If I Had Read This During the Election

I would have been insufferable.

So I just finished Barack Obama's 1994 memoir Dreams from my Father. There is plenty to say about it, but I think I'll start with this:

It is, literally, the only book ever published by a President before that President entered politics (or even, seemingly, thought of entering politics).

This grants Dreams from My Father a particular resonance. Indeed, with all the fatuous cries during the campaign of "who is Barack Obama?" those shouting such vaguely hysteric attacks failed to recognize that Barack Obama, moreso than any Presidential candidate before him, provided the answers to that very question long before he was a national figure and long before he had anything to gain from concealing or spinning his own past.

To be sure, it is an autobiography, and few literary genres are so untrustworthy as autobiographies. Obama himself tells the reader in the book's introduction that characters have been combined from real people in his life and that events have been compressed or extended for narrative, and I feel certain that, here and there, self aggrandizement has crept into the story.

But, at the same time, it is a remarkably humane book. Obama pulls no punches with himself, often casting himself as the flawed character in his own story. There is real wisdom in his telling and it doesn't for a moment feel forced or false. Even without his later achievements, this book would have stood a good chance of leaving Barack Obama remembered as an extraordinary man.

So, first things first: Obama was asked to write the book just after he was named the first African-American editor of the Harvard Law Review. It was supposed to be a personal story of race in America, but it became something more than that over the couple of years it took for him to write it. It became a paean to an outsider's world, a lonely guy story. It is a revealing and lyrical exploration of living between two worlds, of and other than both.

By now everyone knows the outlines of the tale. Obama is born in Hawaii to a White mother from Kansas and a Black father from Kenya. Before Barack is even a couple of years old, his father leaves and returns to Kenya. He will only see him once more during his life - when he is ten years old, and only for a week or so. Obama spends most of his life trying to carve an identity for himself, both as a man and as an African-American, and he is forced, eventually to come to some new synthesis when his father's life and his father's failures are finally revealed to him when he travels to Kenya to, for the first time, meet his relatives after his father's death in a car accident.

It's a compelling story, but it is an even more compelling book. Obama has what so few politicians have - he has the gift of actual literary talent. He is an extraordinarily good writer, both in terms of his ability to describe and set a scene or a character and in terms of his keen understanding of narrative structure. In fact, though a memoir, the book is consciously novelesque and reads quickly and engrossingly like the best bildungsroman.

I say that had I read this book during his campaign I would have been insufferable. That is perhaps because, as an English major, I am stunned and honored to have a President capable of a book of this quality. Perhaps no President since Lincoln has had so firm a grasp on the written word, and America cannot suffer for its leaders knowing how to wield their language well. As hard as I fought and cared and hoped that he would become the 44th President of the United States, I find myself anxious for the end of his tenure as President so that he can get back to writing. I would love to read a novel by the author of Dreams from My Father.

Unclean! Unclean!

Those are Mina Harker's words when she comes out of her stupor at the hands of Count Dracula who has just been found in her bedchamber forcing her to suck on his tit where he has cut himself and is bleeding.

It is pretty much the best scene in the whole book and is positively messy with sex. The scene is described in such a way as to bring to mind - to our 21st century minds anyway - a forced fellatio. There is this description of the act where one of the men who bursts in upon the scene says it looks like nothing so much as a man forcing the nose of a kitten into a saucer of milk.

Fantastic.

One wonders, of course, how much Bram Stoker could have had such a thing in mind (or, indeed, even been aware of such a thing) in those pre-Freudian days, but throughout the novel the vampires are blatantly associated with sexual activity. The Brides of Dracula, who come to seduce Jonathan Harker during his stay in Castle Dracula, are practically soft core porn characters, both in their behavior and description. The thrusting of a stake into a female vampire and her subsequent baring of teeth and thrashing of extremities taking on a decidedly carnal - if gruesome - cast, with the hero plunging his stake into the creature again and again while she moans and screams. It seems impossible Stoker was not aware of himself.

Even before Dracula, of course, vampires had begun to take on the lascivious characteristics that were always under the thin veneer of Victoriana. Camilla, the most popular vampire novel prior to Dracula, was, after all, about a lesbian vampire seducing a young girl. But this very excitement which is evident in Stoker's book (the reader can sense his scribbling hand rapidly increasing the pace with which words are laid onto paper whenever the undead get a scene) is, in a way, part of the problem with Dracula.

