth line's exchange turned the pervasive mood of the city - roughly We're All Gonna Die But Fuck Them I'm Not Moving And Fuck You I'm Hurt But Fuck Me Because You're Hurt Too But It Doesn't Matter Because We're All Gonna Die - into a bitter, funny punch line.

I didn't know what to expect out of The Blueprint. I'd only started listening to rap with any kind of seriousness the previous year, so my knowledge of Jay-Z was limited to his guest verse on Biggie's "I Love the Dough" and the inescapable but not particularly impressive "Can I Get A..." until "Izzo" dominated the summer of 2001. I bought the album because of "Izzo" and the Eminem guest spot on "Renegade." I knew enough about Jay to figure that not every track was going to bridge pop and rap as easily as "Izzo," but while his reputation at the time was based on his strength as a hitmaker, I figured that anyone capable of stealing a verse from Big (which he does on "I Love the Dough") and coaxing a guest spot out of Eminem (difficult at the time) must have some chops.

Damn.

The Blueprint doesn't have any of my Top 5 favorite Jay songs and very few of my favorite verses, but it is the distillation of everything I love about him. His cool wit, palpable arrogance, absolute comfort in his own skin and refusal to find anything impressive other than, maybe, himself - it's all there in super concentrated form.

So words of wit, arrogance, confidence and cool acquired extra power because they were recorded before September 2001 but I didn't hear them until afterwards? Yes. To elaborate: the stuff that came after reeked of false bravado, warrior songs or artificially bright smiles. Even "Hey Ya!", as flamingly hot a pop song as has ever been recorded, seemed in 2003 an attempt at levity in the face of the steamrolling shitstorm that was the Bush Administration. Jay himself burned all the goodwill he'd built up in my book when he appeared on and produced Cam'Ron's execrable track "Welcome to New York City," which reminded everyone that New York was 'the home of 9/11/the home of the lost towers/but we ain't never stopped bangin'/we ain't never lost power.' But while summer faded to autumn and then as winter fell, the cocky joy of Jay occasionally brightened my mood. The third verse of "Hola Hovito":
If you haven't heard, I'm Michael, Magic and Bird
All rolled in one - cause none got more flows than Young
Plus got more flows to come
And if I ain't better than Big, I'm the closest one
So move over - hoes, choose Hova
My food for thought so hot it give you dudes ulcers
There's something so beautifully American about these lines even today. The obsession with excellence and striving - Jay compares himself to the best rapper he can think of and then, two lines later, strings together ten words for one of the best rhymes on an album chock full of them. The fact that, to Jay here, nothing matters more than acclimation as the best rapper alive. Let Mos Def concern himself with the plight of the world, let Eminem try and deal with censorship and hypocrisy, let The Wu-Tang Clan advance their mythology, let OutKast try and walk the razor edge between hip-hop and pop, but give Jay-Z the title, the belt and the crown.

Being a big fish no matter the size of the pond has always struck me as a quintessentially American ideal - it doesn't matter what you win, so long as you win. Of course, buried right in the middle of Jay's boast is the literally enormous counterweight, in the form of Christopher Wallace. Jay might be the best rapper alive, but it's because his friend is dead. And for J-Hova too, the paths of glory will lead but to the grave.

One of the principal attractions of music is that, like smell, it works like a time machine. I've written before how quickly and completely music can transport me, but what was unique about "Love and Theft" and The Blueprint was their ability to put me back in a time that was just as lost as that conjured by Pet Sounds or London Calling, despite the freshness of its passing. I would snap the plastic CD center around the spindle of my Discman and listen to Jay's exuberant nihilism or Bob's good-humored fatalism and marvel at their capacity to describe a world and a feeling that was unimaginable when they stepped into the studio. I listened with the fascination of one who receives a voicemail from a spouse who is killed in a traffic accident on the way home to these final dispatches from the carefree America in which I was raised, now consigned to the ever-receding past.

Concerning Narrators

"Calvin is a great character to write for, because I only need to know as much as a lazy six-year-old." - Bill Watterson

One of the tricks that Bill Watterson plays in Calvin and Hobbes is casting as his lead a character who is simultaneously a boy and a man. While Watterson only needed to know as much as a lazy six-year-old in order to write Calvin, he often snuck Calvin lines like "I must obey the inscrutable omens of my soul" in his conversations with Hobbes. In his musings about the nature and purpose of existence, his ruminations on modern art, his iconoclasm in the face of authority, Calvin evinces behavior much closer to an adult's unrestrained id than any young boy.

Of course, Calvin is a cartoon and one of the primary conceits of the strip in which he appears is that his stuffed tiger converses with him and enables his scheming and misbehavior, so questions of what Calvin should and should not know or be able to express are a bit curmudgeonly.

