Seven Red

Obama at Old Main, Penn State University (March 30, 2008)

Ruined a perfectly good Ultimate football game, the bastid…

OK, so we’ve only been here since August, and I’ll admit to not really knowing the “essential” North Side of Chicago. That said, this video about Sam Zell’s plans to sell the name of Wrigley Field comes pretty close to my image of the North Side (a North Side imaginary?), right down to the star’s goatee. she said, “Yeah, and the chick. She’s so Chicago.” She is. The great irony of selling the name of Wrigley (for $300 million) is that Wrigley Field may be the first big “corporate-named” sports arena (chew much gum lately?). Still, I’ll have to admit, after one ballgame and many times walking by the Great Red Sign, the history is palpable, and the fact that it was originally a spearmint gum schlocking kinda operation pales beside the 100 year drought, and the magical sad sack resonance of the ivy. The Times discusses the renaming issue and the Cubbies’ prospects in “As Jinx Turns 100, The Friendly Confines are Getting Fiesty.”

But, without further ado, “We’re Not Gonna Change It,” here. If you’ve never been the the North Side, this pretty much sums it up:

Love the retro-science tropes…

Andrew Bird, Imitosis

1) babygirl talks a lot. “My phone.” “I need help.” “On the playground.” Other such stuff. It’s pretty amazing.

2) We Own the Night is a painfully bad film. Plotwise, it’s absurd. For some reason, though set in New York in the late-80’s, the director has decided to run a late-70’s soundtrack, which is just weird. But she and I both noticed the same thing: the dialogue is terrible. The exposition dialogue is ridiculous. At a cop’s funeral, one cop tells another that “They’re setting up a new drug deal,” or something to that effect. It’s silly. I mean right when they hand the shovel over. Amusingly, Ed Koch makes a few appearances, despite the fact that the whole premise of the film was that his administration of the City in the late-80’s was a catastrophe. Good to have a sense of humor, I guess.

But the really awful dialogue is interesting, since the film has otherwise good qualities. The acting is pretty strong, the production values are good, they clearly spent money on it. In fact, it could almost be a good film if it weren’t for the terrible writing. Which made us wonder: why did nobody stop this thing? Why didn’t anybody say, “Hey, we’re making a gritty thriller here, let’s get the lines right!” Then we saw that the guy who wrote it also directed it, and both Joachim Phoenix and Mark Wahlberg (the two leads) produced it. In other words, there was no quality control on the writing at any step in the process, and probably others were too intimidated by thye director and producers to say, “Hey, that sucks.”

That said, the film had a distinctly New York outer boroughs feel, so it was somewhat satisfying. At one point, a couple in the film is staying at the Kew Motor Inn, a famous “by-the-hour” joint on Union Turnpike in Queens, near where I went to high school. Friends of mine used to brag about having gotten the “Jungle Room” at the Screw Motor Inn, and other laughable high school sex stories. A character in the film correctly mentions that everybody calls it the “Screw Motor Inn.” Strangely, though, the film cuts to the sign, and it reads “Cue Motor Inn,” which means that they bothered to construct a fake sign, but they spelled the name wrong. It’s a metaphor for the whole film, really: a lot of effort expended for a relatively shitty product.

3) I upgraded to Wordpress 2.5 today. It’s nice. I’ll play with it tonight.

BAGHDAD – Shiite militiamen are everywhere. Police and Iraqi army checkpoints are nowhere in sight. U.S. soldiers are keeping their distance. [...]But a more finely tuned measure of the tensions may be found among the one- and two-story homes and shabby storefronts of Sadr City. As the crisis deepened, The Associated Press toured Sadr City on Wednesday to observe its rapid swing from relative quiet to a return of the Mahdi Army swagger before the U.S. military troop buildup in Baghdad last year.- “Mahdi Militia Makes Sadr City its Stronghold“

You never know what you’re going to get with a Secretary of Defense. The Vietnam generation got a sad statistician; Robert MacNamara could dazzle with his sheer grasp of the numbers – how many sorties, the rice production in tonnage of New Life Hamlets in a particular province, the percentage of remaining petroleum, oil, and lubricant facilities within 45 miles of Haiphong. And so you got those kinds of briefings, but a different kind of war. Maybe the war always goes the opposite way. When your guy at the DoD is a maniacal rationalist, you get a war of concerted irrationality. So what do we get?