Thing is - the book is really terribly conventional for its day. There must be twelve chapters in which the protagonists hold hands and pray together and resolve to love one another always. The men are, to a one, flat as the paper they are written out upon and Mina, clearly the most dynamic and interesting character, is constantly passing up action to moon over the men. One senses that Stoker either didn't know what he had in Mina Harker or was conflicted about a "new woman" protagonist and couldn't bear to let her loose upon the plot where she could have torn through literature for real.

Still worse, Dracula is hardly in the damned book. He gets several short chapters in the very beginning and then disappears almost entirely until the aforementioned "rape" of Mina Harker. Hell, he doesn't even get a final scene. The protagonists spend the last third of the book rushing all over eastern Europe to catch Dracula before he can return to his castle and regain his strength while Dracula outwits them in a hundred different (and boring) ways, but when they finally reach Castle Dracula, just before the sunset, the are successful in killing the fiend in his coffin before he can rise for the fight.

Its the most stunning anticlimax I have come across in ages.

Save for Sherlock Holmes, no character in fiction has been adapted for the screen as many times as Count Dracula. If one was to add all of the other media - books, comics, art, music, video games, toys and games - I would lay money that no character PERIOD has even been treated with so much as Count Dracula. And though, naturally, Stoker could not have known this would come to pass, to give such a creation no final speech, no fight to the death, no death scene, even? Criminal.

Look, I had always heard/read/been told that Dracula was boring and not worth the time it would take to read. I can say definitively that this was not the case. It isn't by any means a perfect novel and it is nearly buried on occasion underneath tedium and Victorian bloviating, but it reads faster than I would have expected it to and it is so impossibly classic that it feels perhaps more rewarding than it really is.

Other People's Dreams of Teeth

Everyone loathes to hear another person's dreams related to them.

So I'll make it brief.

Dreamt last night that two of my teeth fell out. they had two small metal prongs by which they were meant to attach to my gums via insertion of these prongs into very small holes. I spent the whole dream frantically trying to simultaneously direct the prongs into their apertures and still hold on to the tooth. No matter how hard I tried I could not replace the teeth in my head. It seemed terribly important and caused me horrible stress that i could not put everything aright.

I've read somewhere that to dream of one's teeth falling out is common, but I've never before experienced it. Supposedly, if you're the sort who believes in the unconscious mind and the interpretation of dreams, such a dream reflects a feeling of not having control in one's life.

It certainly seems plausible in my case. When I awoke, I didn't feel any relief to discover that all of my teeth were in place. Instead I just replaced one nightmarish fear-stress continuum with another.

Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes?

Turns out, I do.

Here're my thoughts:

Watchmen is a really and truly wonderful graphic novel. I really believe that it may be the only comic book to have fully transcended the medium to arrive at that higher, ivory tower guarded realm called Literature. It's layered and profound and filled with three dimensional characters. It speaks to and about comic books, hero worship, the cold war, fascism, the purpose of art in the world, and the philosophy of consequentialism.

It has a lot on its plate. I think it mostly is able to handle what it sets out to do.

But the film Watchmen is another thing.

I wanted to like it, but it is a deeply flawed creation. First, it is interminably long. Second, some of the casting (acting) is dreadful. Third, the plot that slinks along so well in the book just feels slow and bloated in the darkened theatre.

That said, it has parts that are really something to see; moments that actually do manage to stay with you when you leave your seat and walk the stickum off of your shoes on the way back to your car. The Dr. Manhattan stuff, which I would have laid money on failing, actually works pretty well. Billy Cruddup does an admirable job emoting through a character whose defining characteristic is his failure to emote. Ironically, it is the scenes where normal everyday humans are supposed to be talking seriously that rang the most hollow and community theatre-esque.

Anyway - capsule review: if you liked the comic book, give it a shot. It won't ruin the book or anything and some of it is fun to see on film. If you haven't any idea what Watchmen is or any inclination to read the book - I'd pass. It is, after all, a bloated, gassy movie filled with unnecessary slo-motion fight sequences and gigantic blue penises.

