Seven Red

We just moved to a new place, and I more or less moved half our stuff myself in order to reduce the moving costs. But that’s not cost free, either physically or in terms of opportunity costs. In any case, one of the costs has been the continued neglect of this here blog. I’ve found it’s hard to blog when you’re carrying boxes of books down three flights of stairs. Harder when you’ve done that all day. Now that we’re set up, I wanted to add this random post to convince myself that I am still adding posts, and that I haven’t given up on this blog in the same way I’ve given up on the Mets’ season (you’ll notice the really severe slide started as soon as I put up a Mets blog post, by the way). Meh.

So,

A. The Wisdom of she – Only people who understand percentage get rich. Very few people understand – really understand – percentage.

B. Soundtrack for the Moon Landing, 40 Years Later – NPR was having a moongasm today. I think one of the big breaks between my generation and my parents’ generation is general feeling about the moon landing. Put plainly, we really don’t care all that much. But hearing the ecstatic recitations on NPR today, I was struck by how much some previous generation does care, and does still get worked up about the whole thing. The moon! I mean, can you imagine? So, a top five songs for the moon-landing-iversary? Suggest other, dear Reader:

5. David Bowie, A Space Oddity (obviously, but for something new, try Natalie Merchant’s cover on the Live at the Neil Simon Theater album)

4. Peter Schilling, Major Tom

3. R.E.M., Man on the Moon (double obviously)

2. Modest Mouse, 3rd Planet (from “The Moon and Antarctica” album – and you could take the whole album, for that matter)

1. Billy Bragg, The Space Race is Over

The #1 jam is the transitional moment – the confused space between those who care and those who don’t care:

My son and I sat beneath the great night sky
Gaze up in wonder
I tell him the tale of Apollo
He says, “Why did they ever go?”
It may look like some empty gesture
To go all that way just to come back
But don’t offer me a place out in cyberspace
Cuz where in the hell’s that at?
Now that the space race is over
It’s been and it’s gone
I’ll never get out of my room
Now that the space race is over
I can’t help but feel that we’re all just going nowhere

The Billy Bragg song really captures it for me, and has for awhile. The space race is over. This was the second theme on the radio today: nobody cares. But it’s more than that, I think. It’s the end of the outside signaled of course by Derrida (il n’y pas hors-texte), and worked into a geopolitical register by Hardt and Negri. Empire is the end of the space race, the impossibility of exit, in its traditional, spatial sense, anyway (it’s no mistake that its cover features a shot of the Earth from space). That’s already what the sad contrivance of Billy Bragg’s lament names, though in this very specific way:the problematic of immanence. And the moon landing would serve to date the demise of exit fairly well, and would be in line with other datings of the so-called postmodern (Jameson’s abandonment of the gold standard comes close enough).

But maybe push it back a bit. Just before we moved out, exited, our old place, we saw Revolutionary Road, several months late, as per usual. It’s really of a piece with all the great exit literature of the period, and it all spells a similar desire struggling with the immanence of capitalist society. From The Organization Man to The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit to The Lonely Crowd, these are 50′s narratives of exit, or confronting the problem of exit’s demise. In Revolutionary Road, “Paris” may as well be the moon – it serves the same function as the moon serves for Billy Bragg. Of course, the 1950′s version is now clearly lunacy, but it culminates in the space race in the first place.  But the shift to “don’t care” really shows the new phase of the transition, one in which the anxiety about spatial exit has been eliminated; the moon landing fails to register after the baby boomers because Empire is already consolidated spatially. (A few years ago I heard an interview with Billy Bragg while we were driving in the car; my mother-in-law, a mathematician, was in the back seat. Bragg made a much more forceful case, recalling how shocking it was that mathematics could do that, could make one get to the moon. Three huzzahs from the back seat. His English accent helped too, I expect. I think this is right, and part of what he wants to say). So Billy Bragg’s quite right in a number of way, but chiefly this: where in the hell’s that at? The old labor philosophy – trained in the spatial logic of the line and the factory gate – can only ask this question. And gaze up in wonder.

But this is really the anthem for a labor movement that’s utterly finished.

How I know I’m getting old:

1. I see that Bravo has a show called NYC Prep, which follows the travails of Manhattan prep school students, a la the Real Housewives franchise. I may be confused about the way these shows gain an audience, but it seems like their only purpose is to stir up class resentment. (The utterly despicable and tedious Miami Social would be the ultimate in nauseating behavior).  That would be, of course, fine by me, but the right seems to understand far better than the “liberals” how to leverage that resentment politically, so it’s more or less a wash.  So she has NYC Prep on for ten minutes or so, during which time I grow increasingly disgusted, until I realize that I’ve hated these fuckers for twenty years. Since before they were even born.
2. Digable Planets “Rebirth of Slick” is now apparently being used to peddle Tide laundry detergent. We be to crap what key be to lock.

Bloglect. Been busy here with a million different things. she tells me that they don’t pay me like a lawyer, so I shouldn’t be working until 2:30 every morning, then getting up at 6:30. But she knows I secretly like to, and I can’t really sleep anyway. But since the bloglect has been going on pretty long now, I thought I’d just update with some random stuff.

