In Praise of Michael Scott

Until I moved to Boston, I didn’t watch much TV.  I watched sports, 24 and Lost.  There were plenty of shows that were recommended to me, but I never really had the time to spend in front of a TV.  I used most of my free time to write, hang out with friends, and play IM sports (though not necessarily in that order).

Anyways, fast forward a couple years, and I’m here in Boston with no friends and a job that has me spending copious amounts of time in my own living room, physically in front of my TV.  I’ve also discovered Netflix Instant, which is basically the broadband internet of watching TV (if TV in the old days was pre-Internet, and TV on DVD was dial-up; at this point, it’s hard NOT to watch old TV shows).  One of the first shows I checked out, after years of recommendations, was the US version of The Office.

I watched it chronologically, starting with season one, which was a challenge.  Season one consists of only six episodes, and in this early going, Michael Scott – Dunder-Mifflin, Scranton’s Regional Manager, is at his most idiotic and hurtful.  In later seasons of the show (basically starting in season two – the writers must have made a quick, tactical decision), Michael is far more human than in those first six episodes.  Nevertheless, I stuck with the show, watched seasons 2-5 in (literally) one week, and now am a faithful, dedicated fan.

N0w the show is funny, to be certain.  There are very successful dramatic elements, but if someone asked you “Why is The Office so good?”, I think you’d still have to answer “Because the jokes are good.”  What I think is interesting is why the show is funny – or rather, why it’s so much funnier or better than other shows on TV.  The four main characters are Jim and Dwight, sales clerks; Pam, the receptionist; and Michael, the boss.  Comedically speaking, the former three are straightforward archetypes:  Jim and Pam are “everymen” (though it must be noted that they have the dual role of carrying much of the dramatic weight of the series).  Dwight is the nerdy, socially inept barbarian who is ironically ignorant of his own qualities.  You could even call him an idiot savant, given that he wins sales awards while showing himself somehow incapable of even interacting in a regular way with the other salesmen.  Perhaps “idiot savant” is new ground for a sitcom.

Michael Scott, however, strikes me as the one primary character who is particularly unique and of-the-times.  To the extent that he is an “inept boss,” he is a character that we’ve seen before.  To the extent that he is “the boss that everyone hates,” he is a character that we’ve seen before.  What is unique about him is that his negative qualities all arise from an embellishment of qualities that are all admirable, or at least pitiable.

Michael Scott is a terrible boss because he just wants friends.  Because he’s lonely.

I think you could argue that it’s easier right now to hate your boss than ever before.  Of course, everyone has always hated their boss, and they always will.  No one likes the person who tells them what to do.  Think of the people you’ve always hated.  At different times in your life, that list has probably consisted primarily of your parents, teachers, bosses, and the police.  It’s a thankless job, ordering people around.  But the fact remains that that hatred is really just a kind of knee-jerk, peer-pressure hatred.  50% of the time, it has nothing to do with who that boss actually is.  It’s a personal reaction to what they represent.

Things are different now, though.  In the last ten years or so, The Corporation has become public enemy number one in America.  It’s the most unifying enemy we have right now, in the grand tradition of Taxation Without Representation, Nazis, Communism, et. al.  It crosses class lines because for 99.999% of people, there’s always someone richer than you are, and it crosses party lines because everyone hates a greedy bastard.

The ascension of The Corporation has transformed hating your boss from something purely personal and almost mechanical into something with a tinge of nobility.  It’s rock n’ roll, the 21st Century way to stick it to the man.  You no longer hate your boss just because he tells you what to do; you hate him because he represents the higher-ups that always screw the little guys with their schemes to acquire more, superfluous money.

And that’s the beauty, timeliness, and cultural resonance of Michael Scott (and, of course, the juxtaposition that makes him hilarious):  whereas the hated boss is now synonymous with the greedy suit who doesn’t care about the people below him, Michael Scott is inept BECAUSE he cares about the people below him, both in the sense that he considers them “family,” and in the sense that he truly, madly, deeply just wants them to like him.

All of Michael’s hijinks seem to come from this incredibly lonely place.  He takes his employees on a booze cruise, and constantly interrupts the captain of the ship not because he’s power hungry but because he thinks people will like him more if seems like the biggest, coolest guy aboard.  He makes crass jokes that are very often offensive, but he makes them because in his social calculus, being funny is the most attractive quality one can have.

The challenge of Michael Scott, then, is to make his underlying longings visible under the buffoonery.  As Verne Gay points out in his recent comments on the current season’s premiere, “Michael is a clinically interesting personality type who is profoundly unempathetic, until such times as he is very empathetic. The wonderful creative trick of “The Office” is knowing exactly the right moment to humanize Michael.”  That, I think, is the longer answer about why The Office is so good.

The longest answer, though, is that the writers always make Michael’s internal logic clear, and this logic goes against the grain of what we want to think about him as one of pop culture’s classic bad bosses.  The Office is great for exactly the reasons Gay points out, but it’s perfectly right for right now because Michael is a character that forces us to re-examine reality and question our instincts regarding a current favorite, widely-accepted, tacit platitude.

And really, that’s what good, lasting comedy does (I think).  Jim and Pam are generally regarded to be the characters do all the hard work for The Office’s drama.  I’d bet that Dwight is generally considered to be the most lasting comic character on the show.  But I think Michael does all the “relevancy” heavy lifting.  And for that, Michael Scott, I think you are in a very unique, beautiful position.

That’s what she said.

Hank Moody, American Idol

I’d guess that Nathanael West is best known for three things:

1. Writing The Day of the Locust,
2. Coining the name “Homer Simpson” in The Day of the Locust, and
3. Dying at age 37 in a car accident on the way to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s funeral.

These three facts seem pretty ironic to me, given that The Day of the Locust was a treatment of the elusive, destructive Hollywood dream… and in the present day,

1. Writing a fictional work critical of Hollywood,
2. Having your work re-appropriated and made more famous in a different context, and
3. Dying young in circumstances involving another celebrity

could probably all be described as Hollywood clichés.  It just goes to show that the meaning of things is entirely different when the things in question are abstraction or iconography instead of reality.  In some ways, it seems a bit tragic that this is where Nathanael West sits 70 years later.  On the other hand, it seems kind of appropriate:  his status in culture necessitates discussion of the ideas that his work treated.  If you want to know anything about Nathanael West, you have to break through the ideas that he seems to represent, and look at what he actually did.  Based on The Day of the Locust, I think this is what he would want.

I’m a big fan of Showtime’s Californication, and one reading of the show is as a modern Day of the Locust:  Author Hank Moody moves from New York to Los Angeles when his masterwork gets made into a movie, loses his mojo and his long-time girlfriend, and hates himself and the city.  In the meantime, he sleeps with everyone he can, real or fake (though he much prefers real); does copious amounts of drugs; and idolizes rock n’ roll (spending much of the second season following around a legendary producer, in order to write a bio about him).

It is very clear what Hank represents.

Anyways, I didn’t mention Day of the Locust just because Californication is an examination of the underside of the masking glamour of Hollywood, but rather because it’s got the same fundamental concern:  when something becomes a reality, instead of just an icon, is it ever as cool as we thought?

Californication is probably best known for three things:

1. Overt sexuality,
2. Overt sexuality, and
3. The fact that David Duchovny went to rehab for sex addiction.

I started watching the show basically because of T&A and David Duchovny.  The fact that the main character was an author was in play, but a distant second to the prospect of seeing LA women naked, and seeing David Duchovny (naked or not, I’m happy either way).  Turns out there’s a lot more to the show than nudity, but nudity is the marketable part.  In fact, it’d be easy to guess that all the overt sexuality is nothing more than a marketing gimmick:  notoriety sells basically as much as sex sells (but that’s usually because, at least in the US, notoriety is a direct result of sexuality).  The truth is, though, that all the maybe-superfluous sex, drugs, and rock n’ roll serve a real purpose, which is to make it clear that the characters in the show aren’t real people that have the characteristics we tend to idolize, but rather that they are the idols, except that idols aren’t all they are cracked up to be.

In fact, the underbelly of the show is a lot more tender that one might think, even if the show’s writers always find the crassest possible ways to present the sympathetic material.

Hank is struggling to deal with his teenage daughter, who is sometimes the most grown up of the family and is always the one who most clearly exhibits the hardship and emotional trauma of the “divorce,” and in the newest season, is finally becoming a “terrible teen.”  Hank is also constantly trying to help his agent and best friend, Charlie, negotiate his marriage, which is often stressed by his boneheaded choices, typically involving women, and which typically become fiascos because Hank gets all the woman he wants with no effort, while Charlie never gets the women he wants, even after extreme effort.  The irony, of course, is that Charlie has a great wife, while Hank has lost his partner and can’t be on good behavior long enough to win her back.

That relationship – between Hank and Karen, his longtime girlfriend and mother of his child – is the driving force of the show, at least by proxy, since Hank is the driving character and as that relationship goes, so goes Hank.  Karen is Hank’s muse; one of the major themes of the first season is that Hank can’t write without her.

Indeed, Hank’s writing is the constant barometer of his well being.  When things are good, he can write, magnificently; when they’re not so good, he either can’t write or can’t write anything good:  at the start of the third season, with his daughter acting out and Karen back in New York City, Hank’s recently completed book (about the aforementioned producer) won’t sell.

The causal connection between Hank’s writing and person is interesting, and the surface idea that a man’s fulfilled-ness and artistic value are intertwined implicitly asks a very West-ian question:  What’s the value of all the glamour of LA, given the emptiness of the people underneath it?  Or, in Californication’s terms:  When idols walk and talk, are they everything we want them to be?

Realistically, you can watch the show for lots of different things and be satisfied.  It’s successful probably more for its surface qualities than for it’s ideas.  After all, let’s be honest – Hank is compelling and perfectly played by David Duchovny*; basically every gorgeous woman on the show gets naked, and gets busy; the rock soundtrack is fantastic; the jokes are great.  It doesn’t need anything deeper to be good.

Give it a chance though – watch it for more than overt sexuality – and it’s quite rewarding.

*An aside:  Isn’t this the perfect role for David Duchovny to play?  He’s always been the classic Man: tall, dark and handsome; athletic, intelligent…   On The X-Files, we saw him play basketball, run, shoot guns, solve crimes, and protect his partner (partner in all of its meanings).  But there’s always been the other side to him, as well.  Fox Mulder thought outside the box, wanted to believe when others didn’t, and we always knew that his motivation was love and guilt over his little sister’s disappearance.  He’ll always be Fox Mulder first, but Hank Moody, Bad Boy Author, really lets the guy show all his chops (Bad Boy and Author).  He even gets to direct sometimes.  Well done.

Lurking Designs: The Serenity Prayer

Hey kids, here’s another piece that I found at the Lurking Designs fiction forum that I thought was worth sharing.  Enjoy…

“The Serenity Prayer”

The train is vibrating gently all around me, and with my cheek pressed against the cool surface of the window, I almost feel excited about this latest new beginning.  My eyes pick out one thing at a time – a tree, a car, a power line, a house – to watch zoom by outside the window.  It’s all familiar; I’ve seen it all before, one way or another.

I’ve been a wayfaring stranger for some time now, collecting people and places that all seem to leave me in roughly in the same situation:  ready to move on, again, with not much money and not much prospects.