Mesocyclonica

So, every Neko Case album review begins with some remark about The Voice and this one is no different.

For those who have been following Ms. Case since she was banned from the Grand Ole Opry for taking off her shirt during a performance at the Ryman Theater in Nashville, this latest album will have little to surprise. Rather, she seems on a trajectory, moving further and further away from the alt-country siren she once was and toward the asymmetrical, overtly poetic singer songwriter she now clearly is.

The Voice, though, that always remains. She describes it as a firehose of sound, liquid and loud as all hell, but unwieldy for delicate singing. She sells herself considerably short. Middle Cyclone finds her reverb drenched vocals swooping and diving and pouring themselves over fifteen songs about - in the sense that they are about anything at all - natural disasters, animals, death, and her own insecurities. There are songs about tornadoes in love and murderous whales, songs about maneating and disappointment.

All are dark and melodic and perfect for three a.m. listening, but what continues to impress me is how she's managed to carve out a coherent world for herself and her music unlike anything else going. Songs sometimes barely flirt with two minutes in length that could easily have been expected to be four and half minute numbers in anyone else's catalog. Songs go for four minutes and then give you the chorus precisely once before ending at the four and a half minute mark. All the lyrics are slantwise and the tempo often not at all representative of the subject matter. In short, she's made herself over six or seven albums into an honest to goodness rock poet. And that would be enough to admire even without The Voice, but to be perfectly frank it is The Voice that keeps people coming back for more. It is The Voice that alchemizes it all into something potent and addictive - there simply isn't anything like it in popular music today. It is like Patsy Cline was trapped in the machine that created Dr. Manhattan.

Middle Cyclone isn't immediately as satisfying to me as was Fox Confessor Brings the Flood, and it doesn't do for me what Blacklisted still does for me, but it is a good deal more upbeat (at least musically) than either of those two albums. Check it out.

Oh, and this is still 2009's greatest album cover. They may as well hand out the award already.

The Chiara Heresies

Chiara and I are in bed.

She is telling me a story from work:

They have a public address system at Nordstrom, where Chiara works, and occasionally employees are tasked to make certain announcements. The other day a particularly effeminate gay man who works with Chiara was making some announcements and Chiara was beside herself with delight.

Chiara adores everything about homosexual men.

Apparently this guy speaks with a pronounced lisp and in a kind of valley-girl patois and apparently it is quite funny and quite charming. Anyway, Chiara says to another girl she works with how much she enjoys when this particular guy makes announcements.

"Why?" says the girl.

"Because," says Chiara with an eyeroll "He's soooo gay!"

"Do you think so?" asks the girl, her face scrunched in confusion.

"Of. Course." levels Chiara.

And there is a kind of pause. Let us imagine it is longish and pregnant.

"Look," begins the other girl "not that I have any problem with it myself, but don't you think that gay people are doing something against the will of god?"

And, wait for it. Chiara's response:

"God? Which God? Are you stoopid? There ees no god. Don't be reediculous."

This is where I burst into shocked laughter.

"I theenk I might be a sociopath," says Chiara pensively.

In the Slipstream, Between the Viaducts

Once, when I worked retail, in those heady, Arabian Nights-like days when employees could play their own music in the store, I was listening to the Van Morrison live album from 1974, Too Late to Stop Now, and a woman, a customer there with her portly and Limbaughed husband, complained.

"What IS this horrible noise?" she asked in a pinched manner.

"The Music?" said I.

"If you can call it that. What is it?"

"Van Morrison. You don't like it?"

"Ugh, does anyone?"

"Most people consider him to be one of the preeminent singer-songwriters of the latter half of the twentieth century."

I really said that. Exactly that. For some reason I remember that part vividly. Maybe because I, like you no doubt, are revolted that I actually speak this way.

"Well, is he anything like Beethoven?" asked the woman with a pronounced arch to her narrow and crispy eyebrow.

"No. No, he isn't. But, in fairness, no one is." I replied resignedly.

And just for the record: on another occasion I was listening to Beethoven and some gigantic golf moron complained bitterly about that, too.

Anyway, this is all a digression from my point. And my point begins at Too Late to Stop Now.