I stumbled out of bed; I got ready for the struggle
I smoked a cigarette, and I tightened up my gut
I said “This can’t be me, must be my double.”
And I can’t forget, but I don’t remember what…
-Leonard Cohen, I Can’t Forget

On Tuesday we trekked down to the Chicago Theater for our Big Night Out, and this time it went perfectly. The sitter got here at 6:30 or so, and we drove into the Loop. There wasn’t a spot of inbound traffic on Lakeshore Drive, and then we actually got a free parking spot on LaSalle. And then there was the show itself. Wow. I guess it helps if you are an uber-devoted Leonard Cohen fan (are there any non-zealot Cohen fans?), but I think even the uninitiated would have appreciated the artistry of the show. It was just beautiful and wonderful, and, as she said somewhere, made you forget your cynicism for just a little while. I was particularly drawn to Dino Soldo, who played, as Cohen said, “all the instruments of wind.” It was kind of a bonus that he was a little bit hip hop, rockin’ the Kangol and banging it out to Take this Waltz like it was thumping in a club. The guy had stage presence, for sure. I also liked that they played a few songs from Cohen’s 2001 album Ten New Songs, which I consider one of the great unappreciated albums of the decade, and underappreciated within Cohen’s corpus (it’s hard to compete with I’m Your Man, sure). It was just a perfect evening. And three hours. You felt like you got your money’s worth and then some. Hell, I left wanting to pay more. I would show the DVD that they’re selling of the London live show as an example of creating ethos. You can’t but be drawn to this kind of funny, humble and graceful, yet remarkable performance. Easily in the top ten live shows I’ve seen. Top five. Of course, I’m a zealot.

One of the great things about this concert, we noticed, is that nobody quite knew how to dress for it. Or, to put it another way, the variety in dress was just off the charts. You had people there looking like they were going to opera, and people there who look like they just stumbled out of a Virginia Beach knock-off of Margaritaville. It was pretty hilarious. I was also reminded of this line from Simon Frith’s Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music: “I sometimes suspect that it is at such sit-down shows – for Leonard Cohen, say, or the Cure, or P.J. Harvey – that one best gets a sense of what the mid-nineteenth century battles over classical concert behavior were like, as the listening and the dancing sections of the crowd get equally annoyed with each other, and as the attendants struggle to keep everyone seated” (125). He can pretty much scratch Leonard Coehn off that list.

But graceful and humble is not me. Here is a snippet, pretty close to direct quotes, of a conversation we were having today. The subject: should we seriously look into this condo in a borderline dicey neighborhood. The issue is, of course, not the neighborhood itself but the schools. When they require uniforms in elementary schools to discourage gang activity (yes, elementary schools), it’s a bit much, even for me. So, I say, “yes, well, we’d then have to roll the dice on these application-only public schools.”

she: Or we might have to face up to sending them to private school.
topspun (who walks around saying things like “I went to New York City Public Schools, public university, all the way through…ain’t a damn thing wrong with public schools”): Fuck it. I’ll drive ‘em down here to Saint Matthias and hand ‘em over to the goddamn nuns.
she: …
topspun: They’re like Polish over here, y’know? That’s good Catholic.
she: So it has to be like ethnic Catholic?
topspun: Of course.
she (laughing): It can’t be American Catholics?
topspun: American Catholics are like fucking Protestants.
she: Heh.

Mind you, I grew up in a neighborhood where everyone knew the parish borders down to the street level, as in “You live on the other side of 26th Avenue: that’s Saint Luke’s.” But it was still largely immigrant or first generation Catholics: Italian, Irish, Croatians, etc. And I’ve got it into my head that this is reasonable Catholicism, where nobody really cares that much about the performance; the church is a place to get your bearings rather than run your life. Plus, there’s booze. Of course there’s still the guilt and all that, but it’s really paganism with some moral structure thrown on for show. I’m not talking about the 60′s and 70′s Catholicism, with the hippies playing the guitar in church and all that. Saw that whole bit a little in college, and I was like “No thank you.” But neither is it this totally weirdo suburban American Catholicism. When we lived in State College, I saw a Catholicism I was totally unfamiliar with. The whole practice resembled one of these evangelical  churches, and the people were real zealots, all hyper-conservative politically and just deadly serious about the teachings. It was unnerving. Needless to say, she and I are both atheists, but if we have to pack the kids off to a Catholic school, it would have to be the kind that includes the wink and nod.

Back to grading. Oh, and we’re on the quarter system, so I still have 4 weeks of class left. It hurts at this time of year. But then again…

Oh, it’s that time again. Insomniac rambling about daily life and such. Meaningless reports: nostalgia for the always incomplete end of bureaucratic culture. There’s still something vaguely sexy about the forgotten colonial outpost, and the dedicated functionary who sends in the dispatches, despite the fact that nobody’s reading them, and that the surveillance has lost all utility. Hmmm. The horror of banality. So here we go.

1. The kids are asleep. I’ve been saying that a lot, even when they aren’t, or not really. It has a nice ring to it. The kids are asleep. Variations: The kids are sleeping. Kids? Asleep.  …and a couple of kids of course. Them’s some sleeping kids. You might have fooled the Philadelphia, and joshed the Joliet, but you never did the Kenosha kid(s are sleeping). Are the kids asleep? Yup, they are.  It’s fun to say. Try it. The kids are asleep. On account of there’s two of them. Kids. Asleep.