Love has become a triviality:  I’ve loved many men over the years.  A lot of them.  There’s not a type I don’t know.

There’s a businessman sitting in the booth kitty-corner from mine.  He’s got on a red striped tie.  The first man I loved wore the same one.  He’d come to our door when I was only sixteen, selling knives.  It was 23 years ago.  My skin was still smooth and my breasts were still perky and I could tell by the look on his face that he didn’t hide fast enough when the door opened that he liked what he saw.  It was the first time I felt the power of my body.  While my father was busy rejecting his sales pitch, I snuck out the back door, circled around the block, and caught up to my dashing salesman.  He used me and went to knock on the door of the next house down.  It wasn’t the first or last time that would happen to me.

The booth next to me is home a young lady – maybe 20, 21 – and she’s screaming into her phone that “I warned you not to leave the formula in the microwave for too long or you’d burn the kid, you dipshit!”

Luckily, I’ve never been there.  I’m not sure if I’m barren or if it’s just been good luck (actually, knowing what I know now, I think being barren would be good luck), but I’m still childless, still able to bounce around to the next paycheck and next man in the next town.

The girl notices me starting glassy eyed in her general direction, and after hanging up, says (half to me, half to herself) “Men can be such fuckin’ idiots.”

Now that I can relate to.

In my late 20s, I spent 57 days in Jackson Hole.  I’d had enough of life in the city for the time being.  Having heard that Jackson was nice, I hopped on I-84 out of Portland and got there in time to catch the tail end of summer.  It was a nice place, but the guy I shacked up with there… now that guy was a fuckin’ idiot.  He told me he couldn’t understand me, that I was too complex – and this because I told him he didn’t have to hold every door in the world open for me to walk through.  I guess feminism isn’t dead yet.

Jackson Hole was a pretty place though.  And even if Jackson (that actually was his name, now that I think about it) was a bit too chivalrous for his own good, he was a good man.  After being in Portland, it was good to taste fresh air and see a bunch of normal people.  But even the great outdoors can be oppressive.  I guess anywhere can, really.

Actually, I don’t know… the things that pass by the windows of a train?  Can they be oppressive?  I don’t think so.  They race by too quickly.  Oppression needs stasis to operate.

There was another guy, in Topeka, who I started dating when I turned 30.  That was a long time ago.  I don’t remember how I ended up in Topeka – probably involved drugs and an Airstream trailer – but when I hit 30 I decided I wanted to date a younger man, for once.  It was the beginning of a trend.

The kid’s name was Mark but he spelled it M-A-R-Q-U-E if you made the mistake of asking him.  He was 24 and he had a shaggy head of hair and shaved very infrequently.  His eyes made him.  They just worked.  You can’t get away with shit like spelling your name “Marque” if you don’t have piercing eyes, and the guy did.  He just had a way about him that held it all together.

He was a real student of the earth, too.  Or of “energy,” as he would say.  On our third date, he told me he was a solipsist, and when I asked him what that meant, he said “It just means that you are the perfect woman for me.”  I thought that was about the most romantic thing I had ever heard.  A few years later, I actually looked the word up, and some of the romance vanished.  If he was a solipsist, why would he create his world as Topeka, Kansas?  That’s some new age shit.

This was the beginning of my disillusionment.

We stuck together for a while.  I was never so enchanted as to lose sight of his pretentious bullshit, but the sex was good and we had a good time together.  If there was one thing that most guys had failed to show me, it was that there was a world beyond machismo.  And I guess that’s my own fault, really – I sure know how to pick ‘em – but it was still nice to not have to give up on the idea of a man who wasn’t so caught up in his own image that he couldn’t break down now and then.  Or to show me museums, or take me to shows.  Or to let me actually touch him.

When we finally broke up, it was because he latched on to another, younger woman.  Same old song and dance, I thought.  But a few years later, when I finally figured out what a solipsist was, I realized Mark just thought he’d created himself someone new.  If you believed that everything was in your head, was it wrong to pursue someone better?

Maybe he wasn’t such a bad guy, I decided.

I’d learned a lot from him, after all.  I had never before been in a relationship where I didn’t feel like I was pigeonholing myself by acting needy.  Mark made me understand that you have to recognize needs if you’re going to survive with someone else.  He also told me to stop judging myself based on my success with men.  “Soul mates are real,” he told me one time, “but only because people need a reason to search in earnest.  No one hardly ever actually finds their soul mate, but they try so hard to make sure they don’t screw up the possibility that they end up loving deeply after all.”  I wasn’t sure that I totally agreed with him, and I really wasn’t sure how that jived with solipsism, but then, that was his greatest lesson:  even in a world that you create for yourself, things can get fucked up.

Everything outside the window is slowing down.  We must be coming into the next station.  It’s Scranton.  The typical interchange of people takes place.  The girl with the idiot boyfriend gets off.  The businessman stays, but watches the people getting on with rapt attention, like the woman destined to be his fourth wife, the one he’ll finally be happy with, might walk through the doorway.

A kid sits down across from me, after pausing for a second to decide if he’s enticed or alarmed at the idea of sitting across from a cougar.  He tosses down his pack, looks out the window, and pulls out a book:  Slaughterhouse-5.  He’s somewhere in the middle, which is to say, he could be at really any point in the story.

God, I love that book.  Just the idea that someone, or something, can see everything we do in one clear shot makes me feel a little better about it all.  I don’t know where my story ends; I have no idea if I’ll end up with a soul mate or on welfare or alone in the Midwest where I started.  But I do believe that I’m working toward something.  If I didn’t, I would have just picked a guy to settle down with by now.

As such, I consider myself something of a Billy Pilgrim.  Maybe I’ve even come unstuck in time, I dunno.  It certainly seems possible.  I’ve dated 50 year olds and 20 year olds and when I end up on these long train rides I’m never sure if I’m reminiscing or re-experiencing.  Who knows?  It might not even matter.

I remember trying to explain this to a guy, in New Orleans.  He was the educated type, had a real good book collection that was spread all over his house.  That’s how the book collections of real readers end up.  Anyways, I noticed he had Galapagos and Cat’s Cradle, so I asked if he had Slaughterhouse.  He told me he did, and I started to explain to him about how I wished I could see like a Tralfamadorian and how the Serenity Prayer was the only one that had ever worked for me.

When I finished, he told me I was silly, and that after all, the book was a big joke.  It was cowardly, he claimed, to take something as tragic as what happened in Dresden and turn it into some kind of sci-fi dramedy.  It was too important, he told me.

I told him that I didn’t think I could tell my life story with a straight face, and not because it was hilarious.  Then I asked him if that meant I wasn’t important.

A couple days later, I saw a want ad in the paper for a secretary in Birmingham and quickly made up my mind to catch the next Greyhound up that way.  I left the guy a note taped to his headboard:

I’m sorry things turned out this way, but I’ve got to move on.  There’s a job in another state that pays better than what I’ve got now.  I’d think about staying here but I’m a solipsist, and if my mind made me an escape route, I think I’m obliged to take it.  All the best.

Like I said, Mark was good for something.  Citing personal philosophy for a break up is like being a conscientious objector during Vietnam:  the other person might not like it, if they attack your beliefs, they’re just a shitty person.

The scenery outside is changing:  it’s rocky, and it feels like we’re rising again.  There’s a tunnel coming on, I can feel it.  I try to look ahead in that futile way, where your forehead leaves perspiration on the glass but your eyes just can’t get outside.  It hurts your nose, too.  I can’t see anything, of course, but after a moment everything gets black and I see wisps of smoke outside my window.  It’s pitch black for 10, 20, 25 seconds… and then we shoot out into light as if reborn.

God, I love that feeling.

I guess the Appalachians are all but behind me now.  Well, I think they are.  What a peculiar set of mountains – once you’ve been West, they don’t seem to amount to much anymore.  It becomes challenging to discern if you’re among mountains, foothills, or simply the typical rise and fall of the earth.  But then, I don’t just mean geography… everything about them is peculiar.  The culture.  The people.  The stretch of different states they cover.

Ray, down in Georgia, he was a peculiar guy.  After the first few dates, I decided that he must have descended from Appalachia like Rip Van Winkle – just a few parallels south.  When I finally asked him about his background, it turned out that I wasn’t too far off.  His family was from West Virginia.  His grandparents’ house still didn’t have electricity.   He’d been the first one to go off to college, and at some point, he’d come to Atlanta with the debate club, become entranced by the big city, and never left.  I never asked him if he meant that literally – as in, if he truly hadn’t been anywhere else – because I figured that if he’d decided Atlanta was the end all and be all of existence, he’d clearly never travelled anywhere else in the country.  Clearly.

He was nice though.  Too nice.  Nothing ever really went wrong with him; I just got tired of all the vanilla.  They say women go after the bad boys.  I definitely had that phase, but I’d outgrown it – it just turns out that it’s hard to be attracted to someone who is wholly one emotion.  The reason women get over the Bad Boy is the same reason that Nice Guys finish last – you need a little bit of both to be tangible.  At least, that’s what I think.  But hell, I’ve far from figured this all out.

Anyways, Ray is still in Atlanta, and now happily married.  He found a good girl his age, also from West Virginia.  I’d been invited to their wedding without a hint of vitriol or obligation, and despite having to turn them down out of my own ideas of normalcy, I still get a Christmas card every year.  He and… Jeannie, I think it is… He and Jeannie have three kids now.  I’m glad that he’s doing well.  After a few years, I even realized that I like getting the cards.

I’m shaken from my thoughts by loud whining:  a mother has walked into my car, which has the bathroom, with her 9-year-old daughter in tow.  I’m not sure why, but the daughter really, really doesn’t want to go potty.

I don’t remember what it was like being nine; no one does.  I have memories of being nine, sure – but I don’t remember what it was like.  Nevertheless, I’m pretty certain that at nine, I didn’t care about any of the things that derail women after they hit puberty.  I didn’t care what I thought of my appearance, and I didn’t care what others thought of my appearance (boys or girls).  The whole idea of a “crush” was still based around tag.  Whichever boy tagged me the most was probably my boyfriend.

It’s really too bad that things change.

By 19 – only ten years later! – I’d started caring almost exclusively about what other people thought.  I cared about what my guy thought, and as soon as that went sour (which it did, often), I cared about what I thought only until the next guy to be interested in came around.  Then I cared about what he thought.  In fact, looking back, the only time I really cared about my own opinion was when something had gotten screwed up.  The only times I ever cared about myself were the times when I thought something about me was fucked up.

By 29 – ten more years – I started caring about what the last guy thought more then I started caring about what the next guy thought.  In fact, I started caring about the last guy, period.  Full stop.  I’m not sure what triggered that change.  Maybe I wanted to be more like a 9 year old again – wanted to care about people just because that seemed like the natural thing to do.  Maybe I realized that all those guys that I split from were just like me:  still sojourners in a couple’s world.  I just started wanting them to do all right.

I think that’s why I like getting Ray’s cards.  I kind of wish I had gone to his wedding.  I’ll say it with more certainty:  I want to go to the wedding of someone I’ve dated.  It’ll be like playing tag again, like running around in circles until recess ends.  We – meaning not the happy couple – could just laugh and dance and mesmerize ourselves with a kind of kaleidoscopic courtship that doesn’t end.  And we’d be happy for our friends.