If you don't have it, you don't have a record collection. It manages to distill everything about Van Morrison and his preternatural connection to Soul. Because it came at a time in his career when, arguably, his best music was behind and right underneath him, and because he is capable of something fierce and authentic and shamanic in his live performances (if you catch him on a good night), it ends up as a sort of accidental greatest hits record. Really, unless I feel like listening to Astral Weeks, I probably listen to Too Late to Stop Now more than any of his other albums. I think it is one of the five albums I'd go into space with if I never planned to return to Earth.

But for all of its soulful, avatar of rhythm and blues, operatic splendor, Too Late to Stop Now does not capture an aspect of Morrison's music that he himself has only rarely tried to connect with. It doesn't reach for or grasp the aether in quite the way Astral Weeks did and does any time you want to take it for a spin and you're in the bath on a Sunday morning in June. And even though he isn't what he once was, the chance of maybe melding the two into a third thing, perhaps transcendental soul or rhythm and mysticism, makes me feel slightly faint.

In other words: I have high expectations.

Enter Astral Weeks Live at the Hollywood Bowl.

I want it to be a revelation - an archeology of the album I love so dearly, unearthing something new and unexpected from the songs that I know too well after too many listens. It isn't quite that.

The album is really good. Van Morrison is clearly engaged in the material and the off-the-cuff feeling of the original is preserved here (the band only had one run through before performing together) intact. There is the usual Van Morrison schtick of extending, through vocal riffing and interposing of other songs for brief sections of music, each song by four minutes or so. Sometimes that can be a drag, but there is life in it for Morrison and you never get tired of listening to him pour himself and the listeners down into a trance.

I don't know that I want to go into detail about every song, but suffice it to say that fans of Astral Weeks will find plenty here to reignite their passion for the original album as well as plenty to enjoy for the first time. There are real differences in tone between the two albums - the newer, live album is bluesier and Morrison's voice gruffer, his phrasing more expressionistic, but ultimately Live at the Hollywood Bowl is a sort of reflection of the original album thrown off by a smoked glass. There are moments I like better than the source record and moments that don't come close to matching its purity and surprise.

But really, isn't this all one can ask from a live album - that it reengage, refigure, and reveal?

Like so many reviews I give (what does this say about my confidence in my opinions?) I'll just say that, if you're a fan, you'll really like it.

The Best Snowstorm of the Year

I'm decidedly of two minds about the weather today.

On the one hand, I'm personally offended to have snow in March. It had been warmish and increasingly vernal for several weeks. Flowers were starting to push their way out of the ground, birds could be heard scrabbling on the roof in the morning. Winter seemed in full retreat.

On the other hand, it was the most curious snowfall. Early this morning, when I dragged myself out of bed like a marionette with tangled strings and looked out our bedroom window, the whole world was coated with a marshmallowy dollop of white.

Between an inch and two inches of snow on every roof, on every lawn, on every branch - right down to the tiniest of new buds - but not a speck of snow on the streets and not a hint of it on the sidewalk.

No shoveling to be done. No extra care to be taken behind the wheel.

What's more, by some odd trick of the storm, every street sign and every billboard, every stop sign and every shop sign, every school crossing and every mile marker, was covered in snow as though each had been frosted with a cake spreader. No vertical space could be seen without its message obscured by a perfect coating of snow.

Tabula rasa. Everything ineffable (or, at least, uneffed).

Still. Goddamned March, isn't it? Enough already.

Surge Overkill

I loved (in the sense that you could love something so bleak and utterly devoid of hope) Thomas Ricks' Pulitzer Prize winning book, Fiasco, about the planning, selling, and "execution" of the Iraq war between 2002 and 2005. It was thorough and humane and technical and scathing. It richly deserved its plaudits, especially in those dark and chaotic days of the Iraq war in 2005, 2006, and 2007.

So now Ricks has a new book out about the Iraq war following immediately from Fiasco. It is called The Gamble, and it is largely about the 'surge.'

But what is/was the surge?

It turns out the surge was really three distinct things orchestrated to happen at once. The first, and most familiar, was the increase in troop levels inside Iraq by roughly 30,000 men and women. the second was a complete reset of the American strategy in Iraq, led by Generals Odierno and Petraeus over the objections of almost everyone who had any say in the affairs of the United States Military. The third was the so called 'Sunni Awakening' which was, in point of fact, a billions of dollars effort to pay the Sunni insurgency to stop killing Americans and start killing Al Qaeda.

