When the Summer Comes Undone

1.

If you come to find out who you are

May you find out, may you find out who you are

And if you come to search for what is lost

May you find it, may you find it at any cost

— Kevin Morby, “Parade”

 

2.

    A few days ago I woke up at 5.30 in the morning and the sun wasn’t up yet, which sounded a melancholy note that has continued to ring through the rest of the week. Everywhere there were signs that this summer, which has been remarkably short and fitful in Portland, was on the wane: Galen Rupp took bronze in the Olympic men’s marathon, marking the end of the games; a feverish hot spell broke and collapsed into another cool, marine afternoon; I began to ponder with idle dread the pending season of storm and malaise. In a month the trees will be burning with autumn. In another month the rain will be falling with its insistent hiss. Time, that gyre, tumbles on.

    Just now I walked by an apartment I walk by nearly every day. Every day, I walk by this apartment and look in to see a cheerful old boxer dog, his lower jaw thrust out under his jowls, happily watching the street and waiting for his people to return home from work. Sometimes I place a finger against the glass and he will raise a tentative paw to test the boundary between us; we are, in our strange way, friends. But just now I walked by that window and looked inside and my friend wasn’t there. Neither was the couch he usually sits on, or the radio that burbles in the background, or the bikes that idle against the wall. It seems my friend has moved away, taking his people with him. It felt abrupt, unfitting, like a song that ends halfway through its last verse: couldn’t they have waited until fall to go away? That would have made more sense.

    I never spoke to his people, though I used to see them out walking my friend around the neighborhood most days. I always felt a little embarrassed when that happened, as if they knew that many afternoons I peered into their apartment with the intensity of a peeping Tom. I wanted to preemptively tell them that it was just that I like their dog. But is that any less weird, really?

 

3.

 

 

4.

    My brothers and I made a decision this morning that’s making all the melancholy a little more intense. Years ago now, our parents moved out of the neighborhood where we grew up, and back to Bend, the town where my mother grew up.* Two of us boys were living out of state, and we were unused to spending Thanksgiving and other landmarks without our parents there. Between the three of us, we had enough money to buy a little two-bedroom condo on the west end of town, at the base of a big hill beneath the college. We painted its walls bright red and named it “Thunder Canyon”, with the silly logic of long fraternal understanding — meaning I can’t really tell you why, anymore. It was just a 1000-square-foot condominium in a block of other condominiums. But the name stuck.

*It’s actually only sort of the town where my mother grew up, anymore. Back in the 50s and 60s it was a little logging community with 12,000 or so wind-blasted souls clinging to the eastern edge of the Cascades there; now it’s a tourist bonanza, bloated to nearly 90,000, with almost all of that growth coming in the last 20 years. It is, she says, more or less unrecognizable, except the house out on Neff Road that her father so inelegantly designed and had built to hold his brood of eight.

    Over the years we had a lot of good times there. When we first had the place, a little giddy with the thrill of ownership, we half-wrote and kind-of-filmed a sitcom about the three of us living there, in which I was cast as the oppressive, straight-laced older brother that (believe it or not) I actually kind of was when we were kids. We watched parts of two World Cups there, and cooked frittatas for every extended family Xmas party, and smoked countless cigarettes on countless drunken nights by the barbecue. It provided safe haven when life turned weird: when I discovered that I almost could not tolerate to be in Minnesota for more than a few months at a time, it was where I returned to lick my wounds and feel the sun on my face. It was the place where I finished my novel. It was where I did altitude training for a marathon. It was the last place I saw my now-dead foster brother happy.