Dammit.  Listen to me.  Who am I, Scheherazade?  A new story for every person or thing I see, telling them like my life depends on it?  I just want to get to the station.  I guess this is my own 99 Bottles of Beer on the wall.  It’ll end eventually, but not because I run out of stories.

And I mean, I never will run out of stories.  Right?  It’s not like I’ve learned from my past yet.  Like I said, I’m not even sure my past exists.

Here’s the thing:  people say we are the sum of our experiences.  You burn yourself on a hot stove and you don’t try touching fire anymore.  You get treated like shit and you don’t date second-rate rock stars from Albuquerque anymore.  But that approach implies that memory is a tool for decision-making; an evolutionary catalyst.  But my mistakes haven’t changed.  Maybe I understand them a little better now, but does that really count for much?  You tell me that understanding is the beginning of change and I’ll tell you that evolution happens on an astronomic timeline and I’ve only got a few more childbearing years.

That’s why I tend to think that memory isn’t much more than a delusion.  Maybe it’s not entirely fabricated, but I think our brain just gives us the pieces to make the decision that it wants in the moment.  That’s why I run to the men that I do:  not because I’m consciously choosing someone that was better than the last guy, but because in the moment I want something now and I’m emotionally weak enough to take what I want.

I guess that begs the question, then – what is real?  And what changes when you acknowledge that memory is a fake?  Well, to the first question:  Emotion.  And to the second:  nothing.  Or maybe it’s the other way around.

The train is finally coming to a stop.  Thank God.  I’ve made it to Oneonta.  What a final destination for my Odyssey, right?  Sure, it’s out in the middle of nowhere, but it’s got a couple of schools and that means jobs and educated men.  Maybe it’ll be nice.

There’s a ton of people on the platform.  Perhaps school is just coming back from a break (I don’t really remember that sort of thing anymore).  I scan the platform, looking at the faces for any that strike me as appealing, or familiar.  I might have met one of them before; you never know.  I might be sleeping with one of them in a few weeks time – you never know that either.  But I feel certain that these men are the men I’ve always known.  Mark is up there somewhere, as is the door-to-door salesman and the businessman and Ray and the fuckin’ idiot from Jackson Hole.  Whether the men up there deserve to be boxed that way or not, that’s what I’ll tell myself.  That’s what I’ll believe.

But this is what I’m always wondering:  If I believe that, why do I keep moving?  Why do I continue to believe that playing the same hand is better in Oneonta than in Birmingham, or New Orleans, or Jackson Hole?

I think it has to do with the fact that, like I’ve said, memory is delusion and I’ve seen it all before.  I think it has to do with the fact that those ideas – that memory is a delusion, but that nothing is new – seem starkly incompatible unless you begin to accept the idea that we may actually define for ourselves the world we live in.  And I know what you’re saying to yourself.  You’re saying, “Well, then you’ve done a piss-poor job of defining your world, if that’s the case.  And that aside, if you do define your own world, and you’ve already seen it all before, then you’re right, it is futile to keep playing this game.  If you are a solipsist, and the whole world is just and outward extension of your mind, then there truly is no point.”

But here’s the rub:  I don’t know myself completely.  There are vast untapped corners of my being that I still can’t pin down.  So I have hope, and that hope stems from this one singular realization about my existence:  the salesman, Mark, Ray, et. al… every time I meet a guy – every single time – I catch a glimpse of real love.  Of what it really, truly is.  Sometimes I can almost grab its coat tails, slow it down, and look it in the face to see it for its unadorned essence.  But even when I can’t, I know that I’m on to something worthwhile; I know that I’ve come closer to that most noble of ideas:  that myself, someone else, and our union can be perfected, and that all of those things are one and the same.

Maybe that means that our soul mates are just love, plain and simple.  Maybe Mark messed up the “searching in earnest means you end up loving deeply anyway” part.  Maybe what he should have said, and maybe has realized by now, is that once you realize that love is your soul mate, you realize that the search is loving deeply.

The door of the train opens, and one of the railroad men steps inside to announce the stop.  “Oneonta,” he says, “Get off here for SUNY or Hartwick.  Next stop is Utica.  Utica is the next stop.”  He speaks with the same cadence as the worst guy I ever hooked up with.  It was in Minneapolis, and he was the only guy who’s ever taken a swing at me.

I think for a second about just staying on the train and riding along to Utica, or whatever’s after Utica.  But at the exact moment that I hesitate in reaching for my bag, the sunlight coming in through the open door hits the railroad man’s profile in a way that I have never seen before.  In that instant, he is not recognizable as a man.  He is a new creature; he is transfigured before me into a manifestation of everything I haven’t yet found.

I grab my bag after all.  I step out into that same sunlight, get my bearings, and pull out my map to get started finding the place I’ve arranged to rent for the first few months, while I get everything else in order.  The platform is crowded, and I keep my head down.  I don’t want to make eye contact.

When I actually stop and think about such things, I’m not sure if I’m a solipsist or not.  Sometimes I think that there’s no way this life could possibly be the life I want; sometimes I think it’s exactly the life I want.  Either way, it’s what I have to work with, and I recognize that the ugly fucking reality of that statement is that I’ll either spend eternity hating my life, for being the antithesis of what I want or deserve, or I’ll spend eternity hating myself, with the implicit understanding that the used, lovelorn nomad I see in the mirror everyday really is me.

I just don’t think that’s all that bad.  In either scenario, I know what I want.

In either scenario, the next stop will just be another piece of Understanding, and while understanding of self may or may not be the beginning of change, it’s sure as hell not the opposite of love.  They might even just be the strangest of bedfellows.

Well, aside from me at 24 and a 49-year-old author in a TriBeCa loft.  But then again, he gave me Slaughterhouse.

Some Thoughts on Halloween

Last night I went out to the North End of Boston dressed as Stuff White People Like.  I wore a sweater (#103), a scarf (#97), and an Arcade Fire T-Shirt (#’s 84 and 41).  I had a Whole Foods bag (#48) sticking out of my back pocket.

Some people I ran into thought this was  a really creative idea.  I’m sure plenty of others didn’t get it.  I chose it mostly because I could still dress in relatively normal clothes, and choosing a “clever” or “witty” costume is much more inline with my personality and body type than choosing something “sexy.”  At least at this point in my life, I’m not pulling off a sexy doctor or Aladdin or Kimbo Slice or any other costume designed for big biceps and washboard abs.  Maybe next year I’ll dress up as Ben Gibbard and be a sexy intellect.  That’s probably as sexy as I’m getting.  They don’t have an entry yet, but white people like Death Cab.

Anyways, being out and about in Boston last night meant witnessing a lot of people in costume.  After all, Halloween is Stuff White People Like # 113.

I’ll admit it:  I like Halloween, and have for a long time.  I’ve liked Halloween since long before SWPL was a blog, and since long before “blog” was the acceptably bastardized word that it is now.  But I’ve never liked Halloween for the costumes, which is what the SWPL entry seems to indicate.  The costume is always the stupid/stressful part, in my humble opinion.  It never seems like it’s worth all the trouble.  For me, it’s always been about the imagery, the atmosphere, and the reactions that these things engender.  I like the ghouls and goblins, and I like finding out how people react to them; finding out what people do in the face of them.

I think it comes down to the fact that I’m kind of eternally, fundamentally interested in answering two questions:

1.  What makes me break?

2.  What can people do for and with each other in the face of frightening, unknown situations?

Granted, scary movies, haunted houses, and ghost stories are hardly ideal methods for answering these questions.  Nevertheless, I don’t see Halloween as appealing because I think actually answers these questions; I just think it provides some fun, romanticized discourse on what people are made of, when it comes down to it.  The best films of the horror genre are about relationships deteriorating or strengthening in the face of gore, not about the gore itself; the best haunted houses frighten us not because of whatever unspeakable act actually took place there, but because of the motivations that leave behind the shimmering remnants that haunt them.

What I’m trying to get at is that – while these questions are certainly distinct – they are also both fundamentally about relationships  - the two most important classes of relationships we have:  those with ourselves, and those with others.

All of that said, none of those high-concept ideas really seem to characterize Halloween as we know it in America today.  Today’s Halloween is really just the biggest costume party of the year, and a bunch of idiots dressing up doesn’t seem to count for much.  That is, unless you concede that every costume anyone wears has some kind of underlying psychology.  And if you don’t concede that, you’re the idiot.

The underlying idea here, I suppose, is that costumes are all about getting to be something that you’re not.  Everyone accepts this premise – but it’s not really the point.  Because everyone accepts it, it becomes part of the canvas.  And that allows it to become nothing more than a trope, which in turn plays into the fact that Halloween costumes are never about being something you’re not; they’re always about revealing something about who you are.

By dressing up as Stuff White People Like, I was implying that I was not one of the people that the blog satirizes.  I was making the point that I’m not an affluent, white, educated, Whole-Foods shopping hipster.  Except that on the surface, I am.  All of those descriptors apply to me to some extent, though I’d say that my mindset is pretty damn far from the hipster mindset.  But even that was part of my point in choosing the costume:  it was my attempt to say, “Look, I know this is how I appear.  But this is not me.”

Of course, my attempt to make this point with this particular costume only played into the SWPL stereotype, given that #50 is irony. But not to worry:  I pointed this out on my costume so that all the sexy nurses, sexy policewomen, sexy crime scenes, etc., could see how self-aware and smart I was.

Anyways, I simply want to make the point that there is some kind of underlying thought process behind every costume people choose.  The kind-of-nerdy guy who wears glasses with tape on the bridge wants to make the point that he knows he’s nerdy, which theoretically makes him cool.  The actual nurse who dresses up as a sexy nurse wants to make the point that while she may be smart and successful, she can still get down.  Last night, I saw a guy dressed up as Luigi, but without his brother Mario in sight.  He was repeatedly singing the Super Mario Bros. song like a funeral dirge.  Maybe he’s a post-modern, video-game era Holden Caulfield, except with a green hat.  I even saw one guy dressed up as a cow, and his costume allowed him to shoot liquid out of the anatomically-correct udders.  I’m not totally sure what that one means, but I think it’s sexual in nature.

This is all good fun.  It’s usually really good fun when there is alcohol involved.  But it’s interesting to me because it seems to be contradictory to the fact that in general, given the opportunity, people always choose to hide. The social story of the Internet thus far, for example,  has been that people, given anonymity, will do and say horrible things.  That behavior is certainly revelatory, perhaps in much the same way that a costume choice might be.

There remain, however, two fundamental differences:  firstly, in the case of costumes, the choice of a hiding place is the revelatory action (whereas in the Internet example, all of the revelatory actions are done behind the fascia of the hiding place).  Secondly, choosing a costume and deciding what to reveal about yourself is very much a conscious decision.  When someone says or does something morally murky behind the anonymity of an avatar, I’d argue that it’s often with a mindset that is transfigured by said anonymity, not through any particularly conscious thought (other than “this Youtube video blows”).

There’s a lot of weight in that distinction, because it means that Halloween is a case where people consciously  choose to both acknowledge that we so often wear masks, and allow those masks to mean something, and these are two things that we consciously choose not to do the vast majority of the time.

