Neighborhood Landmarks

1. House Full of Hippies

    There’s a house on the street that dead-ends against the alley behind my building that is just chock-full of hippies. This is interesting to me, because it’s a relic of a time before this neighborhood started gentrifying, when its hundred-year-old bungalows could be profitably rented out to working class people; up on the hill, where my building is, the gentrification is complete, and four-bedroom houses go for three quarters of a million dollars — but down the hill, where some of the streets aren’t paved or don’t have sidewalks, that’s not true yet. And so there’s a tumbledown orange house that always has shirtless dudes and dreadlocked chicks hanging out on the porch, smoking cigarettes and spliffs, working on old vans, talking about nothing, smiling more than seems rational, and waving at anybody who walks by. If one were to taxonomize these hippies, they appear to be of the huge-jeans, neon-torch, all-night-rave variety, rather more than banjos-and-acid variety or the urban-organic-tomato variety.

    The presence of hippies is Portland’s true valence; though the place is stereotyped these days as a haven for skinny jeans, Buddy Holly glasses, ironic sundresses, striped socks, and bad moustaches — and those are here in quantity — these can be found in almost any coastal city anymore. No, what makes Portland different to Seattle or Oakland or Brooklyn or Boston (aside from a distinct lack of tech douches) is that its counter-culture roots are showing, as the dropouts and weirdos who washed up here during the Nixon administration have long attracted fellow travelers to come here, hang out in backyards, sell junky trinkets at the Saturday Market, loudly play Barry McGuire on street corners, and generally not be hassled by anyone. Even when I was a kid, when Portland was a little city with a high proportion of rednecks, our ethos of not hassling people attracted hippies, and hippies remain at the foundation of a lot of Portland’s self-image: they’re why every food truck advertises its locavore friendliness, why bikes take prominence over cars on many urban streets, and why, to this day, young people move here figuring they’ll just make it work, find some like-minded people to flop with, apply to every job listing on Craigslist, and not worry too much about stuff.

    There’s a lot of anxiety in Portland right now that the no-hassle ethos is going the way of the dodo, and that we’re going to go corporate and lose our souls — that Portland is going to turn into San Francisco. I get that, I do; I drove by my old house in Sellwood yesterday and one of the neat little bungalows across the street had been knocked over and replaced with one of the cookie-cutter monstrosities that are taking over a lot of the neighborhoods on the east side. It was horrible. But I also think that things change, or they die; I think that Portland’s instincts contradict (if we’re so green, why are we so against building denser, better-engineered housing?); I think the core conservatism of many people who fancy themselves extremely liberal is a symptom of a broken movement. Realism isn’t a notable quality of Portland.

    Anyway, my neighborhood still has a house full of hippies, and around the corner there are a few more, the kinds of places that don’t get painted very often and always have people out on the porch. If there’s a way to keep that, I’m okay with it.

2. Pocket Park

    A few blocks from the house full of hippies is a little tiny park in the middle of the block on a sleepy residential street, about as wide as two houses and stretching from 27th to 28th under the shade of some big elm trees. This park is key to understanding my neighborhood.

    Back in mid-century America, there was a frenzy for building freeways, as white people moved to the suburbs in droves, leaving behind poorer and more ethnically diverse neighbors who often didn’t have the political clout to keep their houses from being bulldozed to service the fleeing middle class. In Portland, I-5 was driven right through the heart of the city’s traditionally black neighborhoods on the north end of town, and I-205 carved through the poorer outskirts of southeast. A planned downtown-to-Gresham freeway would have gone straight up Division Street, the main drag in my part of town. The city got as far as buying out certain older houses and bowling them over, with it in mind that these spots would one day be where the struts that supported the freeway would go. Most people assumed that this was a fait accompli, and for years the neighborhood decayed, as property values plummeted and many places became derelict. The spot where my own building sits was once four big houses; you can see on either side what they must have looked like, because the ones that remained were eventually renovated and restored, and hang there like architectural ghosts.

    Then, in the early 70s, a bunch of idealistic young U of O grads teamed up with pissed-off neighbors and managed to put a match to the freeway plans. The story is long and interesting and I had once intended to do a radio piece about it but got distracted; anyway, the upshot is that within a few years, Portland had a bunch of money to fund buses and trains, and this neighborhood was no longer slated for destruction. The spots that were once intended to hold up a freeway were now little scars on the city, as though the neighborhood had caught the chicken pox and not been able to resist scratching. The apartment building I live in now was built here in 1975. The pocket park was turned into a pocket park. The city was saved, thank God. This is one way in which I think the no-progress types were right; why should we have paid to build a giant road that only serviced people in Gresham? Screw that.

    The neighborhood remained dowdy and lower-middle-class for a long time after that; in anticipation that it would one day die, Division Street itself had become a string of dive bars and auto body shops; its most notable landmark — one that’s still there — was a porn theatre that served as a gathering spot for sexual adventurists and closeted gay men. It was the kind of place where a teenaged kid might be able to find a long-haired guy in an army jacket to sell him weed. But it was also the kind of place where a lesbian bar could flourish and nobody batted an eye. That’s the thing about cities, a thing that’s wondrous and disastrous all at once: dereliction provides a kind of home, a place for people to hide if they feel the need — but it can also feed on itself, and a city can die. You can (kind of) solve one problem by trying to create a society in which no one feels the need to hide. The other? Well, sometimes the patient just has cancer.

3. House of BBQ

    There’s a house about two blocks east of me where they barbecue every night from late April till it starts raining again in September. I don’t know the people who live there, or why they are so committed to outdoor cooking, but I thank them for it. There are few things more pleasant than walking on a hot evening beneath rustling trees obese with leaves and smelling the twinned odors of charcoal and meat; it calls on something deep in our animal brains, and lets us know that all is well, there is food, it is safe, we are surrounded by our tribe. Many nights I walk by their house before dinner, just to get myself ready, even if I’m only eating rice and beans myself. It’s a warmup, like playing catch before the game, or stretching your achilles before a jog.

4. My Patio above the Alley

    Upon which I sit and sing to my city.

What White People Say to their Kids about Race

    One of the things I think I have in common with a lot of other white people who grew up in liberal, mostly-white Northern cities is that my parents never said much of anything to me on the subject of race. This is, in no uncertain terms, the very definition of white privilege: as a member of an ethnic group that forms a supermajority in both your immediate area and the country as a whole, you are not asked to think about yourself as anything other than a human, and can fairly easily go about your life assuming that this is as true for all people as it is for you. I don’t think that my parents never talked to me about race because they were especially inconsiderate or thoughtless; it’s just that we lived in a place and a time that never really brought the issue to the foreground for us. On some level, of course, this is a condition of existence that white people sought, even if a lot of us would have been horrified to realize that this was what we were doing: white flight from cities like Chicago and Cleveland and New York, away from urban centers and out to suburbs, or to western cities like the one I grew up in, was couched in terms of “finding good schools” and “getting away from crime”, but in many respects it was really about cocooning ourselves away from the black folks who came north in the second Great Migration. This way, we could go on living our lives without having to bear witness to the true effects of white supremacy. In fact, kids of my age and social class more or less grew up thinking that white supremacy was an aberrative behavior sequestered safely in the actions of a few sick individuals who were now all thankfully long dead. It was rarely brought to our attention that white supremacy was alive and well and thriving in our systems, and when it was there was always some way to stave off responsibility.

    Part of the reason for this is the way we were taught about race in school, frankly. Nobody ever said to me in so many words, “Black people were oppressed in this country, but then there was the civil rights movement in the 60s and it’s all fine now,” but if I carefully examine the attitudes I walked out of high school with, I’d say that was the bulk of the message. We were showed some footage of people being hit with water from fire hoses, then a couple of speeches by Dr King, and then left to assume that black people were now happily riding at the front of the bus and tipping their caps to police officers and joining in on the American Dream. We never talked about redlining, or the how the GI bill didn’t work the same for black vets as white vets, or the way in which the draft vacuumed up black and brown teenagers in disproportionate numbers and shipped them off to fight and die in Vietnam; we were never challenged to contemplate the idea that perhaps history hadn’t ended with the passage of the Voting Rights Act; it certainly never crossed anybody’s mind that the panoply of American ethnicity comprised more than white and black, or that the goal of any person of color would be anything other than to become, more or less, an honorary white person, with whatever rights and perquisites that might entail.

    Let me tell you a little story, which might help illustrate how insidious this type of education could be. I remember getting into an argument with a friend’s girlfriend when I said something offhandedly about the Civil War having been fought over slavery. This would have been about 1997, when we were juniors in high school. Anyhow, she came over all condescending and said something like, “Do you really think that’s what it was about? It was about state’s rights.” I remember this so vividly because I had been taught a version of the same thing, and though I had intuited that it wasn’t an entirely accurate representation of what had happened, I mostly felt embarrassed: it felt like getting a question wrong on a test, which I didn’t like and rarely did. I wasn’t self-possessed enough to come back with the obvious retort, A state’s right to do what, exactly? I didn’t know enough to cite all the various ways in which the Confederate States made it clear that what they cared about most was maintaining slavery within their borders. I certainly wasn’t smart or brave enough to condemn an entire system that taught white children a lie about history in order that we might feel better about ourselves and our country. Instead, because of the ways that white supremacy had been inscribed on both of us from very early on, I ceded the point: she was probably right. You must understand that I hate to lose arguments; I hate it so much that part of the reason I remembered this incident for so long was because it felt like the only time in my whole life I had lost one. That’s how powerful received wisdom can be. Now, of course, I remember that moment for different reasons, and I’m glad that I do.* It’s important.

*Luckily for me, the way in which I think about it now also means that I retroactively won that argument! Never wrong, I tell you. Never been wrong.

    I don’t really expect or trust that American schools will ever come to tackle this subject terribly well,** meaning that one day it will be incumbent upon me to talk to my kids about race in America, in a way my parents never felt the need to. I’ll have to do this, not because my parents were bad parents, or even because I think they should have known well enough to have that kind of talk with me — if history never ends, and it doesn’t, then one of the things we need to acknowledge is that people keep learning from it as it keeps going. This is something that white people need to have learned from our experiment in running away from the issue of race in America: sequestering ourselves from it does not solve it. The reason I was taught that the racial history of America ended with Martin Luther King, I think, is that a lot of people profoundly wished it were true, and as the man said, the wish is father to the thought. If we could just convince ourselves that everything was okay now, then we could ignore the ways in which it wasn’t. Having been asked to acknowledge that people of color were human, we did so, and then many of us, fearing what such an acknowledgment might mean, tried instead largely to ignore them. We kept running the country largely by and for ourselves, and the system, through the negligence of many and the malevolence of some, continued to be a system of oppression. Albert Einstein once wrote, “The world is in greater peril from those who tolerate and encourage evil than from those who actually commit it.” This is how that happens.

**Though I do expect that they can stop teaching Lost Cause lies to kids; that’s a very low bar to jump over, even for public education.

    So, what would I say to my kids about race, what specifically? Hell, that’s a hard one. Luckily it’s something I have a lot of time to think about, given that said kids don’t even exist yet. It could even be that my kids won’t be white, in which case, some of this goes out the window. I think, first, I’d say that it’s important to be humble about it. Do not presume to know more than you do; do not make the kind of mistake that I, personally, have made many times, and think that because you’ve read a book by a black person, you are now an expert on blackness. Or being Latino, or Asian, or whatever. Second, be suspicious of happy endings, or anybody who tells you the story ended before you were born. Those people are lying to you, though they probably don’t even know it. Revolutions do not happen in this way; systems do not change overnight. When people are upset, take them at their word. Protests and riots don’t occur because people love violence (though some of them do); they happen because people can think of no other way to be heard.

    But one thing I keep coming back to, one thing that I must admit makes me uncomfortable to think about, is that white people are going to have to talk to their kids about whiteness. In the past — in the present — when white people talk about whiteness, it has usually been as a means to make explicit the system of white supremacy from which white people implicitly benefit. We all sense this system, and know it’s there; we wouldn’t be so uncomfortable talking about this if we didn’t. We wouldn’t be teaching our children a history that ends in 1965. We wouldn’t have concocted a system of shibboleths in which the n-word has more power than any other word on the planet, and racist is just about the worst thing you can be called. These are defense mechanisms, in my read, though they do at least indicate good intentions. (Also, keep in mind that I don’t think it’s a good idea for white folks to go around using the n-word willy nilly.) And I think this is the stuff white people need to talk to our kids about — not to make them feel bad, but so that they can approach the task of making the system better with honesty, and not repeat the mistakes and bad judgements that their parents and grandparents did. I mean, we all wish for the world to be a better place for our children, right? This is part of how we do that.

    The last thing I think it’ll be important to teach my kids (or the last for now, as I'm sure this list will go on mutating for a long time), one I have to remind myself of from time to time, is this: this is not a team sport. I have to remind myself of this these days when people talk about Donald Trump, and how he wins the support of white men disproportionately; this leads some people, understandably, to speaking disparagingly of white men, because Donald Trump is a fatuous gasbag, a dangerous charlatan, a liar and a villain with the mind of a criminal, and he has risen to prominence on the shoulders of a lot of people who share a lot of characteristics with me. I find myself getting defensive: Hey, I think, there are lots of different kinds of white men. Don’t put that shit on me. So I’ll have to help my kids remember: that’s a thought that almost any person who is a member of an ethnic or religious minority has had more times than you’ve remembered to put gas in your car. This is a lesson in empathy. Interrogate the ways you think about people who are different from you. Wonder why you believe what you believe. Remember that every time you feel defensive, you’re reacting to something that happens to you less than it happens to anybody else. Remember that this isn't a team sport, and every person you meet is an individual with an individuated experience.

    Anyhow, I’m not entirely certain what got me off on this jag. Originally this was going to be one of those things where I folded in a TV show and a cultural event, but it’s gotten so long now that I’m not sure there’s really a lot of space to talk about Black-ish or the death of Muhammad Ali or a police shooting in Central Oregon. What I’m really going to do now is force myself not to chicken out on posting this, I think.

I Need a Mirror on a Stick

    I need a mirror on a stick.

    Wait, let me back up. So, this morning I went to clean the catbox and discovered, to my surprise, that there was no poop in the box. None at all. I actually combed through the litter with the scoop, feeling for poop, and I just couldn’t find any. The cat has not been pooping in her box. This made me nervous, because — you may have spotted it already — that meant she’d been pooping somewhere else.

    Now, I feel I should tell you up front that Hana — that’s the cat — Hana goes outside. I know, heap your scorn and judgement upon me, I’m a terrible cat abuser who allows his cat to do her favorite thing in the world, i.e., go outside and be in it. I have a few defenses, chief of which is that Hana spent her formative years living with a very old lady who had not yet got religion on the subject of keeping your cat indoors, meaning that when she doesn’t get to go outside she becomes absolutely, maniacally fixated on getting out. She lurks the door 24/7, seeking to squirt out between my legs every time I go in or out; she yowls and scratches; one time she took a flying leap from a window that was a good 10 feet off the ground. It is her idée fixe, and she won’t be denied. But further, I think that keeping cats who want desperately to go out just locked in all the time is a symptom of our overly-safety-obsessed culture of helicopter dads and 24-hours-a-day supervision and kids not walking to school until they’re 12. Sometimes I think we’re sacrificing our pets’ quality of life for their quantity of life.

    Anyway, I’m off track. So, Hana hasn’t been pooping in her box. In reality, I think she’s probably been pooping in the barkdust at the foot of the stairs and burying it, in her prim feline way, but she’s acted out before, usually by pooping in the bathtub to let me know she isn’t too happy about having strangers around. (Every time I start dating somebody new, Hana poops in the bathtub for a week. Bet on it.) In an overreactive tizzy, I began to search for her secret pooping spot. Was it under the guest bed? (No.) In the closet? (No.) In the coat closet? Under the couch? Behind the bookshelf? (No, no, no.) And then I remembered: one of her favorite places to hide out when the scary strangers are around is in the bathroom, behind the washer and dryer.

    Let me try to paint you a picture. This bathroom is quite small — not New York small, but small enough that I can touch the east and west walls simultaneously with my elbows crooked. The entranceway is crowded: on the right hand side, the vanity, complete with a huge mirror that I’m fairly sure adds about 20 pounds. On the left, a nook, where the washer and dryer are stacked, washer on bottom, dryer on top, the whole shebang about six feet high, possibly a little more. The door opens inward and, when open, obscures the washer and dryer completely. I’m not complaining — I have an in-unit washer and dryer — but it’s a bit of a mess, in the way that apartment living always is. What Hana likes to do when there’s one of those terrifying new girls around is worm her way around the edge of the washer, and hide in the 6-8 inches of space between the washer and the wall.

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The field of battle.

    Now. Let’s be clear here — I have no specific reason to believe that Hana has been pooping back there. In fact, I have a whole bunch of reasons not to believe it: the bathroom doesn’t smell like poop; she’s never done it before; she could be doing it outside; why would she poop in a place where she likes to hang out? But at about 6.30 this morning, I couldn’t convince myself that she wasn’t doing it. I tried. Believe me, I tried. I sat on the back porch with a cup of coffee and my book and I tried to have an excellent, late-spring, sun’s-just-up, it’s-gonna-be-hot-but-it’s-not-yet kind of morning I had been planning all week on having this morning. But I couldn’t concentrate on the book or the coffee or the refreshing bath of sunlight on the leaf-green hills of southeast Portland. No, I was sure that Hana was pooping behind the clothes washer.