The most striking, perhaps, was the strategic shift.

Petraeus was an advocate of the polar opposite of the sort of war Donald Rumsfeld wanted to have. Rather than going small and fast and hard, Petraeus wanted to go big and long and slow. Petraeus wanted to fight the war in the way that counter insurgencies have been fought a dozen times before in and by other nations. Basically, he wanted the Americans to protect the people of Iraq, earn their trust, live among them, and damn everything else until the Iraqis settled down, trusted the United States and got on with the business of a relatively stable nation.

Much of Ricks' book is about the month to month metrics of the surge and the constant fight within the policy arms of the government to keep it going. For most of the book we are meant to feel that the surge is a qualified (though stunning even in its qualifications) success. American deaths in Iraq, after spiking sharply initially, begin to drop. Iraq civilian deaths begin to do the same. Neighborhoods begin to function after a fashion, and American troops begin to recover some of their morale and esprit du corps. But Ricks leaves for the last section of his book the reservations.

Basically, the Americans interposed themselves between the Sunni and Shia factions of a low boiling civil war. Eventually this bore fruit. But what happens when we leave? Moreover, since much of our strategy was arming and funding the very people who were killing us in the war's early years, what would happen to them and their weapons once we were out of the picture? Have we simply created the setting for a more balanced civil war? The object of the surge was meant to be to reduce violence enough for the Iraqi government to come to some kind of reconciliation with its people and begin to take on the responsibilities of securing and providing for its own people, but everyone seems in agreement that this, perhaps the most important aspect of the surge as originally conceived, has been an abject failure.

President Obama has made clear his intentions to draw down American forces to between 35,000 and 50,000 by next August and to remove all troops by 2011, but what we, none of us, know is how Iraq will respond. It may well be that the surge will come to be regarded as an almost mythical success within the armed forces, but it may well equally be that, in hindsight, it looks as though we delayed the inevitable at massive cost to both lives and treasure in order to masturbate with a fundamentally unstable pseudo-nation.

The book itself isn't as engaging a read as its immediate predecessor. It often feels rushed and more like a first draft than a coherent narrative of events. It bounces between so many interviews that say the same things that one is left with the impression that, though Ricks' access seems to have been deep and broad, that there was less of a story than the book set out to tell when it came time to actually write the thing. At times it can be fawning over Petraeus and Odierno (perhaps deservedly) and at other times it can be oddly silent about the world outside the top brass of the Army and the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Ultimately, what best explains the book and its rambling quality is the final line of the thing itself (I'm paraphrasing):

The events for which the Iraq war will be remembered probably have not yet occurred.

That is the most sobering and resonant moment in the whole book, actually.

Andrew Bird @ the Venue - February 25, 2009

Got to the show a bit late and had to cantilever Chiara and I into a riser on the balcony. Had to balance on one foot, supported with a hand levered against some kind of smudgy ceiling strut to see anything. Finally eked out enough space to both breathe and stand just in time for the opener to go on.

Loney, Dear was that opener. They are a sort of Jens Lekman cum Belle and Sebastian outfit (as, indeed, one might expect a Swedish band to be) but perhaps not so precious as the sum of those two parts. I was utterly charmed. I liked them well enough to come home and buy their most recent album.

As is usually the case when rushing into a purchase of an opening band's record, I was somewhat disappointed by the studio versions of the songs that had seemed so lively to me in person. Oh well. Was still a very nice opening set and set the stage quite well for Andrew Bird.

So Andrew Bird is is like the terminator designed by Wes Anderson. He whistles, he skinny ties, he goes shoeless on stage, he plays violin and is enamored of electronic beats and samples. It's a hipster wet dream if one is the sort of hipster who wears sport coats and listens to NPR.

Guilty.

The set was a good mix of material from his new album, Noble Beast, and most of his other records from the past six years or so. They are all of a kind, all as quirky, melodic, and enjoyable as the next. The audience was engaged and I felt happy being there. There was nothing to surprise me, having seen him live before, but for those of you who have not, his routine deserves to be explained.