The reason we typically avoid doing these things is because they tend to show our hand in regards to two questions:

1.  What makes us break?

2.  What can people do for and with each other in the face of frightening, unknown situations?

So there it is.  We’ve come full circle.  I’m not totally sure what it means, though.  It probably means that Halloween really is as cool as I’ve always wanted it to be, even if the reasons are subtle and psychological.  It might mean that fear and anonymity are in some ways intrinsically the same.

I think the one tenable conclusion is that, in some ironic – or perhaps entirely un-ironic – way, the one night a year designated to be about fear gives us a system, comical or contrived though it might be, for answering the questions we usually avoid about relationships – perhaps the most frightening and unknown things we experience.

What to do with the Dirty South?

The American South has long fascinated me.  There’s a great documentary about The Band – those paeans of American Roots Rock who aren’t actually American (except their Arkansas-born drummer, Levon Helm) – and the creation of their second, self-titled album, which turned out to be a concept album of sorts about the South.  In it, there’s a fascinating scene where Robbie Robertson, guitarist and chief songrwriter, is relating the story of a time when The Band visited Helm’s parents in Arkansas.  ”You know Robbie,” Helm’s father told him, “The South will rise again.”

To paraphrase Robertson’s editorial comments about this remark would look something like this:  ”I could tell that he was joking, which he was.  But he also wasn’t.”

That idea was my conception of the South for a long time after I watched it.  The slippery notion that a place could be completely absurd and completely serious and all the while sincere seemed to fit with what I’d read in fiction, read in non-fiction, and heard anecdotally about the mythical land of bygone cotton farming, blues, and sultry women.

Then I visited the South, and nothing about my opinion changed.

Anyways, it’s been coming up a lot lately – what the South is, and why it is, and if there is a place for it in this new, progressive America with a black president and a status quo based around political correctness and extreme, innate equality.  So I’m going to share two stories, as a Californian, about how the specter of the South has been rising lately in my typically slavery-free life.  Then maybe we can get somewhere.

Eventual 2008 Hooters International Swimsuit Pageant winner Sarah Hoots. Yes, you read that right. No, you cannot make this stuff up.

True Story #1

A few nights ago, I was flipping through channels looking for something to watch while winding down before going to bed.  As luck would have it, I stumbled across coverage of the 2008 Hooters International Swimsuit Pageant.  Naturally, I stopped flipping.  I realized this would mean no winding down – likely the opposite, in fact – but at the time it seemed like a small price to pay.

That's Amanda Murphy, on the far right. Thank you, Murfreesboro.

When the field had (unfortunately) been whittled down to 10 girls, they announced them one by one, letting suspense hang in the air for a few seconds before allowing each girl to prance down to the front of the stage.  As the top ten lined up, I realized that one girl was wearing the sash of a familiar town:  Murfreesboro, Tennessee.  I’m no Southerner, and to this point, the only Southern states I’ve been to are Tennessee, Louisiana, and Alabama… but I drove by Murfreesboro, Tennessee several times during my Tennessee visit.  Alas, the Hooters I visited on that particular trip was the one in Huntsville, Alabama – not the Murfreesboro joint.  Nevertheless, Amanda Murphy from Murfreesboro, Tennessee is officially the newest, best representation of the connection in my mind between Hooters and the South.  Actually, it’s more of a connection between oversexed, fetishized women and the South.

When I was there – in Tennessee and Alabama, particularly – I noticed a few things about the various small- to medium-sized towns that I repeatedly drove through in shuttling between Nashville, my hotel room, and the Bonnaroo Music festival.  The first thing was that every single one of them seemed to have a Super Wal-mart, and not much else.  The second thing was that the most common building in those parts was a church.  I’m almost positive that I drove through at least one small town with more churches than residents.  The third thing was that the second most common building was a Hooters.  I’m almost positive that I drove through at least one small town with more Hooters-employed breasts than residents.

The latter two items on the list struck me as extremely idiosyncratic:  did the churches spend most of their time praying about lust?  They had to, I became convinced, as I spent more time in the area.  In Nashville, my buddy and I visited the Charlie Daniels Band Museum.  It had a two room set-up, with the back room being full of Charlie Daniels memorabilia, and the front room being full of Southern souvenirs.  The front room was bigger.  A lot of the items in it offended me.  A lot of them were branded with Stars and Bars, and my personal favorite was a keychain with the inscription, “Don’t blame me, I voted for Davis!”  Yikes.

It seemed pretty bad even before I found the T-shirt rack.  The rack displayed a series of t-shirts from a brand called “Crack of Dawn.”  Now, I like tits & ass as much as the next guy – probably more – but this was a family gift shop; hell, a family tourist spot, and I wouldn’t have been too comfortable having my kids run across these shirts.  Probably the most disturbing one, which I couldn’t find a picture of, had on it a picture of box painted like the Confederate flag, lid half off and cherry stem inside, with a caption that read, “I may not have the cherry, but at least I still have the box it came in.”  That one would be fun to explain to your pre-teen daughter, eh?

That’s one of the major things that was surreal about the South:  You hear that it’s a bunch of Bible thumping people, and it’s true.  You hear that Southern women are hot, and it’s true.  You hear that it’s sultry, and it’s true.  It’s all true.  The women on the t-shirts, like the women in Hooters, are sexualized, idealized, and idolized, and its somehow symbolic of an ethos heavily inundated with God-fearing pride.

I left the Charlie Daniels museum feeling a little ashamed, a little confused, hot, and pretty turned on.  That’s what the South does to you.

True Story #2

A few nights ago (a different few from above), I was hanging out with a couple of friends, and we got to talking about the Confederate Flag.  None of the three of us were Southerners, and I cannot for the life of me remember what sparked the discussion.  However it happened, “talking about” turned into “arguing about” and I ended up climbing out of a cab in front of my apartment at 5 AM.

The basic argument came down to something along these lines:  one of the guys in the discussion – we’ll call him “Billy Yank” – contended that the Confederate Flag should not be flown, because it’s synonymous with racism.  The other guy in the discussion – we’ll call him “Johnny Reb” – argued that there are some people for whom the Confederate Flag has more complex meaning, and that for these people, it can actually be a point of pride completely unconnected to racism or slavery.  I was on Johnny Reb’s side.

I’ll be the first to say that, for me, the Confederate Flag is an uncomfortable image.  While in the aformentioned Charlie Daniels Museum, I was appalled at the merchandise; at the same time, the friend that I was visiting with wanted to buy a Confederate Flag shot glass for a friend as a gag gift.  I didn’t think there was anything funny about it.

But here’s what I realized, here’s why I was on the side of Johnny Reb in this argument – and watch out, because it’s a two parter:  Southerners are proud of a hell of a lot of things, and for 99% of them, slavery is not one of them.  It’s simply an unfortunate part of the history of the region.  Beyond that, Southerners tend to feel that when slavery was taken away – not as a moral act, but as an economic machine – their livelihood was stripped away.  And realistically, it was.  And the fact is that when you take a proud people and rip away something important, you usually end up with people that are more proud, and are now stubborn, too.  When you give proud, stubborn people a symbol, they don’t give it up easily.

I suppose that could be a compelling argument for why the Confederate Flag is perhaps not as bad as it seems.  There’s certainly a bias-based argument in there somewhere about the fact that its easy for a trio of Californians to understand the Confederate Flag only in the context of slavery.  After all, they don’t teach family history in compulsory education – and most Californians don’t have “family history” like it exists in the South, anyways.  But the fact remains that slavery is morally reprehensible, and the Confederate Flag is probably (in America) the most recognized symbol of that racist act.  For the Billy Yank in this argument, that could not be ignored.  The flag was evil for that reason.

Johnny Reb and I tried to make the point that for most people in the South that fly the flag, its more about pride in a broken region than anything else.  We conceded that while flying the flag wasn’t a de facto indicator of racism, it probably was an indicator of ignorance.  We even eventually agreed that our argument was more about the nature of symbols than anything else.  We weren’t arguing about the moral ambiguities of slavery or racism – I think we would all of have agreed that there aren’t any – but rather about the extent to which a symbol can be hate speech, and if there is a threshold of mass understanding after which it becomes one.

Unfortunately, none of those agreements, concessions, or understandings really seems to assuage larger questions about what the South is, what it’s role is, and if or when in history it is stuck.

Shit.

Conclusions…?

So what’s the conclusion?  Is there one?  It’s always a dangerous proposition, trying to write an opinion about someplace that you don’t have a personal connection to.  I’m definitely not working with the best materials – any argument based on Hooters, The Charlie Daniels Museum, and a dust-up over the Confederate Flag (that might actually have just been about hate speech) probably isn’t the most logically sound argument ever.  But the fact that remains is that none of those stories would have been remotely interesting without the South.  Well, except the Hooters pageant.

This is an interesting topic to me because for Californians like me and Johnny Reb and Billy Yank, the South is a “problem.”  What do we do when they fly their flag?  Are they racist?  Are they blinding by old-fashioned Christianity?  Are they stuck in the past?  But I think the fallacious aspect of that train of thought is what’s illustrated so well by the anecdotes above:  the South isn’t a problem that needs solving, in the sense that it isn’t a picture that needs to be repainted to cover up bad brush strokes; rather, it’s a different canvas.  This problem?  It’s what made the Civil War so devastating, but the opposite.  It’s an intellectual war of attrition, and unfortunately, its easier to know how to fight the people that you live with than it is to know how to live with them when they have a starkly different perspective.

I really believe we have to try.

This is really, really important to me, and here’s why:  This type of thought process – this idea that people with different ideas than us are a “problem” – is the prevailing paradigm for political thought right now.  The country is incredibly polarized, and it’s polarized around two groups of people.  The Left might categorize these two groups as “progressive” and “archaic,” and they’d probably focus on issues like abortion, gay rights, and social programs.  The Right might categorize these two groups as “patriotic” and “one-world-ers,” and they’d probably focus on issues like national defense, moral certainty, and education.

The tricky part of the situation is this:  both groups are right!  There are two groups of people in this country; there are more, depending on how you slice it.  But the country has always survived – thrived even – on the notion that the tension between these two groups is a good thing.

I never realized how remarkable that was until I moved to Boston.  States out here are on such a smaller scale than states out West.    Someone recently told me that “California is way too big to be a state – there are too many different groups of people there!”  That’s probably true, and it’s definitely true for the United States of America as a whole.  In Europe, for example, countries are formed around one primary people group, be it ethnicity, religion, or whatever.  But the Good Ol’ US of A has always been a confounding mish-mash of many, many different peoples.  A melting pot, from sea to shining sea.

We’ve always seen the value in that diversity.  The “problem” isn’t that it exists; it’s that in the case of the Left and the Right, one group sees the other group as a problem, as people whose ideas are bad for the whole, without qualification.

If the Confederate Flag discussion proved anything to me, it was that Californians marginalize Alabamans the same way college graduates marginalize high school dropouts and liberal progressives marginalize the Midwest.  Trouble is, Democracy doesn’t work like that.  As America gets more postmodern and the economy gets more technological, the gap between the coasts and the middle of the country is widening.  And if the attitudes of a few University of California graduates towards Southerners is a decent test case of how that gap is navigated, it doesn’t seem to me to bode well.