    What happens next is a little absurd. So, first, I got my stepstool from where it lives, tucked next to one of the bookshelves (like I said, apartment living) and tried to climb up over the stacked washer and dryer and see behind it. This did not work — they were too big —, but it came thisclose to working, so I was tantalized by what might be back there, just beyond where I could see. So the first thing I did was — actually, the first thing I did was wash off the top of the dryer; it was fucking filthy. But the next thing I did was try to wedge myself sideways around the unit, the same way Hana gets in, but I’m a grown-ass man and I could barely get my shoulder in there, let alone my head or (ahem) my stomach. (Those 20 pounds the mirror adds? Literal. Your actual stomach actually swells. I swear.) No, the only solution was to go over the top. But how?

    What I needed was something that was about a foot taller than my stepstool. I looked for things to balance on the stepstool, or upon which to balance the stepstool, but there was no solid candidate that I thought would hold my weight. I glanced at the dresser, which is a surprisingly-solidly-built Ikea thing, but decided against it. This is when I thought about the mirror on the stick. If I had a mirror on the stick, I could look back there and see all the poop that Hana had been leaving. So I began looking for a mirror — you know, one of those little portable ones, like a makeup mirror or a shaving mirror? But (of course) I don’t have one of those. I don’t wear makeup, and — hey, I live in Portland, you think I spend a lot of time shaving? Yeah, no, I don’t.

    I kept finding myself drawn back to the dresser. It was exactly the right height. But it was covered in shirts that need buttons sewn back on them, and winter bundlements that I haven’t quite got around to putting away for good. And it was full of clothes. No way. Right? No way? Or maybe . . . maybe it would be fine. Maybe, in fact, it would be perfect. So I took all the stuff off of it, crammed it all in weird corners that I’ve now forgotten about (apartment living, redux), and began to slide it toward the bathroom.

    This went really well. For as long as I was on the hardwood that covers most of my apartment floor. But the bathroom is tiled with textured slate — rough, ridged, and not conducive to, you know, full-dresser-sliding. It became a sweaty, sweary, ugly game of push-and-pull as I walked my dresser, full of clothes, into the bathroom. After a while, I decided I needed to get to the other side of the dresser, but discovered that I couldn’t get around it — so I had to climb up on the vanity and kind of ape-walk into the bathroom, where I then discovered that the task wasn’t any easier from that angle. This operation took probably five minutes, but it felt like 45, especially when I tried to close the bathroom door — remember, it blocks the washer and dryer — and realized I was going to have to pull the dresser until it was practically flush with the bathtub in order to get the door closed. Then I was going to have to push it back. Then I was going to have to pull it flush with the bathtub, re-open the door, and get the thing back out onto the hardwood.

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See what I mean, with the arguing?

    Did I mention that I’d decided it was paramount that I run some clothes in the dryer during this operation? Well, I had decided that, meaning that, once I got the dresser situated in front of the washer and dryer, I had to climb up on it and then lean over a molten-hot, rattling machine in order to get a look behind it. And once I did that, do you know what I found down there?

    Nothing. Some wires and a floor.

    And so you see why I need a mirror on a stick. It would save me so much trouble. And now I’m kind of curious about what’s behind the refrigerator.

Podcast Rodeo #2: Benjamen Walker’s Theory of Everything & the Auteur Theory of Audio

Podcast Rodeo is an occasional series here on TOUCHED WITH FIRE DOT AUDIO in which I muse on one of the 44 podcasts (the actual, current number) that I subscribe to.

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The logo of Ben Walker's Theory of Everything. I find it very cool.

1. In Which Are Discussed Gilmet and Radiotopia, Their Differences

    Last time here on Podcast Rodeo, we talked about Gimlet Media’s flagship show, StartUp, and its growing pains. Gimlet was launched in the late summer / early fall of 2014, and rapidly became the gold standard of for-profit podcasting networks, hosting not only the popular (if artistically somewhat lost) StartUp, but also Reply All (a personal favorite), Mystery Show, and several other much-downloaded offerings. I have no idea if Gimlet impresario Alex Blumberg is getting rich off of it, but it appears to support his burgeoning family in New York City, and they’re hiring new people all the time. (Despite several applications, I have never been one of these hires. I never really expected to be, though.)

    The world of narrative audio — which is pretty much what Gimlet does — there is one personage, and one show, that hovers ever-present behind every discussion: Ira Glass, and his ever-changing, mould-shattering, first-of-its-kind show, This American Life. TAL pioneered the style that dominates narrative audio storytelling: casual, music-rich, accessible, funny. Glass, with his nasally, very Baltimore and very Jewish voice, did not sound like the other people on public radio; he stuttered his lines, had an essayist’s eye for detail, was unafraid to laugh or go on the air with bronchitis or come off as less than authoritative. It can be hard to understand how unusual this was back in the mid-late 90s, when TAL first came on the air, because Glass made it part of his mission to get unusual voices on the air. Early regulars included Sarah Vowell, whose nasal, girlish voice is so odd she eventually lent it to a Pixar character; David Sedaris, whose lispy, faintly southern speech was unapologetically homosexual in its affect; and Scott Carrier, whose haunted monotone was by far the biggest influence on my own radio line readings.* Spiritual heirs include Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me’s Peter Sagal; Live Wire’s Luke Burbank; Snap Judgement’s Glynn Washington; Invisibilia’s Alix Spiegel (a TAL alum) and Lulu Miller; and Radiolab’s Jad Abumrad. In short, without Glass and his show, the world of audio we know now just doesn’t exist. We are all kicking against its pricks and stealing its tricks.

*Not to brag, but I actually have a classic radio voice, and my Carrier imitation is actually a method of making myself sound less authoritarian and intimidating.

    I mention this here not only because Blumberg’s Gimlet shows are the clearest progeny of TAL’s revolution — Blumberg himself might be the Glassiest radio host other than Glass himself, but other shows on the network are hosted by other TAL alums, and Blumberg has clearly decided to coöpt his former show’s breezy, upbeat style (one, in fairness, he helped create) and use it to make relatable, listenable output that will keep his company profitable. I mention it also because I want to talk about another network, one that is home to many of podcasting’s most self-consciously artful and challenging listens: Radiotopia, which launched a couple of months before Gimlet. The thing is, Radiotopia is home to a bunch of great shows, and it resists Gimlet’s tendency to make all of its shows sound the same, and it has several creators who not only had nothing to do with TAL but actually predate and influenced that show themselves, such as the legendary Kitchen Sisters — and still, much of of its output is completely impossible without This American Life and the way it opened up audio storytelling to new vistas. This is true of Radiotopia’s flagship show, 99% Invisible, which as broadly about “design”, but is largely about its own production and sound design; it’s true of Phoebe Judge’s Criminal, which is a great true crime show that comes out of North Carolina; and it is especially true of Benjamen Walker’s Theory of Everything, an indescribably weird catchall show that encompasses science fiction, philosophy, futurism, tech industry inside baseball, autobiography, and more straightforward narrative storytelling.

2. Benjamen Walker and the Auteur Theory of Audio

    As Walker freely admits, Theory of Everything is a show that cannot be easily packaged, pitched, sold, or advertised. Recent episodes include:

    + “The Future”, which features an interview with a tech journalist who may have been the inspiration for an old TV show of which Walker is a fan.

    + “A light touch and a slight nudge” [sic], including fiction about Donald Trump as CIA plant, and nonfiction about conspiracy theories and why people believe them.

    + A series called “Instaserfs”, in which ToE intern Andrew Callaway — who may or may not actually be an intern — takes a series of “sharing economy” jobs in the Bay Area, including driving an Uber, delivering food, and doing duty as a manservant. This is then followed up by a definitely fictional storyline in subsequent episodes in which Callaway becomes an instacelebrity for his exploits.

    + Another series called “Dislike Club”, which is basically about what a horrorshow the internet is.

    You can see why the show is hard to describe. It’s discursive and uneven; the fictional aspects, in particular, tend to be less effective than the rest of the show. But it is undeniably fascinating, and it appears to be the product almost entirely of Walker’s warped imagination — well, that, and his ability to find interesting stories in strange corners of the world.

    One of the things I find interesting about it (and several of the other shows on Radiotopia) is that it is clearly intended to have one, specific author, in a way that even This American Life, whose guiding light was always the inimitable Mr Glass, never did. Walker finds the stories, he conducts the interviews, he edits the tape, he digs up the music, he does the sound design, and he writes the narration, which veers between philosophical musing, memoir, and speculative fiction, often in the course of just a few lines. The only way I can think to describe this is the squishy, nonspecific word sensibility, which I often try to avoid because it seems to me like a bullshit dump. Walker’s sensibility drives the show’s twists and turns. His level of inspiration seems to dictate the production schedule. He usually churns out a new episode every two weeks . . . or every three weeks . . . or every month or so . . . it’s hard to tell. This is actually a model that kind of only works with, not only an on-demand form of media consumption, but one like podcasting, where several episodes can pile up in a row and not take up too much time or space for you to ever catch up.

    I was talking (well, kibbitzing on Facebook) with some friends about authorship and why people are so desperate to believe in it when it comes to works of collaborative art. (The convo was inspired by Beyoncé’s new record, Lemonade, but equally it could have been inspired by pretty much any movie ever made, or This American Life, or any of a number of other things.) Now, don’t get me wrong, I don’t really have a lot of use for most postmodern theory, and I don’t take “the death of the author” particularly seriously; but it is true that in our perpetual search for that elusive (and probably non-existent) concept, authenticity, people really, really want to impute works of art to a single creator if at all possible. I think this probably has something to do with evolutionary psychology and our need for clean, cause-and-effect stories that flatter the instincts that keep us alive (and allowed us to build this culture we all dig on so much in the first place). I have some tedious thoughts on what this may or may not have to do with various notions of God that I won’t bore you with, but suffice it to say that it seems to me that people are looking for a single creator almost as soon as they’re aware that something has been created.

    I think this has done a lot of damage over the years, including the radical disempowerment of the screenwriter in filmmaking.** It’s also done many great things, including empowering writer/directors to take control of a medium was once engineered and make corners of it creative. It’s a really complicated move, and I could probably write a whole book about it that nobody would read. But what I find interesting is that it’s only just now starting to crop up in audio.

**NB that I’m the brother of a screenwriter, so I may not be wholly impartial here.

    While on the one hand I think this has some bad effects — the conflation of Ira Glass with his show in the popular imagination has really taken a lot of credit from a lot of creative people who helped him make the show what it was, as Glass would probably tell you himself — it also indicates, I think, that the genre is growing up a little bit, and people are starting to take it seriously. It’s right there in the title of Walker’s show, the full name of which is Benjamen Walker’s Theory of Everything. On the one hand, this title is completely tongue-in-cheek, as no doubt the diffident and modest Mr Walker would avow. At the same time, it’s an accurate representation of the way the show is sculpted and directed, as Walker himself, irrespective of whether or not he ever really had an intern, is definitely ToE’s homo magnus and guiding light in a way that even Glass couldn’t be at TAL.

3. Radiotopia and the Theory of Everything

    The interesting thing that Radiotopia does that Gimlet doesn’t is treat its creators as artists, more or less. I have no doubt that Alex & PJ at Reply All, or Starlee at Mystery Show, genuinely do operate their shows largely as they see fit; but at the same time, they are indelibly Gimlet, always accessible, chatty, music-rich. I don’t want to denigrate these shows, because Reply All in particular may be my very favorite show currently going; but they are recognizable, and they’re similar.

    On Radiotopia, the auteur is regent. Walker’s show sounds nothing like Nick van der Kolk’s Love + Radio, which sounds nothing like Lea Thau’s Strangers, which sounds nothing like Nate diMeo’s Memory Palace. Much like Theory of Everything, each of those shows defies classification, other than that it has a controlling creative consciousness who runs the show (with some subordinates). Even the more clicky, pitchy shows, like 99% Invisible, offer unique sounds that are related to, but not the same as, the obviously TAL-inspired fare available on Gimlet, or on public radio shows like Planet Money or Invisibilia. I sometimes wonder how they make their money; the product is much harder to market than Gimlet’s, which I think both the Gimlet guys and the Radiotopia guys would tell you they’re proud of. But I’m glad they’re around.

Recommended episodes of Benjamen Walker’s Theory of Everything:

“New York After Rent” — about Air BnB, the musical Rent, and the gentrification of NYC

“Secret Histories of Podcasting” — three versions of how the podcast became an artform

“Dark Karma” — an extended interview with a man who grew up in a cult

Podcast Rodeo #1: Startup

    I’ve decided to start an occasional series here on TOUCHED WITH FIRE DOT AUDIO, called “Podcast Rodeo”, in which I review podcasts I either do or don’t listen to. The reviews will be peripatetic and sometimes unusual; some of these shows are not things I feel like doing a breakdown on, so there will just be a little story, faintly inspired by the show or its hosts. Some might cover more than one show — at last count, I was subscribed to 43 podcasts, from NPR offerings like Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me to obscurities like Scott Carrier’s Home of the Brave.

    This first one, though, is pretty much gonna be a review, based on some thoughts I had while listening to Startup this afternoon, fighting the ever-worsening traffic of NE Portland as I attempted to return the cable box (that’s right, I’ve cut the cord — take that, Comcast). So, without further ado, some thoughts and ideas about Startup and its place in a world it helped create.

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The Startup logo, replete with annoying capitalization.

Startup: What Is It?

    Because I’m a podcast hipster, I feel the need to clarify that I’d been listening to podcasts for years before Alex Blumberg left his gig at the NPR show Planet Money (itself the first podcast spinoff of This American Life) to found a podcasting company. I think I first discovered podcasts during the 2008 presidential election, when Slate’s Political Gabfest was in its infancy (more on that at another juncture); Blumberg went solo sometime in 2014, and Startup first hit the internet airwaves that autumn, around the same time as Sarah Koenig’s Serial. Arm-in-arm, the two shows, both helmed by graduates of TAL, ushered in a podcast boom — people had been making podcasts for years and years, some of them quite good, but something about these two shows — and the plugs they received on the radio from This American Life, which aired both show’s pilots in its regular timeslot — woke a whole bunch of people up to just what was possible in audio if what you were doing wasn’t constricted by the FCC, the need to fill exactly an hour between Radiolab and Prairie Home Companion, or the pressures that go along with being officially associated with a stodgy enterprise like National Public Radio or Public Radio International.

    Gimlet and Startup had one huge advantage: the core concept for Startup was completely ingenious. Blumberg decided that what he would do is document the very process of starting the company that would host the show, an act of meta-gonzo-journalism that gave that first season immediacy; Blumberg was doing something risky, possibly crazy, and recording himself doing it as he went. There were cringe-worthy moments as he gave disasterous rehearsal pitches to angel investors; there was genuine pathos as he and Gimlet cofounder Matt Leiber found themselves in the fraught territory that lies between friends and business partners (the first season’s most memorable episode featured Blumber and Leiber’s discomfiting negotiations about who would own how much of a burgeoning company that was still little more than a notion); there were late night conversations between Blumberg and his no-nonsense wife, public radio veteran Nazanin Rafsanjani; and, in the end, there was success — Startup was a runaway hit, and Gimlet rapidly became the gold standard in for-profit narrative audio. The first season of Startup was a memorable listening experience, a sprawling story of real risk and real reward, in which an everyman protagonist comes within inches of failure before succeeding. In the long run, though Serial was a bigger sensation, Startup was a better show.

Growing Pains

    As Gimlet grew, Startup shut down for a while, as Blumberg started hiring people to do other shows (notably the great Reply All), looked for a cohost, and tried to find another company to profile. Last summer, it came back to peer behind the curtain with Dating Ring, a dating website that came out of famous startup accelerator Y-Combinator, which helped incubate Airbnb, Dropbox, and Twitch, among other companies. Blumberg had taken some steps to find a different flavor for the second season, including bringing in Planet Money vet Lisa Chow to cohost, and choosing a company that was owned and operated by young women rather than a pair of middle-aged dudes. Chow has been a welcome addition, more confident and less nebbishy than Blumberg, but also a little more traditional in her role as cohost — she’s never the star of the show, and doesn’t insert herself in the story nearly so daringly as Blumberg did in his first season.

    And therein lies the problem that Startup has had ever since the end of its first season: without the daring conceit that the host himself was putting everything on the line for the very show you’re listening to, it loses a lot of its energy. Startup’s second season is perfectly competent, sometimes far more than that, and the Gimlet guys did a great job of finding real characters to star in it. But it’s not deeply urgent or compelling, not the way that first season was, when some episodes would be taken up largely by a sleepless Blumberg muttering semi-coherent panic thoughts into a microphone while his wife and children slept on the other side of a door. It’s great that the show made moves to include more female voices, but by picking people who were so young, with so much less to lose, and with so much less personal connection to the audience, it lost something.

    I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the show’s best episodes since season 1 were the ones from the little “mini-season” that came out last fall, and which were a sort of status check on Gimlet itself. It pondered the uncomfortable question of the thin line between advertising and endorsement. It tackled head-on the company’s racial dynamics. And, hilariously, it used Chow’s maternity leave as a vehicle to get honest about what a shitshow the company can be.

And What Now?