Not so with literary fiction, though.

I'm almost done with Jonathan Franzen's Freedom. Like its precursor The Corrections, it documents the personal failings and emotional breakthroughs of a middle class Midwestern white American family. The observations are sharp, the writing tight and the scope sweeping. Franzen has left the snark of The Corrections out for the most part without softening his characters. All in all, Freedom is a great book deserving of all the praise that was heaped upon it.

Except for one thing. One big thing.

After a brief introductory chapter that tours the St. Paul street where the main characters live, Franzen gives the next 150 pages over to a fake autobiography written by Patty Berglund, the matriarch of the family. Patty is quite the writer. She has a sharp, cynical ear for dialogue, exquisite prose timing and an excellent vocabulary. I just opened the book to a random page. Here, on page 34, is Patty writing after her cheap but wealthy grandfather plies the children with glasses of his homemade Doe Haunch Reserve wine: "While the mothers came running to scold August and snatch their kids away, and the fathers tittered dirtily about August's obsession with female deer hindquarters, Patty slipped into the lake and floated in its warmest shallows, letting the water stop her ears against her family." I have no doubt at all that a bored Midwestern housewife could write about her own life with accuracy, compassion and skill. However, Franzen stretches credulity by the ease with which Patty moves between multiple points-of-view in a single sentence, to say nothing of the inclusion of 'tittered dirtily' and 'warmest shallows,' memorable descriptions that sound much more like a professional writer looking for the right words than a housewife who is composing an autobiography 'at the suggestion of her therapist.' There's an overwhelming stench of bullshit that comes off these chapters, not despite, but because of how well-written they are.

The easiest way for a writer to give herself license to include a character's thoughts and observations while still employing her own powers of observation and vocabulary is to include an author surrogate. Junot Diaz does this in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao with the character of Yunior. Yunior's part in the narrative is minuscule, but he writes the book, and so we get descriptions of the life of a teenage girl in the Dominican Republic in the 1950s that refer to Rafael Trujillo as 'Old Fuckface.' Probably the best modern example of this device are Philip Roth's Zuckerman books. Nathan Zuckerman, whose curricula vitae are suspiciously similar to those of Philip Roth, meets people he finds interesting and then resolves to write books about them. Zuckerman allows Roth to include very authorly digressions about, say, glovemaking in American Pastoral or the difference between crows and ravens in the eyes of an illiterate cleaning woman in The Human Stain. Nabokov makes Humbert Humbert an overeducated European dandy and suddenly Lolita has a vocabulary that allows it to transcend the creepiness inherent in its plot.


There is no requirement that a writer do this, of course, but it does aid clarity. One of the reasons that Ulysses is such a challenge is that Joyce constantly changes narrative voices. Underworld is both thrilling and relatively easy to read because every time DeLillo changes the narrative voice, he lets us know. There is also a traditional, omniscient third person narrator in Underworld who knows things that the characters don't and has a voice distinct from any of theirs. The Brothers Karamazov follows the brothers, but the narrator is always independent of them, and no one would argue that Dostoevsky's power loses any prose in the trade.

Perhaps the best example of a writer allowing his own voice and knowledge to intrude into the consciousness of a character who could not possibly think things that the author ascribes to him is John Updike in the Rabbit Angstrom cycle. Rabbit has a high school education, works as a typesetter and later a car salesman and spends any and all free time golfing, fucking his friends' wives and burning his house down. He also has an encyclopaedic knowledge of the flora of southwest Pennsylvania, a better than average eye for architectural details and is prone to multiple-page riffs on the connective tissue between death and sex or golfing and immortality.

Interestingly, John Updike is Jonathan Franzen's least favorite writer in the history of the universe.

Fissures

“We don’t have a government. We have three independent elected governments: the House, the Senate and the president, who don’t depend on each other for their political survival and have no inherent reason to cooperate. This is a bit of a problem throughout our history and it’s becoming more and more severe now.” - Hendrik Hertzberg, "America's Constitutional Crisis"


