Seven Red

I like this, from our friends at Loungerati:

Since reading about the 500 year anniversary of DOM Benedictine contest last year, I have been tinkering with my own recipe that honors the liqueur but also tips the trilby to the iconic Italian macchina, the Fiat Cinquecento (“500″ in Italian). In other words, DOM meets MOD, a drink that you could have in Torino or West London or Brooklyn. May I introduce a delicious new aperitivo!

Head over to Loungerati to get more on this, including the recipe for The Cinquecento. Just as a note, she and I always make fun of the Fiat Cinquecento. We were listening to NPR one day, and it must have been the 50th anniversary  of the iconic car, because they had some guy on with a thick Italian accent who said something like, “You know, many people in Italy were told that they were conceived in a Fiat Cinquecento.” Wink wink. Hahaha, said the otherwise serious NPR journalist lady, the implication being Oh those crazy Italians with the sexy and the passion! Needless to say, she and I cracked up, since this remains the way “Italy” functions in the American imaginary, even on Marketplace. So now, whenever we see a commercial or news report that draws on the same trope (“Italians are soooo passionate”), we immediately break into Italian accents and say “Did you know, non per niente, that I wuza – how you say – conceived with the bang bang in a Fiat Cinquecento, which izza the funny, yes?, because it is such a smallah car!”

Just as a side note, one could easily index the production of the Fiat Cinquecento to the whole of postwar economic development – and corresponding labor struggle – in Italy. It was through the Cinquecento that the Mirafiore Fiat plant expanded into its giant form; it would become one of the primary sites (along with the Pirelli rubber works in Milan) of the labor uprisings of 1968 (at Pirelli, especially), the Hot Autumn of 1969 (with the occupation of Mirafiore), and the culmination of that cycle in 1973-74.  (Production of the Cinquecento shifted away from Mirafiore in the mid-1960′s, in a deal with Pirelli, Fiat, and Bianchi/Autobianchi). We also see in the production of the Cinquecento the problem of the rapid rise in output in the factories (indeed, the 1957, 1960, and 1965 numbers for the Cinquecento show something like an 80 degree curve, upward), which required the mass migration of southern workers to the industrial valleys of the north, produced the mid-level “pink collar” class of technical workers that would become crucial for autonomist arguments against traditional union structures, and pointed up the problems of intensified labor exploitation together with stagnating wages, the very conditions that made the CGIL accomodationism that much more dramatic. Certainly, there were other industries that shifted the composition of the Italian working class during this period (the development of the massive petrochemical plants in Porto Marghera industrial corridor, for instance), but it would be hard not to see the development and popularity of the Fiat Cinquecento (especially during the 1960′s) as contributing directly to the transformation of the Italian labor movement in the 1960′s and 70′s, which of course comes to us today through people like Negri (Potere Operaio’s role in the Mirafiore strikes of 1973 are especially important for understanding this trajectory). I guess it’s more fun to say “My mama said she makuh the bang bang in the Cinquecento!”

So, to the Cinquecento. I’ll ask Loungerati’s cocktail specialist to make me one when we get back east, and I know what I’ll be drinking to.

It took dominion everywhere.
- Wallace Stevens, Anecdote of the Jar

So I had a therapy session with she this morning on the drive into work, and we reached some interesting conclusions. Here’s the deal: I am perhaps the worst person to drive with that you’ll ever meet. I constantly critique other drivers, often in loud tones, for their various failures on the road. This habit makes my wife crazy, since it becomes very stressful to be sitting next to somebody who is essentially yelling at the world non-stop. She often says this: “In all the other areas of life, you seem overly generous to people – so why is it that as soon as you get behind the wheel of a car you become this angry hyper-critic?” That’s what we were getting to the nub of, therapy-wise.

We decided that the specific personality trait is simple: I cannot stand uncertainty. All the behaviors that set me off when I drive have to do with uncertainty; it’s for this reason that my major statement while I drive is “What the fuck are you doin’, dude?” or “Where ya goin’, ya fuckin’ nut?” So, for example, some driver in front of me slowed down today next to a Starbucks on Lincoln, apparently ready to double park and run in. But the driver didn’t stop quickly enough for me. He or she just sort of rolled at about 5mph, crawling, crawling. Should I go around? Should I wait? Should I slam into the back of this nut’s car on general principle? What the fuck are you doin’, dude? This diagnosis made sense, not least because my ultimate driving hate is reserved for fuckers who don’t know how to use their turn signals. Guess what, asshole? I don’t care where you’re going, so putting your signal on after you already break is a worthless procedure; put it on before you break so I know that I will have to break! Grrr. Ah, she says, but just a little while ago you yelled at somebody who didn’t pull far enough into the intersection while making a left turn (I had to really squeeze to get around): “Nice fuckin’ left turn, you dipshit!” “Well, yes, that’s an execution problem,” I say. No, no, she says. That’s also an uncertainty problem: you know they’re going left, but you don’t know when you’ll be able to pass. It’s not, therefore, uncertainty in general, but uncertainty about my ability to go. Other people are blocking my plans! I do not have total mastery over my environment! She also decided that this pathology manifests itself when I lose something. I first fly into a minor rage, as in “Where the fuck is the X?” I search for it for some negligible period of time (the uncertainty about my ability to use the item now in full swing), but I almost immediately decide that it is gone and lost for good, finis. “That’s why you give up on the search,” she says, “Because as soon as it is lost for good, you are no longer uncertain, or rather, you’re certain that the item will not be available for you!” Agreed.