    This season, the show is clearly suffering from mission creep, at least if you ask me. It was clear that they couldn’t just go out and profile a nother fledgling company; they’d done that twice, and the second time through hadn’t been nearly as much fun as the first. Would they profile a failing company? They’ve been kicking that around, and keep mentioning it, but it hasn’t happened at all. Instead, the first two episodes have been a gimmicky, not-that-great profile of the streaming video company Twitch — the gimmick being that they don’t tell you it’s Twitch they’re profiling until the very end of the second episode, though if you’re a sharp listener who ever had reason to stream TV back in the late 2000s, you’ll have figured it out by the end of the first episode. This story lacked the immediacy of either of the first two seasons, because (A) it’s told entirely in the past tense, and (B) the main characters come off as fairly straightforward tech douches, who think that because they made a billion dollars, anybody in the world can. (Yeah, they all went to Yale and then Y Combinator. Not exactly just “anybody”.)

    Now, Startup is promising to move on to other companies, possibly ones that haven’t fared so well, though I must admit that I’m a little skeptical. The show lost something real when Blumberg ceased to be its main character, and now seems to be casting about for reasons to exist. Maybe the problem, at least for me, is that I’m actually not that compelled by stories of businesses qua businesses — the word entrepreneur is an epithet in my household, and a lot of the people who would use the word for themselves tend to rub me the wrong way. I was on-board because I had an established relationship with Blumberg going back to his days hunting down his childhood babysitter on This American Life, and because the first season was such a high wire act that I was mostly curious about whether he — or anybody — could pull it off.

    Ultimately, I think the problem is that Startup was a brilliant idea for a one-off show, but it is not evergreen at all. The reason Reply All (which bills itself as “a show about the internet”) can continue to churn out great content week after week is that its purview is so broad; “a show about the internet” can be about practically anything, because it’s actually about the people who use the internet, why, and how. Startup has to be about, well, startups. And though no two startups are the same, so far the show has failed to prove that they’re different enough to be interesting, either. Gimlet might do well to retire its flagship show, or only bring it back for the kind of self-reflexive status checks like last fall’s “mini-season”. Because what they’re doing now isn’t really working.

Sonder

    I got off the train downtown in a mass of people and was minding my own business when I saw something that’s still got me upset twenty minutes later. It was a small thing, not ugly or dangerous, not in any way an outrage. That’s not the kind of upset I’m talking about.

    It was a kid — well, a young man. Anyway, it was a college-aged guy, big, muscle-bound, wearing the kind of gym-shorts-and-hoodie outfit that has become de rigeur for a certain kind of teenager these days. You’ve seen guys like him getting drunk at the beach, or making too much noise in a movie theatre, or grab-assing around at the gym when you’re trying to play basketball. But he had his hood up, covering his hair and ears, with the drawstring pulled tight so that it concealed as much of his face as possible. He looked determinedly at a spot not far in front of his feet, and had his shoulders clenched, as though he thought he might be able to hide behind them. There were tears streaming down his face.

    I have no idea who this kid is, or what would have brought him to be weeping on the sidewalk as pedestrians streamed past him on their way to work or class. He clearly didn’t want to be seen by all these people, and he wouldn’t have been crying if he could help it — that much you could tell by his body language. But what was wrong? What could possibly be so wrong on a Tuesday morning?

    A whooshing sonder passed over me as I realized the incomprehensible vastness of his life, and the fact that I was just someone passing through it, the first stranger he saw that morning that he had his heart broken, or heard his mother had died, or his cat got out and ran off, or any of a whole smorgasbord of cataclysms that could have caused him to be in that place at that time, doing what he was doing. What I really wanted was to be able to stop and tell him it was going to be okay, that whatever was troubling him would pass. But of course I couldn’t do that, because I had no idea if it was true.

    Sometimes I think about my own capacity for indifference. Many times in my life I’ve happened upon an emergency and turned away. The most haunting was one time when I was walking late at night through an industrial area in North Portland with a friend of mine, and we heard a woman scream — not a you-spilled-icewater-on-me scream, but the real, jagged, completely immediate cry of someone who is in deep trouble. That night, my friend and I looked at one another, and then we walked away. Whatever was happening to that woman continued to happen.

    Was this moment like that one? I guess not, the more I think about it; I think part of what was so upsetting about this kid’s distress was how obviously embarrassed he was to be out in public with it. If I had stopped to ask him what was wrong I just would have made it worse. I can’t imagine being in his situation and wanting some stranger twice my age asking me if I’m all right. It would, among other things, be humiliating. I can only hope that he’s been able to find someplace where we aren’t all looking at him by now.

Why Your Dog Isn't Special, and Other Thoughts

    There’s a bird that wakes just before dawn and sends its song, solitary and repeating, ringing through the streets of my neighborhood. We get up at about the same time most days, and I do morning things listening to the sharp notes echo from the houses for blocks around. The neighborhood is empty and lies on the side of a hill. I imagine that once it was a forest. When my friend the morning bird and I are the only ones awake, it’s easy to imagine it that way again.

    Living in a city can be like that, these rare moments of solitude a reminder that one day, maybe not that long from now, this will probably be a ruin. And then people awake and the sound of the freeway begins, and before very long all is motion again, and that’s good, too. I don’t think I would like to live somewhere where it was just me and a lonely bird all the time. I would get bored.

    There are disadvantages. Once I found a substantial chunk of human feces crammed into a wax-paper bag of the sort that usually contains crackers. Another time someone smashed out a window from my car and tried to pull out a bike pump. When it wouldn’t fit through the tiny rear side window the thief had smashed, they decided instead to grind out a cigarette but on the car door and drop it in the back seat. At least they didn’t light it on fire for no reason.

    I would swear to you that once, not that long ago, Portlanders kept their dogs on leashes, as is the law. Now, however, everyone seems to have decided that this law is for other people, people whose dogs are dangerous, rather than harmless, like my dog is — irrespective of his enormous teeth and slavering maw, my dog is perfectly polite and well-behaved, thank you very much. Of course, this isn’t true. There is no dog on earth so completely docile that it can be trusted off-leash in a city. The temptations are too many. When I go running, I am one of those temptations.

    This morning I was huffing down the hill on which I live when a black streak bolted across the street after me. A woman had been standing sort of in the vicinity of this black streak back when it was just a dog, but she hadn’t had it leashed, I’m sure because the dog is her pet and she’s sure it’s harmless. It didn’t seem very harmless as it barked raggedly in full fly. It seemed like an animal bred to kill — which at least some of its ancestors most surely are. I went from a discomfited jog to a dead sprint, leaping over an abandoned tricycle, zig-zagging between bushes, trying to keep anything I could find between me and my pursuer. After about a block — lord knows what would have happened if I hadn’t had a head start of several yards — I vaulted over a picket fence and into someone’s back yard, where I landed in a heap in splintery dirt. The dog barrelled head-on into the fence and fell back, stunned. Then, from what sounded like miles away, its owner called its name. The dog stood, snuffled at the fence a couple of times, and then galloped back to her side. Harmless. I mean, I guess I wasn’t harmed.

    In the end, there were some bonuses to this experience. My ankle, which I have been babying and rehabbing and worrying about for fully six months now, felt fine, and continued to feel fine as a I ran several more miles, though there was one close call as I was going down some stairs. According to my Fitbit, I cleared that first mile much more quickly than I normally would, despite several seconds spent lying in a stranger’s yard, contemplating my own mortality. And I managed to prevent myself from following the dog back to its owner to let her know what I thought, on the theory that perhaps she’s learned her lesson, and yelling at her would probably get nobody anything.

    Now a crow is cawing, and other birds go po-tweet-tweet from trees all over, and cars roar by on Division Street, and everything’s basically fine.

The Shuffle

    For about a year now I’ve been trying to write my way out of my life, and into another one. It’s hard to explain what that means, really, in part because it means a lot of things. In some ways it means that I’ve been doing a lot of writing-as-therapy, which can be a good trick but also runs the risk of falsifying the self in the attempt to explain it; going to actual therapy has helped me understand that some of the stories I tell about myself are in many ways not true. In other ways it means that I keep thinking that being good at this can get me out of this interminable rut that I feel I’ve been in since — what? 2011? Jesus, that’s five years ago now. I lost the script in October of my first year of graduate school, so that would be 2011. Anyway, I’m less clear on how being a good writer was supposed to do this, other than that I keep thinking one of these days someone will notice I’m good at it and it will validate my entire existence, which of course is a silly and destructive thing to hope for. But there you have it. Stringing sentences together, at this moment in time, feels like literally the only thing in my life. The rest is flat, meaningless tedium. It’s driving me insane.

    The most recent bout of insanity started on Friday, when I spent the entire day sitting in a chair either watching basketball or playing video games, and then discovered (not surprisingly) that when night came around I couldn’t sleep. I lay in bed for hour upon hour. I read for a while, I watched TV for a while, I stared at the ceiling and thought about my life (such as it is) for a while. Then, eventually, the sun came up. After some time there was really nothing to be done but get out of bed. So I got out of bed. Then, of course, I had nothing to do. So I went back and sat in the chair and played video games some more. Eventually there was more basketball on TV. I managed to go to the gym. And then it was night again, and once again I could not sleep.

    This is where it becomes completely clear that writing is not really a solution to most problems. At about 2 in the morning, going on 40 hours of constant wakefulness, I pulled out my computer and gave a run at writing about insomnia. The problem with insomnia, however, is that it doesn’t preclude the condition of tiredness — it just means that the body and / or brain (usually brain) will not shut down enough to allow for sleep. I managed to eke out a couple of paragraphs about why I think I can’t sleep (it has to do with an intolerance for silence) before I began to feel explosively, delusionally weird. I was having difficulty keeping track of what was real and what wasn’t. I got focussed on the name of a character from Parks & Rec: Shauna Mulwae-Tweep. It’s a funny name, and I sat in bed with my word processor open, thinking to myself, Shauna Mulwae-Tweep. Sometimes it made me giggle, and sometimes it made me feel weirdly lonely and sad. And then, abruptly, I became aware of how insane it was making me feel.

    And then the bottom fell out of my bed.

    I heard the sound of wood creaking, then splitting, and then the new bedframe I just bought collapsed on itself, sending me, the mattress, my pillows and blankets, and the cat plummeting to the ground, where we all arrived, more or less intact and healthy, with a thud. In another frame of mind I might have cried out, or tried to fix it, or something. Instead I just picked myself up, walked into the living room, lay down on the couch, and typed a status update on Facebook: Shauna Mulwae-Tweep. Eventually I managed to pass out for a couple of hours. Yesterday was an unfolding catastrophe of tiredness and irritability. I wrote a series of irate emails to Overstock.com, the company that sold me my bedframe, finally demanding that they give me $24.95 so that I could purchase an axe and dismantle the bed they sold me, in order to return it to them “in a similar package” to the one they sent it to me in, as per their request. They haven’t replied yet.

    I was hoping that sleeping better last night would solve a lot of this, but as of right now, that hasn’t been the case. The chief symptom of the brokenness in my life is loneliness, a loneliness that seems impervious to companionship or work, that feels like a thousand light years of steel between me and the entire rest of the world. And here again is the failure of my attempt to write my way out of my life: because my life consists largely of blank, flat aloneness, and writing is a solitary activity. If it can be done in company I’ve never figured out how. If it can seek friendship I’ve never seen it happen. It can’t fix your life.

    I try not to spend too much time wallowing in self-pity, both because self-pity is not a good look on a person and because I think wallowing in it tends to make it harder to wash off. But it can be hard when you wake up every morning and there’s no reason to expect that this day will be any different to the one that came before. I’ll be 36 years old in a couple of weeks, and my life makes no sense to me. I can remember when I was half this age, graduating high school, thinking I was looking forward to becoming an adult and figuring out who I was. I worry now that that’s exactly what happened, and what I’ve figured out is that I am a flat, dull person who simultaneously feels intense loneliness and finds most people completely intolerable to be around.

    Fuck. Sorry. I was gonna try to end this funny, but I failed. Now to go off to my shrink’s office and complain about stuff for a while.

The Knock-Knock Plot

    I’m not supposed to go running today. It’s funny, in my life I’ve run a lot — enough to have crossed the country east-to-west at least twice, since I took it up seriously about seven years ago — and I’ve enjoyed it at various times, but never before have I experienced the feeling of wanting to go running, being physically capable of going running, and having to stop myself doing it. Even in my best shape, right before my second marathon, days when I didn’t have to go running seemed to dawn a little earlier and brighter than other ones. The act of running could be enjoyable or exhilarating or fun or painful or exhausting or whatever, but I never, ever looked forward to it. Never stopped myself from doing it. I always had to force myself to do it.

    My perspective on that has changed over the last five months. I wrecked my left ankle jogging down a gentle slope on a seamless sidewalk back in early October. For reasons I have never been able to piece together, I put my foot down sideways, and then brought my entire weight down on it. I couldn’t walk without crutches for a week. I couldn’t walk without pain for a month. For ages and ages, I could hardly do anything at all. It was then that I began to feel jealous of people I saw out running. You know the people — they’re bounding healthily down the street, trim and neon-clad, enjoying the vim and excitement of using the body. I envied these people so completely that it was a physical sensation — I could feel in my legs and arms the urge to run after them. But I couldn’t.

    Sometime in January, about three months after injuring myself, I started running again. I started very slowly — both in pace and in distance — but it never quite felt right. The ankle didn’t hurt, but it felt stiff and weird, and I was scared to go more than three miles or so at a given time. Then, about six weeks ago, I rolled it again. Very gently, and it didn’t hurt much, but it was a reality check. I was not ready to be running. I had to stop. But at least then I had obvious physical symptoms telling me no — stiffness, a little bit of pain. I returned to rehabbing, which involves doing the most absurd exercises in the world: first, you stand on one foot for sixty seconds; then you bend at the knee, still standing on one foot, ten times; then you hop forward and then backward, still on one foot, ten times. Maybe that description doesn’t do justice to how dumb it feels. Because that rehab exercise requires almost not physical exertion. But it is, simultaneously, incredibly hard. You fall over a lot. You look dumb, hands planted on your hips as you play what looks like a version of stationary hopscotch.

    Last week, I decided to give it another go. It had been five months since the injury, five weeks since the re-injury. I had no pain when walking or standing for long periods. Surely it would be fine. Wouldn’t it?

    It wasn’t. The ankle felt weak as I ran, and then throbbed all through the night. I had to stop again. It was reluctant — I went out one more time on it before I decided I had to stop — but I did it. It sucked.

    The major problem with actual life is that it has no plot structure. One’s life can consist of nothing but rising action with no crescendo, nothing but incident without resolution, all denouement without real crisis. People who seem like main characters end up as bit players. The love interest moves back to Pittsburgh, or gets back together with an ex, or is simply surprised to find that you consider them a love interest at all. (Or the unnerving opposite, when you discover that some coworker or friendly acquaintance has cast you in a major role in their life.) People die before they resolve their estrangements. Things get rapidly out of hand and then disappear. You rehab your ankle, and rehab it, and rehab it, and it never really gets better. If this were short story that third try at running would have been lovely, pain-free . . . and then its consequences would have been emotionally devastating, somehow. We call that the knock-knock plot. It’s also a solution for insanity.

    But I went running earlier this week, and for some reason, everything actually was fine. I ran four miles. No pain, no sprains, no lingering ache afterwards. Then I did it again the next day. And again yesterday. Which is how I find myself here: there is no immediate, physical reason why I shouldn’t go running today. Everything feels fine — better than fine. Great. I can finally take pleasure in the movement of my legs again.

    But. I have been told again and again: the easiest way to re-injure your ankle is to over-exert yourself when you come back. (Second-easiest: give up on rehab when you feel better, which . . . yeah, I’ve been doing that, too.) I have to stay off it. I have to stay off it today so I can use it tomorrow. And it’s driving me insane.

A Peripatetic List of Words I've Looked Up, Political Edition

palingenesis — rebirth or recreation; used in philosophy, science, political theory, and theology

    biology — another word for “recapitulation”, the phase in an organism’s development during which it experiences evolutionary change

    theology — reincarnation / baptismal rebirth

    palingenetic ultranationalism— “national rebirth”; one of the core promises of fascism.             Palingenesis in this context is often achieved through violence.

    I saw a video today of a widely-known and -respected photographer named Christopher Morris getting choke-slammed to the ground by a man in a gray suit, as a crowd of white people screamed in orgasmic ecstasy. It’s hard to tell, in the video (or the various others of the moments preceding and following it), if the crowd is cheering for the assault on Morris, the ejection of some black American activists that happened moments earlier, or something else entirely — something said by the man who was the reason for the occasion, Donald Trump. Morris, who works for Time magazine, is a willowy man in his mid-50s who is well-known on the campaign trail, and spent years photographing President George W Bush. In the video, he’s obviously carrying a camera. In a subsequent video, shortly after being allowed to stand, he attempts to demonstrate what was done to him by placing a hand on his assailant’s neck, at which point he is arrested. The Trump campaign says his assailant was a member of the US Secret Service.