    But we decided this morning to sell it. We’ve been talking kind of idly about it for a year or two, as the housing market in Bend has recovered from the recession and become blistering hot. There are a lot of other factors — for one, our parents moved out to the country, and one can no longer walk from our place to theirs — but that’s really the bulk of it. You know, one tries to be cold and rational about an issue that really just boils down to stuff, but as I was packing up to leave it this morning, I realized that I’d probably just spent my last summer evening there, that for the last time I’d returned from a long run slicked with sweat and stained with thin bruises of dirt — that, to some degree, the place I’d thought of as home was not going to be mine anymore. That’s fine, I guess. I’ve been trying to change a lot over the last year or so, with a surprising amount of success, and one of the things that change has meant is that I didn’t really need a place where I could go hide from the world anymore. It had just become an excuse to be less than I am, to bathe in nostalgia and memory in a way that wasn’t entirely constructive in the long run.

    I once told a friend of mine that I think I get melancholy and joy mixed up sometimes. Mornings like this one are why that happens. I mean, I was leaving home. But what might I find beyond its walls?

Some Losses

1. Grief as Paranoia

    I flew down to Bend for my cousin’s wedding over the weekend. Flying to Bend is always a bit of an odd experience — the flight, which only covers 120 miles or so, usually takes about 25 minutes, so that getting to and from the airport is a bigger ordeal than being in the air. When I got down there, nobody was there to pick me up. Not a big deal — the Redmond-Bend airport is not much more than a glorified bus station, so there’s nothing arduous about getting in and out — but I wondered, sort of, if I’d been forgotten, so I called my mom to see if someone was on the way. She said my dad was, but he was running a little late.

    Then a weird thing happened. A couple of minutes later, I was still waiting, and she called me back. When I saw her name on the caller ID, I became convinced that she was calling to tell me that my dad had been in a wreck on the way to pick me up, and was dead. This is a completely ridiculous, irrational fear, but it was so strong that I almost didn’t answer the phone. When I did, she just wanted to say that she’d talked to him and he would be there any minute. Even as she did, I spotted his car pulling up to the curb. Everything was fine. Nobody had died. Of course nobody had died.

    When I was a kid, my dad hated answering the phone, and the explanation given was always that he associated unexpected phone calls with answering the call that informed him that my half-sister, his oldest child, had been killed in a car wreck. I sort of pretended to understand that — it made sense in an abstract way — but I never really did. It wasn’t until I got a similar call a couple of years ago that I started to understand. Now — now, my grief over that event has largely subsided to a background noise, something that’s always there but rarely all-consuming. It has, however, manifested as this very specific form of paranoia. If there’s a way for my brain to line up events in such a way that someone has died, it’ll do it. And though I know it’s ridiculous, I can’t help it. Every phone call is a disaster in the making.

 

2. Grief as Public Rite

    When David Bowie died, I was as surprised as anybody, I suppose. But what really surprised me, far more than the actual fact of his death, was the response to it. My Facebook feed erupted in a collective cri de coeur, one which roared for a full day but still hasn’t really petered out. Links to his videos, teary-sounding tributes, lots of agreeing, head shaking, and digital hugging went around. The rending of garments was elaborate.

    This surprised me because David Bowie meant exactly nothing to me. I don’t begrudge anybody else their fandom or their grief — God knows, most of them will all be mystified when a small minority of us are totally crushed by the inevitable death of, say, Stephen Fry — I just don’t understand it. I always found Bowie’s music to be a little bland; it always seemed to me that the theatrical aspect of his art rendered the music qua music not very interesting, much of the time. My favorite Bowie record is probably an Iggy Pop record. (The Idiot, btw.) My favorite Bowie song is probably a Queen song. (“Under Pressure”.) The only time I ever saw Bowie live, it was because he was touring with Nine Inch Nails, and I spent most of his set (he was in Thin White Duke mode that night) idly wondering when Trent Reznor was going to come out.

    And it’s funny, because in many ways Bowie seems to have stood foursquare against a lot of the things I despise: rote fetishization of the authentic; reflexive privileging of emotion over intellect; the idea of perfection in art. Bowie was weird and daring and sometimes sloppy. He took risks that didn’t always pay off. This is the kind of artist I usually love; it’s the kind I try to be. He stands with Neal Stephenson and Richard Linklater and Margaret Atwood in this way. And yet, somehow, I just never locked in with him. My failure to lock in caused me to have a blind spot as to his massive cultural significance.