Now, all this is ironic because the major line in critical theory and philosophy I’ve read since I was an undergraduate reading Heidegger and American literature with Bill Spanos is pitched precisely against this mode of comportment. Acceptance of contingency, understanding of social complexity, critique of Subject as final arbiter, against mastery of the social ecology. And yet, that’s precisely how I operate in my driving, and probably in many other areas of life (“Does anyone know what happened to the fuckin’ stapler?”).

1. Series Match-Up – I like a Yankees-Phillies series. First, it’s old school. I don’t know what a Colorado Rocky is, but its only barely a baseball team. In general, I don’t trust baseball teams that purport to represent entire states. That’s right. I said it. A baseball team should represent a city, not a state. Now, before you go off all half-cocked telling me that the New York Yankees and the New York Mets represent the state of New York, let me just stop you. The Yankees were founded long before such nonsense existed – when all teams were indexed to a city. The Mets, for their part, could never be mistaken for representing, say, Watkins Glen, New York, first because they are the Metropolitans, and second because their colors very obviously refer to the colors of the City of New York, and not the state of New York (the nonsense about the Mets colors referring to the Giants and Dodgers old colors is just silly, and hardly worth a mention). So much for that. But Florida? Arizona? Texas? Colorado? This is some new and painfully corporate contrivance meant to produce wide demographic identification (the worst offender appears in another sport – the Carolina Panthers: they don’t even bother restricting themselves to a state). I like World Series when they are Philadelphia v. New York, or Chicago v. Boston, or Detroit v. Los Angeles. This Colorado v. Texas shite has got to go.

Second, these teams are pretty evenly matched. Yankee fans who think the NL team will be a push-over this year, in the style of the hapless 99 Padres, have another thing coming. Indeed, I’d say that Philly is the stronger team at this point, largely because the Yankee offense has been so uneven, especially with runners in scoring position. When the bottom of the line-up hits, and the top of the line-up do their thing, the 09 Yankees are essentially unstoppable. We saw this on display in Game 4 – with all pistons firing, the Angels looked like what they were: a pathetically outmatched team. But there have been real offensive problems, and I don’t just mean Swisher’s performance (though his defense has certainly argued for his continued inclusion in the line-up). The Yankee bats have been iffy at best, which of course can’t be said of the Phillies. NY has been saved by three factors: opponent errors, stellar pitching, and clutch A-Rod. (For just a signal of how A-Rod smacked down Mike Scioscia’s strategy, he was on base five times last night, with two singles and THREE walks, all of which involved Angel pitchers trying to keep the ball the fuck away from his wheelhouse, which itself seems massive at this point. They even walked in a run pitching around A-Rod. Compare games 1 and 2, when Scioscia tried to pitch Rodriguez with impunity, hoping to break his confidence. Bzzzt. Try again next year.) On the other side, of course, is Ryan Howard, who has been tearing up anything in his path since Game 1 of the postseason. Clutch v. clutch. Tight pitching v. tight pitching, and even the Phillies pen didn’t seem all that bad. And Jeter v. Rollins? This should be interesting.

Q: And because both cars were made by GM, were they both available in metallic mint green paint?
A: They wuh!

The bloglect has become atrocious. Ah, what can one do? In my defense, it is the usual very hectic close of an academic year (yes, early May people, we’re still going here), and that comes with a fairly predictable set of distractions. Primarily, you get many students who have been – let us say – otherwise lax in their efforts suddenly showing up at office hours like “What do I need to do in this course?” They seem at times unaware that the assignment sheets, syllabus, and course calendar have been posted on the course content management system, which they can access from the comfort of their own Dorito-strewn apartments. They also seem unaware that there is a course content management system, which is exceedingly strange, since that’s where all  the course readings are, too. You also have the more interesting problem of wrapping up everything for the year and getting set up for the real work of writing during the summer, which you will no doubt do ten hours a day, just as you planned. Third, you get this weird service ramp up as all the outlandish projects promised by various committees in January suddenly face the uncomfortable necessity of delivering up some, well, deliverables; since you’re at the close of the year, you also get all kinds of events that require attendance, because every level of committee is trying to mop up before everyone disappears. Where these people supposedly go in the summer I can’t imagine, but there does seem to be the sense of “You better do such-and-such now, because nobody’s going to lift a finger again until September.” I mean, huh? Finally, and more locally, we had a pretty egregious tenure denial within my small Home Unit at Unnamed Employer Institution, so that’s taken up much mental, emotional, and physical energy. Sometimes the banal really is evil.