    I’m not an historian of anything other than my own life, and I’m certainly not an expert on any political system. I try as hard as I can to be a person who can step back from naked partisanship and see the bigger picture; this is made easier by the fact that I hold heterodox liberal views, meaning there’s basically no group for me to get my identity conflated with in order to obviate choice or annihilate the need for critical thought. I also try, as much as I can, to be cautious about change — the people who promise it, the scope of its possibility, the labels it receives. Unlike a lot of my friends, I was never disillusioned by Barack Obama’s inability to remake the federal government in his own liberal, technocratic image — because I never believed he would. I’m not stating this litany in order to make myself look better or smarter than other people, though I will admit that in my smuggest moments sometimes I do feel that way. It’s mostly about trying to avow my neutrality, to get you to see that I am not, as a rule, one of those lefties who believes that conservatives drink the blood of liberal babies. Because what I’m about to say is going to feel a little bit like that, I suspect.

    In the course of the last few months I have run across the word palingenesis a couple of times, and eventually jotted the above notes on it into a big file I have on my computer called WORDS I’VE LOOKED UP. Most of these words come from the lapidary phrases penned by literary docents, and I keep them so that sometimes I can page through them and feel a certain weltschmerz about my waning on-command vocabulary and how it doesn’t measure up to Zadie Smith’s or David Foster Wallace’s. But palengenesis kept coming up when I was reading about Fascism — real, big-F Fascism, of the sort practiced by Benito Mussolini, Francisco Franco, and Adolph Hitler. I was reading about Fascism for the same reason that a lot of people have been reading about Fascism lately: Donald J Trump seems like a bit of a fascist.

    Despite its dire connotations, palingenesis actually helped me maintain a grip on that cautious, skeptical-of-change nature I was talking about before. Make no mistake, Trump’s “politics” (if that’s what you call his unerring instinct for saying what some people want to hear and convincing them that this is somehow an act of bravery) are ugly and dangerous, and there’s a convincing argument to be made that he’s the inevitable result of the white identity politics that the Republican Party has been playing footsie with at least since the days when Nixon was developing the Southern Strategy.* But one of the tenets of Fascism, as practiced both by Mussolini and Hitler, was that they and their parties would bring about a sort of national rebirth — and not just a national rebirth, but a rebirth occasioned by political violence, often in the form of ethnic cleansing. Hitler, popularizing the Dolchstosslegende, or stab-in-the-back myth, asserted that the First World War had been lost, not through the German Command’s various tactical and strategic blunders, not because the Central Powers were vastly out-numbered and out-resourced, not because they awoke the sleeping giant that was the USA, but because lily-livered pantywaists back home chickened out — and these lily-livered pantywaists were, largely, Jewish bureaucrats who didn’t really feel any loyalty to Germany. Germany would be reborn through the violent expulsion or incarceration of such subversives. Eventually expulsion and incarceration devolved into outright murder. And, whatever else you could say about Donald Trump’s various ugly lies and panderings, he was not calling for violence. Palingenetic ultranationalism, one of the core tenets of Fascism, was not a part of his deal.

*Note: links to a Washington Post op-ed written by Robert Kagan, a prominent Neocon who has been slipping left ever since John McCain decided that Sarah Palin was a plausible candidate for national office.

    But the more I watch things like the orgiastic reaction that Trump’s crowds have had to violence — Morris is just the most recent in a long line of people to have come a-cropper of Trump partisans or paid thugs — the more I worry about it. Trump appears to have no fixed ideology other than Trumpism. Though he appears to me to be a fatuous gasbag, he’s managed to build a sort of cult of personality around himself as a compulsive truth-teller and caller-out of bullshit (irrespective of the fact that his “truths” are, in fact, meaningless pablum usually shot through with lies, and there is no bigger bullshitter than himself). He clearly lives for those cheers and screams; without them, he would have no concept of himself. I’ve come to believe that, if he saw the opportunity to accrue more adulation by proposing a program of ethnic and/or political violence, he would do it. He has no shame, or limits, or sense of responsibility to his nation or the world. His desperation for adulation would be sad if it hadn’t become so dangerous. He’s already promising the rebirth — “make America great again”, he says, as though America’s greatness were not, in fact, still completely self-evident in most respects. The US is a nation troubled by economic divides, bad crime policy, and a dipshit system of government, but it is still unequivocally the largest economic, military, and cultural power on the planet. The things Trump claims to want to do — like push people around in trade negotiations — are things we’re already doing. He lives in a dreamy paper world, constructed by the heirs of Nixon’s Southern Strategy, in which increasing diversity and the empowerment of the disenfranchised somehow equates to decline rather than massive progress. When the rebirth one promises largely involves the re-subjugation of troublesome minorities, the call to violence against those minorities is just on the other side of a door. All he needs do is open it.

    I know some people on the left who say that Marco Rubio is “just as dangerous” as Donald Trump; some who fear Ted Cruz because he seems competent where Trump is, as mentioned above, a fatuous gasbag. I don’t have much interest in living in a world constructed by either of those men and the parties they would lead, either, but I think the equation isn’t balanced. Trump’s lack of experience with the traditional levers of power could thwart him; perhaps the Republican Party could co-opt him, as some reports have suggested. My instincts run that way myself; I suspect he would be an embarrassing, ineffectual President, possibly even one who got impeached within a few years of taking office. But there are far more dangerous possibilities in there, too. A man who wishes only to build a cult of personality around himself will have no compunction about simply obliterating the traditional levers of power. Mussolini and Hitler both came to power toting with them paramilitary groups that allowed them to enforce policies that were not, in fact, hugely popular, through brute force. Military leaders could, as one article I saw suggested, refuse to follow his orders — but the white identity politics he plays with appeals to a group of people htat is heavily armed, and ready for a guerrilla action against the federal government already. And even if Trump does not use the militia movement as an impromptu Schutzstaffel, do we really want to live in a country where the military no longer responds to civilian control? I don’t. An America decapitated in a coup is only marginally better than one dominated by a minority of Trumpists and their arsenals.

    Robert McNamara, who had a lot of opportunity to contemplate both nuclear war and human fallibility, once told the documentarian Errol Morris, “the indefinite combination of human fallibility and nuclear weapons will destroy nations.” A modified version of this is why I think Trump is a far more dangerous phenomenon than any more traditional conservative candidate, little though I agree with those people’s political views. It’s possible that we could just let Trump keep going, assuming that eventually he’ll implode, or run up against the limits of his own self-regard, or get lucky and not fuck it up too badly. But that strikes me as an incredibly irresponsible way of looking at things. The indefinite combination of Donald Trump and political power will eventually destroy this nation. Maybe we’ll get lucky, and he’ll lose in the general election. Or he’ll come to heel once he realizes what’s involved in the Presidency. Or he’ll bow to Congress. Or he’ll listen to his military advisors. Or he’ll have a heart attack from the stress. Or any of a number of other things. But do we really want to gamble on that?

Zero to Sixty

    Turns out family is complicated. I want to say, “the bigger it is, the more complicated a family is,” but I’m not sure that’s always true, really — some of the most-complicated families I’ve known have been relatively small. I also don’t think the Anna Karenina principle is all that accurate, either: even happy families are complicated and weird. I know mine is.

    My mom’s younger brother died yesterday. We weren’t close. In fact, we were about as un-close as it was possible for two guys who lived 20 miles apart and shared a lot of ancestors to be. This morning, I was on the phone with my mom, and we were trying to suss out when the last time we saw him was. She said she’d seen him three years ago, at a funeral. It was his birthday. The encounter was brief. Me? I think the last time I saw him was at a wedding, in about 2003 or ’04. We were both a little drunk.

    Why weren’t we close? Part of it is that I’m just not close with people, really. Part of it is that he teased me when I was a kid, I think because he noticed I was extremely suceptible to teasing and the whole galaxy of older-male behaviors that it lives in; I would turn red, and yell, and eventually come to the point of tears. I still don’t like it very much; when people feel like they have the right to fuck with me it pisses me off. I’m not completely sure on the chain of causality there, but the waters run swift and deep on that one. And then, beyond my own borderline sociopathy and our fraught relationship as young people (he was still in high school when I was born), there was some very heavy business between him and the rest of his siblings, business I’ve never quite understood. I’m not going to go too deeply into that, because it feels disrespectful to plumb those depths so soon after his death, but suffice it to say that I was not unique in being largely estranged from him.

    When I was young, and he still lived at my grandparents’ house, my uncle had a cat he’d named Cookie. Cookie is also my mom’s name (well, nickname, really, but it’s what everybody calls her). This was no mere synchronicity. In the way of many big families, the older kids in my mom’s generation were tasked with stewardship over younger ones, and my uncle came under my mom’s care. They enjoyed one another’s company so much that when a stray cat wandered up to the back door, my uncle named her in tribute to my mom. I’ve been told that when she came home from college, the first thing she would do was huddle with her little brother and exchange all the important news of their lives. Maybe that’s why he teased me so relentlessly — I took his place. Or maybe that’s reading to deeply into the business. I don’t know. Anyhow, I’ve tried to put myself in my mom’s shoes, and in my uncle’s shoes, to understand what it would be like to have a relationship that was once so close go poof one day. And then to have the possibility of ever getting it back foreclosed. I have the good fortune to have difficulty imagining that.

    This is all by way of saying that I can’t properly eulogize the man, because I didn’t really know him anymore. When he was young he was famously devil-may-care about everything — money, time, goals, girls, you name it. In pictures he has a big shock of wavy, reddish-blonde hair, and is usually in some surreptitious way having a joke: in the one I remember best, he’s riding shotgun in my dad’s convertible VW Bug, smiling along with the rest of the crew . . . with his right hand dangling down below the door, so that only the camera can see his middle finger proudly extended. I always thought that picture was funny. There was an aspect of the lovable scamp about him in those days. He was often grinning in a way that indicated he knew something you didn’t.

    I can’t imagine that being a fun-loving rebel was the easiest thing to do in the house he grew up in; he was the only son of a big, tough, difficult, and very successful father, who was known to have little time for bullshit and time-wasting. In that kind of an environment, actively pursuing bullshit and time-wasting becomes something noble, I think. There actually is value in letting older people know that you don’t care about their rules and refuse to live by their standards. Even if you eventually become one of them, as my uncle did, as I am doing, as we all should be so lucky to do.

    Funny how I asserted at the beginning that Tolstoy was wrong about happy families, and then went on to detail the ways in which my family, which I think of as mostly a happy one, was in some ways not happy at all. I don’t know. I guess don’t think happiness is binary, or something.

    But anyway, today I’m remembering my uncle, who died yesterday, aged just 53. He was an imp and a joker, the son of a tough father, the younger brother of five sisters, the father of two daughters. I always believed that our estrangement would end one day; today I mourn the fact that it didn’t. Super perfundo, RWC. You are missed.

My Eyes! They're Berning!

1. A short history of feeling the Bern.

    I’m fairly certain the first time I voted for President, I voted for Al Gore, though I might equally have voted for Ralph Nader — I don’t remember. It didn’t really matter; Gore took LA County by something like 50 points, and California as a whole by nearly 12. I, and every single person I knew, could have voted for Bart Simpson and it wouldn’t have made a whit of difference. This is one of the great frustrations about being an American voter, of course. In a country this enormous, it’s hard enough to convince yourself that your vote matters. (Mostly because it actually doesn’t, really. People are reduced to absurdist tautologies like, “You can’t complain if you don’t vote!” to keep themselves motivated.) When you live in the places I’ve lived — Portland, Los Angeles, the Bay Area, Brooklyn, Minneapolis, even small-town Bend — it feels doubly that way. I’ve never lived in a Congressional district in which the outcome wasn’t a foregone conclusion. In 2000, my Representative was Maxine Waters. She received almost 87% of the votes in my district, including mine. I’ve never lived in a state that was competitive in a Presidential election year — the closest I came was Minnesota in 2012. Obama won it by 7 points and more than 225,000 votes.

    In 2004, I volunteered for the Dean campaign. I look back on that experience — which was mostly disorganized and ridiculous — as a harbinger of much of what was to come. Dean’s campaign was driven largely by opposition to the Iraq War, which was the great, unrepresented policy position in the election that year; Democrats were so cowed by GW Bush’s ability to manipulate the public with the memory of 9/11 that it seemed like they’d never seriously considered mounting a candidate who opposed it. Ultimately, they opted for John Kerry, largely because many party doyens believed his military record would inure him to attacks suggesting he was weak; this didn’t work. Kerry lost a winnable election. Dean never got close to the nomination.

    By now, you’ve heard about Dean’s revolutionary use of the internet, the way he built a donor base of small, committed activists who would give him 20, 50, 100 bucks at a time. That was a huge deal. But I think it misses a big part of what was really happening: I, like many of the dreaded Orange Hats who tottered around Iowa and New Hampshire knocking on doors and generally (it turned out) annoying people with our zeal for our candidate, was very young then. Not yet twenty-four years old. I think, in fact, our youth was a big part of what annoyed people. I get annoyed when kids on the street brace me about political causes. Because of this fact — kids with clipboards are annoying — I think a lot of people misunderstood what was going on. We were dismissed as dilettantes, lefty college kids who would one day come to Jesus and moderate on everything. But that wasn’t it at all. I am right on the cusp of two generations, GenX and the Millenial generation, neither of which I really fit in with. I was born during the waning months of the hapless Carter administration. What people didn’t see about me, and people like me, was that we were the crest of a wave of very liberal young people who were raised in an increasingly diverse world and taught at every turn that acceptance of difference was perhaps the paramount value for existence in America. Our parents, without realizing it, were indoctrinating us with values that a lot of them didn’t quite agree with.

    The Dean collapse was inevitable, and looking back with 20/20 hindsight, I think he probably would have been beaten fairly handily in a general election. What I hadn’t realized yet — what I think a lot of people may never realize — is that you don’t win elections by condescending to the electorate. Even if you genuinely believe that your ideas are much better than those of other camps (and I still believe that Dean was probably closest to the right guy to actually lead the country), no amount of explaining yourself to them is going to change their minds. You can’t lecture your way into office, no matter how much it seems like you probably should be able to. Genuine political change happens slowly. But what Dean did is put an idea out in the world. It entered the conversation. And instead of being the subject of a lecture, it stewed in the morass of American culture.

2. A quick lesson in the difference between us and them.

    My memories of my childhood, like many people’s, are fragmentary, but one of my most vivid ones is of a day when I was nine. There was a little neighborhood store not far from our house, and my mom had taken me there to do some shopping. They had a big stack of newspapers that they kept on a stand next to the front door. On the cover, a bunch of people were tearing hunks out of a giant concrete structure. When we got to the meat counter, my mom and the butcher had a lot to say to one another. I didn’t quite get it, but it piqued my interest — my best friend’s stepmom was from West Germany, and this news was about West Germany.

    This is the fall of the Berlin Wall, as I imagine you’ve already guessed. Over the next few years the Soviet Union collapsed — I still remember seeing the tanks on the news when the Soviet hardliners tried to take down Gorbachev — and Germany reunified. Yugoslavia literally Balkanized. We talked a lot in class about how if you bought a globe it might be out-dated by the time you got it home. (These were the days when you actually went to a store to buy things like globes. Weird, right?) I sort of half-understood it, but I found it all very interesting. And then it was (at least for us here in the USA) all over. Communism blew away like leaves in a warm autumn wind, leaving behind only detritus like Cuba and North Korea. (Yes, I’m aware that those two countries are not really comparable. This is about “Communism” more than it is about actual Communism.) By the time I was old enough follow electoral politics closely, the Cold War was a dead letter. Over. Done. We had won.

    Keep in mind, then, that people my age are probably the very youngest people who have any memory of these events at all. My younger brothers don’t remember the Berlin Wall. There are people who are old enough to vote now who were born in Bill Clinton’s second term — who aren’t old enough to remember 9/11. Communism is a fact of history to those people. You can no more frighten them with the spectre of Soviet aggression then you can convince them that Nazism poses an existential threat to Western democracies these days.* Hell, the first time I registered to vote, I think I listed my party as communist, with a small c. That was basically a lark, as far as I was concerned. It certainly struck no fear in my heart.

* NB that I believe we would all do well to be a little more worried about creeping fascism in our politics, here and abroad.

    For generations, the vague association of socialism with Communism has so tainted the discourse that the mere word “socialist” is held to be a deadly epithet in many circles. We’ve all heard it used as a weapon against Barack Obama — “He’s a socialist!” is a common refrain among the President’s opponents. But, notwithstanding the fact that it’s obviously not true, most of the people who grew up in a post-Soviet world respond to that accusation with this question: So the fuck what? Freed of the bugaboo of the USSR, the way in which American politicians got economic ideas all wrapped up with political and military ones, there’s a whole generation of people who can evaluate socialism for what it is, for how it has worked in other completely free countries. And a lot of them seem to think, Hey, not a bad idea. Irrespective of whether they’re right or not, these people can vote. And it would be a mistake to dismiss them as kids who will come to Jesus — a lot of them are adults, with jobs, families, and well-worn political beliefs, ones which don’t appear to be changing.

3. Are the kids all right?

    After the Iowa Caucuses this week, a lot of people noticed a striking fact: though Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton came in at something close to a tie — it appears that Clinton is going to win by a razor-thin margin — there was a startling, age-related breakdown in who their voters were: Sanders won 84% of voters under 30, 58% of voters between 30 and 44; Clinton won 58% of voters between 45 and 64; and 69% of the senior citizen vote. Because older people tend to vote more than younger people, this was just enough to carry her over the top. But the difference is notable.