I don’t think we are at a historical moment when we can afford to engender alienation between major population groups within the country.  Economically, we are in an era when people can “steal” our jobs from thousands of miles away; in an era when competition isn’t about the corporate giant swooping in and putting mom and pop out of business so much as the Indian or Chinese giant swooping in and putting Uncle Sam out of business.

And we would fracture so easily over some kind of perceived elitism?  In some ways, that type of alienation almost seems worse than racism or homophobia – it’s a lot easier to prove to someone that they are an ass when they are rejecting someone based on skin color or sexual preference.  When it’s about not being a card-carrying member of the intelligencia, or about still believing in God (which most people do in one way or another, even if they don’t realize it), or about driving a pickup truck with a gun rack… well, it’s a lot harder to figure out what exactly is wrong.

This essay has meandered a lot, but here’s one last thought.  I can remember learning in high school English class, while reading The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende that, while prominent in Latin America, magical realism doesn’t really exist in American literature… except in the South.  The link?  It probably has to do something with destruction and economic collapse.

My question is this:  if that’s what causes magical realism, what does this emerging alienation cause?  Will we see magical realism out of the Midwest?  Will there be more racism and homophobia and Bible thumping prophecies of sin and decaying society?  Will they be true?

We need the healthy tension that arises from starkly different points of view.  If America has ever been anything, on the historical scale, it’s the idea that a government by the people, for the people, and of the people can allow the confluence of ideas that comes with diversity to make the whole greater than the sum of its parts.  That being the case, why the fuck do we want to cut one part off?

One in the Chamber: Anywhere I Lay My Head

Exposing the multitude of truly great songs out there, one song at a time…

Anywhere I Lay My Head

Rain Dogs

Tom Waits, 1985

There’s a great line in Bob Dylan’s Chronicles, Volume 1, where he’s talking about American poetry:  ”There was a letter from Archibald MacLeish waiting for me on the table.  MacLeish, Poet Laureate of America – one of them.  Carl Sandburg, poet of the prairie and the city, and Robert Frost, the poet of dark meditations were others.  MacLeish was the poet of the night stones and the quick earth.  These three were the Yeats, Browning, and Shelley of the new world, were gigantic figures, had defined the landscape of twentieth-century America.”

Whether it happens in threes or not, art lends itself to such characterizations.  Though they may not all turn out to be Sandburgs or Frosts, artists tend to rise monolithic from their surroundings in ways and at times that allow them singular identities – often in the context of each other.

Tom Waits, and Dylan himself, are like that.  Dylan, poet laureate of the old America, and Waits, the poet laureate of urban love and grit.

Waits’ music always seems to come from a place of kinship with the city’s downtrodden – even when he’s not writing about literal cities or literal downtrodden-ness, their forms are always hanging around.  1985’s Rain Dogs is his great paean to those forms, and it wraps up with “Anywhere I Lay My Head,” a short, effective song that closes the album up with a musical and lyrical mediation on what makes the Waitsian city dweller so worth hearing about.

After all, that’s one of the great questions about Waits:  much of his work hangs on the idea that he’s describing characters that we care about and relate to, while at the same time, it feels like he only ever describes their blemishes and tribulations.    He seems to search for the nobility in the most ignoble of places, people, and circumstances.

“Anywhere I Lay My Head,” with its refrain, “Anywhere I’m gonna lay my head, I’m gonna call my home” succeeds as a song, and as an exercise in this sort of understanding, because it is a work of dualities.  Waits half screams, half sings the opening lines “My head is spinning round/my heart is in my shoes,” in a voice that isn’t quite angry or anguished.  You think it’s language of pain until the verse continues, and you get first to “She’s laughing in her sleeve, boys/I can feel it in my bones” and then to the refrain, at which point you start to suspect it’s perhaps more defensive than anything else.  It’s the old Waits’ trope:  ”you only think there’s something wrong with my situation because you’re only observing it.”

Somehow, Waits maintains the scream-singing while being backed by a plaintive horn arrangement.  Or rather, it might be a plaintive horn arrangement – that is, if its not a prelude that’s about to break through dark clouds.  You could almost hear it being part of a religious piece, the Spirit descending as a dove.

The song is only two short verses.  The second is like the first in that the sad images – pockets that used to be filled with gold, cold wind – are negated by the fact that “the world is upside down;” things aren’t right anyway.  The refrain after this second verse is extended, and this time Waits sings:

Well I don’t need anybody, because I learned, I learned to be alone
Well I said anywhere, anywhere, anywhere I lay my head, boys
Well I gonna call my home

It’s an interesting way to end an album.  When you hear it, you think it has a lot to do with the idea that “home is where the heart is.”  But I think it’s different.  I think it subverts the idea of home.  It posits that “home” itself is an ambiguous notion, and that this is why the gamblers and drunkards and pimps and prostitutes and down-on-their-luck citizens of Waits’ songs are beautiful.

People are always trying to find “home.”  And it seems that most of the pity we have for others comes from situations where we think that “home” is something that we have that they don’t.  It’s this paradigm that leads us to look at Waits’ characters (and their real-life counterparts) as the dregs of what the city has to offer.  We think that because we’ve got a roof over our heads or a well-paying job or a lack of obvious problems that we’ve found a home.  But while home may be where the heart is, or may be the roof over our heads, it might also be the streets, or the other disheveled customers at the bar, or the under-arch of a bridge.

What Waits’ seems to say, in fact, is that home might just be knowing oneself.  Not needing anybody.  Learning to be alone.  If you know yourself, loneliness (life, existence?) isn’t happy or sad.  It just is.

The coda of the song is a jaunty little number from the horns.  True to form, it feels happier, but you start to suspect that that feeling comes purely from the fact that the tempo is considerably higher.  When you listen harder, it’s actually kind of a sad piece, because it feels like something’s leaving.  Ultimately, it seems to be just as fitting to the rain dog sleeping in the archway as to the couple waltz-walking across the plaza, hand in hand.  It can be both because in either case, the people know where they belong.

Even Slackers Have Hearts

Farm

Dinosaur Jr.

2009

It seems like everything written about Dinosuar Jr. has to include three things:

1.  A discussion of J Mascis’ slacker ethos.

2.  At least one paragraph trashing any output under the “Dinosaur Jr.” name that didn’t involve Murph or Lou Barlow.

3.  The band’s influence on rock’s evolution in the 90’s and beyond.

Since Farm is the band’s first studio album that I’ve listened to, I’ll try and forego all that stuff and write about the music instead.  Because it’s really, really good.

Pieces opens the album in such a way that it is immediately clear that you have pressed play on a Dinosaur Jr. album.  Loud fuzzy guitars race along, punk-esque, but betrayed in their simplicity by the melodicism of the riff.  J croons – in his way – longing lyrics that seem to be made up of different phrasings of “pieces of our love.”  The rhythm section is suitably frenetic underneath it all.  It’s good, technically strong and – perhaps most importantly – it rocks.  But it’s really just an acknowledgement, not an advancement:  ”Just so you know, this is what we do.  We started doing it in the mid-80s, and we still do it better than anyone.”

Luckily, this album isn’t just about being Dinosaur Jr.  It’s about yearning; about wanting something more and wanting the assurance from the people around you that more is out there.  One quirk of Farm is that the long songs – “Plans,” “Said the People,” and “I Don’t Want to Go There” - are the most plaintive of the bunch.  It’s like the band has determined that it’s not possible to explain heartache in less time than it takes to explain… well… anything else.

Indeed, that seems to be the conceit of the album – all of the shorter, quicker, more immediately catchy songs (in other words, the possible singles) are the happy ones.  Or at least happy sounding.  Or at least, the ones that are slacker-worthy, quick and uncaring.  But that’s just what you give the world.  Even slackers have hearts.

The one song that seems to bridge the divide is, appropriately, the highlight of the album.  ”See You” combines a happy, clean-toned riff with lyrical remembrances and half-thoughts.  J throws out the fireworks at the beginning, soloing over the intro, and then lets the riff make the mood on the broken journey that ends with “Can you tell me who I’ll be?  Do you know what this all means to me?“

To many, being Dinosaur Jr. may be about being a virtuoso guitarist, or being slackers, or being influential.  Farm seems to suggest that it’s more than that.  This is a band that cares.  They may have a reputation for blowing the shit out of ears at live shows, but it’s not purposeless.  It’s not about being loud to be loud, or being technically impressive to show off; it’s about recognizing that the “me” that everyone sees usually isn’t the me that we ourselves know.

Even slackers have hearts.

One In The Chamber: Blue Line Swinger

Exposing the multitude of truly great songs out there, one song at a time….

Blue Line Swinger

Electr-O-Pura

Yo La Tengo, 1995

Yo La Tengo is a tough band to write about, because writing – at least in this context – is all about angles.  Yo La Tengo really resist angles.

At various times, I’ve thought of them as a band that deconstructs music, or that deconstructs emotions… but I’ve come think that they may just deconstruct expectations.  I first started listening a few years back at the release of their still-most-recent (as Yo La Tengo) album, I Am Not Afraid of You And I Will Beat Your Ass.  That album was expansive and more eclectic than just about anything I’d listened to, bookended by ten minute epics and filled in in-between with instrumentals, soft dance numbers, fuzz-guitar, and the kitchen sink.  I was enthralled.

From there, I worked backwards, having learned that Yo La Tengo had been around for quite sometime, wowing audiences with their cover repertoire, scoring movies, and refusing to go big-time.  Eventually, continuing to try and find the fabled YLT that I’d heard had been on the shelf next to Sonic Youth in the “Redefining the Indie Guitar” section, I found Electr-O-Pura.

I’m not going to say much more about the album; this is about a song, after all.  Nevertheless, it’s status as a guitar album is important, because while Blue Line Swinger is certainly about all of the musicians involved, it’s emotion explodes – like many YLT songs – with Ira Kaplan’s guitar work.

Blue Line Swinger caps off the album, and it’s a long, slow-burning finish.  It clocks in at 9:19, and most of the length comes from the jam-session opening.  All of the instrumentalists seem to be on their own wavelength, but the star is Georgia Hubley’s repeated drum pleas, slipping and sliding off of each other; they steal the spotlight while Kaplan and bassist James McNew sneak in the back door.

Things don’t start to hurt until everyone settles on one tempo.

Shortly after they all end up on the same page, Georgia’s buried vocals kick in.  Yo La Tengo has always seemed – to me at least – to be a shoegaze band at heart.  Maybe that’s because none of them have a particularly strong voice, but I tend to think that it has a lot more to do with the fact that they never seem to want you to be able to zero in on any one aspect of their oeuvre.  In any case, Ira has finally started playing uptempo, giving us an actual riff; James is guiding the emotional imperative of the song with the rise and fall of the bass notes; and then Georgia’s voice cuts through with the first verse:

You, you won’t talk about/What we see, when the lights are out…

The lyrics aren’t readily apparent on first listen, or even fourth, or fifth.  You have to earn them.  You can’t know them until you’ve observed the machinations of the other elements of the music.  But they are there, describing the suffocating tension between self-protection and self-sacrifice that marks any real relationship.