Luis has been going to quite a few Yankee games in the past month or so. He recently attended a Yankee loss, which is unusual, but declared the game worthwhile, which is even more unusual, given how much Luis likes to win. When I asked him why the game was fun despite the loss, he told me that it had that tension, the coiled-spring, edge-of-your-seat, ain't-over-til-it's-over, [insert tired sports metaphor here] feel that makes for a great baseball game. The aesthetic experience he had overwhelmed the natural urge to give a shit about which team emerged victorious, which points to another cliche about winning and losing not being the point so much as the process that achieves that outcome.
Accusations that baseball is boring have abounded for decades. John Updike's famous elegy for Ted Williams describes baseball as "a game of the long season, of relentless and gradual averaging-out. Irrelevance - since the reference point of most individual games is remote and statistical - always threatens its interest," which translates roughly to "the only way to give a shit about this is to have always given a shit about it." However, it is my feeling that baseball only began to get really boring in the last dozen years or so. Not at all coincidentally, this corresponds with increased use of statistical analysis in building and rating baseball teams.
Brief but necessary aside on baseball statistics: Since its inception, baseball has been obsessed with statistical achievement. One of the reasons that Ted Williams was worth John Updike's time was that we was the last player in Major League Baseball history to hit .400. Casual baseball fans know the basics: batting average (hits/at bats) and home runs (hits that leave the park) for hitters; strikeouts (the number of batters a pitcher has gotten out with no help from the defense) and earned run average (runs allowed/innings pitched) for pitchers - but in the last ten to fifteen years, a number of other statistics have come to dominate how the game is played and thought about. Chief among these are on-base percentage (hits+walks/plate appearances) for hitters and WHIP (walks+hits allowed/innings pitched) for pitchers. The reason these statistics ascended is simple - they work. If you put together a group of hitters who walk a lot, they are, by definition, not making many outs. If you make fewer outs, you have more opportunities to score. More opportunity = more success. If you also have a group of pitchers who do not walk a lot of hitters or allow many hits, then by definition they are denying opportunity to the opposing team. Logically, therefore, your team will win. To see the truth of this, watch the New York Yankees. They win a lot because they get a lot of men on base and then someone hits a home run. They win close games, occasionally, but more often a Yankee victory is domination. They put their boot on the other team's throat. It can be more than a little dull.
Growing up, baseball was full of what are now called "slap hitters," guys who stuck their bat out, made contact with the ball, ran like Hell and trusted to luck. Tony Gwynn, Wade Boggs, Rickey Henderson, Ozzie Smith, Kirby Puckett, etc. Ichiro Suzuki and Derek Jeter are the last of the great slap hitters, and it is very likely that we will never see their kind again. Why? Because trusting in luck does not win baseball games half as effectively as logic and reason. It is, however, fun. The tension that Luis values in his baseball comes from things like grounders in the hole that match the defense of the shortstop with the speed of the batter, hit-and-run plays, a short fly ball with a fast runner tagging at third.
An horrifying truth has become apparent to anyone who follows baseball: In order to win, a team must be boring. The game is constructed in such a way that the most effective strategy for success is to be as powerful and patient as possible. Oops.
Baseball is our national pastime, though, and judging by the crowds in attendance in Milwaukee, New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Texas, it remains beloved even in its ponderousness.
Much less loved, but equally predictable, lumbering and dull is the game of politics. Just as the flaws in baseball have been badly exposed, even to people like me who will always love it, the American system of government has been damaged, perhaps irreparably, by the successful exploitation of long-present fissures. For example, because the United States was conceived as a federation of quasi-independent political entities, care was taken to ensure that each of those entities was represented equally in the federation, via the Senate. A Senator represents the state from which she hails, not the people. The people are represented by their member in the House of Representatives. You may recall that the United States settled the question of whether the individual states could actually be thought of as separate from the country during the period 1861-1865, and therefore wonder why it is that the 897,934 people of Delaware still have the same power in the Senate as the 25,145,561 people of Texas. The political theory behind this imbalance of power rests on the argument that tyranny by the majority of the people can be just as ugly as tyranny by a despot. The Balkan Wars of the 1990s provide an excellent example of majority tyranny. However, the American system exhibits unusual paranoia about majority tyranny and has thrown up unusual roadblocks against it. In addition to the 900,000=25,000,000 math that is the Senate's hallmark, there is the fact that the Senate requires a supermajority in order to pass legislation. It is true that the filibuster was never used to prevent the passage of any bill before this Congress, but that only proves the resourcefulness of Mitch McConnell. Also, votes in the Electoral College are apportioned en masse to whichever candidate earns the greatest number of votes in each state. So if, say, 13.1 million people in Texas vote for Candidate X and 12 million vote for Candidate Y, our system discounts those 12 million citizens. This leads to awkward situations like George W. Bush being elected President in 2000 despite the fact that more people voted for Al Gore and the constant attention paid to voters in states like Florida, Pennsylvania and Ohio.
Just as with baseball, our system coasts on its connection to the past, its status as the world's oldest republic. Conservatives invoke the wisdom of the founders and liberals tout the experimental successes in various states throughout the country's history. But, like baseball, a reckoning is inevitable for our Constitution and our government. We ignore the gut-level feeling that the quality of what we love is diminished by deep flaws at our peril.