    Explanations were many. On Slate’s Political Gabfest, David Plotz — who is generally a fairly reliable political realist, the kind of non-doctrinaire liberal who can see trends and admit when they’re going wrong for his side — ascribed the split to the idea that, more or less, college kids like to go where the excitement is, and Bernie Sanders is running a much more exciting, fun campaign than Hillary Clinton is. There may be a small degree of truth in this. But it’s also hugely reductive and — I think — largely incorrect. Jemelle Bouie, riding shotgun on that particular Gabfest, immediately pushed back, pointing out correctly that young people weren’t just voting the momentum, but voting for a candidate who was promising things they wanted: a stronger social safety net, the possibility of debt forgiveness, highly liberal stances on social policy. I’d go a step further, actually, and say that all Sanders really has is his cornucopia of leftist positions on these things; Sanders himself is a deeply uncompelling candidate, a haranguer, a grouch, a notoriously rigid asshole whose rhetorical style is not unlike that of many an eccentric grandpa the nation over. He’s not the kook that the Clinton camp would like you to think he is, but he’s not going to win you over with his personality, either. (This is one of several key differences between Sanders and Obama that I think render Sanders a non-starter as a general election candidate, but that’s not really what I feel like getting into here.)

    There’s a lot of anxiety among Democratic mandarins right now, who were surprised by Sanders’ rise, even if it hasn’t been quite as meteoric as his backers would have you believe. This is a version of what happened to HRC eight years ago, when Barack Obama rode a wave of youth and minority support to a stunning upset victory in Iowa and, ultimately, the election. The question is: does this speak to Sanders’ greatness as a candidate (as it clearly did with Obama), or some fundamental weakness in Hillary Clinton? That’s the question I keep seeing asked, over and over again, with the concern being that it’s about some weakness in Hillary Clinton that will cause her to collapse in the general election. (The mirror image of this is that Sanders supporters assert that he is so great that he will win a general election, despite the fact that a huge majority of the electorate simply doesn’t agree with him on hardly anything.) But I think it frames things all wrong.

    In reality, what’s going on is that wave that Obama rode into office is still pounding the beach, boom, boom, boom, as more Millenials become eligible to vote, and as they reach the age at which people become more likely to take part in the political process. If you’ll permit me to over-extend this metaphor, what it seems to me is happening is that Sanders is a far less gifted surfer than Obama, but he’s riding a better board.

    Barack Obama, despite what the right might have you believe, is not really all that liberal, or at least he hasn’t governed as though he is. His healthcare plan is a gross hybrid of warmed-over Republican ideas from 20 years ago, not some socialist plot to force grandma to commit suicide. He tacked gently into a pro-gay-marriage stance when it was clear something close to a majority of the country was already there. His judicial appointments are liberal but not crazily so. He favors free trade.** These are not the stances of a leftist. But he’s an incredibly gifted politician. He had the advantage of having clean hands on the biggest issue of the 2008 primaries, the Iraq War. He’s magnetic. If you vibe with his message, something about him pulls at your heart, every time he’s onstage or onscreen.

** So do I, just so we can get that out there.

    I think a lot of people misread his youth support, in a way that was not unlike how Plotz misread Sanders’ youth support in Iowa this week. Because Obama is so undeniably cool — and he is, handsome, thin, athletic, as comfortable with rap artists as foreign dignitaries — some people thought that this was why young people were coming out to vote for him. Clinton’s campaign has been careful not to get out-cooled this time around, doing things like enlisting the support of young female celebrities to appeal to younger voters. (Not very hard to be the coolest, when your opponents are [as my friend Isaac has put it] someone’s grouchy zayde and the villain from season 4 of The Wire.)

    But Obama is far more than that. He’s not just an inspirational figure, but an aspirational one. The kids who came out and voted for him could see their generation in him. He’s the son of an immigrant, a mixed-race kid raised by his white grandparents far from Washington, a guy who, through wit and skill and luck, rose to the very top of American society. He was not just a very American story (whatever Donald Trump might tell you), but an exceptionally 21st century American story. Nevermind that most of it took place in the 20th century. Millenials could see themselves in him, or what they wanted to be.

    And. Little though he turned out to be a leftist, he was the most liberal practical alternative in 2008. Had that not been true, would that youth vote have materialized for him in the way that it did? I put it to you that Sanders’ ability to capture a large chunk of the electorate, at least in the white and liberal parts of the country, is evidence that the answer is no. Sanders lacks all of Obama’s magnetism, his institutional support, his media mastery, his oratorical skill, and his personal narrative. That’s reflected, I think, in the turnout numbers in Iowa, which are slightly down from 2008. But he has a message that far better fits the audience. (One could — I have — call it pandering). It’s not a message that fits every audience in the Democratic Party. But it fits the young (white) people who vote for him, who have turned out to be far more liberal, far less afraid of socialism, and far more consistent in their views than anybody seemed to expect.

4. Some tentative predictions.

    Is this going to be enough to win Sanders the nomination? I gravely doubt it. Boomers still vote more than their kids. People of color have been slow to come around on Bernie, and though I can’t presume to speak for them, I share some skepticism about whether a guy who is maniacally fixated on income inequality really sees the ways in which racism in this country is about much more than money. There are still a lot — a lot — of moderates in the Democratic Party, but almost none of them have voted yet; this is part of being a big tent party in an age when your opposition seems hell-bent on driving everybody out who isn’t a white dude over the age of 40. And here’s the thing: though Clinton is stiff and seems old, Democrats on the whole still really like her. She does have the advantage of being the first woman ever to make a serious bid for the Presidency. This isn’t nothing. In fact, it’s a very great deal. Though Sanders might represent the future of liberalism in America, at the moment he’s still a factional candidate. It’s just a growing faction.

    If he does win the nomination, will he win? A lot of my friends are serious Sanders supporters, and I see a lot of them asserting that, not only can Bernie win, he’s the only one who can win, as though the passion they and their friends feel is somehow going to metastasize into the culture at large. (This is the “political revolution” the Sanders camp keeps talking about.) They will cite, chapter and verse, nonsense head-to-head polls that show Sanders doing better than Clinton against Cruz or Trump. (See here for a cold dose of reality about those polls.) All they know is, if Clinton is the nominee, they’re going to stay home / vote Green / move to Canada. They’re so blind with their love of his message, a message no one else has bothered to enunciate on this stage before, that they can’t see how hopeless it is.

    Because it is. Hopeless. Sanders is not the first, nor will he be the last, candidate to believe that he can turn out a huge swathe of voters who don’t usually vote but almost certainly agree with him. Hell, he’s not the only guy in this election promising to do that — there’s a billionaire from New York on the other side whose whole deal is appealing to disenfranchised working class white people who feel left out. The thing is that it doesn’t happen. I’m not sure those people exist. It’s true that there a lot of people who don’t vote in this country. It’s not a given that those people are natural Sanders voters. I suspect that just as many are natural Trump voters. He’s the one who has staked out political territory that has truly never been explored in this country.

    Sanders would be the farthest-left candidate since . . . at least McGovern, I imagine. And McGovern ran in a country that was far more comfortable with government spending and taxation and a lot of the things that Bernie stands for. What happened to McGovern? He got destroyed. He got destroyed as Mondale did after him and Goldwater did before him. He got destroyed as candidates rightly do when they stand outside the mainstream, hoping that through some form of transubstantiation the mere enunciation of their ideas will turn enemies into allies. Sanders is, as of this moment, way out to the left of the electorate. His destruction would be as inevitable as McGovern’s was.

    Not to say that Bernie’s wasting his time, at least in the long run. One thing he’s done is alert the Democratic Party to the fact that they don’t just get to have the young voters who have won them the last two elections; people (me included) have been talking about the demographic bomb that’s going off in this country without quite accounting for the fact those young, diverse, liberal people aren’t just going to automatically vote for the Democrat in every election. They might stay home. They might, given an alternative more compelling than Bernie, defect en masse to a third party, the way some people did when Ross Perot showed up. One way or another, they’ll have to be reckoned with.

    I suspect — though I don’t know for sure, obviously — that the Democratic Party of the future is the Democratic Party of Bernie Sanders, much more than it is the one of Hillary Clinton. Parties tend to act rationally. They end up where they are because they’re trying to get people to vote for them; someday soon, a person with Barack Obama’s charisma but Bernie Sanders’ ideas is going to show up, and show you can win with those skills and ideas. Just not yet.

5. An addendum.

    I’ve seen hand-wringing from all over the left that the Hillary-Bernie primary is getting too nasty, that HRC’s people are crapping on Bernie’s people too much and she’s going to lose them forever and hand the country over to Ted Cruz or Donald Trump or (more likely) Marco Rubio. And I suppose that’s not totally out of the realm of possibility. But it seems to me that this is pretty standard fare for primaries. Things got very nasty between Clinton’s supporters and Obama’s supporters as that campaign dragged on and on and on. Far nastier than they are now. The internecine battles of 2008 split not only along generational lines, but along gender lines, race lines, and none of those weapons stayed in the scabbard. A lot of Democrats tried to blame concern trolls and Republican spies for some of the uglier things that got said in that primary, but I suspect that’s mostly a way of resolving the cognitive dissonance. Which is the key. Somehow, everybody ended up back on the same team.

    The Clinton camp clearly thought that the secret to securing the nomination was to avoid getting sucker-punched by a more charismatic candidate again. They headed off Liz Warren at the pass. John Hickenlooper stayed home. Deval Patrick, too. A lot of people were bemoaning the lack of a deep Democratic bench of the sort the Republicans appeared to have. (I think it’s become clear that that turned out to be more of a clown car than a bench.) But the bench wasn’t shallow; it just wasn’t getting in the game. HRC’s people weren’t too worried about Bernie. After all, he’s even older than she is. How could he ignite the base?

    They’ve got a fight on their hands, now. It’s a fight they’re almost certain to win, but it’s a fight. And I think it’s probably a good thing they have one. Last time around, though she lost, Hillary appeared to learn a lot over the course of the primary. Early on she was stiff, emotionless, seemed a little surprised that anybody would ever give Barack Obama the time of day. By the end, she’d found another gear, one that incorporated both her pugilistic instincts and the fact that, at the end of the day, people wanted to see some humanity out of her, to understand that she was a woman as well as a politician. It’s been eight years since she ran for office, and it was clear early on in this campaign that she was rusty. Bernie’s challenge is doing a number of things, some of them more important than this, but part of what it’s doing is giving Clinton the kind of jolt that she needed, so that rust is less likely to be apparent come the dog days of summer, when she has to go toe-to-toe with the furious Trump, the oleaginous Cruz, or the slick Rubio.

    So good on ya, Bernie. Keep fighting. And to his supporters, I'd say: try to have faith that in the long run, your side will win the war.

On Not Feeling the Bern

    As a youngish white liberal from a substantial coastal city, I can tell you for a fact that I am in a minority in my cohort in one very specific way: I do not, as they say, feel the Bern. If one were to look at my Facebook feed — as I do, every morning, whether I want to or not — one might be misled into believing that Bernie Sanders, a grouchy old socialist from the middle of nowhere, has created an overwhelming political following, one of the sort that will almost certainly sweep him to a titanic, Reagan-like victory in November. The feed is filled with selfies taken at Bernie rallies, articles about Bernie’s authenticity, screeds about his righteousness, and a general celebratory mood that matches Bernie’s rhetoric (if not his rhetorical style) about creating a political revloution in America that will sweep in a new paradigm of small banks, universal single-payer health care, union jobs for all who want them, an end to free trade, and a bunch of other stuff that strikes me as basically incoherent pap. Bernie Sanders, whitest liberal of the white liberals in Congress, has managed the trick of convincing many white liberals that they are at the spearhead of a revolution, largely by appealing to our common feeling that we know better than other people, and that if we just explained to [WORKING CLASS CONSERVATIVES / TECHNO-LIBERTARIANS / BLACK DEMOCRATS / SECOND GENERATION LATINOS] where their interests actually lie, and how Bernie Sanders would be the best for their interests, they would all get on board.

    The idea is absurd on its face, of course. No one has ever won an election by telling people that they shouldn’t (or worse, don’t actually) believe what they believe, and they never will. This isn’t even about “telling it like it is”; in some degree one can get away with that, so long as it’s a part of a successful political brand. This is about telling people that what they think it is is actually not what it is at all — that evangelicals’ social beliefs are not more important than their economic ones, for instance. That’s what Bernie’s alleged appeal is based on. But that appeal only actually appeals to people who already agree with him. In fact, Bernie panders as much as (if not more than) anybody else. There’s a large enough faction in the Democratic Party that already agrees with Bernie that he’s able to build a substantial coalition that might (but probably won’t) win him the party’s nomination. But in the general election, Sanders would be faced with one of two options: changing his view on almost everything, or spending months upon months condescending to people who don’t agree with him. Neither one of those is going to work.

    The main reason position-moderation is almost certain not to work is that Bernie’s brand — and make no mistake, it’s a brand — is built around his status as an avatar of all that is authentic and incorruptible and therefore has been chased out of our political process, largely by big money.* Irrespective of whether you think this brand’s going to sell (I don’t), it’s what Bernie has to offer, and if he changes it, he’s going to lose the base that fell in love with him in the first place. He can’t tack towards the center the way almost every politician ever has, because tacking towards the center would be an acknowledgement that he is what he is: just another fucking politician, trying to get elected.

*NB that the money thing is both accurate and not accurate at all. One of the major phenomena of 21st Century politics has been the emergence of the superdonor — the most notable being the Koch Bros, though the left has its own, minor-league version of this, as well. The thing about superdonors is that they give massive amounts of money, not just in the interests of their own businesses, but in the interest of doctrinaire ideological positions. Sure, the Kochs might benefit from some of the policies they advocate, but really they’re so fabulously wealthy that the material change to their bottom line available in this kind of transaction is fairly minor. What they have is the luxury to demand — and receive — fealty to their favorite nutty ideas. In the pre-superdonor days, what was then styled Big Money was, in fact, kind of Medium Money, given by corporations and individuals who wanted specific policy changes, some of which were liberal, some of which were conservative, but all of which benefitted the bottom line. Those people don’t matter anymore. But at the same time, the thing that Bernie has going for him, and that B Obama had going for him before, was an incredibly activated base of small donors. But who are those small donors? I put it to you that, like superdonors, small donors are disproportionately likely to be very ideological: you don’t give $250 to a candidate as a small donor unless you really, really believe in the political ideology they espouse. Transactional politicians, the ones who practice the gory business of actually making the country move, do not inspire this kind of money to come their way in quite the same way, because, honestly — if you’re trying to pay your bills and get your kids to school, are you really going to take $250 out of your budget to give to a politician who’s going to agree to things you don’t like and compromise with people you hate? Probably not. In short, a politics with nothing but small money in it looks a lot like a politics dominated largely by superdonors. h/t to E Klein on Vox’s The Weeds podcast for framing this in this particular way on last week’s episode.

    And let’s be clear here: Bernie Sanders is just another fucking politician, trying to get elected. This was exposed a few weeks ago when people started talking about Bernie’s record on gun control, which is not as far left as his other positions. Why? Sanders’ response is that he comes from Vermont, which is a rural state, and blah, blah, blah . . . this is Sanders trying to pull a bait-and-switch on the kind of politician he is, really. There’s a sort of ontological question that hangs around the edges of debates like these, viz, Is it the job of a politician to reflect the views of his/her constituents, or vote their conscience? Bernie sells himself as the man-of-all-conscience, the firebrand truthteller who won’t be cowed by banks or other interests (viz his constituents), the Last Honest Man in Washington. But do you really believe that Bernie Sanders, of all people, actually has a commitment to the right of the people to keep and bear arms? Or is that just some bullshit he smears on the electorate because he knows they might vote for the other guy if he doesn’t? Yeah, me neither.

    See, it’s very easy to be the most liberal member of Congress when your constituency has roughly the population of Portland, Oregon. The last time Sanders got elected, he did so — in a landslide — with a grand total of about 170,000 votes; these are the votes of lefty, white Vermonters, for whom the only real break with standard lefty politics is on guns. It’s not exactly a road of trials to get these people to vote for an old, white socialist. If Portland somehow seceded from the State of Oregon, what kind of Senators do you think it would elect? White socialists? Would those guys be viewed as avatars of all that is authentic and truth-telling in the world, or just two more hipsters from the People’s Republic of PDX?

*

    There are other reasons that I don’t feel the Bern in the way that so many of my friends do. The first is that I don’t buy the idea that Bernie is going to create some kind of political revolution in this country. I’ve already explained why I don’t think that’s going to happen — why, in fact, it’s extremely cynical and condescending to believe that’s even on the table — but I also think it wouldn’t be good. I think political history, at least recent political history, shows that revolution tends to be very, very bad for a country. Sudden, radical change almost always gives birth to violence — both between factions, and from the state. Despite the fact that it doesn’t inspire much excitement or loyalty, incrementalism is a value — not worth fighting for, but worth preventing fights with. Can you imagine the fallout of a true revolution in America? In the current political environment, with the level of outrage and lack of cross-communication between different sorts of people, I can’t help but think that a Reign of Terror would follow revolution as inevitably as a flood follows the breaching of a dam. Much though I have fantasized about slapping around a Supreme Court justice or two, I honestly think that organized political violence is probably the most dangerous force in human history, and that playing with that kind of fire is liable to burn our house down.