So, first and foremost, I was getting so disgusted with the last design that I decided to run through a redesign, which you’re looking at here. I just wanted something plain and airy, like a light salad at lunch, so you’ll have to tell me if I succeeded. This summer, I’ll likely do a ground up redesign of this site and another one (about which more later), really starting from blank pages and coding up the XHTML, CSS, and PHP from scratch. This current design is version four of what was once the WordPress Palam theme, mixed with parts of the first theme I used. It still has some of the basic CSS, but I’ve made so many modifications that it really is removed from the original theme.

I like coding. I wouldn’t say I’m very good at it, but I do like it. I don’t even check any WYSIWYG portions anymore. I just hand code and test out on my local server. When I first started my diss, I used to scoff at these programmers who always talked about coding all night and just being in a zone with it, but I definitely got that after I started doing it myself. It’s just more results-effective, if I may coin what sounds like a typical management term, than other kinds of writing you do in my profession: change a line of code, run it, and ta-da, it works, and you solved a problem! I can see why that’s attractive. In any case, for this theme, I kept the basic structure and appearance, mainly switching out the images. This was much easier now that I’ve received – and it’s like a dream – my deeply discounted copy of Adobe’s CS4 Design Premium. I heart it like I haven’t hearted a product for years. For the next redesign, since I’ll be building the template from scratch, you’ll likely see more more in the way of changes, since I want to evaluate every element. But now that I have my summer lunch salad of a design, that probably won’t happen for a while.

But back to work. I have a pile of usability test reports with my name on them. No, literally. They have my name on them.

So Zach and Miri Make a Porno had one scene that depicted a high school reunion, and they played about a 4 second clip of Len’s “Steal My Sunshine,” a kind of classic summer pool party/beach song from 1999. You know you sang along to it in your car in 1999, so don’t even bother lying. Damned if the song hasn’t been on a loop in my head for the past four days as a result. I tried the Universal Earworm Erase Program (those classic couple of bars from Ironman), and it isn’t working. “L-A-T-E-R that week” is simply too powerful a lyric. And here’s the bad thing: I’m not sure I want it to go away. It’s mildly pleasurable. I’m even starting to justify its profundity, noting that the first verse ends with a remarkably Nietzschean sentiment (“Of course you can’t become if you only say what you would have done…”) . I’m starting to wonder if I’ll be like that guy who had the hiccups for 60 years: is this only the beginning of a lifelong “Steal My Sunshine” earworm? Will it go on forever? And what kind of person will I be if it does? I won’t link the video, not being in the business of subjecting you to this oddly pleasant torture, but I do feel I have to share this experience, maybe as therapy. DO NOT go look it up on YouTube to hear it. You’ll regret it.

I used to want to plant bombs at the Last Night of the Proms
But now you’ll find me with the baby, in the bathroom,
With that big shell, listening for the sound of the sea
- Billy Bragg, Brickbat

In my business, many of the people you know end up working in relatively isolated locations, Giant State Universities and Smaller Schools all across the country. And when they bump into me, they often say “You’re so lucky to live in Chicago,” to which I usually respond, “Why, they don’t have Blockbuster Video and pizza where you live?” Because the truth is, we very rarely get to go out, partly because babysitting is a ridiculously complicated sort of affair, and partly because, well, we’re like old and stuff. This was at no time more clear than on our odyssey last night.

We dropped babygirl off with some friends who also have a 3-year old; we swap babysitting nights with them to reduce costs. Our destination? Quimby’s bookstore in Wicker Park, where our friend from Giant University Town had organized a reading from his literary magazine, PANK, to coincide with the big Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) conference, which is here in Chicago this year. Quimby’s is a cool little independent bookstore that she and I took to calling the Porn Comix store on account of all the porn comics, but that’s just because we’re like old and stuff, and nowhere near hip enough for the place, or for porn comics. So I parked myself next to the anarchist and Chomsky books and directly in front of the sadomasochism erotica rack, while she sat on the floor, ready to meditate. We met Work Colleague there: I think he was expecting drinks! I’ll have to admit that, though I’ve been to a lot of such readings, I never know quite what to make of them. I think fairly visually when it comes to text; I will generally know where on a page a particular point appeared, even in long books, so there’s something about written text that just resonates with me. It is, of course, a common conceit that poetry and literary prose are better when read aloud, spoken, uttered, but I’m not convinced that there isn’t a bit of the old Platonic disdain of writing itself involved in such judgments, as though some degraded second order signifier had usurped the close relationship between speaking and thought, and we’re trying to recapture it through spoken readings. I’m enough of a Derridean to at least be suspicious about such pronouncements. So I think when I hear writing spoken, it throws me off, and I spend too much time trying to envision it on the page, trying to catch the poetics by reconstructing the visual text. But the bottom line is that my judgments are never clear (or probably reliable) on these things, because I have difficulty encountering language in these ways. I don’t want a writer to have a “voice.” I want a voice to have a text.