The first verse finishes up and Ira comes in again, his guitar splitting its time between discernible melodic movements and panicked, wavering noise soloing.  He is of two minds, as is the song.

The second verse proclaims assuredness; safety.  Ira’s guitar work settles back into the riff.  Georgia gives us a chorus line of “ba-da-da, ba-da” and James continues the bass line.

Then it all comes to a screeching halt.

So what is the song about?  Well, I think the lyrics say it simple enough:  hope in the light of the struggles of love.  It’s not that simple though, is it?  The trouble with Yo La Tengo is that – even if you are able to hear the lyrics, break them down, and think about them – they always make you feel them.

That’s what Blue Line Swinger is about.  It’s about the slow way you build something with someone else.  The way you work yourself into a frenzy thinking about them, and what they think about you.  The way you think about their doubts.  And about the fact that if you believe, their doubts don’t matter.  Yo La Tengo takes all that, and lays it bare with three musicians.

Like I said earlier, I thought once upon a time that they were about deconstructing music… well, they do spend the first half of the song weaving everything together.

I also said that, once upon a time, I thought they were about deconstructing emotion… well, they do give a two verse treatise on trust and faith with an economy of words.

The truth is, though, that Blue Line Swinger is a great song because the band actually deconstructs our expectations about what  a relationship can mean – and what sound can tell us about that question – and spreads it out over 9 minutes so that we can actually feel it.

What else is music supposed to do?

Clear Eyes, Full Hearts

The penultimate episode of the most recent (third) season of Friday Night Lights has a scene that gets to the core of what makes it a real work of art (and a rarity for television). Tyra, emotional fireball who is trying to write the perfect essay for her University of Texas admissions application, is explaining to Landry – the wisecracking nice guy who has doggedly believed in her for as long as we’ve known them – what was different about her only a few years earlier:

“Should I write about my trashy family – the fact that my sister is a stripper, or that my mama is a high school dropout who drinks boxes of wine like its water? Or about the fact that I lost my virginity when I was 13, or the fact that my papa wasn’t around? How ‘bout that? Oh! I know what I should write about: the fact that until about two years ago, I had enough hate in my heart to start a freakin’ car!”

Landry understands that the key to life isn’t simply knowing that you used to be different, but rather, figuring out why you used to be different. And so he asks why she is no longer the person that she just described:  “Well… what changed? What changed from two years ago? Why did you stop having enough hate in your heart to start a freakin’ car?”

She answers after a brief moment of thought, “Jason Street got paralyzed.”

Now, Jason Street is the former star quarterback who was paralyzed during a tackle in a game in the very first episode of the very first season of Friday Night Lights. Though the show has a short “Previously on…” segment at the beginning of each episode, there is no recap of who Street is, no expository dialogue explaining the event or back-story to fill-in the first-time viewer.

What you realize is that – my goodness gracious! – Tyra actually has a memory. Things that happened in the first season of the show still matter, because nothing in life ever stops mattering.

 

I’ve been telling friends to watch this show for a couple of years now. Early on, my praise was, “It’s not about football, it’s about life.” Having spent more time with the characters, what I tell people now is this: “When it’s between seasons, I feel like I’m missing my friends. I don’t ‘miss watching the show,’ or ‘miss my favorite characters,’ because that implies some level of artifice that is remarkably absent. So whenever there’s a question of whether or not the show will be renewed (which there always is), it’s like wondering if my dad will take another job and I’ll have to move away from everyone I know, and no longer be able to keep up with what’s going on in their lives. Because I know their lives will go on.”

Dramatic, I know – but entirely sincere. Friday Night Lights is somehow able to achieve an undeniably organic feel, and it tackles real issues with an honesty and acuity that is commendable. I personally connect to it because the vast majority of the themes it approaches – family and community chief among them – are themes near and dear to my heart. But above all, it’s the show’s refusal to settle for anything less than portraying the most complete human beings and interactions possible that makes it special.

 

Despite the brilliant writing, acting, et al., Friday Night Lights is still fighting to stay on TV. After thinking about it for a while, here is my proposal as to why:

Any significant piece of popular culture necessarily has two overriding qualities. First of all, it has to be something that a large number of people can relate to. It has to hit the zeitgeist; it has to be cool. Second of all, it has to be commercially viable. For anything in pop culture to get big, it has to be backed by serious dollars, because dollars buy widespread visibility. Bankability buys exposure and growth.

Two of the newest forms of American pop culture (though they are already relatively old) are Reality TV and online Social Media – particularly social networking sites, like Facebook. They both fit these criteria to a T.

Consider Reality TV. Someone asked the question, “What will people relate to more than the celebrities they see on typical TV shows?” and came up with the answer, “normal people.” That was smart: after all, the allure of Reality TV is the chance to see a group of “real people” interacting, facing challenges, and reacting. Cameras are around to capture the action, and there’s usually a “Confessional Booth” for participants to share their thoughts and feelings. Honest and organic, right… right…? Wrong – and that was the brilliant part of Reality TV. Someone understood how effective it would be to cut normal people into Soap Opera-worthy personalities and storylines. People don’t just want to be able to relate to what they are watching; they want to imagine it could be them. It’s cool to relate to the people on a Reality TV show; it’s even cooler to imagine you are them when they are as big and glamorous as the celebrities they “replaced.” On top of that, these personalities (unlike normal people) can be marketed – they are bankable. And in the end, they also belie the farce of the situation: that reality TV is edited into something as artificial as typical, celebrity-laden TV – and the viewer knows it.

Now consider social media websites. The big one now is Facebook, the last big one was MySpace, and the next big one probably doesn’t yet exist. In all cases, the general idea is to create a page that represents you, via photographs, lists of interests, and pithy quotes. Once you’ve created this page, you “make friends” with other people – which basically means they can read your lists and pithy quotes, and a thumbnail of their picture shows up in your list of “friends.” Then, once you’ve established a group of “friends,” you keep up with them by writing on their “wall” and announcing how you are doing with ever-present “status updates.”

To recap, the idea is to posit oneself as a collection of lists and one-liners, and use this self to make friends with other one-liner selves. Then your selves talk to each other. This is how the most technically advanced generation thus far has decided to have relationships. And it attracts astounding numbers of people; lucky for Mark Zucker, in the new economy of the Internet, traffic is worth well more than its weight in gold.

Anyways, while I’m probably beating a dead horse, I can’t move on without mentioning Twitter, my personal favorite of all social media phenomena. The idea in this case is essentially to be able to offer “status updates” ALL THE TIME.

Eating a good sandwich? Tell your friends!

Having a personal epiphany about why Whole Foods is totally worth it? Tell your friends!

Watching paint dry? Tell your friends!

All you have to do is fire off 160-character “tweets” that are received by people who choose to “follow” you. The advantage of tweets over Facebook status updates is that they fit perfectly into text messages, so that you can tweet and receive your friends’ tweets anywhere, anytime. Sounds fantastic.

I’m sure I don’t need to spell out the farce here.

As satisfying as it may be, I’m not mentioning these things just to make fun of them. After all, I’ve occasionally watched a reality TV show, and I use Facebook to keep in touch with friends that live back home, in California. (I don’t use Twitter, though. And I never will.)

The point I’m trying to make is this: these are arguably the two newest, biggest ways that the American people like to see themselves represented, and they are both exercises in doublethink. And by “doublethink”, I mean “believing that we are consuming real representations of real people, while at the same time knowing that these representations are as artificial as any other act of theatre.” So in other words, by “doublethink,” I mean “willful ignorance.”

That’s a troubling thought, at least from where I’m sitting.

But then, we all willfully ignore things to make ourselves feel better. It’s not a troubling idea on the individual level, necessarily. However, the aforementioned first requirement of popular is that it by definition has to capture the zeitgeist of the moment. It’s the proverbial canary in the coalmine for doomsday trends (Wouldn’t we have seen the 80’s drug apocalypse coming if we had just stopped for a moment and thought about how horrendous the music was?). It seems that our moment is saying, “We want to project ourselves onto our media – but we also want to make damn sure that we only project the parts we want. And then, for our next trick, we want to tell ourselves that we are doing no such thing.”

So where does that leave Friday Night Lights? In the midst of a culture that says, “Show me people that I can put in a box” or, better yet, “Allow me to create myself exactly as I wish,” it’s a show with no real heroes or villains. It’s a show where the most villain-ish character, the seemingly unscrupulous football booster, actually turns out to be the most loyal of friends to the good-guy Coach. It’s a show where the same good-guy Coach constantly screws things up for his wife, puts football ahead of education, and jumps to conclusions when it comes to his teenage daughter. These aren’t plot twists; they are the realities of the situation.

I suppose, however, that the show’s most egregious violation of the status quo is the fact that, really, it’s mundane. Instead of taking normal people and turning them into celebrities, it takes Hollywood archetypes – hot cheerleader, star quarterback, town slut – and explodes them until the only thing left is real people. It devotes no air-time to the fancy parties attended by Coach and Mrs. Coach (about the closest thing in the show to a power couple) – because there are none. On the other hand, it devotes considerable time to their quest to purchase a bigger, nicer house – which, of course, they ultimately realize they can’t afford anyway (sigh… if only life imitated art, who knows what our economy would look like…).

How can you possibly make that bankable?

Getting back to where we started: the anecdote about Tyra and Landry and memory? Functionally, it’s been the best illustration (among many) of the fact that there is no reductive element to the show. It truly tries to exhibit a real human experience. In a world of characters that are so often archetypes, or cause-and-effect machines, or cardboard cutouts, it’s refreshing to watch a show and feel like you are getting the real deal.

That said, it’s not exactly tenable to expect every piece of entertainment that makes it to a screen to have that quality. Nevertheless, its disheartening to see Friday Night Lights toil on with no audience, saved only by a deal with DirectTV, to be aired on a channel that is not accessible to many viewers.

I suppose we the people of this moment have made our bed, and now we have to lay in it.

Just to prove that this isn’t my own personal doomsday scenario, I want to close with a note from a completely different source. It’s a quote from one of the participants of the Up series of British documentaries that follow a group of children over the course of their lives, catching up with them every 7 years. The series is certainly among the most real, organic things I’ve ever found presented on a screen.

One of the participants, Neil, is a college dropout who has moved from place to place, and at the time of 28 Up lives in a trailer in a rural part of Scotland. When asked, “What other things about modern society turn you off?” he answers:

 

The cheap satisfaction in so many things. The aimlessness. But I think the total lack of thought is at the bottom of it. Nobody seems to know where they or anybody else is going, and nobody seems to worry. You know? You finish the week, you come home, you plug into the TV set for the weekend, and then you manage to get back to work on Monday. It seems to me that this is the path to total brainwashing. And if you have a brainwashed society, you’re heading towards doom. There’s no question about that.

 

That was in 1984.

Ironic, yeah?

I guess doomsday hasn’t happened yet – but what if the canary has, indeed, bitten the dust? What do we do? What can we do? Maybe nothing. Because if the smart part of popular culture is capturing the zeitgeist, the brilliant part is being beyond the influence of any one man.

I’ve never expected anything less than brainwashing from The Media; I just wish it didn’t seem like this was a case of the populace willfully brainwashing itself.