    But really, and much less speculatively, it’s just that I don’t trust people who only have one opinion. And Bernie really only has one opinion: that economic inequality is bad, and solving that will solve the world’s ills. While I agree that economic inequality is bad, I don’t agree with the second part of that statement. To truly believe it is to apply a rigid rubric to every problem, in order to stave off thought, and shut down alternatives. That’s a recipe for failure.

    Bernie’s been tripped up by this on the campaign trail a couple of times. Does he really have the mental flexibility to navigate the maze of racial oppresion? I’m not accusing him of being a racist, not at all. But I don’t think that’s a problem you just magically solve if you solve inequality. For one thing, inequality will never, ever go away, and to believe it will is to buy into the fantasy of a perfectable society: so, if you don’t acknowledge the role that race has played in American history — including recent American history — you run the risk of “solving” inequality while once again leaving people of color, especially black people, completely in the lurch. (This is the objection I have to the older white liberals who fetishize how awesome everything was under Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson. First of all, no, it wasn’t, we were involved in a huge war that killed tens of thousands of Americans and millions of other humans. But second of all, sure, maybe it was awesome to be a white person in mid-century America. It wasn’t that awesome for anybody else, so stop pretending that the policies of the New Deal are a panacea for everything.) For another thing, there are persistent effects of racial inequality that have very little to do with economic inequality — like, for instance, the difference in how white people are policed versus how black people are policed. You can be the richest, wealthiest-seeming black dude around, and there’s a fundamental level on which the state has been built, not to protect you, but to accuse you of being a danger to others. (Just ask tennis player James Blake.) There is a class of people for whom the weapons of the state are always pointed at their heads. Will Bernie’s one opinion — that economic inequality is bad — have a solution for that? I don’t think so.

    I was going to wrap this all up and put a nice bow on it, but I’m incredibly hungry and I have a slice of pizza here burning a hole in its plate. I think you guys get what I’m talking about, even if you don’t agree. I hope so, anyhow. #failingtofeelthebernifthatsokaywitheverybody

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.

We Could Be Heroes

    The holidays can be a rough time if someone you love has recently died. I don’t think this insight is really going to blow anybody’s mind, but I’d never really experienced it first-hand until last year, when Christmas marked the one year anniversary of the moment when I realized my foster brother, Jesse, was in the midst of a manic episode — a manic episode that was followed by a bottomless depression that resulted in his dying in a murder-suicide, in which he killed his five-year-old daughter, as well. Now, two years later, I’ve hashed through the events that followed so many times that I can type them without really feeling the whooosh that I’m sure you just felt when you saw the words “murder-suicide” on the page. It’s not okay — it will never be okay — but it has become normal, in its way. How I feel about it changes from day to day. Lately it’s been rage. The rage is omnidirectional and it’s been destructive to my personal relationships. I think it’s made me a harder, less forgiving person, which I don’t like but can’t change.

    Lately, I was deposed as part of a lawsuit stemming from Jesse’s death. I suppose I probably shouldn’t talk too, too much about that, because it’s still pending. But it was a destabilizing experience. To have a stranger ask you, again and again, for details about a friendship that you can barely bring yourself to think about (or stop thinking about), is disorienting. I said things aloud that I’d barely allowed myself to think before. I was legally required to say those things out loud, in a room full of people I neither knew nor trusted. Afterwards, I managed to contain my tears almost until I got on the elevator. For some reason it seemed really important that I not let any of the lawyers see me cry.

    I guess because it’s the holidays, and because of the deposition, I’ve been thinking about Jesse a lot lately. His final months have tended to color my memories of everything about him with a tinge of nihilism. I think about driving him home from school one day nineteen years ago, a gray Portland afternoon, the day we became friends, and it feels meaningless, ugly. I think about making a ceremonial bonfire of his old notebooks on a bridge over the Clackamas River, and then stomping it out in fits of laughter, and it feels meaningless, ugly. I think about his wedding day, the first Christmas after he moved into our house, and especially the day his daughter was born — meaningless, ugly. This is where the rage comes from, I think. I no longer feel sad, I no longer see the tragedy. I just see the pointlessness of our whole friendship, of the love I poured on him and his daughter, of the time we spent together, and it pisses me off.

    And so, because I do not wish to feel this way, I’m going to tell you a story about the two of us that, no matter what happened after, mattered. It’s not a big story, but it’s a true story. This is a Christmas gift to myself, to remember this.

    I can’t remember the year anymore, or even the month, though my memory is that it was the kind of cool, gray, but dry day that you only really get in like October or maybe April. Jesse and I were driving down a road on the west side of town, out towards Beaverton — much more his part of town than mine; before his father died and he moved in with us, he’d lived out close to the Portland-Beaverton line, while I had spent nearly my whole life in urban Southeast Portland. That side of town is ribbed with high green hills, which are in turn lined with winding busy roads that stream down toward the basin where Portland proper lies gridded over the flats. I can’t remember anymore what we were doing over there. I can’t remember what we were talking about. I can’t even remember which one of us was driving. I can remember, with vivid acuity, gazing through the windshield as we approached a curve in the road. Car after car glided left, around the curve — but the car in front of us didn’t. It just kept going straight, as though its driver had decided to release the wheel and see what would happen. What happened was that it disappeared over the lip of the road. I remember thinking to myself that the most remarkable thing was how unremarkable it was — it happened soundlessly, slowly, almost as if it were the most natural thing in the world for every tenth car around that curve to slip into oblivion beyond its edge.

    We pulled over, along with many people both in front and behind us. As I got out of the car, I took in the situation below: beyond the lip of the road lay a steep, ivied slope studded with Douglas firs; the car that had gone over had slid sideways down this slope and smacked into one of these trees with its passenger door, pinning the car’s frame heavily against the trunk and leaving the wheels spinning ineffectually at ground upon which they couldn’t quite gain purchase. Just visible through the driver’s side window was an elderly woman, who appeared to be helpless to shove the door open against the pull of gravity.

    I remember Jesse peeling off his jacket and saying to me, “Dial 911.”

    “What are you going to do?” I had been busy coming up with excuses not to go down there — the one I’d landed on was that she might have done something to her spine and it probably wasn’t a good idea to move her.

    But Jesse was already gone, sliding down the uneven slope on his huge feet. I watched him for a second, and then pulled out the little flip phone I had in those days. For the first time in my life, I called 911. It made me unaccountably nervous. When the operator answered, my voice quaked. I told her an old lady was down in a gully in her car and might need rescue. The operator asked me where we were. I couldn’t quite remember. I think I told her we were at 17th and Taylors Ferry Road. Once we had hung up, I went back to the lip of the road to watch what was happening.

    Jesse had reached the old lady’s car, pulled open the driver’s side door, and stood against it, propping it open with his back as he heaved the woman out of her seat. Then he hoisted her over his shoulder, more or less like a sack of potatoes, and began climbing up the slope toward the road. I could hear him apologizing for the indignity of it even as he did it.

    Before he reached the top, a siren sounded, and a firetruck appeared up toward the top of the hill — but then, before reaching us, it veered off onto a side street. I realized, suddenly and with complete certainty, that I had given them the wrong location. It would be a few minutes before they realized it too and followed a daisy chain of other 911 calls back to the actual scene of the accident.

    Before they got there, Jesse had hauled the old woman up to street level and set her down on the hood of our car. He was asking her a series of questions that I suspect were meant to test her for concussion — though he was by profession an operations manager for a mortgage company, Jesse had always had the aspect of a cop or a military person, and cultivated many of the skills needed for those professions. These included hand-to-hand combat skills and a strong grasp of human anatomy.

    They also included the instinct to approach disaster in an attempt to help. I have long held a theory about human beings, one that is crude but, I think, true. This theory posits that there are basically three types of people: people who run towards a fire, people who run away from a fire, and people who stand and watch a fire. Most people, for sound evolutionary and psychological reasons, fall in the latter two categories. I am, I have discovered repeatedly, of the stand-and-watch school, often of the stand-and-watch-and-try-to-remember-how-I’m-going-to-phrase-it-later school. But Jesse wasn’t one of us. Jesse was the sort of person who ran towards a disaster, to see if he could rescue anybody from it. The truth is that a lot of the actions Jesse took in his life fall under an aegis that we name heroism. He was proud of that.

    On bad days, I let that taint how I feel about heroism. I’m already cynical about such concepts, and if Jesse hadn’t been such a regular example — this was not the only time I saw him do this sort of thing, though it is the most dramatic — I probably wouldn’t believe it was a real thing. I already have a tendency to think that our ascription of moral virtue to the performance of heroic acts is a bit . . . generous. But then maybe I’m just resolving the cognitive dissonance involved in the fact that I am the protagonist of my own life, but certainly not the hero.

    I’ve been reading Amanda Ripley’s The Unthinkable, about how people respond in various disasters and why. Toward the end of the book she starts digging around in a database of heroes — the sorts of people who run toward a fire in hopes of helping. They have some things in common: they tend to be male; they tend to come from small towns; they tend to have good relationships with their parents; they tend to have friends from all walks of life. Jesse and I each had two of these things: we were both male; he had friends from all walks of life, and I have a good relationship with my parents. But there’s another variable that he had and I don’t: he believed that he could control what happened to him. He had a romantic, almost mystical image of himself as a powerful person — powerful physically, mentally. His childhood had been traumatic, and I think his adulthood was largely about wresting control away from those who held him captive as a kid. Me? I’ve been riding the waves my whole life, just trying not to drown. No one really hurt me as a child. But I also don’t really believe I can change anything. I believe in basically immutable systems.

    There are several facile readings of those alleged insights that could lead one to explain the manner of Jesse’s death. But that would be reading life like a novel, and if there’s one thing I believe above all others, it’s that life is not art and attempts to make it so are destructive. This is just a story about two young men, one of whom is dead now.

Why I Was Such a Pain in the Ass in Grad School

Below is the text of something I wrote in the winter of 2014, my last year in graduate school.

The Various Things, Internetual and Otherwise, I’ve Been Reading and/or Thinking about Lately

Under consideration: James Gleick’s The Information, Raymond Tallis on Jacques Lacan, John Gardner’s reactionary faff, Dana Spiotta’s collage novels, and some other stuff.

1. Because the digital world is lonely and deracinating and alienating, and also because beyond that I am an introvert and find face-to-face interactions with people exhausting, I spend a lot of time alone. Because I spend a lot of time alone and am an introvert and am alienated and deracinated and lonely, I have come to be a denizen of a variety of online “communities”, viz, websites whereat lonely, deracinated, alienated introverts can gather and discuss things without having to look one another in the eye; usually these begin as single-serving websites, focussed on something specific, and become broader: the one I have spent the most time at, in my life, is Baseball Think Factory, which was originally a gathering spot for data-minded baseball enthusiasts — sports “geeks”, we were, which seemed paradoxical in 2002 but now feels totally normal and intuitive, since the geeks have taken over the world — but has since become a freewheeling society of (almost exclusively) dudes, complete with friendships, rivalries, enemies, politics, and entertainments; though baseball is still the most-discussed subject there, the most riotous arguments always erupt over real-world politics, with the majority trending left-libertarian and a vocal minority standing athwart history shouting “STOP!”

2. I’m going to make a distinction here, and it’s going to be important in a minute, and I want it near the top so nobody will miss it: there is a big difference between “data” and “information”. The superhuman geek-god Nate Silver might call one “noise” and the other “the signal”; what I think it really means is that you can get a lot of input these days, but not all of it means what you think it means — or anything at all. The most dangerous mental bias in the data age is probably apophenia: the human tendency to detect patterns in random data. The classic example is how we perceive there to be a face in the geologic forms on the moon, though of course there isn’t: the data, in this case, is the image of the moon; the information the mind wants to find there is the shape of a face. The information that is actually there is the history of the galaxy — if you know how to read it. Anyway, the Man in the Moon is harmless enough, but apophenia becomes dangerous when we are presented with an overwhelming amount of data about the world and the universe and start drawing implausible conclusions: that 9/11 was an inside job, for instance, or that global climate change is a natural process unaided by human inputs (or simply doesn’t exist because it snowed yesterday).

3. An example: the word beautiful contains a very great deal of data, but essentially no information, because if a person says another person is beautiful, we really have no idea what they mean by it: do they like tall, dark and handsome? Rough and rugged? Do they have a ginger fetish? Pretty much anything you could call beautiful — a face, a body, a landscape, a sunset, a night sky, a dream, an idea — is going to present this problem.

4. Anyway, the reason I started off talking about the internet is because there is a common practice on internet forums when someone else elegantly expresses an opinion that you share but don’t feel up to articulating: you quote the entirety of what they have said, and then follow it up with a simple, one-word sentence fragment: “This.” When I sat down to write this little thing, I kind of wanted to quote the entirety of Jonathan Lethem’s essay on postmodernism and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, and then type underneath: “This.”

5. It has become axiomatic, in this post-post-(post)-modernist age, that identity is composed and not innate and so on and so forth. I find this to be immensely troubling and ultimately kind of preposterous. It seems to me to be a kind of existential overreaction to the terrors of fascism & colonialism: because for so long the powerful presumed there was an innate quality in being white & Xian that gave them the right to do whatever they wanted to those who were not white &/or Xian, a lot of thinkers freaked out and decided that there was nothing innate about people at all and that the very concept of innateness was dangerous. And that’s understandable, because racialism or whatever you want to call it is a ridiculous and provably false set of ideas; equally, however, it is provably false that identity consists only of inputs. There is a unique processor somewhere in a human brain that causes similar inputs to output different people; it’s not that this is totally immutable or intractable — I am in a lather to assure you that I do not believe in the concept of a soul — but that there is a core to any person’s being that will cause them to compose themselves in a certain way, which has very little to do with culture or language, and may have something to do with genetics, though it’s of course important to note that the way this breaks down runs against the assumptions of race or class superiority that drove several generations of human thought. Pretending as though this isn’t true because it bothers us renders nobody a useful service. The British neuroscientist and philosopher Raymond Tallis writes in his crushing review of Jacques Lacan & co: a History of Psychoanalysis in France:

Future historians trying to account for the institutionalized fraud that goes under the name of ‘Theory’ will surely accord a central place to the influence of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. He is one of the fattest spiders at the heart of the web of muddled not-quite-thinkable-thoughts and evidence-free assertions of limitless scope which practitioners of theorrhoea have woven into their version of the humanities. Much of the dogma central to contemporary Theory came from him: that the signifier dominates over the signified; that the world of words creates the world of things; that the ‘I’ is a fiction based upon an Oedipalised negotiation of the transition from mirror to symbolic stages; and so on.

This.

6. There is something assaultive about living in the age of data. James Gleick’s magisterial The Information, which is sort of almost a biography of data, is subtitled, A History, a Theory, a Flood, and that feels right: god, there’s just so much of it. Climate data, the home / road offensive splits of the Seattle Mariners, the likely-voter adjustment in a Real Clear Media poll of Ohio voters, the live birth rate in Iran. Those are just the datastreams I, personally, have waded into over the last few days. It’s hard not to feel overwhelmed, and equally it’s hard to trust yourself to organize all of it, at least if you’re constantly aware of your own mental biases, which trend apopheniac.

The first “postmodernism” that requires a new name is our sense—I’m taking it for granted that you share it—that the world, as presently defined by the advent of global techno-capitalism, the McLuhanesque effects of electronic media, and the long historical postludes of the transformative theories, movements, and traumas of the twentieth century, isn’t a coherent or congenial home for human psyches. — Jonathan Lethem, “Postmodernism as Liberty Valance: Notes on an Execution”

This.

7. Have you ever stood in a swimming pool at such a depth that you had to tilt your head back and look at the sky in order to breathe, and even then water kept getting in your mouth and you found yourself wondering if this was a good idea and if maybe it was too late to pull the abort switch?

8. If one were to have an interest in watching a novelist grapple with the feeling that modern life overwhelms identities, it might be valuable to read Dana Spiotta’s Eat the Document, which is about a woman who was once the sort of bullshit-hippie-idiot-terrorist that I’m glad ceased to be in vogue ten years before I was born: you know, the white children of privilege farting about with pseudo-Marxism and blowing people up in the name of something, though just what has never really been clear to me. I guess it’s because I’m a GenXer and was born jaded that I find this kind of thing hard to sympathize with, but it strikes me as dangerously stupid to assume that there’s an ideology that’s going to cure society’s ills, and even stupider to assume that Marxism is it, but then I’m getting off track and anyway the principle narrator of Eat the Document has gone underground and sold out or bought in or whatever ridiculous thoughtcrime growing up is meant to be, and her past comes back to haunt her. Unlike the Lethem essay or the Tallis review or whatever I cannot simply quote a passage of the book and say “this, I believe this,” because on some level the book buys into a concept of authenticity that I just don’t believe in, ie, it seems to me that people are what they do and the attitude they hold when they do it or the, I don’t know, cultural background of their upbringing or whatever other fundamentally irrelevant data you want to bring into the equation doesn’t really matter. On the back cover, in my notes on the book, I wrote, The fetishization of authenticity results from a pointed anxiety about one’s own lack of it. It’s a kind of conservatism. So that — that’s what I think about that, I guess.

