I snapped this photo after watching Me & You & Everyone We Know at the Lumiere. I was riding down Polk Street, and the sky seemed nice and sunny. But there was a chilly little bite in the air. Ahh, summer. A half hour later, the city was enshrouded in fog.
This kitten was in the window of the record store on my block. Another sign of a pleasant turnaround on 14th Street. Ten years ago, it was Naps 2 (a housing project bar with a friendly sort of vibe), and dog crap everywhere. Now, it's a bustling with DIY fare, cool records, a bike shop owned by friends of mine, and an art gallery.UPDATE Feb 2006: Six months after the record shop opened, it closed. So did the art gallery. Now there's a little clothing boutique there. I miss Naps #2.UPDATE June 2006: Needles and Pens also left. My little street is quiet again. Oh well.
A bunch of us journeyed to Oakland to watch Japanther kill em all at a house party. 50 people + 12'x12' living room + 40's & Crown Royal = sweat & mayhem = just another Monday night in Oakland. Also on the bill: XBXRX (wore matching orange leotards, broke the stage), I Hate You When You're Pregnant (performed in a speedo), some pre-teens in drag, Jetomi, and a trio that featured some punk rock saxophone freak-outs.
Has there been a more thankless task in modern literary history than editing Hunter S. Thompson? According to former Rolling Stone editor Robert Love, the magazine actually assigned junior editors the task of babysitting Thompson as he approached his deadline. (Okay, there are worse junior editing tasks than that; I've done them). In a recent in the Columbia Journalism Review article, Love discusses this and much more in his essay about editing the good doctor at Rolling Stone. Charming revelation: HST's bluster and bombast attained readability only after long, hard editorial oversight. The kind of oversight that involves tearing the thing apart and and reassembling it sentence by sentence:
So, a flurry of manuscript pages would arrive, buzzing with brilliant, but often disconnected passages, interspersed with what Hunter would himself call "gibberish" (on certain days) and previously rejected material, just to see if we were awake. "Stand back," the first line would inevitably say, announcing the arrival of twenty-three or twenty-five or forty pages to follow in the fax machine. Soon there were phone calls from Deborah Fuller or Shelby Sadler or Nicole Meyer or another of his stalwart assistants. We always spoke of "pages," as in "How many pages will we get tonight?" "We need more pages than that." "Can you get those pages marked up and back to Hunter?" Pages were the coin of the realm; moving pages was our mission. I would mark them up, make copies for Jann, and then send them back.
The issue for the magazine was never that Hunter wasn't the funniest, cleverest, most hilarious writer, sentence to sentence or paragraph to paragraph. The editor's role was getting those sentences to pile up and then exhibit forward momentum. (Hunter called this process "lashing them together.")
I've never met anyone who enjoyed an installment of the second Star Wars trilogy — Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones, and Revenge of the Sith. Commonly cited aspects of its unpopularity (in no particular order): terrible dialogue, insufferable "love" scenes, new characters that would be merely uninteresting if they weren't offensive, and over-dependence on effects. [Read all of this and more in Anthony Lane's New Yorker review].I submit for inclusion: No Han Solo! No roguish charmer! No swashbucking mercenary! Han is everything that the second trilogy's characters aren't: unpredictable, funny, charming; in short, INTERESTING. In the original trilogy, his unabashed egotism balances Luke's piety and Leia's bitchy coldness, making all three movies much less gag-inducing than they would have been otherwise.Note to screenwriters: If you're going to write a story about the clash of good and evil, you need a character like Han to balance the saccharine aspects of the two. Luke and Leia are pure and uncomplicated; this renders them uninteresting unless they're contrasted with a character who actually displays human qualities. Han's irreverence and greed is offset by a devotion to his friends, and this meaty, real stuff — plus sarcasm, fear, etc — helps viewers embrace the unreal stuff.The second trilogy needed more Lord of the Rings-style stories involving friendship and adventure — something, anything to balance the melodrama and politics. I mean, c'mon. Lucas!? Why subject us to this? A character like Han could have interjected in moments like this, at the beginning of Phantom Menace:
BIBBLE : Your Highness, I will stay here and do what I can … They will have to retain the Council of Governors in order to maintain control.HAN: Yeah, good luck with that.BIBBLE: In any case, you must leave.AMIDALA: Either choice presents a great risk … to all of us.PADME : We are brave, Your Highness.HAN: "We" are getting the heck out of here before the battle driods get any closer.