Let us now praise Donald Rumsfeld, five years hence. If you wanted an anti-MacNamara, well, you sure got it. Rumsfeld is like an intuitionist, even a Romantic. Whereas MacNamara gave us the POL percentage destroyed, Rumsfeld gave us tales of the glass boxes from his childhood. If you haven’t seen it already, I strongly suggest a reading of the poetry of D.H. Rumsfeld. Journalist Hart Seely took a few of Rumsfeld’s ridiculous press conference proclamations, and just introduced line breaks to make them “look like poetry.” In an Intro to Critical Reading class, I gave the students three “poems” to analyze by close reading. One was e.e. cummings “Plato told,” another was a verbatim transcript of a found grocery list from Grocerylists.org, and the last was one of D.H. Rumsfeld’s poems. Their readings were ingenious, but they felt cheated when I showed them the sources of the poems. Apparently few had read the reading for that day, Stanley Fish’s “How to Know a Poem When You See One,” since that would have given away the game, one would think. Needless to say, one of the all-time greats is Rumsfeld’s meditation on epistemological classifications, called simply “The Unknowns.”

The Unknown
As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don’t know
We don’t know.

—Feb. 12, 2002, Department of Defense news briefing

The genius of the classification schema – which would pass quite well as some rhetorical declamation exercise – is the lead-in: “As we know…” We know all these things about knowledge: that’s taken as an axiom. Consider then one of the unknown unknowns. It is something that we know we don’t know we don’t know. If MacNamara was on some Cartesian jag, Rumsfeld operated more in the mode of Duns Scotus (which is not surprising, given the medieval character of The War). So what kind of war do we get, if it turns out to be the opposite of such poetry? I remember when The War began, I heard Rumsfeld on the radio doing his usual ask-yourself-a-question-and-answer-it routine. He said “How long will it last? We can’t say. Will it be six weeks? We hope so. Six months? Maybe. Six years? I don’t think so.” I’m a pessimist, but I didn’t think so either. I couldn’t believe it. So here we are now.

Imagine if somebody had said to you in March 2003 that these unknown unknowns will be true in five years time:

• The United States will have 160,000+ troops still in Iraq, with hopeful talk of a draw down to 140,000 vaguely mentioned for summer
• The Iraqi Army will be engaged in fierce street battles with the Jaish al-Mahdi, a Shiite militia nominally led by a guy whose father was killed by Saddam Hussein (he will be known as the “radical cleric” whenever his name is mentioned)
• US jets will be flying close air support to assist the Iraqi army in their militia crackdown; US troops will be running hammer-and-anvil sweeps in the Sadr City section of Baghdad, largely to tamp down the barrage of mortar fire being launched into the city center from that area
• We will be paying off Sunni tribes to fight an entity called “al Qaeda in Iraq;” many of the Sunnis we pay will be former “insurgents” who fought American troops from 2003-2007, when they joined this extortion scheme called the “Awakening” movement
• the Awakening Movement will be fraying, leading to fears that Anbar Province and towns to the north of Baghdad will turn into fierce combat zones once again
• The American military will have lost the equivalent of a complete regiment in Kilo India Alpha, with the equivalent of two reinforced divisions severely wounded
• Numbers on Iraqi civilian deaths would be spotty, but range between many tens of thousands and many hundreds of thousands