2. Kids These Days – Two flicks I liked recently, with the usual proviso that “recently” for us means months or even a year old for normal people who can go to movies in actual theaters. First, Paranoid Park, Gus Van Sant’s continuing exploration and twisting of the American high school film. A clear follow-up to Elephant, even if not in the trilogy, complete with the continuous following shots of teenage boys walking. I noted this feature of Elephant in a discussion with Chuck from Austin once, and he made a good point: the frustration and boredom the viewer feels at the seemingly aimless, though clearly purposive walks mimics the boredom and aimless directionality of the American teenage experience itself. Elephant opens with what feels like a 10 minute sequence of the following shot; it feels like ten minutes, in the same way the last two minutes of sophomore level math felt like ten minutes, so you’re back there while watching the film, in the pointlessness of the educational system that you already know, by tenth grade, is cracked and broken. That it gets shot up or otherwise cut in half then seems like an afterthought, or at least something happening. If anything, Paranoid Park is even less moralistic and sentimental than Elephant (or Milk for that matter), and certainly seems less interested in pointing up some lesson about youth culture. Yes, it’s fucked like everything else. The film is also, maybe in the same way as The Lookout, about writing. I could see how various expressivist teachers would love this sort of thing, even if it leaves off ambiguously, to the extent that the main character has to write himself a meaning for a meaningless act. Maybe that’s high school, too. Second film, the Swedish vampire flick Let the Right One In. For some reason, the version I got was dubbed rather than subtitled (truly the sign of a shitty distribution agreement), so some of the acting seemed off, but it maintained itself despite this thoughtless crime. Plot: Oskar, a weird little Swedish boy is bullied at school until he meets his new neighbor, a little girl vampire named Eli. The film is then their story. I’m not usually into horror or vampire films, but this one did good. It’s more a sweet little tale with the occasional and very subtle special effects. In one scene, for instance, the little girl scampers up the side of a hospital building seeking her guardian, a man who keeps her in blood through various murders until he screws up for the last time. Her insect-like climbing is a background effect, made more effective for being almost out of sight. Even the one real attack scene has a novel element, as the little girl clutches her victim like a child would, which suddenly seems eerily animalistic. It’s well done. These are both small films, mostly about people, with the sudden and nearly antiseptic introduction of gore.  Better, then, for being small. Of course, we get the sense that Eli’s previous guardian, who came to such a grotesque end in what seems to be his mid-fifties, was the last Oskar, perhaps engaged when he was himself a sweet and bullied little boy, and so the sweetness of the movie leaves off with this disastrous implication. Better, then, for cutting the saccharine with the ultimately dark suggestion. We also saw Frost/Nixon, which is engaging, if a little Karate-Kiddish. The Karate Kids are asleep.

3. Trips and Events – Our big summer trip will be to….State College, Pennsylvania. Oy. Some people go to Paris, etc. I’m going for some workshop that I applied for, while she and the kids are coming along because we know people there, etc. I wouldn’t call it a vacation destination, but it’s pleasant enough in the summer. So we’re probably going to drive out, and we’ll try to then make our way to upstate NY, maybe, but even that sounds dicey. That’s our vacation, essentially: one night in Ohio and a few in Happy Valley. I would have also gone to Montreal this summer for the ISHR conference, but I received notification that my paper was accepted in…April! Everybody else I know received acceptances in friggin’ November. And I’m fine taking the second cut after somebody else no doubt dropped, but I had just assumed that the non-notification was a rejection, not some limbo state waiting list sorta thing. So I’m not going. I have too much other stuff to finish up now to rev up that research bit again for these people who kept me dangling. It seems like an odd way to run things up there. Finally, if our last Big Night Out was kind of a catastrophe, our next promises, I hope, to be better. We’re going to pay ridiculous fees for some professional nanny-type to watch Ellie and Rafe, and we’re going to see Leonard Cohen at the Chicago Theater May 5. Just rah. Can’t wait.

So back to the colonial outpost, and the proverbial forgotten functionary. There’s always a strange local fever spreading mysteriously across the outpost in these things, and no less so now. Isn’t there a strange moment in every one of these plague panics (swine flu) when you think, just for a second, that you really should be scared, even though any disruption would be an inconvenience or worse? It’s like the first few pages of Camus when the rats start to come out of the sewers to die, or the first few pages of And The Band Played On, with the Kaposi’s sarcoma and pneumocystis carinii popping up all over the place – and you’re gonna be the one who is both alarmed, but much too jaded to act on it?  Maybe my usual disdain for being affected by media outbreaks is being blocked by the fact that the kids – these two kids – are asleep…

So she  is on maternity leave, and I’m just loving it. Be aware that she’s bored stiff, despite a (fingers crossed) very non-colicky baby. Everybody told us with Ellie that her non-stop screaming was very much out of the normal range, and I think we knew that implicitly, but when you have no measure for comparison, the whole claim seems somewhat unreal. But this baby might be on the other end of the range; he seems to fuss in minor ways and eat constantly one day, and sleep all the next. I think it’s an eating-growing-eating-growing thing, but what do I know, really? Answer: not much.

But back to maternity leave. Thanks to the good people at Giant Foreign Financial Institution, she gets three months leave. But what do you do to eat up the time? Ellie’s in daycare all day, and once you get them in a daycare here at a particular clip, it’s foolish to try to move them back to part time. I go in every day on my usual 8-4 schedule, though I’ve been coming home a bit earlier than usual since the kid was born (ah, academic schedules…how anyone complains about a job where you can just pick up and leave when you want is still beyond me). But still: that’s a lot of hours, and that dude from The Big Bang Theory can only be on The View so often. So she‘s taken to making some food. I likes it.

To be clear, I do the dinner cooking in the family. Always have. I think we’ve gone weeks at some points during which she never cooked one meal. This is a great deal for me, since I like cooking, and yet I can still pretend it is a household chore. The problem does not escape she‘s attention. Versed in all the feminist arguments about unequal household labor, she consistently points out that traditionally male household labor can often double as a hobby (home repairs and the like), while traditionally female household labor could never be mistaken for hobby (just don’t tell the Bathroom Cleaning Club of Vancouver). I’m like the guy who argues that he shouldn’t have to clean up after the barbecue because he “manned the grill.” So my feeble attempts to suggest that we share the household labor equally because I cook does not fly even as a theoretical matter. (I think it’s also a case of tolerance for general disorder, or household entropy, where my cycle is about two weeks, while she‘s cycle is about 8-12 hours.) But now there’s more encroachment on my already weak case, as she gets more and more into doing the cooking. I’d say cooking every night buys me out of maybe two loads of laundry, in the Family Labor Exchange Guilt System. And I feel like I’m losing a load in the bargain, especially if this whole cooking thing sticks, and perhaps even drifting toward mopping the kitchen floor territory, ledger-sheet-wise.