The Long and Short of It

Well kids, it’s been a while since I’ve posted anything.  I’ve been exploring a lot of different things – new city, the guitar, fiction, etc.  What I have here are two pieces that I wrote recently for different things.  One is very short, and I wrote it on a whim for a AAA contest.  I realized pretty quickly that I was trying to condense a big idea into very few words.  I don’t think it’d entirely successful but it’s interesting to me as a writer.  The second piece I wrote as something that I intended to finish, polish, and hopefully get considered as a piece of “Real Writing.”  One day I’ll get something published in Rolling Stone, Spin, or Esquire.  I doubt this is it, but maybe it’s a start.  I think it captures my style and sensibilities.  Who knows.

Brotherhood

I had recently moved to Boston, and my brother had come to visit me for the first time. We decided to take a day and hike to the summit of the highest peak in Massachuetts. He was four years younger, a senior in high school, and because my last four years had been in college, we hadn’t seen each other much. This was a good chance to be brothers for the first time in quite awhile.

Unfortunately, I hadn’t been the best planner – so we found ourselves freezing cold on top of Mount Greylock in Northwestern Massachusetts, sunlight nearly gone, with only a flashlight to help us hike the four miles back to my Jeep.

I was worried at first by the cold, but luckily, as we hiked, we got deeper into the woods and the cold abated. That left only the dark to worry about. I could tell that my brother was a little afraid – perhaps of the cold, perhaps of the dark or the unfamiliar landscape of an East Coast forest at night. But as we descended into thicker forest – not our own personal Heart of Darkness, but reminiscent, to be sure – we managed to slip back into the old roles of Big Brother and Little Brother that I, for some reason, thought we’d left behind. He fended off fear of things that go bump in the night and I fended off fear of having gotten him into a situation I couldn’t get him out of in one piece. When I fell down, he laughed; when he fell, I dusted him off. It had been awhile, but I guess it’s true: “A brother’s love is… a brother’s love.”

Eventually, the trees thinned out and we walked out onto the farm where my Jeep was parked. It was warm.

_____________________________________

Caffeine and Conversation:

The Grand View from a Small Town in Northern New England

“You don’t meet nice girls in coffee shops.”

-Tom Waits, “Hold On”

I

There’s a lot of anxiety being passed around these days. Uneasiness, dissatisfaction, fear – people don’t trust the government, they don’t trust the banks, they don’t trust their employers, and it often feels like they don’t trust each other. As the effects of the failing economy express themselves in new and surprising ways, it becomes more and more clear that no one is immune to the country’s present ills. Its as if the rug of 21^st century manifest destiny has been yanked right out from underneath our feet. Old people say it’s the death of values. Middle-aged people say it’s the death of American economic values. Young people say it’s the death of America.

I don’t know how to adequately describe what I feel, but I know how to describe what I see: I went to the bank a few weeks back. I was seated with my back to the waiting area, talking to a banker, when I heard a commotion behind me. There was a woman talking to the bank manager. Pleading, actually – not talking. She was trying to convince the manager to give her a loan, and he wasn’t having it. She pulled out an envelope and rifled through it, holding up receipts with abandon, saying, “See? See? I can pay! I’ve paid for these things! You can give me a loan and I’ll pay it!” The manager’s back was to me, but he was shaking his head… The woman picked up her baby out of the stroller next to her, pressed him against her chest, and said, “I can’t leave here. I can’t go back out there.”

* * *

I’ve only been living in Boston for about a month. It’s a pretty solitary existence. I work from my apartment and I live in my apartment, so I have to motivate myself to leave everyday. Sometimes I don’t. I moved out here knowing no one, and the people I’ve met are scattered around the city, so mostly we just meet up at bars or restaurants and chat nights to bed.

It’s put me in a position where I find myself spending a lot of time wondering what loneliness is all about. I thought I understood, given my circumstances, (though to be clear, I welcomed it – I had move somewhere with no social connections for a reason) but it didn’t take long – didn’t take much misguided economics, many bank encounters – to make any loneliness or isolation I felt seem petty and inconsequential.

See, I know what I’m not really alone or really isolated – hell, I know that I’m in better shape than probably 75% of the country. But my only basis for comparison lies in situations that I know. I know the San Francisco Bay Area and Sacramento. I know family and friends and how the economy has hit them. I don’t know Boston, or New England; small towns or blue-collar jobs. I like to believe that I can understand their plight, at least intellectually – but at the same time, I know that that’s something that I want to believe.

And sometimes I come across things that I have to fully acknowledge that I don’t understand.

The Grand View Topless Coffee Shop is a coffee shop that recently opened up in Vassalboro, Maine. Vassalboro is a small town. I read about it online, and was instantly intrigued.

What is a topless coffee shop doing in a small town like Vassalboro? Do women even take their tops off in small towns? I hadn’t thought so when I was younger, that was for sure. But then, I guess a bad economy will make people do crazy things. I mentioned the shop to several friends, out of curiosity and humor. One well-endowed female friend quickly explained to me that any girl who gets her ya-ya’s out in public has low self esteem. This made me wonder if the shop was inspired by the same loneliness and isolation that everyone else seemed to be feeling, albeit perhaps in a different guise. Why else would a young lady take her shirt off in a small town, where everyone would know about it?

It just so happened that I would soon be picking up a 2005 Jeep Wrangler Unlimited (a trade in for my snow-unready Honda Civic), and I had long planned for the inaugural trip to be to Maine. I realized that I needed to go see this titty café for myself. I didn’t know if I’d find any answers, but I was pretty sure there wasn’t a downside to a trip to a topless coffee shop in a state known for its natural beauty.

II

I picked up my Jeep at 6 pm on a Friday. I got up to Vassalboro – after a variety of pit stops and misadventures – at 4 am. My usual MO in this situation was to find a quiet street in a safe-looking neighborhood to park my car and fall asleep.

Vassalboro has quiet streets but no neighborhoods.

I was either parking on the minimal embankment of State Route 3 or I was parking in the driveway of a respectable Vassalboro citizen. I chose option C, which was to find a small, unpaved road along the shore of a frozen lake. It was quite a sight to see at sunrise… until I noticed the private property signs everywhere. I headed back into town to try and find the Grand View. It was harder to find then you’d think, considering that there are only a handful of commercial buildings in Vassalboro.

I noticed two things as I drove through “town:”

1. My concept of a small town was being challenged – Vassalboro was a stretch of Route 3 with houses a half-mile apart and a gas station or general store thrown in here and there for good measure. The Grand View used to be a hotel. I have no idea who came to stay.

2. The citizens of Vassalboro love antiques. Either that, or the booming tourism industry in Vassalboro is based around antique shops. Maybe people used to come, stay in the Grand View, and cruise the antique shops. I really can’t say.

Anyways, I eventually found the place. I was tired and disheveled and actually needed a cup of coffee. It had a curious façade – the windows were all blacked out, so that you couldn’t see the “merch” inside – but they were blacked out with posters advertising the New England Coffee poured on site. Not the typical window dressing for a nudie bar. Continuing the absurdist theme was the sign by the door: “18 and over only. No touching.” This was a coffee shop?

Even though it was 8:30 AM, I had the mindset that I was going into a strip club… and sure enough, there was a bouncer checking ID’s just inside the door. He didn’t check mine. I don’t know if it was the beard or the fact that I looked like I’d slept 3 hours in the back of a Jeep. Which I had.

I was the only customer. I sat down, and realized that I had no idea what I wanted. I wasn’t handed a menu, and this wasn’t a coffee house where you walked up to the counter and ordered from the menu posted on the wall. I had to squint at a menu on another table to see what they offered, and I think the bouncer thought I was ashamed to look my topless waitress in the eye because he told me, “Tell the lady what you want!”

I managed to fumble out some words about a regular coffee with cream and sugar, and then promptly checked my wallet to discover that I had no cash. The joint was cash only. I got up and told the bouncer and my waitress that I’d be right back.

That’s when I realized that I didn’t know if ATM’s existed in Vassalboro.

The bouncer let me know that there was, in fact, a local ATM, as well as where it was (in a general store two miles down the road). He told me to come back when I had cash, but clearly didn’t expect me to return.

I got in my Jeep and drove down the road. I wasn’t sure if I had driven two miles, but I was pretty sure that ANY store would be THE store, so I pulled over at the first place I saw. It was a gas station/general store. The ATM was down, but I could get cash back with my debit card – I just had to wait for the cashier to lend a hand to the local (ice?) fishermen, who were buying worms. God this was a small town.

Arriving back at the Grand View, I followed a family of eight adults through the door, and the bouncer told my waitress – with a mix of surprise and respect – “He came back!” I sat down to wait for my coffee and the cinnamon bun that I had been convinced to order, and finally got to observe the small town anomaly that I had come to see.

I’m still not really sure what I expected to find – but I’ll try to articulate what was on my mind. I grew up in a town of 25,000 people next door to a town of 125,000 people in the backyard of San Francisco. My dad has a lot of family in Oregon and Alaska and despite the fact that he grew up in Sacramento, his parents farmed their backyard and his whole family personified down-home small-town values. I was trained to hate the San Francisco Bay Area; I was trained to hate large groups of people, period. And what this meant, in practice, was that the “City” and the “Small Town” were more than dissimilar locales: in my mind, they were two very different ideas. The City was a place of possibility but of uncertainty, a place of promise at the cost of moral decay. The Small Town, on the other hand, was the embodiment of Puritan consistency, with a firm ceiling compensated for by the virtual guarantee of “living the good life.”

All this to say that a topless coffee shop in a small town was a damn curious thing. Unnatural. And so my hypothesis was this: in a time of such economic unrest and cultural anxiety, the city was exporting its undesirable qualities to the small town, because for once, life in the small town was as threatened and uncertain as life in the city.

It’s probably relevant to divulge that I cooked this theory up sitting in my lonely Cambridge apartment.

There was an idea in my mind about isolation and loneliness, and I thought that perhaps the physical isolation of the small town – which had always begat surfeit moral isolation – was for once being overpowered by the cultural loneliness that all of America was bearing together. I heard a woman in a bank saying, “I can’t leave here. I can’t go back out there,” and I heard it echoed by another woman saying “taking my top off in a coffee shop is a job, if nothing else.” In both statements lived the idea that, for maybe the first time as a superpower, we – as Americans, as individuals, as citizen patriots or citizen apathetics – were feeling incredibly alone. It was an idea predicated on the implicit notion that when the chips are down, you do what you gotta do – though maybe this time with a different oeuvre. Because, perhaps for the first time, it seemed like isolationism couldn’t be the answer.

My late-night California-via-Cambridge mind thought this was all wrapped up in a wooden building in the middle of nowhere on Maine State Route 3.

What I found was something entirely different.

* * *

By the time my coffee arrived, the Grand View was far more populated than when I had left to find the town ATM. The aforementioned family of eight was sitting at four tables in the center of the room. Their ages had to range from 25-65… it was some kind of bizarro Sunday Brunch. And that wasn’t it – the Grand View was full of small town clichés. There was the 20-something with wraparound sunglasses on his head. He was in the booth next to me. He actually knew one of the waitresses and I overheard them talking about a party later that night. They probably went to high school together. I think he had Twisted Sister in the CD player of his lifted truck (Ok, so I made that up, but I’ve probably got a 91% chance of being right). Then there was a booth with two middle-aged men, probably getting their morning Cup of Joe before fishing with the worm buyers. Another booth held an older man reading the day’s paper. It was everything I would have expected from a diner in a quiet little town – and I’ve been to a lot of those – except that the waitresses were topless.