I’m a pessimist, but if Rumsfeld had made such proclamations during one of his pre-war poetry jams, I would have thought him an alarmist, and I knew something about Iraq, having been involved in activism against the sanctions regime during the late-1990’s. I wouldn’t believe it, no sir. But there it is. Four thousand, or the ones we didn’t know we didn’t know.

it took
a nipponized bit of
the old sixth

avenue
el;in the top of his head:to tell

him

One time you were a glowing young ruffian
Oh my God it was a million years ago…
- The National, “Racing Like a Pro”

I guess I’m like a super fanboy of The National now that I’m posting a third video of the band. This morning, I looked up their page to see if they were playing any shows in Chicago. Oh, there’s one. I was hoping for a smaller club or maybe even a bar, something smallish that would really suit the music. There it is. They’re playing here June 6. At the United fuckin’ Center. Opening for R.E. fuckin’ M. There’s a lot of stuff I’ll swallow at this stage in my life, but packing into the 300-level of the United Center to see an opening act for $200 bucks a ticket is most definitely not one of them. Sitting through Michael Stipe’s new religious antics gets a ditto ixnay. So I guess I’m out of luck.

It seems all wrong for the music anyway, though I’m sure it’s a satisfying coup for the band, and that’s good, I guess. I’ve got Boxer on a perpetual loop while I work; I’m totally hooked into that record like nothing since I played Strangeways Here We Come so many years ago. I think it just nails a version of late-20’s/early 30’s urban masculinity – all its self-indulgence, and self-pity, and wrecklessness, and foolishness, and yes, even some good things, I guess – it’s like a weird update of A Catcher in the Rye for that new moment of disorientation, or as “Mistaken for Strangers” puts is “another uninnocent elegant fall into the unmagnificent lives of adults.” It’s not just that men get to play at being teenage boys long after women have been forced to abandon all that. Or it is that, but that comes with it’s own set of problems. Patriarchy fucks everybody, though certainly some more than others. But taken on its own, that experience – and I have to think it’s more or less generalizable – is complex and gritty and in some ways maddening. I think Boxer as a whole just gets the fucked-upedness of it, the good and the bad and the indifferent. Especially the indifferent. Here’s from “Slow Show,” presumably a love song, though it takes back everything it gives in that vortex of selfishness that characterizes The National’s characters:

Looking for somewhere to stand and stay
I leaned on the wall and the wall leaned away
Can I get a minute of not being nervous
and not thinking of my dick
My leg is sparkles, my leg is pins
I better get my shit together, better gather my shit in
You could drive a car through my head in five minutes
from one side of it to the other

I want to say, yes, that’s right, that’s exactly it. If I’m sitting on the El reading a book (right now, David Liss’ A Conspiracy of Paper, on BoogaFace’s recommendation, and it’s excellent), and I turn away for a minute and look like I’m staring out into space, that’s exactly what’s going on. I’m not big on “identifying” with works of art, and other such nonsense, but that’s just about a perfect description of this consciousness. You’re pink, you’re young, you’re middle class. You could drive a car through my head in five minutes. That’s exactly what it feels like. From one side of it to the other. And then:

I wanna hurry home to you
put on a slow, dumb show for you
and crack you up

And this is sweet, and also exactly right, caught on that strobic wheel that cycles through, but always comes back:

so you can put a blue ribbon on my brain
God I’m very, very frightening
I’ll overdo it

If there’s a moment of reflexivity, of consciousness recognizing itself, that’s it: God I’m very, very frightening. Even when I care for the other, there’s something in it for me, symbolically. And I recognize how fucked that is, but still. This isn’t music for the United Center. Like I said, fanboy.

I Am Legend – Preposterous.

No Country for Old Men – Masculine toughness is proportionate to degrees of separation from Barbra Streisand. Casting hurt. Of course, I’m still hung up on the “Danny Boy” scene in Miller’s Crossing, so grain of salt. Can somebody explain to me why Woody Harrelson’s character is even in this film?