Disclaimers: (1) I'm not a Star Wars nerd. I thought that Episode 1 unequivocally sucked and left the theater (or blocked out everything) after the pod races. I laughed through most of Episode 2, except for the scenes that made me retch. Ditto Episode 3. And (2) While it's fashionable to point out problems in these movies, I don't have much experience with official Star Wars criticism beyond my own snide remarks and the snide remarks of others — so perhaps someone has already written about this.Unrelated: Check out McSweeney's amendments of some classic Obiwan lines: "The Force is what gives a Jedi his power. It's an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us and penetrates us. It binds the galaxy. Oh, it's all horseshit. God."Next problem with the new trilogy: No Lando.
So as it turns out, Bob Woodward met Deep Throat in a White House waiting room. Of all the juke joints in all the world! Woodward was a lieutenant in the Navy and often delivered documents to the White House. Felt was there on FBI business, undoubtedly looking out for the best interests of the nation. Woodward's account is amazing. All these years, I thought Deep Throat was some kind of all-knowing genius. Turns out he was a petulant administrator who was bitter about being passed over at promotion time. One must ask: Why the *hell* did his family think that this was a good idea?Woodward offers a glimpse at the kind of thing we'll probably read once Felt publishes his own account. Too bad the cloak-and-dagger "prearrangements" sound so corny:
Take the alley. Don't use your own car. Take a taxi to several blocks from a hotel where there are cabs after midnight, get dropped off and then walk to get a second cab to Rosslyn. Don't get dropped off directly at the parking garage. Walk the last several blocks. If you are being followed, don't go down to the garage. I'll understand if you don't show. All this was like a lecture. The key was taking the necessary time — one to two hours to get there. Be patient, serene. Trust the prearrangements.
Woodward also revisits some All the President's Men territory in describing the early days of his Watergate reporting. Before Felt got involved, he and Bernstein did some elementary legwork that resulted in a somewhat hilarious revelation about the (ahem) depth of the scandal:
I was tentatively assigned to write the next day's Watergate bugging story, but I was not sure I had anything. Carl had the day off. I picked up the phone and dialed 456‑1414 — the White House — and asked for Howard Hunt. There was no answer, but the operator helpfully said he might be in the office of Charles W. Colson, Nixon's special counsel. Colson's secretary said Hunt was not there this moment but might be at a public relations firm where he worked as a writer. I called and reached Hunt and asked why his name was in the address book of two of the Watergate burglars."Good God!" Hunt shouted before slamming down the phone. I called the president of the public relations firm, Robert F. Bennett, who is now a Republican U.S. senator from Utah. "I guess it's no secret that Howard was with the CIA," Bennett said blandly.
The most enduring legacy of Watergate seems to be that political crimes are much better orchestrated nowadays. And, when stories about them break, they tend to disappear, cf. Karl Rove's smear campaign of John McCain, discussed in the Atlantic Monthly in the fall of 2004.
Bookforum recently published a tribute to Thomas Pynchon called "Pynchon from A to V," written by critic and Pynchon maniac Gerald Howard. Most Pynchon fans discover that their love dare not speak its name because when it does, it instantly labels one as a literary snob and smartypants. Like experience in armed combat, love of Pynchon and Gravity's Rainbow is best delivered in the format of memoir, and Howard's affectionate tale of his own Pynchon obsession inspired me to reconsider mine.Let's first get the unavoidable and unfortunate realities out the way: Gravity's Rainbow is dense and unfriendly. Pynchon's characters appear from nowhere, have bizzare names, and disappear without a trace. Poof! Gone. Most vexing of all, reading Pynchon in general, and GR in particular, requires wrangling zillions of intricate conspiracies within conspiracies, many of which seem to have no bearing on the Point of the Book, whatever the heck that may be.Howard's GR experience was similar to mine, a kill-or-be-killed, finish-or-die-trying affair. I read GR when I was 23. It was a time of confusion, bluster, distrust, cut with confidence that my recently-acquired BA in English had given me unique insight into the world; in other words, I was GR's ideal reader. It could be argued that few readers who aren't young, male lit majors would subject themselves to a 760 pages of punishment thinly masked as intrigue. Who else would have the faith, or time, to read and re-read page after page, memorizing seemingly pointless details because any detail may suddenly become somehow relevant? At the time I read GR, I had just moved to a big city that seemed populated by the very people who populated Pynchon's pages — shadowy people with sinister secret lives. Perhaps their shadowy, sinister appearance was a result of the fact that I didn't know anyone, had a terrible job, no girlfriend, no band and very little money. Moreover, I didn't know what I wanted to be doing, who I wanted to be. Like the protagonist Tyrone Slothrop, I was filled with unease and concern. And yet at the same time I was having TONS of fun. Doing absolutely nothing except marveling at the mysteries of everything around me. I loved it, but I wanted it all to end, and I wanted to figure it out — all at the same time. And the book! The book provided a very faint hope of actually understanding something, anything. Immersed in the world of GR, all of life was a puzzle to solve, a knot to unravel, a refined and glamorized version of my own world. Slothrop was me: a confused mix of unease, hope, and good times. Of course, vast sections of the book nearly crushed me. I often completely forgot what had happened on the previous page, or who a character was. I must have re-read enough pages to read the book twice.But I was propelled by the illuminating, invigorating passages that laid bare the elements that so many recent bachelors of arts seek to understand — the impersonal forces at the heart of civilization, the greedy corporations governing our daily lives, the evil truth behind the happy facade. Pynchon brings these things to life in passages of overwhelming, all-encompassing knowledge (nowadays imitated by the likes of JFranz, DFW, etc), and within them exists a character quite familiar to my younger self — a hopeful, curious guy who wants to know the answers but can do no more than uncover mysteries of greater magnitude.Readers rebuffed by its complexity might argue that GR's greatness is a collective delusion of the few readers willing to endure the punishment, the endless parade of bizzarely-named characters, the narrative digressions leading to further digressions that ultimately become the narrative, the problem of the protagonist disappearing somewhere around page 500 — the list goes on. To them I say this: You really need to make it to the end to understand. Better yet, don't expect to really understand anything. Then you'll be ready to start.