There were three of them now. Mine was tall and lanky with small breasts and two pierced nipples. I thought she seemed a little hangdog until we started chatting and she turned out to be a lot of fun. Then there was a shorter brunette, with larger breasts, and one pierced nipple. She was the one that Twisted Sister knew. She looked like she probably knew how to find the hottest Vassalboro parties. The third waitress was the tallest and most well-endowed, but also the chubbiest. Neither of her nipples were pierced. It made me wonder if they scheduled the waitresses that way on purpose, to cater to all crowds.

They all seemed comfortable. I started a conversation with mine to prove that I wasn’t uncomfortable, and we ended up talking for a while. I told her how I was from Boston and came up to Maine to get away… and she told me how she and her friends went to down to Boston to get away. Fair enough.

When she went to help other customers, I took a look at the décor of the place. They had done a real bang-up job. Like I mentioned, the Grand View had previously been a hotel. From the looks of things, they had simply taken the lobby of the hotel and put in ugly, uncomfortable booth seating. There was a counter with coffee machines and a register, and a standard break-room refrigerator holding the day’s pastries. In the entry way of the place – behind the bouncer’s barstool – was a pen and ink drawing of Dave Letterman. Letterman! I couldn’t help but wonder if he had given consent to have his picture used to promote this endeavor. Near my booth was a pen and ink of a B-rock star, if I remember correctly, Jon Bon Jovi, and on another wall was, no joke, a pen and ink of the Three Stooges. All things considered, I had no idea what they were going for. I think the point was that they were really just selling one thing. Two, I guess.

At least, that’s how it felt.

However, as I looked from the décor to the “It’s a Wonderful Life” clichés sitting in the booths around me, I realized that my conception of what the Grand View was “selling” was flawed, thanks to my life as a City Kid. In a City, the place I sat in would only be selling breasts. We’ve all been to the strip club that wouldn’t pass as an acceptable bar if it didn’t have boobs on display.

This was the same thing, except that it wasn’t.

Despite all appearances, this was a coffee shop that was selling what all coffee shops sell: caffeine and conversation. And unlike most Big City coffee shops, there wasn’t a laptop in sight. If there was anything in front of a patron’s face besides a cup of coffee, a donut, or another person, it was a newspaper. The conversation was genuine. There was a family of eight sitting together. In a completely unexpected turn, it was comforting and familiar in the way that lunch at a normal Small Town diner would be.

I had finished my cinnamon bun (good) and was working on the coffee, trying to take everything in. I had no answers – but that wasn’t for lack of information. It was the most understated sensory overload I’d ever experienced. My problem was that I had driven up North with a preconceived idea of the answer I wanted to give, before I even had a proper question formulated. So now, I sat in the shop, staring at Larry, Moe, and Curly hanging on the wall, stealing glances at Party Girl’s rack, and thinking about how much I wasn’t a drip coffee guy… all the while wondering if, maybe, there wasn’t anything interesting to write about after all. I was wondering if perhaps what I had wasn’t a story about Big City disillusion in a Small Town, but rather about how the Big City and the Small Town remain as different as ever. Or at least about the ignorance of Big City people, like myself, towards Small Towns.

I was interrupted by my waitress: “So, are you an artsy person?”

I looked up at her, laughed in spite of myself, and then replied, “What makes you ask that?”

She really only had appearances to go on. I was wearing beat-up Nike shoes that had been – if ever hip at all – preppy-hip when clean and new. I had on a tight pair of designer Levi’s jeans and a flannel hooded sweater with expensive aviator sunglasses hanging on the collar. My San Francisco-made Chrome bike messenger bag was on the seat next to me. Of that motley collection of articles, I really expected a comment about my jeans being way too tight, or my flannel sweater, or the fact that the clasp on my bag was a seat belt buckle. These were the kinds of comments I normally got in the Northeast.

What she said was, “The shoes. Only artsy people wear shoes like that. And maybe the aviators… you just can’t pull those off…”

Maybe that is artsy, or hipster-ish, in Maine; maybe even in New England – but in Berkeley, my shoes and aviators would have been a dead giveaway that I wasn’t artsy. After all, they weren’t Chucks and rainbow colored Ray-Bans.

She went on about the glasses. “The other thing about aviators is that they get scratched within five days of you buying them. Last time I was in Boston with my girlfriends, I bought a good pair for $15 or so, and I dropped them the next day and they scratched. That’s how it always goes.”

I was fumbling with my own pair, and dropped them. They didn’t scratch, and that may or may not have had something to do with the fact that they were $200 aviators, as opposed to $15 aviators. I suppose that admitting the price would have been the most revealing and honest thing for me to say, but I kept it to myself, because her next move was to venture a guess that I was a musician.

I should have lied.

Instead, I told her that I was an aspiring writer; that I thought that maybe there was a story in a place like the Grand View. I asked her how she liked working there, and she said she loved it. I asked if they ever got trouble from locals who weren’t appreciative of the nature of the business venture, and she said a little, but that it wasn’t too bad. That was the extent of my investigative journalism.

It was quickly time for me to leave. I had read online that some of the waitresses allowed hugs as one exception to the “no touching” rule. When I read it, I assumed it was about customers who wanted to get cute, and the girls letting them indulge a little – I realized, however, that it was probably more about the fact that everyone in the damn place knew each other! In any case, I think I could have gotten a hug from my waitress, but decided just to pack up my things and leave. The other move on my way out would have been to give the bouncer a wink – I’d proved him wrong, after all – but considering that I looked artsy, was wearing tight jeans, and had originally seemed nervous about the topless woman serving me, I figured it was probably best to just climb in my Jeep and head off.

III

I got back into Boston in time to meet up with friends for St. Patty’s weekend festivities. They were waiting for me at an Irish pub, with a live, three-piece Irish band. I ordered Bangers and Mash, had a lot of Guinness, a car bomb, a Tom Collins (sounds Irish…?) – it was a good time. Everyone was drunk but there were no fights. I’d thought it was impossible to have that many drunk people in that little space without fights. Suffice to say, I was thankful to be in Boston for that particular weekend. And I’ll be honest, the Grand View wasn’t anywhere near the front of my mind.

Nevertheless, as the weekend came down and the Guinness wore off and I put my green shirt back in the back of my closet, I started thinking about the café again. I wondered if my waitress had come to Boston to get away for the weekend, to experience St. Patty’s in a Big City. I wondered what I would have done if I had bumped into her in the pub I was at, with her shirt on. It would have been strange, that’s for sure. I probably would have bought her a drink but I’m not sure that I would have had words for her, and I sure as hell wouldn’t have had words to explain to my good Christian friends where I knew her from.

That’s what dawned on me, though: what I had been experiencing throughout the trip was that most basic of human fascinations, the unkown. My waitress at the Grand View goes to Boston for the same reason that my California friends called me after March 17^th to get the lowdown on St. Patty’s in Beantown, and for the same reason that I wanted to drive up to Maine even before I heard you could buy coffee and donuts and stare at tits in one convenient location. It was the same reason, even, that I moved to Boston in the first place. It’s hard to be fascinated with something you know intimately. And life without fascination is painfully regular.

When I was driving home through Maine and New Hampshire, I thought that I would be writing a piece about how Small Towns and Big Cities are as different as ever, or perhaps the same as always; about how a “topless coffee shop” in a Small Town was really just a “coffee shop with topless waitresses” – though in a Big City it would almost certainly be a “topless coffee shop.” The purpose of this piece, if I followed my original intentions, would be to use that conclusion to say that, in this time of great uncertainty, the two ideals were still no closer together than when they had been moving forward through time uninhibited. Crisis averted, at least for the easy distinctions I had made for so long.

In truth, if I had set out with a good question to answer, I had gone about answering it all wrong. And if I had set out with an answer and a desire to confirm that the question was valid, I only succeeded at confounding my own biased notions. Perhaps Vassalboro was suffering gravely from the economic downturn. Perhaps antique sales were way down and their one ATM would soon be shut down for lack of use. I really don’t know. But toplessness is not a proxy for economic desperation. I’m not sure if that’s what I thought going in, but I certainly would have entertained the idea. I know now that it’s not the case at the Grand View Topless Coffee shop, as clearly as I knew within five minutes of sitting down for coffee that I wasn’t going to be answering my original question.

So did I end up with either a question or an answer? That’s neither here nor there. On a personal level, the Small Town and the Big City remain exactly the same for me. If anything, the experience strengthened my preconceived notions of what Small Towns are – I was genuinely impressed with the candor of the patrons and the help at the Grand View. Well, except maybe for the bouncer.

But I think the final conclusion was this, neither question nor answer: People cannot separate themselves from their expectations, and these expectations are intrinsically tied to the circumstances that inform our view of the world – tied to what we know. In this sense, Small Town and Big City are certainly meaningful groupings of peoples or lifestyles. Nevertheless, the expectations I had for the Grand View based on its lack of clothing were in essence the same as the expectations my waitress had for me based on my clothing. This is precisely how the people of Small Towns and Big Cities are the same – in the way they construct their notions of the world outside the scope of their own understanding. But it’s not a matter of the Big City leaking into the Small Town, or vice-versa. It’s human nature. It’s an immutable consequence of our construction, whether we chose to cover it up or let it all hang out.

* * *

If you’re wondering why I chose to mention the scene at the bank, I can only hope that the image sticks with you as evidence that there is something that’s changing right now about the American condition – because there is still a connection between that condition and what I’ve been writing about. See, I’ve been back to my local bank several times, and I’ve wondered each and every time whether or not the desperate mother ever got her loan. I’ve wondered if she even left the bank. And if I expected my trip up to Maine to somehow assuage the concern and disconcert I felt at my encounter with a real manifestation of the economic unrest that’s taking hold of everyone, well, I was sadly disappointed.

In a different sense, however, I found something that should probably be as, if not more, demonstrative than what I had hoped to find. What I discovered is that people are still just people. Half-empty pessimism about unflattering Big City qualities leaking out to Small Towns has been replaced with half-full optimism rooted in the fact that this is still the same America. And as far as America is concerned – let’s just be honest and say that we’ve faced troubles before. We’ve faced depression and unrest and isolation and human ingenuity has pulled us through each and every time.

So it is that the certain link between the subject of my trip and economic unrest is that America is facing a new problem that will color the Big City, the Small Town, and the interplay between the two a different shade than ever before. They are categories that are truly defined by cultural context. That context right now is grave and challenging, but we are ingrained with a receipt-waving sense of resolve to find a solution, Small Town and Big City alike. It’s what people do. There are desperate women in banks everywhere. Worm buyers and artsy types may find solutions in different ways, but you can be damn sure they’ll both be working on it – and the solutions they arrive at will not be symptoms of population or loneliness or poverty, but rather will be indicative of the different ways of life that coexist in America. The economy is not contributing to a breakdown of the walls between the Big City and the Small Town; the economy is a catalyst for understanding why they are both distinct and valuable.

I’m not sure why it took breasts to make that clear, but I can’t complain.