In any case, there were some memorable parts of the readings that I managed to process despite my general incapacity to get into the rhythm of such things. Jennifer Pieroni read an unpublished poem called “Unlucky Babies,” the point of which seemed to be that all the qualities considered admirable by literary bohemians (poor hand-eye coordination, the capacity to see the strange and beautiful in the ugly, and the like) are generally considered “unlucky” in culture. It’s a poem about eugenia, in other words, the “well born” and “beautiful,” but quibbling on the point of a poem always strikes me as missing the point, so to speak. Pieroni created an interesting list poem, and the rhythm sticks with me. Rachel Yoder then read an epistolary essay titled, I think, “Letters to My First Love,” in which the narrator (R.) sends a series of unanswered notes (I almost said “missives,” but resisted the urge) to her first love (M.) at the instigation of her professor – a curious set up that I would have liked to hear more about. As the essay stands, it is like a self-conscious contemplation of self-indulgence, complete with references to Jacques Lacan and the general problematic of the adequation of words and things. The clear tension that then emerges between the self-conscious and the self-indulgent was its most memorable quality. At one point, for example, the narrator notes that she used to think people who claimed to like Jim Jarmusch films were pretentious assholes, but now she likes them, and maybe thinks that she is herself a pretentious asshole, etc. About that speed throughout. Personally, I found the repetitions of M. and R. (the address and signature) for each letter to be somewhat disorienting, but maybe that’s what she was going for. Perhaps dates would have separated the letters without introducing this odd repetition (we know M. never replies!). My favorite of the night was James Grinwis’ poetry, largely because I don’t remember its content at all, but remember it to be really jarring and cutting. This is an exception to my usual incapacity to be struck by spoken language; I’m not sure what he did poetically, but it was aggressive and dark and sumptuous – I really dug it. He was also the most understatedly funny speaker of the night in my view: he described how his sister-in-law had bought him a writing journal which required daily entries (and the fullness of that story was just wonderfully suggestive: one imagines the sister-in-law bemoaning the bohemian existence of her executive husband’s younger ne’er-do-well brother, whom she refers to sardonically as “The Poet,” until her thoughtful friend – a sorority sister from her college days, perhaps – suggests that she encourage him in his writing career, advice she takes to heart by buying him a writing journal in an expensive luggage store, and presenting it with a self-satisfied if pitying grin on Christmas morning, in front of the whole family…). So he had filled out many dates early on, jumping well ahead of the actual date, but was now well behind. This struck me as glorious revenge on the sister-in-law, and her real scheme, which would be to enforce some discipline on his writing practices, if he was going to be a writer after all. Grinwis conveyed all this in a kind of dazed, drunken deadpan. Hilarious.

Daniel Nester then read an essay about his guitar playing skills, or relative lack thereof, and the many technical devices he had purchased to make up for them, culminating in the dreaded talk box. Nester’s essay was charming and funny, switching between contemporary rock history and self-deprecating autobiography, but I found it interesting, I think, because it really delves into the problem of failing at that which one loves, of capacities. It’s much easier for us to accept the notion of musical capacities than capacities in other areas of activity, and particularly writing. I think this is what the literary people have over the composition studies people: they recognize that writing requires a set of capacities just like anything else, and that some people just cap out at a certain point. Such a conception is anathema to a writing studies that likes to think of itself as democratic: it first elevates writing to the general mode of existing in common and participating in public, and then must derive a universal capacity for good writing that merely requires good teaching. What Nester’s essay emphasizes, I think, is that even a deep love for an activity and years of practice don’t guarantee even moderately passable performance. The capping out of performance capacity would then, a fortiori, come even sooner when someone evinces hardly any interest in a thing. Say, the average student in a first-year composition classroom. If, however, writing is the key to power and voice in a democracy, one simply cannot admit such a thing, because it would imply second-class citizenship. The problem of capacities, in this way, becomes the unspoken (though certainly not ungraded) monster (unlucky baby!) haunting the composition classroom, and more so the more a teacher is trained in the democratic ideology of composition. But Nester’s essay will have none of this. He keeps bumping up against the problem of capacities: his nubby fingers only stretch four frets, he lacks hand-eye coordination (unlucky baby!), and similar insuperable problems prevent him from becoming the guitar player he wants to be. At a pudgy forty, he is rejected by younger, hipper bands, with their floppy-haired lead singers even slamming the door in his face. He wants to “play out,” which is to say, in public, but does so only ten times thus far in his life (a few times with a band called “Fear Itself” – I told you it was funny). And he purchases all manner of device to cover his incapacities, even the talk box, the hideous talk box. There’s much to contemplate in this description. Certainly, one cannot immediately lend guitar-playing the same equivalency with democracy that writing attains, even as an empirical matter: writing, literacy, has a snugger fit with its supposed political twin. But it would be an interesting thought experiment. At one point, Nester notes that if he was as bad a writer as he was a guitar player, the reader (and we were listeners, again) would be reading “jabberwocky” (I like Carroll, so this struck me as off). But why not? Why not consider the writer who loves it, but can’t do it? Why not consider those capacities that stand in the way? Why restrict such incapacities to the musical instrument, the paintbrush, the dance?