But the upside, despite the looming threat of all natural all purpose cleaners in my future, is that she actually makes good goddamn food. I make good food. I’m a good recipe cook. I’m not very creative in my cooking, I don’t think, but if you give me a decently constructed recipe, I can make something really good. And because I’ve been at it for awhile, I’m more comfortable, and for even some complex meals that I’ve done several time, I even understand the theory (I guess you’d call it), so I can do those without checking the recipe and make some variations. Blah blah blah. I’m still talking about me, when this is a post about she’s cooking! Do I ever shut up? In any case, the larger point is that I’ve been coming home to really good meals and other foodstuffs, which seems like a definite benefit attached to this whole baby thing. So I took the following pictures, which she calls my “documenting of her domesticity.” We’re only two weeks into this thing and she’s going all Germaine Greer on me.  Anyway, it’s nice when you show up and find

Butternut Squash Risotto

fresh baked Banana Bread

Blah blah blah:

• she no longer works for troubled (American) Giant Financial Institution. Now she works for Giant Non-American Financial Institution. Doing more or less the same thing. Her team stormed out when they had another offer.  You basically don’t tell anyone you’re leaving until the day you leave, at which point you walk up to the Ops manager with a resignation letter and say “I’m going to such and such a place; please forward my personal belongings.” And storm out. This is the established protocol for what the industry calls “walking across the street.” I like this idea, and think there should be more of it.
• Cheap eats: Just around the corner, a kick ass Vietnamese bakery where I get a grilled pork sandwich (called Banh Mi) for $3.62. That’s Chicago on a shoestring. Yums.
• I find myself increasingly uncomfortable with Diego’s “Rescue Pack.” For those of you who don’t watch, Diego is an animal rescuer who goes on many advetures, well, rescuing animals. Whenever he gets in a particularly difficult jam, he calls on his handy “Rescue Pack,” which is a talking orange backpack he carries around, and which can only be “activated” by loud shouts of Activite!, in Spanish. Once activated, the Rescue Pack offers a set of options for escaping from the current dilemma. So, if the mischievous Bobo Brothers (two troublesome monkeys) cause an avalanche with their monkey business, the Rescue Pack – after a musical number that, in a disturbingly catchy tune, notes that the Rescue Pack is “coming to the rescue” – will offer up a bicycle, a dune buggy, and a sled, leaving you, the viewer, to choose which solution will most effectively deliver Diego from the monkey-caused snow event. And thus suddenly materializes a sled from the Rescue Pack, and Diego goes sledding down the avalanche to safety. Now I’m sure various child psychologists have their hands all over this thing and have determined that the choice between the means of escape promotes creative problem solving and all that. So I get the whole options thing, but it troubles me for three reasons. First, I’m a neurotic who gets worked up over stuff like this, but that’s a given. Second, it violates the most basic principles of Aristotle’s Poetics by building a deus ex rescue pack into every episode (as did the old Bat Man, but that’s another story). Finally, it gives the kids the idea that there’s an easy solution for every pressing problem. But, really, fourth, it confirms Aristotle’s argument for me, in that I am troubled by the deus ex machina for the same reason that Aristotle was really troubled by it. Formally the deus ex machina is an annoying and cheap device that disrupts the unity of the composition (the action should make sense internally, so you can’t build up an impossible situation only to rescue it with a new device that hasn’t yet been introduced into the ensemble). Fine. Every first year English major knows that. But I think Aristotle is, like me, more annoyed by the pedagogical force of the deus ex machina, in its reassurance that every problem, no matter how grave, comes packaged with a magical solution. This type of thing is deadly for a society, is the point.  So I’m troubled because I agree. But maybe, fifth, I’m really troubled because my father used to mouth sarcastic comments at stuff on teevee when I was a kid, and it absolutely drove me into a silent rage. He’d never just let the show be a show, and I hated that. And yet here I find myself saying stuff like “Oh, here comes the Rescue Pack…and a magic raft just in time to save Diego from the flood…what a miracle…” just as Ellie is yelling activite! activite! trying to get the damn Rescue Pack to open. So maybe, to set Aristotle aside and make it a Mommy-Daddy-Me thing, I’m really troubled because I’m turning into my father. Oedipus at last!
• I believe that once a car reaches ten years of age, it becomes eligible for a nickname. Not before.
• “The truth is that sexuality is everywhere: the way a bureaucrat fondles his records, a judge administers justice, a businessman causes money to circulate; the way the bourgeoisie fuck the proletariat; and so on. And there is no need to resort to metaphors, any more than for the libido to go by way of metamorphoses. Hitler got the fascists sexually aroused. Flags, nations, armies, banks get a lot of people aroused.” Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus
• If you’re looking for about the most depressing show on television, try The First 48. The premise is simple: most murders are solved within the first forty-eight hours, so this show follows homicide detectives in several cities as they investigate a murder – for the first forty-eight hours. Now, I’m a great lover of the murder show, whether it be an hour-long drama, the various “real forensics” shows, a two-hour Dateline special on some trial, or documentary like Paradise Lost or The Staircase. I will basically watch one of these shows at any hour of the day or night if I’m not busy, and I know this is a population effect, since now they have a network through which I can do just that (the Investigation Discovery Network). Point being, I know me my murder shows. But TF48 really takes the cake. What you learn watching the show is very simple: most murders are over piddling bullshit, done by sad people to sad people, done by dumb people, hastily, stupidly, and wretchedly. You learn that most suspects are identified not by wacky, futuristic DNA techniques, but by people calling in and reporting tips. You learn that most murders are solved not in some gotcha interview, but by the suspect simply confessing, without much pressure, with no lawyer present, and seemingly without regard for the complete wreck of their own lives. People kill each other over nothing – a silly drunken argument, three or four hundred dollars, or petty beefs escalated past any reasonable levels, poorly planned robberies gone awry, some agitated moment that soon passes. They leave obvious clues at the scene, and when I say obvious, I mean their own fucking cell phones. They tell everybody they know about it, and someone invariably calls the police. They tell ridiculous and non-credible stories before succumbing and confessing. It’s pathetic, in the classical sense. But the show is a good antidote to the other murder shows, which almost always include some complex plot or other that has to be untangled and leads to a complicated and suspenseful trial. These really do stand out because they are the exceptions, these “exciting” storylines. But mostly it’s just ugly and sad.
• On a brighter note, I’ll be reporting next week from my old home town of San Francisco, where I’ll be attending the annual 4C’s conference. You may have noticed that I only offered 15 of the Top 20 4C’s Presentation Mistakes last time, so I’ll be on the look-out for more. Hell, I may even commit some to fill out my list. Don’t kid yourself: the paper’s ready to go; I’m just fine-tuning the handout. But just to annoy my audience, I will be starting my presentation with a QUIZ. I was inspired by an internet quiz that asked you to determine whether the person in a picture was a porn star or a Fox News reporter. I scored 4 out of 10. Yeah, I groove like that.  So, Number 16: administering pointless quiz at the beginning of a presentation? Maybe! Stay tuned.