So Andrew Bird is a sort of indie-folk version of Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins - you know, in the scene where he has the one man band apparatus on. Bird plays, as I've already mentioned, the violin, but he also plays the guitar, the vibraphone, and, in the sense that it can be played, his clarion whistle. On top of all that, his drummer runs the sample board while drumming, his bassist plays the saxophone and the clarinet and his second guitarist--well, he just played the guitar, really.

But, because he can't possibly play all of these at once (why not try strapping the drumkit to your inner thighs and the vibes to your lower back says I) he employs an array of stomp boxes the likes of which I've never seen. He'll play a brief bit of music on the violin and hit the stomp box to loop it. Then, he'll play another refrain and loop that. Then, he'll pluck a melody line on the violin and loop that. He might whistle a few seconds of something and loop that. Eventually, he'll play some chords on his beautiful Gibson Les Paul and loop those before finally settling in to the lead guitar bit and the singing of the song, all the while backed by a piece of music seven or eight players deep - all of which are he and his three bandmates.

So every song is a stereophonic palimpsest and half the fun for the audience is watching (and hearing) the thing being built and then controlled throughout by Andrew incessantly jabbing at the row of buttons arranged at in front of him with his socked feet, bringing back or silencing little snippets of music he put down live at the beginning of the number. Its a great show and one can't help but appreciate the effort when so many would have just prerecorded whatever samples they might need and played them the same every night. Add to all of this the fact that his voice is soaringly better live than on record - a kind of arch version of Jeff Buckley's morose but exquisitely controlled wail - and I think anyone would say they had been to a great show.

Cairo to Capetown via Curmudgeon

I once rented from Netflix a documentary series starring Michael Palin in which he traveled from Cairo to Capetown overland. It was warm and funny and humane and fascinating. The roads were shit (and worse), the boats and trains were dilapidated and slow, the food looked awful, and the nations through which one must travel in such a journey were (and still are) in terrible condition socially, politically, economically, environmentally, and medically. Still, Michael Palin's charms and Africa's splendors are such that I was envious of him and of his adventure. So it was with that interest intact, along with my own limited experience with the continent, that I dived with gusto into Paul Theroux's Dark Star Safari.

There are really only so many ways one can go from Cairo to Capetown overland (it is, afterall, a journey in only one direction), so Theroux and Palin visited many of the same locales. The two men's journeys could not, however, have been more different or more differently portrayed.

Palin is an affable traveler most of the time. He is, of course, a famous funnyman, British, and possessed of a calm, sunny disposition. Theroux is none of those things; he is the most famous misanthrope in the bookstore. He seems, at times, to hate everyone - especially fellow travelers, westerners, and intellectuals. At literally every opportunity he reminds the reader how much he loathes his life in the west, with its telephones and computers and familial obligations and how much he prefers the worst hovels and mudholes of a backwater village in the middle of nowhere. He hates beuraucrats with a passion, and loves the authenticity of decay, disorder, and defeat. Almost the only thing he and Palin have in common is their abiding love for their subject. Theroux, at the end of all of it, loves Africa deeply and personally and because of (not in spite of) its faults.

Theroux, for all his bile and condescension, is a fabulous writer. He can capture a place and a moment and a populace in a thousand ways, and none ever repeated or overused to the point of stereotype or cliche. He goes places most people don't want or feel safe to go and he goes there traveling routes noone would take - almost gleefully traveling wherever he is warned not to travel.

Reading the book, you get chaotic Arabic Africa, truly weird Ethiopian Africa, defeated and dangerous east Africa, failing central Africa, and prosperous (if emotionally dead) South Africa. You get the flavor of each of these places whole clove, and you get the sort of vignettes that you don't soon forget, though you're glad they aren't yours.

I hate Paul Theroux. Or anyway, I'd hate to be trapped in an elevator or a dinner party with him, but I dearly love his writing and his nomadic spirit. He's Anthony Bourdain without the self aggrandisement and posturing. He's V.S. Naipaul with a bias against his own culture instead of that he visits. He's mean spirited, cantankerous, ironic, keenly observant, and a really wonderful travel writer. If you have a thing for Africa, or just for travel books in general, this is one of the best.

Romance!

A quick update before I hop into the shower to have a drink. (who's gonna know?)