    It’s weird to be reminded so viscerally of the ways in which you’re out-of-step with the zeitgeist. If Bob Dylan or Mick Jagger had died and this been the response, I would have been as all in as everybody else. But the death of David Bowie, even at the relatively young age of 69, did not rock my world. I kind of wish now that it had. I’m obviously missing out on something.

    The night Bowie died, I was walking up Clinton Street in the dark, and I saw a big crowd gathered around a firetruck and an ambulance. My first instinct was to take out my radio gear and see what was going on. But as I approached, I heard a boombox playing “Under Pressure”, and then “Rebel Rebel”, and I realized something public, important, but not necessarily newsworthy was going on here. It had something to do with David Bowie, though I couldn’t tell what. I never did figure out what the firetruck and ambulance were there for — nobody was hurt — and eventually I moved on. Really, I probably should have taken out my gear anyway and started asking around. I’m sure there was a story there. Maybe, though, I was not the person to tell it.

 

3. Grief as Public Rite 2: The Re-griefening

    But then Alan Rickman died. Rickman and Bowie were both English, both 69 years old, both died of cancer. I was actually shocked to find that Rickman was the same age as Bowie — his rise to fame came 15 years later, with his iconic performance as Hans Gruber in Die Hard. I think I would have pegged him at about 55, if you’d asked, though I don’t know why you’d ask me how old Alan Rickman was when you could just Google the guy. But it gave me a window into what other people were feeling about Bowie. A reminder, really; I’ve been getting bummed out by celebrity deaths since the suicide of Kurt Cobain at least. I don’t know that I’m gutted, the way some people seemed to be by Bowie’s death. But I’m not happy about it. It scares me — not least because Rickman was younger than my father and not much older than my mother. And it feels completely not real. Like, how is it possible that Alan Fucking Rickman is dead? Hans Gruber sure isn’t dead, even if he is. Severus Snape isn’t dead, even if he is. (Spoiler alert, Potter newbies.) How can the man who brought them to life be dead?

    A few years ago, I was poking through some website looking for an Adventure Time t-shirt, when I ran across something far better: a baseball undershirt with blue sleeves and, positioned smack in the middle, an airbrushed glamour shot of a young Alan Rickman, sandy-haired and, in his weird, beaky way, very handsome. I knew immediately that I had just found the greatest item of clothing ever made. I will admit that some of that was the seriously WTF nature of the person on its front — Rickman was famous (very, after his turn as Snape), and seriously talented, but he wasn’t a celebrity in the way that the people who get their faces on t-shirts usually are. His dalliances didn’t make the pages of People magazine. I have no idea where he lived. I’m actually not entirely sure whether he was straight or gay. Until he took the role of Snape, he had been a slightly-more-handsome-than-average character actor. Even after he took the role of Snape, he was still a character actor — it was just that he was probably the single most famous character actor in the world. Why was he on this shirt?

    But there was more to it for me. Rickman had always been one of those guys that I felt a little bit of ownership of. One of the things I used to do, back when I had a membership to a fabulous brick-and-mortar PDX movie rental shop called Movie Madness, was fall in love with an actor or actress and make a project of plowing through every movie on their IMDB page. The whims that took me could be capricious, weird — I watched every terrible movie that the terrible actress Jennifer Morrison (of the terrible TV show House) made, for instance. But one of the more rewarding ones of these projects was Rickman. I never finished — he’d been in over 40 movies and TV shows by the time I took it up, some of them quite hard to lay hands on (I never managed to find a copy of a BBC miniseries called The Barchester Chronicles, in which Rickman plays a reportedly very minor role, for instance). But you’d find Rickman doing solid work in the weirdest corners of cinema and television — as the title character in an HBO movie called Rasputin: Dark Servant of Destiny, for instance; or as the nasty Outback imperlalist Elliot Marston in the dopey Quigley Down Under. Though he was often typecast as the heavy, he could do just about anything, as attested by his comic turn as The Metatron in Kevin Smith’s Dogma, or his unexpectedly heart-throbbing Colonel Brandon in Sense and Sensibility. When finally he was tapped to play the role that would make him a worldwide icon — Severus Snape in the Harry Potter franchise — it felt like there was no other actor on Earth who could breathe life into JK Rowling’s most complex, dangerous, and magnetic character.