Yup yup.  It’s that time again.

• Victory! Having scarfed down about 20 chocolate chip cookies, there was no way I was going to get to sleep at my usual bedtime of 1am. But I tried anyway, tossing and turning and generally getting no closer to sleep. Then I watched as my daughter came scampering out of her room, headed for the bathroom. She went in, pulled down her pajamas and her pull-ups, sat on her potty, made her pee, dumped it, wiped, and flushed the toilet. In the middle of the night. This is a great victory in the Seven Red house, and I’m just so proud that I’m telling all you fine folks about it. Potty training was an ordeal, but what I’ve learned is that it’s a completely non-linear process. We worked on her for four months, through refusal, tantrums, false starts, hiccups, half-steps, half-a-dozen how-to books, and massive frustration. We were getting nowhere. Then, one day, I sat with her for about an hour and simply refused to let her leave the bathroom. She settled in, did her thing, and then took to it. Overnight. She went from refusing the potty and saying “I’m a BABY,” to using it all the time, as if by magic. It’s clear that she could have been potty trained earlier, but she just didn’t want to do it. But a night-time trip, completely self-motivated? It’s a beautiful thing.
• Irony! We live on the third floor of a three-flat, as they call them here in Chicago. Downstairs from us is a nice guy named Steven, who lives (I think) with his girlfriend (who I’ve never seen). Below them lives a couple who moved in when we did – the building had just been through a gut rehab, and we were the first tenants. The first floor couple are married, but they’re young, maybe in their mid-twenties. They fight all the time. It’s really unbelievable. I go out back to smoke, and I hear them two floors down in these brutal conversations, like “Can’t you even understand the question I’m asking you? Are you stupid? “Are you?” “I’m so sick of dealing with your shit!” All the time, like that. This qualifies, in my book, as “putting your business in the street,” and she knows that there is nothing I detest more than putting one’s business in the street. I don’t think she and I have ever had a fight in public, because as soon as one even comes close to starting, I mutter something like “business in the street” and disengage. And we don’t wonder whether they have the same fights inside. The basement of our building is a general storage area for all the tenants, and we put tons of stuff down there because we have almost zero closet space. So, from time to time we have to retrieve this or that from the basement. As it turns out, you can hear conversations in the first floor apartment pretty clearly from the basement. It goes like this: “I can’t fucking believe you. You asshole.” “Oh, like you’re better. Fuck you.” “God, something so simple and you still manage to screw it up.” Etc. All the time. Now the kicker for this came about three months ago. I was in my usual state of insomnia, and heard some ruckus outside at around 2:30am.It was so loud that it woke she up: some commotion in the street. We both went to the front window, and saw a very drunk woman laid out on the ground, with a man trying to pull her to her feet, tugging her arm roughly and yelling “Get up! You never fucking listen to me!” The woman was saying, screaming “I want to stay here!” “Get the fuck up!!” she and I looked at each other like – no, is that them, our neighbors? People started coming out of their buildings to see what was going on and help the woman into her house, and the police even came. Sure enough, it was our downstairs neighbors. A truer instance of putting your business in the street would be hard to imagine. The woman was literally in the gutter.  Two days ago, she was yelling at her husband to let her into the car, and he drove off while she was still gripping the door handle. This as I was walking up the block, so I reached our front door at the same time as she did. “Uh, how you doin’?” I asked awkwardly. So today I was coming in, and I bumped into Steven, the nice guy on the second floor, not connected with the first-floor couple. But he says to me,  mistaking me for the first floor guy (I had a hat and scarf on), “Sorry about the noise last night.” Huh? Then he sees that I’m his upstairs neighbor and says “Oh, sorry again. The first floor people were banging on the ceiling because we were being too loud.” I smiled. Nope, I would actually come down and knock on your door if that was happening. Since I’m like, an adult. We parted ways at the second landing. But I just had to laugh that the first-floor couple would have the nerve to tell other tenants to, um, lower the noise. Amazing. Now, she thinks that they shouldn’t be married. I agree. They seem to despise each other. But I will say that there is at least one activity they seem to enjoy doing together, and they are no less loud at that than they are in their fights. Let’s just say that I hear a lot when I am outside for my smoke breaks…
• Fluffy! We watched Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist. Eh. I can do without that Juno kid, for reals. Always with the same character. I get it, with the halting delivery and self-consciously charming not-like-the-other-high-school-guys bit. I really do. I’ve had a television series and now three movies to learn it, and I get it now. Basta! But I will say this. The movie gets exactly right the teenage all-night-Manhattan-trip, even down to the Rasta guys who invariably butt into your conversations. We used to do this occasionally when I was a teenager, especially after the rave clubs opened on Hudson Street, and it was always exactly like that. In similar news, we watched Zack and Miri Make a Porno last night. I also get the whole Seth Rogan bit. she calls it the “schlubby guy gets hot chick” appeal. For my part, I don’t think any of those Judd Apatow movies (and their various Roganesque offspring) are about women at all. They are about the intense pathology of the male friendship. The women in these movies are merely functions to contrast the male friendships. This is most obvious in Pineapple Express, but re-watch The 40 Year Old Virgin, Knocked Up, Superbad, whichever, and tell me these aren’t primarily studies of the contemporary male friendship circle.
• Cookie! It’s all like Revolutionary Road up in here today. I made my ass-kicking Organization Man 1950′s Style Meatloaf and she baked a batch of her awesome cookies, which is why I’m still up writing this blog post at 2:56 in the morning. I should have been asleep for twenty minutes by now! (I don’t really sleep. It’s a personal failing). I won’t even try to describe the cookies. This is what the kitchen counter looked like at around 4:30 this afternoon:

• Pretty! As in, you think you’re so…

• Groovy! Michael White and the original Liberty Jazz Band were just incredible on American Routes today, playing live at the House of Blues in New Orleans. Knock you down good. We had it on when we were eating dinner, and I was just mesmerized by it, as I always am by good live jazz. There are worse ways to spend an hour than this, I assure you:

American Routes, February 21

Wow. This whole blog-thing is getting so confessional. Whatever.

• The pilgrimage to the holy shrine of all mid-30′s-middle-income-urban-parents today. That’s right: the Blue and Gold Temple of IKEA. We picked up a shelving unit for babygirl’s room. IKEA is not unlike the Catholic Church. When you’re actually there, it’s a mild and almost anodyne experience, during which you feel virtually nothing. Both have the clearly defined ritual paths and behaviors, designed to slow and pacify a gathering crowd. Both have the serial repetitions: The Lord be with you…and also with you…We lift up our hearts…We lift them up to the Lord…Should we get some new dishtowels?…Do we need them?…The old ones are getting kinda grungy…OK, let’s do it. But most of all, like the Catholic Church, the true pain of Ikea – like searing, lingering guilt – never hits until you get home, and have to build the damn thing. The problem with IKEA is not the instruction sets; they’re actually remarkably clear. Like Catholicism, you always know what you’re doing wrong. The problem is that you do wrong despite knowing it’s wrong, because the thing, the shelving unit in this case, makes it damn near impossible to do it right. Which is to say, it is precisely like the Catholic moral system: personal failure is a feature, not a bug. Why, I ask you, must a system designed for DIY construction be organized such that a half-millimeter error would make its construction impossible? Oh, God of IKEA, we are merely human, with all these human faults! So we spent the afternoon in sin and penance (and more penance than sin, but that’s always the way…), but ended up with a pretty nifty shelving system. Irony? It’s called the Expedit. They need to expedite the building process.
• I find it odd that both she and I have male first cousins who live in Boston and have visual arts careers (photographer, film-maker). Neither of them is from Boston. I sometimes imagine that they’re the same guy, which weirds me a little. It’s also true that we hardly ever speak to either of them, though not for lack of desire. I think I’ve seen my cousin twice in ten years.
• The shelving unit is part of the preparation for the babybelly. Don’t ask me how; it’s not the point. We’d done the equivalent of jack squat to prepare for the arrival of the babybelly until about two weeks ago, when we were like, “Oh, shit…we’re gonna have another baby in less than 90 days!” Well, yeah. Maybe we should get off our asses and get our shit together vis-a-vis the impending arrival of another human being (and a very needy one) in our home. Last time around, we were uber-prepared by now, but we see now that the whole preparation thing then was really first-time-at-the-rodeo sort of behavior. This ain’t our first rodeo. So, all things considered, I think we’re at about the right mix of “Eh, it’ll all come together” and “We’re so screwed!” Plans are in the offing. Plans and lists. Lists and more lists.
• We’ve been watching the DVD’s for Season 1 and 2 of 30 Rock and we think it’s friggin’ hilarious. Alec Baldwin deserves every award he gets for that show. Double that for Tina Fey.
• We had yummy dinner courtesy of one of the best Vietnamese joints in Chicago, Pho Xe Tank, better known as just Tank Noodles. I worked in a Vietnamese restaurant some years ago, and we’ve made Vietnamese a pretty consistent staple of our diet ever since, so I know good Vietnamese food, and this is good. It’s located in what could be called the Little Vietnam section of Uptown (Broadway and Argyle), and it’s always, always packed. They must make a mint. In any case, I got the house pho (with the tripe, soft tendon, and all), while she got a nice beef dish (wrap it up with a ton of veggies in some rice paper, yums). The cha gio, of course, are mandatory. babygirl thought the nuac mam was too spicy, but she liked the cha gio. Tank does not eff around. I’m not sure these pictures convey the scale of the pho I got for $7. That’s a friggin’ salad bowl:

I declare to my antimacassar if you took up a straw from the bloody floor and if you said to Bloom: Look at, Bloom. Do you see that straw? That’s a straw. Declare to my aunt he’d talk about it for an hour so he would and talk steady. - James Joyce, Ulysses

In which I offer an analysis of the subject lines for the last three spam messages I’ve received.