Chiara and I have apparently reached a point in our relationship where, when she comes home from work on Valentine's Day and finds me wearing pants, she asks me "Deed you go somewhere today?" in a suspicious tone.

I told her I had to get dressed for when the police came.

Homeless for the Holidays (At My House!)

One year, while living alone in a little house I rented, I had a Halloween party.

In the early part of the evening I stayed in and handed out candy to the trick-or-treaters and, because I was forever opening and shutting the door anyway, I didn't bother to lock it in between candy out-handing.

So I could hardly have been surprised when the seven foot tall homeless man, stinking of whiskey and pee (and of clothes washed in whiskey and pee) burst through my door and into my living room to "get away from the dude who stole [his] bike!"

At first I tried to humor him. Pretended to look outside. Told him I didn't see the guy he was running from - that the coast was clear. Somehow he took this elaborate pantomime as an invitation to sit on (and forever mar the smell of) my sofa.

He grabbed my phone off the coffee table and punched a long succession of numbers. While he sat there, fidgeting, holding the receiver against his head as though waiting while it rang on the other end, he told me he was calling the C.I.A.

When he finally got through to the C.I.A. he asked to speak with Mr. Santos.

He became enraged when he was, apparently, told that Mr. Santos had been transferred to another department and that they did not have a contact number. The homeless man held the phone away from his face and shouted into it "I ride with Jesus on a rickshaw!"

This all ended predictably, with me pushing my head into his chest in order to get him out the door, like trying to get an elephant onto an airplane.

So all that was years ago. The reason I mention it is that I am, apparently, the nexus in some cosmic relationship between the wheel of the year and drunken vagrantism.

Today, Valentine's Day, I received a telephone call from my delightful French neighbor, informing me that a drunken man was sleeping on my front porch (a sentence that sounds surprisingly sophistique in a French accent).

I laughed. Imagine if I'd gone to get the mail this afternoon. How long had he been there? As it was I had wandered by the front window half a dozen times today without seeing his sack-like body slumped in my Adirondack chair. But the sun was on him and he was sound asleep, drunk as a fish, blissfully unaware of my presence as I peered at him through the glass.

I wish I'd thought to take a photo before the police came. I called Eric to tell him about the whole thing and he didn't answer. If he had, he told me later, he would have convinced me to decorate the guy with tinsel and string - as a Valentine's Day gift for Chiara.

"Because that's a gift you can't buy in a store," he said.

As it was, I did the safer thing and just called the police.

In three minutes they had nine officers and four paramedics there. It was ridiculous.

Everyone seemed to be enjoying themselves, especially after they determined that the guy was basically okay - just hammered. They led him away and I got a picture of that. They would take him to a detox shelter and they said he would be fine. They handcuffed him, though. That seemed a shame.

Still, they told me as they were leaving that he was just out of prison - on parole for only two days. So maybe a good thing I didn't put glitter on his face after all, Eric.

One odd note more - after the cops took the drunk guy away from my house, I went outside to sniff the wet spot on the chair (only water - I think) and I checked the mailbox. The mail carrier had come and gone while the dude was passed out on my porch. I have to ask him about this the next time I see him. It won't be awkward, I have to talk to him anyway. For some reason we've stopped receiving the lingerie catalogs the previous owners received at this address and something has to be done, recession or no.

Somewhere, a Pair of Black Panties are Unidentifiable

Yes, you will tell me that there are scores of reasonable explanations, but fuck you.

I went to get into my car today and I saw this on the asphalt nearby.

Is it a Hello, my name is sticker, do you think?

I would lay money that it's in a woman's hand - so the chances of it being ironic or jocular are somewhat reduced. But could she have so many as to need a label just for these? Who labels articles of clothing this way, anyhow?

The mysteries are legion. Also, it kinda turned me on.

I think it would make a perfectly good album cover someday.

Playing with Dolls

I've gone back and forth on whether or not I wanted to "review" movies on this blog.

For one thing, I see so many of them. For another, I seldom have anything terribly interesting to say about them afterward. I'm plenty good at discussing things I liked about them in conversation, but every time I've tried to write about a film it has come off as either bloviation or bathos.

So here is my compromise with myself: I will try to do a blog about movies I see in the theatre, but not the scads of them arriving every month from Netflix or flickering late at night on the movie channels of my cable subscription. Moreover, I will try to just write a few words about each film.