Quark (when it's not a subatomic particle) is a byproduct of curds and whey that results in what some describe as "a German-style cream cheese," others describe as "a cross between yogurt and cottage cheese," and still others describe as "yummy." This Saturday we bought some lemon quark at the Spring Hill Jersey Farm. This can best be described as tasting like the filling of a lemon cheesecake. You can eat it with a spoon, spread it on toast, or just use your finger to scoop out delicious lemony creamy pleasantly tangy milk fats in a semi-solid state. My friend Reed recalls that in Holland, they sell quark in something like yogurt-containers, and that there it is mostly like pudding. I like it best spread on toast and drizzled with some 420 Honey.
People insist on inventing new pronunciations for this word, god knows why. I bet you could find entire regions in which the predominant pronunciation of this word is kway-sa-dilya. "Can I get one kway-sa-dilya, and a side of ranch dressing, please?" To be sure, quesadilla is what linguists call a "loan" or "borrowed" word. In most cases, borrowings are modified so that they conform to the pronunciation rules of the new language, but there's something especially insulting about mispronouncing a word as seemingly widespread as quesadilla. I would feel way more sympathetic to someone who stumbles through "smoked trout nicoise salad with hearts of romaine and dijon viniagrette" than a word that is on the goddam Taco Bell menu. The truly mysterious thing is that the people who mispronounce "quesadilla" are inevitably people who look like they probably know the Taco Bell menu by heart. I can see why people are inclined to say "kweh-sa" or "kway-sa," because "qu" is "kwa" in words like "quiet" or "question." And I can understand why people of French-Canadian descent may be inclined to pronounce the "qu" as "ka" or "keh." I guess I can also understand saying "dilla" as "dilya" or "dillah" rather than "diya," but I'm relatively sure that these same people pronounce "tortilla" correctly. But maybe they don't. Maybe they say "tortilya." When you string all of the mispronunciations together, and you get things like kway-sa-dilya, or kah-sa-dillah, it just makes you sad for the state of civilization, for the future of language, for the likelihood that things that matter will be further eroded by people who simply don't pay attention. On the other hand, it's also a perfect example of people voting with their feet, or their mouths as the case may be. Which is interesting yet terrifying, as always.
Ahh, Amsterdam. Sometimes I wish there was a General Foods International Coffee flavor that would transport me back to those gauzy days on the banks of the Amstel — the cool fall breeze, the Nightwatch, the hazy coffeeshop afternoons. Actually, to faithfully recreate those simpler times, a single cup of coffee would have to knock me on my ass and erase my memory for a week. Furthermore, it would have to make me feel like I'd been lobotomized, and send my life into a terrible, slow-motion tailspin. It would also have to empty my bank account, force me to live on nan bread from the Indian restaurant next to my crappy London apartment. (If not for the kindness and infinitely tolerant understanding of Karla Betts, this era of my life would have been nothing more than a platter of cheese cubes drifting silently past me). While it can't faithfully recreate the Amsterdam experience of my vague recollection, there is a cheese which has a way of taking me back to a more ideal place. It's called Old Amsterdam. It's in the gouda family, and it has got a nice salty bite balanced with the requisite gouda creaminess. Does it lead me to spend 72 straight hours in the basement lounge of a hostel? No. But it tastes nice with crispy crackers, tomatoes, and olive oil, and it doesn't give me uncontrollable cravings for falafel that I can't afford.