Finally, Sheila Squillante read a poem and a short essay. Squillante was the only speaker whose writing I am somewhat familiar with, and, quite frankly, I consider her a brilliant stylist. Again, I’ve seen her writing: I think of it as text on a page, so this may affect my impressions. In any case, by this time, she (who is, let’s remember, 7 months pregnant) was getting a little uncomfortable, so I was a bit distracted from Squillante’s reading. But she won back my attention on the second part of her essay, during which she describes the encounter with a tribe of wild chickens in the Pacific Northwest. The very notion of undomesticated chickens is, of course, resonant in itself: the ultimate in domesticated and bred animal returning to a natural state. That said, I’ll usually key in on some words or image. In this case, Squillante said something like “Those chickens owned that piece of land,” with the real emphasis on owned, just an odd but powerful word in this context. She described their wild tails, completely beyond the range of what we’d consider a chicken, and likened her reaction to seeing her doctor out at the grocery store, or in an airport gift shop: they were at first unrecognizable as chickens. For some reason this just grabbed me, as Squillante’s prose has done before. There’s something lyrical to her prose and images that I just appreciate.

So, you’re pretty but you’re boring. Obviously, I’m not referring to the readings in the subject line, but to us, Seven Red. And, really, you might split the difference, assign one quality to each of us, and be done with it. Getting back to the theme, in any case, of being like old and stuff. After the readings, we gabbed a bit with our friends, but decided against going out for drinks with the whole AWP crew, largely because we were very hungry, and this was sort of their thing, and we had no confidence that they would be moving in under ten minutes. And this is where the odyssey of being old and stuff begins. We walk out of the bookstore, looking for a place where she and I can eat, but Work Colleague can drink (he is desperate for beer by now, having expected to have been drinking for an hour already – and this is a tough expectation to have squelched). Here’s the result of that search:

1. Aberdeen – We start off at the bar directly next store to Quimby’s. We walk into a wall of sonic loud that would knock you down, some real shit techno, awful. It was so loud that I was literally scared for the babybelly. It was so loud in there that even saying ‘It’s too loud in here” was a massive struggle. We walked out immediately, probably looking like those squares who storm out of the theater in the middle of Pink Flamingos.
2. Wicker Park Tavern – We find another bar-restaurant, and get an actual table: a miracle. The waitress then tells us that the kitchen, which they share with the restaurant Absinthe, is too busy to make anything but appetizers for us. Well, what are the appetizers? Nachos and fucking wings. Unacceptable. We leave soon after.
3. Crossing Damen three times: we then cross Damen three times looking at various places. They are all full, closed, or just dodge. It suddenly occurs to me that everybody around us is under 28 and dressed to the hilts, except the grifters.
4. Some Pasta Place – In desperation, we walk into a contemporary Italian style restaurant, which looks pretty full from the outside. Ah, what the hell. We’re optimists. The hostess tells us “Oh, it’ll be about 40 minutes,” as if our car won’t turn back into a pumpkin at the babysitting expiration time we set for 10pm. Yes, ten. We storm out without even saying “No thank you.” What next? First, we have to get the hell out of Wicker Park. she decides that we’ll drive back to our own neighborhood, where at least 40% of the people out in the bars at night are safely in their thirties, and she’ll drop me and Work Colleague off. Off we go.
5. Garcia’s – she has given up on the night. She’ll just go get babygirl while we get drinks, and grab something to eat at home. She drops us off by the Western station on the Brown Line, saying “Don’t stay out too late.” And we head for the Huettenbar in Lincoln Square (one of my favorites). Halfway there, I decide we have to eat something, so let’s go to Garcia’s for a burrito and some beer before we go to Huettenbar. Garcia’s is packed: every table is filled, the bar is filled, and twenty people are waiting for tables. Where’s this bad economy? I curse under my breath, determined to drink on a now well empty stomach. Off to Huettenbar!
6. Huettenbar – I walk in, show my ID to the grungy looking bouncer kid. But Work Colleague doesn’t have ID! No ID! “I don’t drive,” he says, and tries to show the kid his Unnamed Employer Institution ID card, which states that we are faculty. The kid says no dice. Mind you, I’m in my mid-thirties, and Work Colleague is several years older than me. It would be a strange universe indeed in which we could pass for under 21. But there we are, getting turned away at the door of a bar. “I don’t drive,” Work Colleague says again, apologetically, “I don’t have ID.” How the fuck do you get on an airplane? I mutter. He responds, sensibly, “With my passport.” Hmm.
7. Skewers – We truck down Lincoln in the now falling snow, heading to a place called Skewers. We get there: out of fucking business. Welll, shit now. This is starting to look like fate. But right next door…
8. Jack Rabbit – We finally get a table in Jack Rabbit, a little nouvelle Mexican bistro operation on Lincoln. I’m exhausted and starving. I eat a fajita (damn good) and drink one – yes, ONE – Negro Modelo, then we pretty much agree that it’s time to head home. I’m in the house before 10:15. Unlucky baby.