Atonement – I’m dead inside. I found the film thoroughly unmoving. It was my greatest hope that all the characters would die in a fire. The only thing that could have saved this film is an incest subplot, because it was that thoroughly modernist. For some reason, I never quite caught the faux heft of the constantly invoked “implications” for the little girl’s lies. So two people who love each other are separated. By World War II. Forgive me if I don’t follow the purity of their attraction when the whole world is spinning into massacre and chaos. Let me revise: I don’t give a fuck about these characters. Hollywood thinks I need therapy, I suspect. And it was almost as predictable as that awful The Namesake (she and I worked out the whole plot of that one in the first 15 minutes, the only disagreement being whether the father would die of tuberculosis or – my suggestion – in a fire).

The big revelation interview at the end of Atonement drew an eyeroll. It would have been much better if the older Briony had revealed that she made the whole thing up after too much scotch, not enough sex, and a solid month devouring the works of Somerset Maugham and D.H. Lawrence. You see, when the brother brings the friend home from Oxford, the friend is always an asshole. We know this from every drama set between 1890 and 1940 in every single manor house in all of England. Oxford friend = Asshole. Always.  Moreover, we also know that the son of the housekeeper will be spicey hot and labor pure, a real go-getter who will get both comeuppance for his class passing, and validation for working class grit.  Two cheers for democracy. Now die in a fire.

It is babygirl’s second birthday today. When asked what she wants for her birthday she replies “lemon” and so we will have a lemon themed birthday party on Saturday. Yellow streamers and lemonade. Don’t you wish you were invited?

babygirl and Mommy on the big day…youch: not so fun.

Reading is better

Title Fight

Papa-razzi…

Saw this pic on Reddit and thought I’d give up our location. You’ll be showing up at our door any minute now I expect…

Image from flickr collection of myelectricsheep.

What disease of cluelessness led me to believe that I could just hop on the El and get down to Unnamed Employer Institution in Chicago on Saturday, March 15? It’ll be an easy trip, right? Twenty minutes, and a comfortable read on the train, yes?

Well, yes, if every drunk twenty-something in the city and points North weren’t converging on the Loop for the Annual Amateur Night Irish Parade. Aw, who am I kidding? I can’t be mad at twenty-two year olds who are so obviously drunk at 10:20 in the morning that they are convinced for five consecutive stops that they’re going the wrong way on the train, despite the fact that a new pack of drunk twenty-two year olds continues to get on at every stop. (Lesson: How can 200 twenty-two year olds be wrong?) These are my peoples, and I love them.

Besides, they were funny. One guy must have had one of those Heineken mini-kegs in his backpack (in his fucking backpack, ya hear?), because protruding from the area of his shoulder was a very discernible beer tap, which a group of about 15 kept taking slugs from, as we rocked and rocked on the Brown Line. His friend told him that he looked like he was lactating, an observation that drew howls of approval and recognition from all around. Then the group broke into what I thought was a fairly good rendition of Parliament’s “Tear the Roof Off Sucker (Give Up the Funk),” complete with baritone variations and , well, a whole lot of rhythm going round. I was advised by a guy pouring what appeared to be Jameson’s from a flask into a little cup attached to his girlfriend’s green beaded necklace that it was well and truly time to turn this mother out. Ow. Gotta have that funk. Many train riders were rockin’ the O’bama t-shirts, among other creative Irish-themed garb, like clip-on leprechaun beards, green plastic top hats, all manner of beads, Donegal sweaters, shamrock-patterned suspenders, tweed newsboy lids, and a thousand and one “Kiss Me I’m Irish” temporary tattoos affixed to the face, neck, forehead, arm, ear, and visible areas of the upper breast (the last of which makes a damn fine argument, I should add). It’s a party. My man with the Jameson’s asked if I was “Shcomin’ ta the parade,” and the whole group seemed genuinely disappointed when I told them I was going to work. “Y’shacall in shick, man!,” one girl said, and there were nods all around. God love ‘em, the younguns.