    He was probably too old to play Snape, really; the Severus of the books is still a relatively young man (some rudimentary math would suggest that he’s in his early 30s by the time Harry and the gang show up at Hogwarts), but Rickman was 55 — old enough to be the father of the character he was playing, if you think about it. But still he seemed perfect. Rickman’s specialty was the character who was supercilious, hyper-intelligent, malevolent. Snape was all of those things. He was scary and mean and cruel. The thing is, a lot of people could do that. But the part called for someone who could play all of those things, and then make it convincing when he finally displayed something many never expected him to have — vulnerability. When the moment came, Rickman was more than up to the task. By that point, seven-and-a-half movies in, the Harry Potter franchise was not really featuring the acting skills of its players very much; the books were far too long and complex to be adapted into movies, especially when the movies made the mistake of concentrating on the action at the expense of the things that truly made the books special — the characters and the humor. Rickman was just about the only adult with a big moment to play in either of the final two films. Many other very fine actors — Ralph Fiennes, Helena Bonham Carter, Michael Gambon, etc — were reduced to little more than cackling villains or noble godheads by that point. But Rickman nailed it. Inasmuch as the bloated, overstuffed behemoths that were the last few Harry Potter movies had a heart, Rickman’s Snape was it. He pumped hot blood through a cold franchise almost single-handed.

    I still kind of can’t believe he’s gone. I no longer follow movies as avidly as once I did, but the idea that the upcoming flicks Eye in the Sky (a star-studded techno-thriller in which Rickman stars opposite Helen Mirren) and the certain-to-be-dreadful Alice in Wonderland sequel, in which he’ll voice the Catarpillar, will be his last? That just seems wrong. I re-watched Harry Potter & the Prisoner of Azkaban, and every time he was on the screen, I tried to convince myself that he was really dead. I never got there. Somehow it just doesn’t make sense.

Susan, Who Is Desperately Sought

    I decided to watch Desperately Seeking Susan because I listened to a couple of episodes of Karina Longworth’s You Must Remember This about Madonna’s early career, during the period when she was making elaborate, outlandish videos like “Vogue” and “Material Girl”, which traded directly on pomo rehash/remix of classic movies, from Metropolis to Diamonds Are Forever. You should listen to the episodes. Longworth’s skills as an editor have improved greatly in the two years she’s been doing the podcast — the levels are sometimes off, and her narration is somewhat artlessly Radiolab-y, which is often the sign of someone who hasn’t had much experience with ProTools or Hindenburg — but she has a passion for the subject borne of growing up in a media world that seemed, for almost a decade, to belong wholesale to the Material Girl. (Longworth and I are about the same age, which makes me feel incredibly unaccomplished and lazy.) Longworth’s thesis is that Madonna in some degree composed her fame of shifting, shifty images of female beauty, in order both to appeal to and subvert the wanton desires of pop culture. I have long been an advocate of Madonna, both as a songwriter and as a sort of auteur of the culture, and so I find myself in sympathy with Longworth’s arguments, even if I’m not all-in on the idea of Madonna-as-subversive. Longworth’s mastery of film history, though, combined with her obvious enthusiasm for the subject mattter (despite her dry delivery) helps her construct the argument far better than I ever could.