So that’s the story of Seven Red’s big night out in Chicago. Luckily, Blockbuster gets new videos every Tuesday.

As an addendum to the last post, the mafia nickname. This is also in honor of today’s headline in the Chicago Sun-Times: “Joey ‘The Clown’ Gets Life.” Don’t worry. I won’t do another subject line analysis on that headline suggesting that the neighborhood joker finally had an epiphany (I get it now, said the Joey the Clown, I really, really get it…). But since we were on the mafia, and names, I’ll add this bit about a friend I had. My uncle once gave me some sage advice. He said never to hang out with somebody who had more than two nicknames. Once you hit three, you’re really dealing with aliases. Now my uncle drove half-tracks in the vicinity of Tay Ninh City during the Tet Offensive, so I usually take his life wisdom as fairly definitive, and it’s been born out in practice. So, this is the story of a guy with (at least) three nicknames, Crazy Joe, a.k.a Joey Bats, a.k.a Joey the Lid.

In  junior high school he was Crazy Joe. This is a fairly typical nickname arrived at through unconventional means. Joe was off the wall, for sure, and was best known for lobbing M-80′s and blockbusters into crowds of kids hanging out after school. But I think he really got the nickname Crazy Joe when he was fourteen, and got arrested for train robbery. You heard me right. Joe was arrested for train robbery in New York City in the late 1980′s.  Joe’s dad owned a truck parts business in Long Island City, which was then a very industrial area. So Joe used to hang out there after school,  and he made friends with some other kids from the (hip hop infamous) Queensbridge Projects. So Joe and these kids would break into the freight yards near the Queensborough Plaza stop on the Seven, and they had a field day, boosting sneakers, beepers, and other items right off the trains. One day, Joe and these kids are back at it, and they crack open a freight car looking for some electronics. Instead, they find a car full of cereal. I’m talking General Mills, all brands, loaded on pallets and the whole bit. Now, the savvy criminal would realize that this car was not particularly fruitful, and move on, but Crazy Joe and his boys decided that they were hungry (munchies, most likely), so they parked their asses on the car and started eating straight out of boxes of Fruit Loops. Needless to say, this was the day their scheme was up, and about twenty cops jump out of everywhere, guns drawn and ready for action. Joe and his buddies get trucked down to the 107th Precinct, where the cops all call him Fruit Loops. Train robbery.

Later, when we were in high school, Joe was known as Joey Bats. Now, you might think that he got a name like that because he was proficient with a baseball bat, but Joe wasn’t really a fighter so much as he was a stoner. So “Bats” derives from the giant joints he used to roll, which looked a bit like baseball bats. No, really. They were fucking big. Back then, New York used to have a “pot parade,” which was really just a NORML rally in Washington Square Park, but it was a kind of get-out-of-a-ticket free day, or rather, Washington Square Park became a forgiveness zone for drug possession. Seriously, there would be thousands of people in the park, all smoking pot and drinking openly, and there’d be a lot of cops there, but the cops were just there for crowd control: they didn’t bust you even if you were smoking a blunt right in front of them. This had to be well before Giuliani, because this is precisely the sort of shit that Giuliani couldn’t stand. So one year we were at the pot parade, and we ended up standing near a group of Puerto Rican guys from the Bronx. Joe asked another one of my friends for some rolling paper, and these Bronx guys were all like “Oh, check out white boys with the joints!” They were unimpressed. “White boys,” they said, “You can’t get high on no joints; you gotta smoke the blunts, son” and they pulled out some big blunt, and generally thought they’d stumbled on to some Long Island know-nothings or some such. We all looked at Joey Bats. He just smiled. “Gimme the whole pack of papers,” he said, “and gimme the ounce.” We knew it was definitely on. Joey Bats proceeded  to roll the biggest joint any of us had ever seen – giant, otherworldly, and definitely fitting for the occasion. “Mira,” he said to the Bronx guys, holding it up, and their eyes just about bugged out of their heads. Of course, we shared with them, and we knew their prejudice against joints was definitely relieved when they said “These white boys a’ight.”  It didn’t hurt that we brought the good shit, and not their Gun Hill Road swag. Spread love, son.