9. And then I made the mistake of reading John Gardner’s On Moral Fiction, which, wow, what a piece of shit that book is. Some of this reaction has to do with the fact that Gardner was a small-time novelist taking arrogant pot-shots at people who were vastly superior writers (anyone who dismisses Kurt Vonnegut out of hand, especially when allegedly thinking about how to deal with morality in fiction, pretty much goes straight to the bottom of my shit list). But more it has to do with the intellectual straitjacket that Gardner tries to fit on society, dismissing postmodernists as glib and “commercial”, which I guess might have some merit, but then when he talks about what a book or work of art art or whatever is supposed to get up to, he makes these vast generalizations that stand on a foundation of pure hot air, to wit: “True art is by its nature moral. We recognize true art by its careful, thoroughly honest search for and analysis of values.” Do I really have to explain why this is total faff? Aside from the fact that it’s reactionary and dangerously dismissive of what one might call the great polyphony of world tradition, it’s also the kind of big, baseless assertion that lies in the crumbly fundaments of religions (of which, by the way, Gardner was dismissive, somehow not quite seeing irony there). This is the kind of thing that sounds stern and brave but is really just an odiferous belch in the face of the challenges of modern life. It also precludes what I think of as the diagnostic role of some art in society: I once had a conversation with a woman I was dating about the state of the newspaper industry, which was then in the early stages of the death throes that continue to drag down a few papers a year; she wanted to know what I thought about, well, that, and I gave her my honest opinion: that the age of print media was basically over and in a few years we would live in a thunderous echo chamber made up mostly of tiny niche websites that would help us live in the self-organized feedback loops of corrupt data. She wanted to know, given such a dire prognosis, what I thought should be done about it. And I said, Nothing. It’s going to happen and we can’t stop it. This made her very angry and she said there was no point in having an opinion about something if you don’t have an opinion about how to change it for the better, which I find to be a completely ridiculous way of looking at the world, which I told her, and then I said, Sometimes the patient just has terminal cancer. She really didn’t like that. A few months later she moved to California and I didn’t go with her.

10. It is necessary these days to have one’s perimeter well-defended against bad data. There was recently a story that raced around social media among a certain stripe of conservative, which concerned a former Marine attending a college course taught by an atheistical professor who blasphemed loudly and demanded to know where God was to strike him down. The Marine then gets up, assaults his professor, and says, “God’s busy looking after our men and women who are out defending our freedoms, so I stood in for Him” [sic]. The sickly irony aside, this story is obviously a lie, and I suspect that many people who shared it around didn’t have any illusions as to its factuality. But it confirmed the way they thought about the world: professors and atheists bad; soldiers and Xians good. It may not have been factual, but it was true, as far as they were concerned. Encountering this on the Twitter and Facebook feeds of my more conservative relatives drove me crazy; but more pernicious by far, at least in the Life of Liberal Joseph, is the mirror image of that story, one in which the atheist is tolerant and triumphant, and the right-wing macho man is served justice. Such stories exist, I am certain of it. But I may be too blinded by my biases to properly ferret them out.

11. Liberals loved Nate Silver as long as he was was reassuring them that Mitt Romney wasn’t much of a threat to Barack Obama. Those feelings have become much more complex now that he seems to think the Senate will flip red this fall.

12. Change your passwords. They know.

13. Yeah, but who are they?

14. THE SYSTEM IS BLINKING RED THE SYSTEM IS BLINKING THE SYSTEM IS THE SYSTEM

15. What was I driving at? Oh, right — there does seem to be a semi-radical consensus going around that the way we live now is somehow difficult to take, in a way that it didn’t used to be. I’m not sure I find that particularly persuasive (living in the age of data is certainly not worse than living, for instance, in wartime Europe, or Soviet Russia during the famines, or really medieval anywhere), but does it seem to anybody else that we are all somehow far from home? I think I’m comfortable stipulating that the way we live is qualitatively difficult in a different way, in that there is a shattered, unfocussed, drowning quality to day-to-day life (combined with a stultifying unstimulated stillness of the body); but I’m not prepared to say that life is more difficult to tolerate than it used to be. I think the feeling I’m trying to describe, which is nebulous and which I don’t completely understand myself, comes from an intolerable clash between the fact that there is a core identity to each of us and it’s struggling to combat &/or process an oceanic amount of input in order to fashion a self. We live in postmodern times but do not possess a postmodern I, in the convenient, destabilized, meaningless, ultimately quite wrong way that Lacan and his many acolytes, students, scholars, fellow-travelers and dipshits would have us believe.

16. But what does this mean? Should you read The Information? Yes, I suppose you probably should, if my experience of it — that it was accessible, fascinating, and completely full of thoughts that seemed new to me — is one that can be generalized. Should you read Eat the Document? That’s a more complicated question. Eat the Document is about how the shredded remains of a life story cannot be completely disregarded or disposed of, though its execution sometimes seems more intellectually sound than — what’s the word? — oh, satisfying, that old critic’s saw. It’s a collage of voices and sorts of documents, which is interesting; but ultimately Spiotta fails properly to inhabit all the voices she’s telling her story in: a teenage boy writes in much the same way that his 40-something mother does, and it’s a problem. Her next novel, Stone Arabia, avoids this, sort of, by narrating itself in a weird amalgam of the first and third persons, so the voice makes more sense, but the book ends arbitrarily and is probably a hundred pages too short for its own good (not a common complaint in this day and age, but there you have it). Should you read On Moral Fiction? Yes, if you’re an aesthetic reactionary, or maybe if you’re participating in a bit of ancestor-slaying like what I’m doing here; otherwise, no, of course not, it’s a silly book, overfull of generalizations about what art is and what it’s for and why one should pursue it and . . . I don’t know, it didn’t make a lot of sense to me. Maybe if I annoy you, if after reading this little bit of post-post-(post)-modernist dithering you find everything I have to say stupid and silly and objectionable (an entirely reasonable reaction, if you ask me, as I am a bit of a pain in the ass), then it’s the book for you, and you should go off and buy it and read it and write modernist, realist, moralist fiction that my friends and I can sneer at and write dismissive reviews of and then send links to said reviews to one another via our Twitter accounts and then you guys can review what we write and poke fun and nobody will listen to anybody else and we’ll all just live as one big unhappy family in a choking atmosphere of self-arranged, self-reinforcing data that can mean whatever we want it to mean. I don’t know, guys. Who am I to tell you what to do?

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. 

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    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.

On Writer's Block / On Bad Writing Advice / Breakthroughs

1. On Writer’s Block

    For a long time I was the sort of person who said he didn’t believe in writer’s block. I know that I’m prone to saying provocative things mostly for the purpose of getting a rise out of people — one that always gets a doubletake from people is when I say that I don’t believe in authenticity — but this actually wasn’t that. From the age of maybe twelve until I graduated college, I never once had difficulty writing. I filled notebook upon notebook — all of them mercifully lost, now — with song lyrics, poems, personal observations. It wasn’t journaling. I don’t find journaling to be a very useful activity most of the time (it usually just devolves into complaining). I said I was emulating the poet William Stafford, who got up every morning and wrote a poem before starting the day, but I don’t think that was really accurate. On some level, I think it was just that I was a kid and was fairly sure most of my thoughts were really important, revolutionary thoughts that should be written down. It was also incredibly good practice. Though I can go through things I’ve written and find the style refining, warping based on the venue or the subject matter, a lot of the fundaments of how I write were formed long ago, in the crucible of little spiral notebooks that I spent hours and hours scribbling in. The discursiveness, the use (overuse?) of the M-dash, the high-low balancing act of poetry and dialect — those have all been there for a long time. I’m glad I wrote like that for all those years, just as I am glad I lost most of the shit I wrote back then. But it gave me unrealistic expectations.

    The poems dried up right after I graduated, when I was living in a little house with a couple of old friends from college. I wrote almost nothing at all for several years. I didn’t think of this as writer’s block at the time (in fact I thought of it as being a total failure), but I think that’s what it was. I tried to write a couple of novels, but I didn’t really have an idea for one. I tried submitting my poetry for publication, but after a while that started to seem phony and I quit. I didn’t really get back in the swing of things until the summer of 2005, when I finished Harry Potter & the Half-Blood Prince and then began penning a fanfic version of the seventh book that eventually sprawled to 90 pages. That uncorked something, and soon I was writing a novel of my own. It wasn’t very good, but it was writing. Within a few years I was publishing stories. After a while I got to grad school, and really developed what I think of as my adult style. I had a couple of realizations: I don’t have much interest in writing Literary Fiction of the sort that I was raised on — formless, muted stuff about people never quite saying what they mean. I don’t mind reading it (sometimes), but the fact is that writing it makes me sleepy. And so there will always be an element of science fiction, or crime, or weird adventure, to everything I write. I’m happy about that. I don’t want to be Raymond Carver anymore.

    But the bouts of block have come and gone ever since. I’ll go months in which the only things I write are blog posts and emails. (I am known as a sender of long emails. I dated a woman for a while who thought my long emails were an enormous pain in the ass, and frankly stated that she didn’t read them. No wonder we didn’t last.) Sometimes, I don’t even write that much. (To wit: the last month on this blog.) I’ve been trying to convince myself that these periods of not-writing are actually useful. There’s a sort of subconscious cognition going on, I think. After I finished the disastrous second draft of my second novel, I spent an entire summer mostly worrying that I wasn’t a writer anymore. Then, in two months, I vomited out about 50,000 words, and finished the thing. I had no sense during the long, uncertain summer that I was actually cutting the gordian knot of my novel. But not even an old bloviator like me can just make up the second half of a book he’s been working on for almost seven years on the spot. Something subconscious must have happened.

    So maybe I still don’t believe in writer’s block, now that I think about it. Maybe I’m always writing, in one sense. It’d be nice if I could avoid losing all confidence in myself and feeling like a fraud during the periods when I’m not actually putting pen to paper, though.

2. On Bad Writing Advice

    There’s a lot of bad writing advice in the world, but I think my least favorite was the kind I heard on the podcast A Way with Words this Monday. The hosts kept going on and on about how writing should be kept simple, and how they tell their kids that they should be aiming below the top of their register most of the time, blah blah blah, and I gotta say — this is bad advice. I mean, here on the bloggy pages, we’re mostly chatting, so I’m not digging about for my most complex sentences and recondite vocabulary. But I think that the emphasis on simplicity can be oppressive, and make a lot of writing dull and flat — in short, Strunk & White were not right. Their reign of terror must end. Unsheathe your semicolons, young writers of America. Be aware that the passive voice has uses on occasion. And, for the love of God, have some fucking fun. Writing should not feel like the act of pulling against a leash.

3. Breakthroughs

    I have felt for a while now that I was on the verge of turning into a new, better person than I’ve been for most of my adult life. This isn’t really in evidence in my actual life — I still get depressed, I still drink more than I probably should, I’m still short-tempered and confrontational sometimes, and I still flee from relationships the instant they threaten to turn complicated or serious — but I’ve had this feeling, like a stone in my stomach, that I was about to break through some kind of imaginary wall and find myself in a sunnier, warmer, more sweet-smelling world. I can’t tell you why. I think that part of it is just feeling prepared to actually do things differently. Try the metacognition necessary to understand why I have been the way I’ve been, what steps I can take to change the things that can actually be changed, and what I’m just going to have to accept about myself.

    This blog has been a part of that project, at least sometimes. One of the reasons I decided to lean into some of the uncomfortable stuff — especially the stuff about race that I was writing about over the summer — was that I had a sense that being honest about it was the only way to get it sorted out. I’ve had the experience of really stepping in shit on this front, almost entirely out of the cluelessness that’s born of growing up white in a mostly-white place like Portland. I felt like the only way to sort out my embarrassment, and try to move forward as a smarter, more mindful person, was to write about it. And in public. Because embarrassment and shame sometimes metastasizes into something altogether worse. Though I didn’t think I was in danger of turning into a reactionary, I wanted to see if talking about it out loud would somehow inoculate me against that. (Answer: the only way that’s going to work is to keep writing about it, whenever it comes up. There’s never a time when you’ve “cured” yourself of racism and bias.)

    But there are other ways in which it hasn’t been, not in the way I had hoped it would be. There are good reasons for some of that — I learned the hard way that you shouldn’t write about people you date casually in a place where they might find it — but a lot of it has been the old fear: of being known. I don’t want anybody to know me too well, because then they would understand just how awful I really am. I’ve already confessed to being entitled and motivated by fear and full of rage and judgement and sometimes pointlessly cruel. I wouldn’t want anybody to know the really bad stuff. And I wouldn’t want anybody to have a store of examples.

    But the breakthrough, if it’s going to happen, will have to be a process of becoming. I’m never actually going to bust down that wall and come over all rosy one night. And so here, at the bottom of this post, I’m going to start a new tradition: I will keep myself accountable, and in public. Maybe that will help.

Goals, short-term

Limit myself to two beers, except on special occasions

No smoking. Period. (I’ve been pretty good about this the last few weeks.)

Read for at least an hour every day.

Never have a day on which I don’t leave my apartment.

Goals, long-term

No more dating women I don’t really like.

Try not to feel like I’m too broken to stay with women I do like.

Try to monetize my writing better.

Jessica Jones & the Superhero Problem / The Dirty Secret about Master of None / Man in the High Castle's Great Lie

    It’s been a few weeks — I got discombobulated when the blog’s domain expired. I was told by Hover that I would have the opportunity to buy it back, but I’ve checked almost every day for a month and it seems that somebody, somewhere, has decided that my old website is a domain that they need to have and I don’t. This reminds me, more than anything, of the time I left my bike helmet clipped to my bike outside a supermarket, and some jerk stole it. What’s the point of stealing something with no value to anyone but its owner? To increase global chaos? To teach “society” a lesson? I don’t know.

    I’ve been watching a few shows that have entered the zeitgeist since we last spoke, dear reader. Each, in its own way, strikes me as being less than what its hype would lead one to believe. Two of them hold little interest for me at all.

    The best of these shows is the new Netflix outing, Jessica Jones, in which Krysten Ritter (of Breaking Bad and Veronica Mars almost-fame) plays a hard-bitten private dick doing battle with a creepy English sociopath named Kilgrave. Wait . . . did you notice what got left out of that summary? Two things, one not very interesting, the other more so:

    1. Everybody’s got superpowers.

    2. Kilgrave, played by The Internet’s Boyfriend, David Tennant, once used his superpower (mind control) to subject Ritter’s titular character to a form of sexual slavery.

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Krysten Ritter as Jessica Jones

    The show is based on a little-known-outside-the-comics-world Marvel book called Alias, and its tone is bleak, its affect blank and sarcastic, its cinematography artfully dark. Though the show is nominally a superhero offering, it does most of its stylistic cribbing, not from comics, but from film noir. This is a wise choice for a number of reasons, but chief among them is that the attitude of cynical gloom that infested noir well matches a protagonist who is a fairly recent survivor of sexual assault. The makers of Jessica Jones — possibly the author of the book on which it is based — intuited something: noir ethos is a rendering of PTSD.

    Think about your typical noir hero. He drinks too much, has trouble maintaining meaningful relationships, often works obsessively, is driven by demons that roil beneath the surface but are never coherently exposed. He has usually severed relationships with old partners, and now works alone, conducting most interactions as a form of hostage negotiation. Violence comes easily to him. Much of the time, he wears a trench coat.

    That trench coat might just seem like a tic, but it’s actually key to unlocking the hard-boiled detectives of noir film and dime novels all over the English-speaking world. Why? Because it hints at the big, unspoken Trouble that lurks behind all the small trouble that drives the story: he’s a veteran. Sam Spade, the ur-hard-boiled-detective, the trench-coat-wearer-in-chief, is almost certainly a veteran of the First World War, like his creator. I don’t think that it’s a coincidence that Spade’s literary career began in 1930, when a lot of people had suffered the privations of the First World War, and then blossomed after America joined the Second. For two generations, the world was full of hard-drinking, disjointed men who didn’t feel at home in the America they’d been raised to believe in. Detective fiction and the film noir embody that alienation, and make it beautiful.

    Jessica doesn’t appear to be a veteran of any war, but she is a veteran of sexual assault, which sometimes has very similar psychological impacts.* If one is going to aestheticize her world, especially in the pomo remix culture that dominates the discourse these days, it only makes sense to turn to the language of noir to do so. This is where the show most succeeds.

*I should make it clear here that I’m speaking entirely second-hand here. Though my life has not been untouched by tragedy, it’s been my good fortune never to witness the violence myself. I have known some people and read some books, that’s all.

    It’s less interesting in other areas, frankly. The superhero stuff feels rote and second-hand, very tired and standard. People were experimented on as kids, blah blah blah, they came out the other side with powers and feeling like freaks, blah blah blah. Rinse, repeat. There’s nothing insightful or interesting in most of this backstory, and frankly I found myself wondering about how the show would work if none of it were included — would Jessica Jones be worse if Kilgrave was simply a magnetic sociopath, Jessica a hard-drinking detective, and her various relationships not negotiated through the medium of her being vaguely super? I can’t imagine it would. The show would of course be different, but I’m not sure the difference would be for the worse. Almost all the superhero stuff is cliché by now. I get it, the normals are afraid of the supers. (I saw The Incredibles and X-Men.) Yes, having great power comes with great responsibility. (Superman.) Your powers are a metaphor for trauma. (Like every superhero movie or comic ever.) None of this illuminating or even very fun anymore. Can we move on?