    I watched Desperately Seeking Susan in a mood of curiosity. The film came out before I was making my own moviegoing decisions — I was five in 1985 — and then, when I was in my serious film-buff phase, it didn’t have the kind of advertising that called out to me. I will admit that the teenaged me had not yet really put any critical thought into Madonna, either as a musician or a media phenomenon, and I mostly viewed her as an omnipresent, plastic non-factor, whose entire role in media was to appeal to male satyriasis in order to make money. (This was before I had realized that authenticity is a bullshit dump, and was still mostly in thrall to overwhelming male geniuses like Kurt Cobain and the young Van Morrison.) I also suspect that the film’s reputation was not high in those days. It certainly seemed to have been marketed as a fizzy, frivolous romp for the sister set, starring a pair of stylish young actresses whooping it up. I think I assumed that it was a sort of Thelma & Louise for nincompoops.

    It’s certainly not that. It’s not a truly great movie, really; it is, in fact, somewhat frivolous and fizzy. But it’s those things in a much cleverer way than I had ever before imagined. I think you could call it a postmodern farce, in the best sense of the word. 

    I’m not really going to recap the plot here, because the plot qua the plot is not really the point of Desperately Seeking Susan. It centers around a series of mistaken identities, amnesiac events, and crime-caper MacGuffins that serve to set two characters — Rosanna Arquette’s timid housewife, Roberta; and Madonna’s impulsive party girl/con artist,* Susan — adrift in social environments to which they are not used: Roberta touring the seamy side of Manhattan on the arm of an extremely handsome film projectionist played by Aidan Quinn, and Susan lolling about in the lap of luxury in a suburban mansion in a tony New Jersey suburb. It’s a story of a young woman saving herself from the savage doldrums of a life defined by roles she didn’t invent. By becoming Susan — that’s one of the mistaken identities — Roberta comes to realize that there’s a lot more, not only to life, but to herself, than she had previously understood. It’s not a revolutionary plot, but it’s given a feminist spin that seems to have been lost on a lot of its contemporary reviewers, and certainly wasn’t hinted at in the ads.

*In fact, Susan reads, in the current pop-psychoanalytical environment, as a classic sociopath, not unlike Ferris Bueller, with whom she shares a lot of personality traits.

    You’ve heard of the Bechdel Test? It was invented by cartoonist Alison Bechdel, and it contains one simple criterion: a movie passes the Bechdel Test if it features two female characters who have a conversation about something — anything — other than a man. It doesn’t seem like it should be that hard a test to pass, but if you invest about 30 seconds’ thought in it you’ll find that not many movies do. The Godfather? Hell, no — I’m not even sure its three female characters are ever onscreen together. Pulp Fiction? Nope, there’s never a scene without a man in it. Boyhood? Not a chance. Not that a movie can’t be good without passing the Bechdel Test. It’s just something to think about.

    Desperately Seeking Susan casually and easily passes the Bechdel Test, despite the fact that its two main female characters don’t really meet until the film’s climax. It does this in a way that would seem simple, except that so many movies fail to do it: it gives its female characters identities and jobs and things like that. Madonna’s Susan is a hedonist, an unapologetic club kid, an opportunistic thief. When the last of these lands her in a pot of hot water, she goes to a female friend who works as a magician’s assistant in Manhattan for help. What do they talk about? What do you think? They talk about Susan’s crime and her friend’s crappy job. Then they go to the movies. The scene makes so much sense that it doesn’t stand out at all, until you begin to think about the movie with 30 years of cultural criticism in between you and the film’s release.

    Another subtle, but I imagine purposeful, sequence happens at the end of the film, when Susan’s misdeeds have started to catch up with her, and she’s abducted at gunpoint by a creepy bleached blond dude, who thinks she has a pair of earrings he wants. They creep along through a warren rooftops and fire escapes, hotly pursued by Susan’s sometime boyfriend. But when a blow comes to the bad guy’s skull, it’s not Susan’s boyfriend who delivers it, but Roberta, newly empowered and more assertive after a brief walk in Susan’s shoes. It’s not didactic — if I hadn’t been clued in by Longworth’s podcast that watching the movie through a feminist lens might be interesting, I almost certainly would have missed it — but it’s about the most spectacular way to pass the Bechdel Test there is. Two female characters save the day, all without talking about a man.