It’s my belief that you don’t really have a nickname unless you have a “the” in it. The definite article lends the nickname a certain grandeur, as if you are the only person that can lay claim to that title. There may be many clowns who understand life, but the readers of the Chicago Sun-Times are expected to know precisely who is being referred to when the headline writer invokes the name of Joey the Clown. And so it was for us. Probably my first year of college, while I was away, Joey Bats became Joey the Lid. Now, this nickname eventually morphed into just plain Lid, as in “Hey Lid, shut the fuck up and roll us a joint.” But I was always partial to the full version, as in “The fuckin’ guy was launchin’ blockbusters at us up on 154th street.” “Who?” “Fuckin’ Joe.” “Joe Mastaciola?” “No, dickhead. Joey the Lid.” You’d think that a movie-script perfect mafioso nickname like Joey the Lid would have come about through some fantastic incident. Sadly, no. Lid and his buddy Tommy were driving around doing whippets (Nitrous Oxide), which – and this is life advice – is not a particularly smart thing to do. Joe’s specialty was a four whippet balloon, which means you crack four nitrous canisters into one balloon: it’s not conducive to staying conscious, much less alert, while driving. So Joe – in his infinite wisdom – loads up four whippets into a balloon and hands it over to Tommy, who’s driving, and Tommy sucks it all in and predictably passes out and crashes into a light poll. Joe gets a nice chunk of windshield glass right in the eyelid (which strikes me as lucky, all things considered). Thus Joe Bats ends up with a scarred eyelid that hangs down a little, and fairly instantly becomes Joey the Lid. It could be worse, I guess.

Now I should admit my own nicknames. I’ll do that if I hear others. Confession is a two way street.

Some random thoughts on the Super Bowl. First, I should say that I haven’t watched football seriously in more than ten years. It’s getting to be like Easter for the semi-Catholic: I watch the Super Bowl, and maybe a playoff game or two. I have better things to do with my Sundays. OK, I don’t have better things to do, but the game bores me, which is strange, since I used to be really into it until just after college. In any case, watching the very exciting closing minutes of this year’s Super Bowl, it occurred to me – as it no doubt did to many others – that I’d seen this game before, like, last year. So I wondered, Descartes-style, whether there might be an evil genius who scripts these things, and, if so, how the script works. Because there does seem to be a formula. So, first, what are the problems that have to be overcome by the Super Bowl script. The obvious first problem is the blow-out. Nobody but the fans of the winning team keep watching a game that looks like a blow-out, and many of the Super Bowls of my youth were just that. If the advertisers are paying so much money, the second half slots have to pay off. So, you need a close game, or at least one in which the possibility of a come back remains very real until well into the fouth quarter. Second, you want to promote football itself, while also including the sports channels and shows, which would have to be in on the con. So, it should be exciting, with numerous back and forths and big plays, and it should have two or three really serious highlights for the sports shows, preferably dazzling catches or impossible runs. Not only can these be run  on a loop as a “signifier” for the game, but they are also sought after by fans and others trying to relive the experience of having seen the event live. So the David Tyree helmet catch from the 2008 game or this year’s toe-tap game winner by Santonio Holmes will serve as little snippets of marketable code. The script, given this set of problems, becomes clear. The teams battle back and forth, but stay within two touchdowns for the first three quarters. Everything then loosens up in the fourth quarter. The then trailing team springs to life, just as we always knew they would, and suddenly takes the lead, preferably with a magnificent drive led by their legendary quarterback. The team that had been leading, that had sensed victory just minutes before, is crushed. They get the ball back with two to three minutes remaining. It all comes down to this! Everything seems doomed, but they claw back and push and push. The final drive – which ends in a dramatic touchdown with under a minute remaining – is either capped by or includes an amazing play that will be the pre-packaged “memory” for the viewer…I saw that catch live, sonny, etc. The team that had come back, but now trails again, gets the ball back with 30-50 seconds left, just enough to keep viewers watching and anxious until the final play of the game, and transitioning them into the post-game show. The last two Super Bowls followed this general script exactly. Diagnosis: sound stage in Burbank! (The innovation in this year’s script was the miraculous interception and run back to close the first half: why waste even a second of ad time, and why not give the viewers a treat to remember?)

Of course, I don’t really believe this. On average, if you watch a lot of football, I suspect many of the games play out in this way owing to the various forces at work through the rules, within the coaching tradition, and on the field itself. (Example: I’d still argue that a “prevent defense” is a terrible idea, though I’d bet that coaches have clear statitistics on how it works more than it fails.) But it is odd that the last two Super Bowls have operated according to what would seem a strict formula for maximizing viewership at all levels (current, future, and auxiliary programming such as ESPN and DVD sales).