    Of course, Jessica Jones wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for its superhero pedigree. It’s a part of something called the MCU, or Marvel Cinematic Universe, which encompasses several titanically popular movie franchises and a few less-popular TV ones — most notably The Avengers and all its offshoots. Suffice it to say I have a lot of what my friend Isaac would call “feeeeeeelliiiiiiiings” about the MCU, most of them not very positive. I find most of the movies samey and dull. I’m not allergic to a good action sequence, and even the occasional superhero movie can be fun (the Christopher Reeves Superman is a favorite), but the fact of the matter is that the MCU represents, at least to me, the triumph of the corporate over the individual, the engineered over the created, and the glib over the nuanced. The real problem with the MCU, at least at the film level, is that superheroes like Iron Man and Captain America and the Hulk lack specific psychology, almost by necessity: they are the creations of many hands, and can only be made so specific if they’re going to stick to their archetypes: a superhero is almost always basically one thing — RAGE!!! (Hulk), revenge (Batman), technology (Iron Man), etc. There’s only so much of that kind of shit I can take before I start to get bored. Couldn’t we quit blowing stuff up and have a conversation, man? Like, about a specific day in 1993 when a cute girl named Ciara laughed at a joke you made and for 22 years since then you’ve been trying to recapture that, to slip gently into the slippery glow of an adolescent boy who just realized he liked girls because he made a pretty girl laugh, and that’s why 99% of the things that come out of your mouth are meant, in one way or another, to be humorous?

    Jones, I think because the character is obscure, is less subject to the vicissitudes of mass manufacture — Jessica has been wronged in very specific ways, and has committed very specific wrongs of her own. While under Kilgrave’s spell, she punched a woman in the chest so hard that her heart stopped. The ramifications of this act compose some of the central tension of the show, which takes place about a year and a half after it happened: (1) She has allowed an innocent busdriver to take the rap for running over her victim (though he is not held legally responsible, he feels morally tortured), and (2) she grows morbidly obsessed with the dead woman’s widower, who she eventually falls into bed with.** This is pretty good stuff, allowing the show to explore the ways in which lack of culpability does not always lead to a lack of guilty feeling. But then, there’s all the stuff about how the people were experimented on as children, all of which should have been left on the cutting room floor.

** This character, Luke Cage (Mike Colter), is due to get his own Netflix show next year, following in the footsteps of both Jessica Jones and Daredevil, a show that has received outlandish critical praise and generally bored your humble correspondent shitless.

    There’s a lot to recommend Jessica Jones. Chief among these is the performance of Krysten Ritter,*** whose previous work has consisted mostly of comedy (Don’t Trust the B in Apartment 23, Veronica Mars) and minor character work (Breaking Bad). Ritter here combines notes she’s played before (disaffected, sarcastic) with ones she hasn’t: angry, conflicted, smart. Even in her best previous work, which is quite good, Ritter usually plays someting of a ditz or a flibertigibbet, a person who isn’t wholly engaged with the serious and ugly parts of life. Not so here. David Tennant is good, too, though his character eventually devolves into a cackling cliché without much more to say than, I’m gonna geeetttt youuuuu, Jessica Jones! Carrie-Ann Moss is strong as Jeri Hogarth, a high-powered lawyer embroiled in an ugly divorce from her do-gooder doctor wife.

*** I was once in a bar in New York City with a woman I was dating, and Ritter was there. I didn’t talk to her — I wouldn’t have had the nerve, even if she wasn’t famous, because she was, quite simply, the most beautiful human being I had ever been in a room with. It’s kind of hard to explain how beautiful she was. The television certainly doesn’t do her justice. There was just kind of an aura around her, one so powerful that it was hard not to stare in her direction. Other good-looking people looked plain in her presence. My girlfriend at the time had a harder time not staring than I did, and I had a pretty hard time.

    But it’s not without flaws, many of them embodied in the character of Robyn (Colby Minifie), Jessica’s notably weird upstairs neighbor. Through most of the show, Robyn is a sort of formless collection of eccentricities, many of them centered around her twin brother / roommate / possible fuck buddy, Reuben. The character is meant as comic relief, I think, but she’s basically a pain in the ass. And then, for reasons that are never made wholly clear, she becomes irrational, vindictive, and dangerous. The action is not totally unmotivated — Reuben dies, after all — but it’s not well-motivated, and Robyn rapidly becomes more of a cog in the plot than a character. Robyn, in short, sucks, and she’s not wholly unrepresentative of how supporting characters function in Jessica Jones. Luke Cage, for instance, remains kind of featureless and bland, defined mostly by being handsome, noble, and kind of super, powers-wise. The references to the MCU tend to be heavy-handed and silly. And there are, of course, plot holes you could drive a Mack truck through. But then it wouldn’t be a superhero show if there were none of those.

*

    The other, lesser shows I’ve watched — though neither in their entirety — are Master of None and The Man in the High Castle.

    Master of None is Aziz Ansari’s venture in the direction of Louie-like TV auteursim. Ansari co-wrote almost every episode, along with fellow Parks & Rec alum Alan Yang, and directed a few episodes, as well. The show is amusing, and kind of cute. But it’s also very self-congratulatory, and far more interested in making its viewer feel good than think very hard, which is probably the chief difference between it and Louie. Master of None has some Important Things to Say, and I’m glad it’s getting its day in the sun —  the truth is that Hollywood, like many (if not all) American industries, remains dismayingly white, and the world of entertainment has been allowed to get away with quota-ing and type-casting in ways that are insulting and destructive. But I also think the show has a problem: it’s not actually that good. It’s funny sometimes. It’s got some pretty warm vibes. But psychologically incisive it is not. It is, in fact, hopelessly didactic and dull. Though it says some stuff about race and the entertainment industry that needed to be said, in most respects it’s not challenging or complicated at all. And many of the performances are for shit.†

† Yes, I know those are Ansari’s actual parents. So the fuck what?

    The other is The Man in the High Castle, based on Philip K Dick’s 1962 novel about an America conquered and divided by Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany. The show is amusing, but that’s about it, as far as I can tell. Almost all of the principal actors have transparently been cast for looks rather than ability (the only exception being Alexa Davalos, who is also, paradoxically, breathtakingly good-looking), and the formulation of the plot undermines the book’s key strength — a depiction of the many brutalities, large and small, of colonialism. Though the show isn’t terrible by any means, it does Hollywoodize the book in such a way as to turn it into a lie: by adding an American resistance, it injects a plot that is basically about the triumph of the good guys that in fact doesn’t track with the very concept of the show. The point of The Man in the High Castle — I would argue that the point of history — is that the powerful dominate and the efforts of the powerless to dislodge them are almost always fruitless. Power persists in part by creating a state of tactical apathy, a form of pandemic depression that helps the powerless deal, but also prevents uprising most of the time. The TV show, by seeding a resistance through this, perpetuates the lie that the good guys will win in the end. No, they won’t. Look at the world. Seriously. The bad guys almost always win. Love does not overpower fear. Honor does not defeat cynicism. Violence destroys pacifism. All the time.

    Of course, the real reason I’ve quit watching The Man in the High Castle is that it’s on Amazon Prime, which I don’t have, and the picture & sound on my illegal stream were so bad. So maybe there’s more to it that I will never learn about.

On Seeing a Shrink / The Problem of Over-Reading Television, Pt 2: The Leftovers and the Lost Effect

1. On Seeing a Shrink

    The first time I can remember going to a psychiatrist was sometime in my late teens. I had been fighting with my mom a lot, over stuff that now seems so picayune as to be obscure, and my parents (rightly) suspected that there was more to my attitude problems than being a teenager. I, of course, resented it. I don’t really remember what I would have been “right” about in those fights, but I was sure that I was right about whatever I was fighting with my mom about, and it felt to me that my parents were responding to my perfectly reasonable objections to their opinions and actions by trying to get me bunged up in the loony bin.

    I realize now that this wasn’t what was going on at all. Not to blow up anybody’s spot, but mental illness clearly runs in both sides of my family, to varying degrees. The family tree is liberally strewn with little black decorations: people who drank the pain away, others who grew known for being caustic and difficult, still more prone to black moods in which they saw conspiracy in every corner. My parents saw in me what they had seen in other people that they loved. But at the time it just pissed me off. I believe this period was the first time when I had a major depressive episode.

    I’ve always been chronically prone to dissatisfaction, and occasionally given over to dark moods, but it’s only happened two or three times that I became so depressed that I lost touch with reality. When I’m in these periods, they seem all-consuming, and obsessively, totally real. It’s not “sadness” — I can’t think of a less accurate word, actually; I’m very rarely sad — it’s something else. I am, quite literally, disturbed. I sink into paranoia and obsession, I have difficulty sleeping at night and difficulty doing anything else in the day. Total anhedonia is also a problem, which tends to lead to excessive drinking, which doesn’t help with the not-in-touch-with-reality thing. Now, when I’m just run-of-the-mill anxious and restless, I have a hard time getting inside that feeling. I can describe it for you, but it’s so faraway that I can’t conceptualize what it’s like any better than you can, probably.

    Anyway, I’ve covered that territory before. What I was going to say was that, when my parents sent me to that shink, I resented it. (Didn’t help that he was technically a child psychologist.) So I went to the library and looked up the symptoms of a disease I knew I didn’t have, and tricked the psychiatrist into thinking I had it. This was all part of a very shitty, adolescent superiority complex I had (which is in slightly — slightly — better check now), which largely manifested as a need to prove that I was smarter than everybody, mostly as a means of humilating them and making myself feel better. This shrink prescribed me some drugs, which I was smart enough not to take, thank God. Later, I went to another shrink, ostensibly to treat the mental illness I had convinced the first shrink I had, the mental illness which is not the mental illness I do have, and I decided to fool her, too. She was a little wilier, but after a few months I had proved to my own satisfaction that psychiatry was a scam and that these psychiatrists in particular were idiots. I took Zoloft for a while, but I never noticed it did anything other than make my dick malfunction. So I quit that.

    The next shrink I saw was a clinical psychiatrist who practiced in a big old building in one of the fanciest parts of Portland; I seem to remember sessions with him were outrageously expensive. Because I was young and chronically irresponsible, I (A) did not have health insurance, (B) tended to skip sessions, and (C) had a hard time remembering to pay the bills. Combine this with the fact that the guy I was seeing seemed to talk to me about basketball a lot, and my ongoing suspicion that the whole thing was some kind of confidence game, and not a lot got done in those sessions. I was put back on anti-depressants, this time Celexa, and again I didn’t notice much change — I was sweating more, that was basically it. At least he had correctly diagnosed me with clinical depression, instead of an array of things I didn’t have. Shortly after I moved out of town and quit seeing him, he lost his license because he’d been prescribing pills to his patients and then buying them back off of them. I don’t even remember his name. If you look up the archives of Willamette Week from 2003 or ’04, you’ll find a story about him. He was on the cover.

    Since then, I’ve kept psychiatry at arm’s length. When I was in graduate school I had another one of the really serious episodes, the ones where I lost track of reality and quit sleeping for a few months. I went to see a staff psychiatrist at the University of Minnesota. She put me on Zoloft again. Again, I gained weight and my sex life got screwed up. It was either a solution to a problem I didn’t have, or the wrong solution to a problem I did have. I’ve never really figured it out.

    The major difference is that by then I had a stronger sense that there was something wrong with me. I mean, I had always had a faint idea that I didn’t fit in, I wasn’t a real person, I wasn’t functioning how other people did. Things had been developing, however, and I’d come to feel genuinely broken. But when I tangled with the mental health system, it didn’t offer me what I needed — what, probably, those shrinks I had manipulated and fooled back when I was in college had been offering. I didn’t need a pill to stop me feeling bummed out. I needed help changing my habits. I needed to drink less, figure out how to sustain a real relationship, and quit feeling like a fraud at every adult endeavor I undertook. There’s no pill for that.

    So I’ve started seeing a shrink again. I’m hoping that coming at it honestly, really hoping to change some stuff, will make the process work better. Who knows, right?

2. The Problem of Over-Reading TV, pt 2: The Leftovers and the Lost Effect

    The other day I was on some internet forum on which people were talking about Damon Lindelhof & Tom Perotta’s televisual adaptation of Perotta’s Rapture-fest novel, The Leftovers. (See here for part one of this post.) Much of the discussion consisted of one of two things: people complaining about how the show was just going to fail to deliver on its promises, like Lost did; and people dissecting its alleged “mysteries” for clues as to how they would be resolved.

    Far be it from me to tell people how to enjoy the media they consume, but — holy shit, all of these people are watching the show wrong. The Leftovers is a show with some things in common with Lost: a head writer; an ensemble cast; an interesting mix of science fiction and naturalistic drama; a willingness to do weird shit largely for the purpose of fucking with its viewers’ heads. But The Leftovers also illustrates, at least to me, what Lindelhof appears to have learned from the Lost experience — how to use an air of portent and mystery without promising answers that are bound to be disappointing.

    I mean, the first clue here is right there at the heart of the show. I said in the last post that the premise of Lost was a question: “What is this island, and how did these people come to be on it?” That’s just not true of The Leftovers. The newer show does center around a troubling, mysterious event: one autumn evening, 2% of the world’s population vanishes — not dies, but vanishes, leaving behind no bodies or explanations. The thing is, The Leftovers only rarely asks the question, “Who were those people, and how did they disappear?” It only ever comes up when it’s organic that one of the characters or institutions involved in the show might be asking the quesiton. The show itself does not seem interested in that question. That’s the big difference between Lost and The Leftovers. It’s why The Leftovers is a more finely-crafted show. It may also be why the show lacks a little of its antecedent’s manic inventiveness, but these are the tradeoffs one makes in art.

    Illustrative of this is a character from The Leftovers’ first season: a bald, middle-aged guy who goes around killing dogs (Michael Gaston). The series’ protagonist, Kevin (Justin Thoreaux), keeps encountering him out at night. Sometimes they have offscreen encounters when Kevin is sleepwalking. The character is freaky and weird. There is also never any implication that he knows more or better than the viewer does. He’s somebody who has observed a phenomenon: after the Departure (the series’ name for the Rapture-like event at its start), some dogs appear to have become irretrievably feral. They’re dangerous, they need to be disposed of. Watching whatever happened drove them insane. Maybe most people don’t recognize it, but these dogs need to be gotten rid of. This is the kind of thing that the viewer, if she lived in the world of the show, could deduce for herself, if she had the bravery to.

    And that’s what’s really important: the character matters more as an allegory than as a mystery, and his mystery never really drives the story. He stands in for the understanding that a lot of people share, that it’s sometimes impossible to surpress — that disorder is a flinch away, and the only way to maintain a society and a coherent reality is to battle disorder with disorder. Kevin is a police chief; this man is a vigilante. Kevin has a choice: does he combat disorder with the tools provided to him by the law, or does he do it by any means necessary? This mirrors a choice he has to make about a cult called the Guilty Remnant, a cult which has absorbed his wife and is threatening order in the little town in which he is police chief. That he encounters the dog-killer character while sleepwalking is not a mystery, but instead a profoundly troubling question about the human psyche: are we who we are when we think, and make choices, or are we who we are when living out the unfiltered processes of our brains?

    On Lost, the dog-killer character would probably perform a much different role. The dogs would drive a couple of episodes. We’d worry about his motivations. He would still be functioning as an allegory — part of Lost’s genius was its ability to ask big, sometimes ugly questions about the nature of society — but he’d also be a plot point, in a way that he’s just not in The Leftovers.

    But some people will persist in reading The Leftovers as though it were Lost. I can’t tell you why, but I have some guesses. Probably chief among them is that Lindelhof himself is attached. It’s natural to expect his next show to be similar to his last show. (It is, actually, just not in this specific way.) And it’s true that strange things happen on The Leftovers. But I also think that part of what has happened is that the infinite combination of the internet and science fiction television has destroyed some people’s ability to appreciate TV as anything other than a series of of clues that lead to a solution: not just, What are the whispers in the jungle?, but Will Lorelai choose Christopher or Luke? And I’m just not sure that’s a very good way to watch most shows, even if it’s kinda Damon Lindlhof’s own damn fault that you’re watching The Leftovers in this way.

    So what does it mean that the country of Australia keeps coming up in The Leftovers? (Kevin’s father claims to be interested in moving there; a nutty prophet-type who lives on top of a pillar in the show’s second season appears to be corrosponding with someone there.) I saw a certain amount of dissection of this question on the above-mentioned internet message board. You know what I think it means? I think it means two things:

    (1) Damon Lindelhof is having a little fun with his fans, who remember that Oceanic Flight 815 departed from Sydney, Australia before crashing on the Island.

    (2) There is somewhere very far away, and though it, too, has been affected by the same disaster, it seems like a clean slate to people who have never been there before. It is clean, and unmarked by the memories of the departed here in America. It’s about a common grief fantasy: escape.

    Anyhow, what I’m saying is that reading The Leftovers for clues and mysteries is a boring, and liable to be unrewarding, exercise. It’s a show that really does reward close reading in a different way: the characters and themes that course through it. What does it mean that a woman who lost her whole family might hire a prostitute to shoot her while she wears Kevlar? What happens to teenage culture when its already foreshoretened view of consequences is complicated by an event that emphasizes mass mortality? How do you love after loss? Raise children? Move on? That’s the stuff you should read closely.

    (Note: the first season of The Leftovers is very grim stuff. That’s probably a different post, if I get around to writing it. The second season is brighter and more colorful, in more ways than one.)