Starting with the first film I saw in 2009, Coraline.

The first thing to be said is that it was great. The second is to gape slack-jawed at you (as best I can in text) in imitation of my reaction to the 3-D in which I saw the movie.

I don't know when this 3-D thing started to be legitimate, but I had no fucking idea. I was amazed and filled with real wonderment just watching this already beautiful film. You have to see it to believe it.

As for the film itself - creepy and memorable and visually stimulating while simultaneously tripping enough of the switches in our collective consciousness to have some real resonance.

For some reason, what sticks with me most (other than the eerie uncomfortableness it trucks in) is the lighting. There are so many light sources in every scene, some from in world sources (which are often weird and wonderful), and some from just out of frame, and they all bathe the film in a changeable light palette - sometimes cool and sepulchral and sometimes warm and languorous. The way the film uses the lighting to communicate mood is subtle and stirring and deserves to be paid attention to while you're in the theatre being wowed by the movement and the 3-D.

It isn't a perfect film, but the stop-motion animation is the best I've ever seen and the story stays with you after you leave the theatre. What more can you ask of it?

So, I say see it.

Perfect, Inspired by Perfect

I admit, up front, that it is entirely possible that the only reason I liked this well enough to post it here is that I am deep in the thrall of medicine head, buried under fathoms of Nyquil. Still, she does seem to get it, doesn't she?

Video found by someone at Buzzfeed.

Redoubtful, But a Nice Idea

Upon learning of the imminent volcanic eruption in Alaska, Chiara said:

"Good. Maybe we can finally keell Sarah Palin een lava."

Stay safe, rest of Alaska. We love you down here when you aren't Palining up the joint.

Videos Can Be Odd

Peter Bjorn and John "Nothing To Worry About"

Jeff versus Owls

Someone's dream of owls reminded me:

Once, years ago, on leaving a woman's house in the wee hours just before dawn, I walked to where I had parked my (convertible) car. There, perched on the steering wheel, was a small black owl, more or less the size and shape of a coke can.

I paused in the deserted street and watched it for a moment.

I slunk closer and closer, gripping my keys in my fist to prevent their jangling.

When I drew near enough that a lunge could have allowed me to touch it, it fluttered away into an overhanging tree. I watched for a moment and then pulled myself into my car, drowsy and anxious to get home to sleep away the day.

Just as I was shoving the key into the ignition I was smacked in the head by what I was sure was a rudely thrown pinecone.

But, as evidenced by the muffled flutter of wings in the branches above me, I had, in fact, been divebombed by an owl.

Another owl. Perhaps the mate of the one who had been sitting on my steering wheel. In any case, I lept out of my car and stood in slack-jawed shock in the middle of the road.

When I felt sure the little owls were going to stay put, I sauntered back to the car. This time I saw it coming and ducked.

One of the little, yellow-eyed terrors just clutched at the hairs on top of my head as it went past. I screamed or laughed (or both at the same time). I ran back to the girl's front door and knocked until she answered, already half asleep and now in only her underwear.

After a minute of convincing her that I was in earnest, she followed me into the street while I tried to find the owls in the tree. We must have stood there for three or four minutes, me gesticulating wildly and shouting in the now pinkish dawn, her in her panties and t-shirt, clutching herself underneath her breasts from the cold. Eventually, she assured me that she believed me, but begged off witnessing anything in favor of bed. Reluctantly, I let her go, sure that she thought I was exaggerating at best and lying at worst.

Just as she turned to go - pinecone to the back of the head.

I shout. Girl turns. Girl sees owl flying back into tree, away from the general area of my cranium. Girl sees self-satisfied Jeff, thrilled to have provided evidence of mad owl instead of owl madness.

She ended up standing there, jumping up and down and waving her arms - distracting the vicious things - long enough for me to jump in my car and speed away.

I often think about those stupid owls. What did they want with my car?

Hypnopop - February 5, 2009

I suppose I must have had this song in my head this morning because of their upcoming sophomore album, but I don't know why it would have been this particular song. I haven't heard it in months and months. Anyway:


Peter, Bjorn, and John

"Amsterdam"

Writer's Block