    Over and above its political aspects, the movie has one really big asset: Madonna, as Susan. Kind of famously, just about the only thing that Madonna ever set her sights on and didn’t get was movie stardom. She married a movie star (Sean Penn) and later a movie director (Guy Ritchie), and in between conducted a torrid affair with a rapidly-fading movie star (Warren Beatty). But despite several bids at stardom, it never quite happened — her Breathless Mahoney was alluring enough, but Dick Tracy was a fatuous vanity project, all surface and no depth. She was good but distinctly outshone by Rosie O’Donnell, Tom Hanks, and Lori Petty in a comedic turn in A League of Their Own. The closest she came was the starring role in Evita, for which she won some awards and good reviews, but the film was a fairly forgettable adaptation of a minor Andrew Lloyd Weber musical that (in my opinion) the world would have been just fine without. Desperately Seeking Susan would suggest, at least to me, that the reason Madonna never became a huge star was not because she wasn’t capable, but because she was miscast. Maybe she chose to be miscast; one of the signatures of Madonna’s career, once she hit her stride, is that she rarely did anything she didn’t want to do. But all the same — miscast.

    It’s tempting to assume that Madonna is playing a version of herself as Susan, not least because the overlap between Susan’s crucifixes-and-fishnet fashion sense and Madonna’s own was basically one-to-one. Who knows if that’s true, but somehow I doubt it. Susan could be a total cipher, with a lesser performance, or worse, a floozie — she’s almost nothing but self-interest and hedonism. But Madonna imbues Susan with a magnetism, a cynicism, an intelligence, and — yes — a lissomeness, that make her scenes hard to take your eyes off of, even when they’re sort of easy spoofery of upper-middle-class suburbanness that was fairly common in the 1980s.** When she dances in the club with an older man, mocking him for his squareness, his sobriety, his fundamental lack of life force, part of the reason it works so utterly is because she is completely the opposite. Madonna, whether or not she had the chops of Meryl Streep, was not to be ignored.

**One thing I hadn’t known, or perhaps had forgotten, was just how beautiful Madonna was when she first hit. I mean, of course, I was aware that she was an attractive woman, probably even before I began to understand what that really meant. But by the time of my own sexual awakening, Madonna had remade herself as an unapproachable blonde, a woman of complete glamour, which was the sort of thing that did not really appeal to me. The Madonna of Desperately Seeking Susan, punky and less calculated(-seeming), though, was a great, undeniable beauty.

    The film, of course, is not perfect, either aesthetically or politically. A lot of the stuff about Roberta’s buffoonish husband is cartoonish, and not in a particularly good way. Some of the storytelling choices seem hilariously — but not self-consciously — absurd. And, of course, this being a movie, Arquette’s Roberta somehow manages to go on a days-long adventure through Manhattan without ever meeting a person of color who isn’t a servant or a thug. (Hell, I’m not sure she meets anybody at all who isn’t either white or black, meaning the Manhattan of Desperately Seeking Susan has been largely flushed of its Chinese, Indian, and Puerto Rican populations, among others.) And it does belong, at least in its second half, to a genre of film that was popular in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, which I’m not always in love with: the city-as-hell movie. (Usually this hell is New York, though sometimes it’s Los Angeles. Has it been Chicago? I’d bet it has.) You know this movie: The Warriors, Escape from New York, New Jack City, Grand Canyon, Taxi Driver, etc, etc, etc. I’m not saying that these movies are all the same, or that they’re all bad. In fact, the list I just named has one stone classic, three cult classics, and one decent-if-pablumy offering on it. But I find the genre tiresome, after a while. Though I realize that America’s cities went through a distinct rough patch in the mid-late 20th century, with crime skyrocketing, white flight causing dereliction, and so forth, sometimes it seems to me that Hollywood processed what was happening in urban America entirely through the lens of white anxiety about black people. I mean, come on. R&B music was, for a long time, called urban. For a while, I was hoping that Desperately Seeking Susan would resist the meme that cities were scary and bad and plagued by dangerous black people — early in the film, Manhattan is a place of excitement and discovery for Roberta — but soon enough there were three black dudes leaning on a white guy’s car when he came out of the shop. And then Roberta was being chased through a weirdly abandoned SoHo, and the city-as-hell thing was in full swing.***