1) Tired of people laughing at your small tool – The initial meaning of this statement is clear enough, with “tool,” serving as a common metaphor for penis. So, on a quick reading, one might think that the author is asking the reader a rhetorical question, the answer to which would be, well, yes. But, oh, so much more interesting. In the first place, simply on that initial reading, the subject line writer is being gender neutral: he or she doesn’t specify whether these “people” who are thus laughing are men, women, or both. The spam message seems, in other words, intent on avoiding any heteronormativity. It’s also quite complimentary in a strange way, since the reader would have had opportunity for more than one person to laugh at his small penis, and, in fact, one would even think that many such people have laughed, since the whole operation has become tiresome. So the implied reader for the rhetorical question seems to be somebody who is extraordinarily good at inducing others (of indeterminate sex and orientation) into a situation of nakedness, with the only downside being their eventual laughter at his small penis. This is a persuasive courter, but with one little flaw. In a more extended form, the question could be restated as “Aren’t you tired, dear reader, that all these people you’ve successfully convinced to go to bed with you only end up breaking up in hysterics when they catch sight of your very small penis?” But that’s just the initial reading. If we look more closely, we should notice that there is no question mark at all. The subject line, while missing any closing punctuation, could thus read as a declarative sentence rather than a rhetorical question: it is the subject line’s author who is tired of people laughing at the reader’s small tool. This is a strange sort of statement indeed. In order to buy into it, we’d have to assume that the writer, a third party, neither one of the laughers nor the small penised reader, has had access to the laughing, and has grown tired of it. Was the writer in the room on several of these occasions? Hiding in the closet, wincing? Is the writer a friend of the recipient who has had to endure many sad, alcohol-soaked tales of this recurring problem? And what would those conversation have been like? Why would the writer himself be tired of other people laughing at the reader’s misfortune? Is the writer merely compassionate? Or is there something else going on? This is very curious stuff. Of course, we are also authorized, I think, to read the statement literally, and to ignore the cultural metaphorics of the tool. Maybe there really is a small tool, like, say, a tiny little screwdriver used for detailed electronics work, and the writer is sick and tired of all the people who immediately break into penis jokes whenever the small screwdriver is removed from its delicate carrying case. Maybe the writer is a manager named Ernest in a small accounting office, and this email is not spam at all, but a misfire, meant for the tech guy, Kevin, who comes around to the office from time to time and breaks out the small screwdriver, and everybody in the office starts laughing, because Dave, the office jokester, says “Hey, that’s a pretty small tool you got there, Kevin,” and Gina the New Girl laughs and laughs, and Ernest loves Gina the New Girl, and wonders some nights if he hired her because he loved her the very instant he saw her, and the ethical problems that would entail, and he has seen her talking to Dave at Rumours Lounge after work, talking up close and giggling at his jokes, and he now fears that Dave will win her over with his humor, so he’s writing this email pleading with Kevin not to bring that damn tiny screwdriver around again, in order to deprive Dave of the opportunity for yet another knee-slapper.

2) Don’t be embarrassed of your little one every again – On its face, this subject line would seem to have the same general message as #1: the implication is that by opening the message, you will learn of some technique or process by which to enlarge your penis. But a closer reading reveals several characteristics that distinguish it from #1. First, the reader is not openly laughed at by people, but rather experiences a subjective state of embarrassment. This is a key distinction, because we’re not assured that the implied reader ever does manage to get anybody in bed. This embarrassment may precede any partners, and may even prevent the reader from approaching possible partners in the first place. While the reader in #1 would thus experience the cruelty of others, the implied reader for this subject line could be thought to be at the root of his own problem in socializing. Or, alternatively, the reader may have one or more partners who do not laugh, but the reader imagines that the partner(s) may be laughing, and thus suffers a state of embarrassment. Whereas the reader for #1 experiences an objectively verifiable reaction, the reader from #2 can only refer to an inner experience, either before, during, or after the exposure of said small penis to others. I will leave it to my own readers to determine which is a sadder story: the master pick-up artist who suffers the supposed cruelty of his partners (itself a cruel irony), or the self-conscious subject who merely imagines such cruelty, and is tortured into inaction because of it. But again, we might read the subject line another way. Specifically, the term “little one” is often used to refer to one’s children; indeed, as I learned when she frequented new parent bulletin boards after babygirl’s birth, it is the common phrase, and even often abbreviated as LO. So, this subject line, like the last one, may not be about penises at all, but about parents who are embarrassed by the behavior of their own children. What does the subject line promise? Behavior modification for small children? Or some method for parents to get over themselves and allow their kids to just be kids? And really, we might ask again which version is more tragic: the shy and humiliated man who cannot meet people because of his embarrassment over his penis, or the parent who recoils at the behavior – perhaps innocent – of his or her own child? The subject line tells a sad story, in any case. And we also might attend to the error – presumably a typo – of “every again.” The substitution of the non-standard “embarrassed of” rather than the more common prepositional usage of “embarrassed by” would suggest that the error really is an error, in which case, what a rich and meaningful mistake it is! Or is it a mistake? Did the writer mean to include a noun after “every,” rather than actually meaning to write “ever.” Was this a verbal tic that was never corrected in revision? Could it have said “Don’t be embarrassed of your little one every morning play date,” or “Don’t be embarrassed of your little one every time you hire a hooker.” Maybe the writer didn’t want to specify, and decided to use “again” instead, but simply forgot to delete “every.” We’ll never know, I guess. Finally, I think we should note the imperative form. It is, of course, common sales practice to use the imperative (Don’t spend too much on car insurance!), but might not the imperative here signal an actual order, and, indeed, an order that the reader could not possibly comply with? Might it not be an ironic commentary on the limits of subjective freedom? For how does one prevent in advance one’s own embarrassment, where embarrassment constitutes an almost involuntary affective state? Might not the author of this message be commenting on the impossibility of controlling particular affects, these states that come from outside, that cannot be controlled by the subject that experiences or endures them? Isn’t this really a bit like saying “Don’t love her anymore!”  or “Don’t love him any more!” – the worst advice given to the moping teenager by his or her friends – but really an introduction to adulthood, as we learn the boundaries of the will: Don’t love her anymore, as if one could control through sheer will one’s fallingness, one’s loves? Don’t be embarrassed of your little one every again! Oh, the reader thinks, would that I could turn it off!