On the commercials: meh. The first half featured the usual “Women are better naked” misogynistic crap. The Bob Dylan/will.i.am commercial was somewhat memorable (the graffiti evolution bit helped). But two struck a chord with me. First, the Denny’s “Serious Breakfast” commercial. The premise is that three mafiosi are sitting in a diner discussing a future hit on an informant. But just as the mob boss tries to order the hit, a waitress comes over and starts spraying a whipped cream happy face on his pancakes. The noise of the whipped cream container interrupts the serious discussion a few times, and then we cut to the catch phrase: Isn’t it time for a serious breakfast? Cue bacon close-up, etc. The commercial is funny in its own right, but it reminded of of a phenomenon I’ve been noticing on Facebook. Specifically, when I compare the friends I had growing up with the friends I’ve made since college, I notice the glaring imbalance of Italian names. When I was growing up in Queens, I just assumed that a prevalence of Italian names was common across the country. You had your Massimo’s and Vito’s and Angelo’s and Rocco’s, your Francesca’s and Concetta’s and Rosanna’s, and even where the first names were anglicized, they were anglicized in a certain way (no Dave’s or Gary’s, but all Mike’s and Joey’s and John’s), and you had the last names to get you through: the Mastaciola’s and DiPietro’s and Pallazzolo’s and Capparella’s. And when I look at my friends list, I see it, all those Italian names, and then I look at their friends and it’s even more so, with something like half of all names being Italian in origin. But not so much the friends from college and afterward. The names have all changed since I hung around, so to speak. And when I think about the people I grew up with, I notice that most – including me – had at least one parent who wasn’t born in the United States, who had an accent (Irish, Italian, Greek, Croatian), who arrived here in the late-1960′s or early 1970′s, or later. I thought this was normal. But, of course, it’s not. What I realized only later is that I grew up in what was essentially an “ethnic enclave,” a strange thing when you think on it, but not uncommon for big east coast cities. I’ve never really considered myself “Italian” or “Irish,” though my father is to this day an Italian national, and my grandmother emigrated from Ireland in the 1920′s, and kept her brogue until the day she died. I’m American, and I think I’ve always been a little embarrassed of the whole “claiming your cultural heritage” bit. I still am. I certainly don’t get all worked up about “images of Italians in the media” and other such issues, because I’ve never really thought of myself as Italian, and I always assumed that anti-Italian discrimination – in terms of actual life effects – was really an early-to-mid 20th century thing. But two incidents.

First, I was visiting a (midwestern) school while I was deciding on PhD programs, and one of the graduate students who was showing me around kept introducing me to people as “[insert stereotypical Italian first name here] from Brooklyn,” and he kept saying it with a really obnoxious Vinny Barbarino accent. He was thoroughly amused by this, and the fake New Yawkah accent grew thicker and more insulting as the day went on. He was a Southerner, from Alabama if I remember correctly, and he didn’t pull off the Barbarino bit particularly well, but the message was clear enough. I remember being annoyed, thinking it was disrespectful, though I just smiled along wanly, fuming. I was careful to eliminate any hint of a New York accent from my diction when I said “Hi, it’s nice to meet you” after his little performances. I bumped into the guy again at a conference in New Orleans last year, and one of my friends introduced me to him. He knew perfectly well who I was, but I used my full name, decidedly unanglicized, emphasizing its vowels. It was all I could do to keep from tagging the guy with a right hook on the fucking spot. Spread love: it’s the Brooklyn way. Second, I was at a job interview at another midwestern school, and I was on my last event, having breakfast with some graduate students. I don’t remember how the question came up, but one of the students asked, and I do remember it was out of the blue, whether my father was in the mafia. In the fucking mafia! In 2007! Needless to say, I replied “that’s right,” and kind of laughed it off. But on the plane back home, I grew increasingly agitated (I had da agita ovah dis fuckin’ bagiagaloop!) by the question. Like, what the fuck? In the mafia? Really? As an innocent question – playful or not – at a graduate student breakfast with the prospective professor? Ey, ya fuckin’ skootch, isn’t it time for a serious fuckin’ breakfast?

The second memorable ad was for Career Builder dot com. It starts with classical music playing in a lush office, obviously the well-appointed digs for some hotshot CEO. The camera then zooms in to the magnificent moosehead on the wall, an impressive trophy. Then, in a continuous shot, the viewer is led out of the executive’s office and around to another office directly adjacent, and here’s where we see the joke. The classical music transitions into the repetitive sound of a printer, and we find in the second office a man at work on the computer, trying valiantly to type away. It turns out the the stuffed moose’s head was not removed from the body, but merely stuck through the wall with the rest of the mooses body – to wit, the ass-end – residing in the poor man’s office, and, indeed, standing directly on his desk with the ass just above his head. He has to work with a moose ass in his face all day. He looks unpleased. The catch line is something like “Time for a new job?” Conceptually and technically brilliant ad, in my view. But, really, what a metaphor for class consciousness! The apparent splendor of the boss’ office mirrored on the back end by the misery of the working conditions, with the two intimately connected through the same device: the body of the moose. When you look “beneath” the luxury of moosehead (and a traditional signifier here), you get the cost of that luxury on the worker. If I wanted to start a propaganda outfit, I’d want the writer of this ad on my team. Just great.

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”

Radiohead does Headmaster Ritual

“…spineless swine, cemented minds…”

Indeed. A story that will need telling later.