***Two key caveats here: (1) Manhattan really was a rough place in those days, as Madonna herself could attest — she was sexually assaulted at knife point in the early 80s, long before she was famous, outside her building in the East Village. (2) City-as-hell is not really completed in Desperately Seeking Susan — ultimately, Arquette’s Roberta elects to stay in Manhattan, preferring it to the suffocation of the suburbs. In most city-as-hell movies, the (almost always white) protagonists either escape the city, or are killed by it. Think about frequent Madonna collaborator David Fincher’s dreadful Seven, in which Gwyneth Paltrow complains bitterly about living the city with her cop husband, and is rewarded with decapitation.

    All in all, Desperately Seeking Susan left me lamenting a Madonna movie career that moved along more natural paths, playing to her strengths as a comedian. There’s no guarantee she would have become an world-bestriding movie star, but I think she had it in her. Maybe the mistake was in trying to do movie stardom in her pomo remix style — instead of following her strengths as an actor, trying to manufacture herself as Marilyn-style glamorous blonde. (Madonna was always far too cynical and knowing to play the Marilyn part. It’s part of her appeal.) Perhaps Madonna was always too much in control for the moment — maybe there was no way for a woman to be a movie star without relinquishing the driver's seat in those days. (Or these ones.) Who knows.

    Ah, well. The road not taken. Here, I’ll leave you a video of with her best song.

Dos and Don’ts, Week of 31 July 2015

Do

Read Station Eleven

Watch the first season of Six Feet Under

Read this Vox piece on the dangers of mob justice

Watch this video of an elephant calf meeting some birds:

Eat Cascadian Farm granola

Fancy, no?

Listen to conductor Peter Phillips and The Tallis Scholars

Play The Last of Us on PS4

Listen to my friend Audrey Quinn on 99% Invisible, talking about the AIDS Ribbon

Watch the following gif over and over again.


Don’t

Watch the Minions movie (it blows)

Watch the second season of Six Feet Under

Read the comments on any article about Cecil the Lion

Try to talk to Mariners fans about Dustin Ackley

Run the Suncadia Half-Marthon (the course is too long and is mostly around a golf course)

Be a jerk

This Ain't No Time to Get Cute

    I was going to write an ambitious post about the many significant Julys 4 of my life this afternoon, but then I encountered a traffic jam. I suppose it’s evidence of my cossetted life that the traffic jam basically ceased to be a part of it when I moved out of California twelve years ago,* but the truth is I only really deal with them a couple times a year. Whenever I find myself in one there’s this sensation of — What? How is this possible? WHERE DID ALL THESE FUCKING PEOPLE COME FROM? DON’T YOU PEOPLE HAVE JOBS AND FAMILIES?! DON’T YOU HAVE ANYTHING TO DO OTHER THAN DRIVE YOUR CARS?!?!??!?!?!?!!? It doesn’t matter that they’re all saying the same stuff about me inside their own vehicles. The outrage wins. Every time it wins.

*Don’t quote me on that. Writing this blog has been a lesson in how quickly one’s memory erodes. You could tell me that I left California ten years ago or fifteen years ago and I’d go, “Yeah, that sounds right.” I remember when my parents would struggle with dates from their own lives I’d go, “Jesus, what happened to YOU? How do you not remember that?” I had no idea how hard it is to pack more memory into less space as you age and your brain ever-so-slightly decays.