3) RE: Q&A Doctor Anita Graves – Since I have never – to my knowledge – attended any discussion by Doctor Anita Graves, nor written any follow-up email regarding the Q&A that presumably followed such discussion, you can imagine my surprise when  I read this subject line, which takes the form of a response email to a follow-up to a Q&A session. Did I attend any such lecture? Did I send any such response to the Q&A? These questions struck panic into me when this subject line popped up in my inbox: could such a thing have happened without my remembering it? And so I examined the subject line more closely. In the first place, I’m struck by the form of responsiveness that’s imputed. First, there must have been some discussion. Following the discussion, there must have been a question and answer session. Following the question and answer session, the implied reader felt the need to either inquire or respond further. And following that response or inquiry, the writer of the subject line presumably provided yet another response. “RE: Q&A Doctor Anita Graves” can thus be read as a dense sign of these much more extensive relationships of response and counter-response, information and courtesy. We can go further. The initial speaker, Doctor Anita Graves, retains her title, though whether she is a medical expert (who studies, say, the relative size of male sexual organs), or a professor of some kind is left to the implied reader’s memory. Certainly, a good argument can be made that Dr. Graves is, in fact, a medical doctor, since the use of the full term “Doctor” is much more common when referring to medical doctors than it is with regard to PhDs. So, for the sake of argument, let’s assume that Anita Graves is a medical doctor. That adds a new layer to this richly woven subject line. The initial contact was with a professional, an expert. The expert is at the heart of the questioning; all the responsiveness and dialogue that follows is premised on the expert opinion of Doctor Anita Graves, the font of knowledge. In this small subject line we can detect the social structure of scientific, medical, and perhaps even expert discourse as a whole: the expert speaks, then allows additional clarifying questions; the implied reader seeks more, ever more truth from our expert, who gamely replies, as is the expert’s duty to both layperson and peer. Or perhaps I’m wr0ng about all of this! Perhaps Doctor Anita Graves has refused to do a Q&A in her pending lecture, absolutely refused to take questions from these jerks, and has stated so in no uncertain terms, and the administrator insisted that Q&A was a condition of the stipend, as follows: “Q&A Doctor Anita Graves…is a condition of the stipend!” Using her whole name and title thusly spelled out – the email equivalent of your mother calling you by your full given, middle, and last name when she catches you outside writing in the wet cement or catching a drag from a cigarette, and all your little hoodrat friends take off running because they know you’re so fucking busted when the full on name comes out. Doctor Anita Graves! Is that you writing in that cement there! Get in here this instant! And then this email, Doctor Anita Graves’ response to the completely inappropriate tone of the administrator’s admonishment, something like “RE: Q&A Doctor Anita Graves…It may be a condition of the stipend, but you can take your stipend, your lecture, and your fucking Q&A and shove it! I will not – NOT – be questioned by the likes of, etc. Yrs, Anita Emily Graves, MD”

So, yes, I had to be one of the numerous jackasses who felt the need to comment on how cold it is in my Facebook status. Sue me. It’s unusual. Still, mentioning that it’s like, really friggin’ cold is about as interesting as recounting the plot of a sitcom you saw last night, or telling detailed stories about the goings-on in the life of your cat. So now I will add more.

1. Clothing – I’m always amused by the outfits people wear when the forecast says it will be 25 below zero with the windchill. It’s like any thought of aesthetics goes out the window as you tend toward a particular limit, and everything goes super-functional very quickly. The major effect, as I see it, is that everybody ends up having to turn their whole bodies in order to look to the right and left, because the scarf-hood combinations end up acting like blinders. It leads to an odd sort of visual in a major city, because everyone’s gait is slowed, and you get these almost robotic movements, as if the population has itself slowed down like molecules. As for me, it’s not like I’m wearing she‘s yoga pants under my jeans or anything like that. Oh, wait. It is like that.
2. Clothing, Part 2 – Thus far, I haven’t encountered any of those total assclowns who wear shorts on the coldest day of the year in order to show you how they’ve mastered the physical environment. This particular brand of imbecile was extremely common when I was in college, but it may be a localized Northeast sort of practice. And suddenly, rumors of the “more practically minded” Midwesterners start to make sense.
3. Frosty – How is it that I have a frozen windshield on the inside of my car? Can any science heads help me with this? My hypothesis is as follows: the snow that has fallen or been footshovelled into the car evaporates somewhat, but then immediately freezes when it comes into contact with the glass. She’s hypothesis was as follows: a) You’re wrong, and b) It must have something to do with the temperature. Well, no shit. On both points. I suppose it will remain a mystery.
4. Icicles – Giant, huge, incredible icicles. Eight, ten, fourteen feet long. Clustered in massive packs.

So, wasn’t this fascinating? Oh, by the way, you should have seen what Willy the Cat did the other day. It was hilarious…