    This one started just as I hit PDX metro, headed north on I-5 having just taken a pleasurable, scenic drive over the North Santiam Pass from Bend. I had been contemplating idly the loveliness of the valley in summer, and thinking about the poetic things I would write about the various Julys 4 I have experienced. I was thinking about how to best convey the arresting complexity of my feelings about Independence Day, and patriotism, and America in general. Also, I was thinking about what song I would blast from my open windows as I came over the Ross Island Bridge.

    That’s when I hit the wall of cars, inching along northward — into town in evening rush hour, which I found mystifying. Maybe if I were more familiar with driving around here, I’d understand why northbound traffic south of the city is terrible at getaway time — is everybody going to Vancouver? From Salem? Does this mean something troubling about where our state workers live? — but as it is, I was confounded, set adrift on a sea of traffic with all my outrage. All my poetry and complexity leaked out along with the steam shooting from my ears.

    Now, I’m pretty wizardly with the streets of Portland’s east side, a result of years of trying to be cute with shortcuts. The shortcuts almost never work, but as a result of trying to take them I cannot get lost over there. I’m sure there’s a street or two on that side of the river I haven’t driven down, but they’re few and far between. But I was on I-5 south of the Marquam Bridge, stranded in the west-side suburbs, which might as well be the surface of the moon as far as I’m concerned. And so it was inch, inch, inch, and with each inch I became less the artist and more the grouchy old ass I’m daily turning into.

    I know most people hate talking about traffic, and I’m sure all y’all didn’t care about my traffic story, but it’s been on my mind a lot lately. I’m curious about traffic, and interested in it — I’ve read books about it — but one thing that I’ve come to understand with expanded information is just how far I am from understanding it. This has turned out to be true with nearly every field, over the years. The more books I read the more I understand how many I’ll never read. The more I learn about baseball the more I see how little of it I’ll ever truly get. And the more traffic there is, the more I see how impossible it must be to fix.

    I read Tom Vanderbilt’s book on the subject about a year ago,** and one of the things that really struck me about it is that we appear to be infinitely thirsty for freeways: build one up, say, SE Division Street from downtown to Gresham, and traffic actually won’t get any better on any of the other freeways in town — people will just drive more on the new one. It suppose there’s an eventual saturation point, but nobody has figured out what that is. Give us the opportunity to drive, and we’ll drive. Add a freeway and you won’t relieve a traffic jam — you’ll just create another.

**or rather, I listened to the audiobook

    I use that example advisedly, of course, because in a couple of days I’m going to interview a guy named Jay Howell, who was one of the people who was on the ground for the Mt Hood Freeway fight forty years ago; that freeway would have shot straight up what is now (the very posh) Division Street and — no joke — plowed under the lot where my apartment building now sits. It’s hard to fathom.

    The infinite yen for freeways is evident in archival reading I’ve done about the fight, by the way. People who supported the freeway didn’t seem to care about relieving the congestion downtown, which was the nominal reason for building the freeway — in interviews with The Oregonian, people repeatedly say they just want a fast way to get to work. The freeway revolt that prevented the construction of the freeway was uncannily prescient, it seems: the PDX of today, known for its smart planning (despite its mysterious traffic jams), is built on a foundation of good decisions taken for reasons somewhat orthogonal why the decisions were good. That I’m sitting here now in a beer bar on Division Street, as another rosy sunset crashes resplendent over the trees, the pedestrians, and the traffic, is basically a coincidence.

Footnotes on a Life Ill-Lived #15

2 Not even them, anymore. A fractious & fractured media environment has destroyed the rock star. And huzzah! One more defeat for what Walter Benjamin would have called the cult value of art, another blow against the cult of personality. I don’t wish to seem overly sanctimonious, or to pretend that I, too, have not loved the occasional rock star, but I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s fundamentally bad for societies and psyches to worship icons. It obliterates thought, negates responsibility, and ultimately causes us to idolize the despicable — perhaps, even, what is depicable about the admirable. But I digress.