Hypnopop - January 30, 2009

Of all the songs I could have in my head when I wake up and get out of bed, I don't know that this is the one I'm most proud of. Nevertheless, it's catchy and I like it well enough - just not as much as some others by the same artists.

It's a Bee Gees cover, and Leslie Feist doesn't even perform it live in this arrangement (she opts for a slower, quieter, less dancy version) but this is the one I had on my cranium all morning. I'm a sucker for journalistic integrity.

Feist

"Inside and Out"

Let it Die

I Married Homer Simpson, Apparently

As I was working in the office down the hall, I heard Chiara suddenly yell out from the bedroom.

"YES! YES! YES!"

I assumed (hoped) that she was having some kind of orgasm. I asked what that was all about.

Turns out she was watching Oprah discuss donuts and what brought about the When Harry Met Sally moment was the revelation that glazed Crispy Creme donuts have fewer calories than ordinary cake donuts.

This, for Chiara, was something like a smoker discovering that cigarettes gave one the powers of time travel, invulnerability, and flight.

A Mirror with a Memory

Errol Morris did a photographic retrospective of the Bush presidency this week, using the photos and insight of several photographers from the Whitehouse Press Pool. Some of them are iconic and already familiar. Some of them are really stunning and revelatory. Check it out. (And don't just look at the pictures - read the damned article).

It IS Hard to Cut Through the Irony

I didn't spot this. Someone on Buzzfeed did. I just like it. I just like irony. And photos.

Paddle to the Plastic Straining Device

When I was a child, my mother used to read this rather sad little book to me called Paddle to the Sea.

It was about a little wooden carving of a Native American in a canoe that was set into a river somewhere in the upper Midwest or Canada or somewhere. You see, carved on the bottom of the canoe was a message entreating anyone who found the little man to place him back in the water so that he could find his way to the sea.

Through a series of misadventures (getting stuck in beaver dams or picked up by children - that sort of thing) his journey is thwarted and then continued anew as people eventually set him on his way again. Eventually he gets to the Atlantic Ocean, where, one can only imagine, he was eaten by a shark.

Anyway, this is a good deal like the journey of my kidney stone.

I've not heard from the spikey bastard in a couple of weeks. It has been paddling around in my bladder, I suppose. In any case, someone has read the inscription carved on its horrible underbelly and returned it to its purpose.

So now it seems to be on the move again, this time out the only way available to it and through the last, most awkward to describe leg of its journey.
Suffice to tell you that it hurts, but not so much as when it is in the kidney, knocking about and making one long for a nuclear missile to swallow. You feel that you have to pee a lot and then you don't pee. It is like a bumblebee is stuck in your urethra and is trying desperately to find its way out, blindly.
Oh yeah, and the bumblebee is wearing those football pads with the spikes - like in The Road Warrior.

Back on the meds.

When I catch the little fucker maybe I'll post a picture. Wouldn't that be terrible?

John Updike, R.I.P.

No book ever depressed me more than Rabbit, Run. I'm sorry he's dead. I don't know that T.C. Boyle and A.S. Byatt can edit every anthology of fiction, but now we'll have to find out.

Sir! Sir! You've Forgotten Your Debilitating Addiction!

On my way back home with my new TiVo, I saw a funny little tableau while stopped at an intersection.

A woman in a green apron was rushing out of a sandwich shop in the way that you do when you are trying to catch the person who just left their credit card on the counter when they walked out with their sandwich.

She called out repeatedly after a man who then stopped and turned to allow her to close the distance between them.

The man was clearly either a homeless person or a method actor gearing up to play a homeless person.

When the woman finally caught up to him I saw what she was racing to return to the man. It was a nearly full bottle of bottom shelf vodka. The woman held it like a dog turd for which she did not bring a plastic baggie, between two fingers and held away from her body at arm's length.

The man grasped the bottle with two hands, reverently, and thanked the woman profusely, as if it had not been his already and was, instead, some unanticipated gift.

I wish I could have heard them talking or seen the end of the encounter, but the light finally changed and I was off, taking my hopefully dead-behind-the-eye new TiVo home to begin its new life of recording slavery.

Skynet Junior

Had to replace my TiVo today because it was crawling out of the primordial ooze and struggling toward sentience.

Well, it isn't really a TiVo. It is a Motorola brand DVR provided by my cable service. But it is basically the same thing, only without the adorable sound effects.

So the squirrelly little box had been acting up for a couple of weeks now - recording television programs we had never asked it to record.

To add insult to injury, it had atrocious taste.

We'd come home after work and curl up for Top Chef or The Colbert Report and instead be asked to try out According to Jim or Wedding Wars or Burn Notice (whatever that is).

It was like my father had come over while we were out and reprogrammed the damned thing.

The last straw came last night when the little freak recorded not once, but twice, Good Will Hunting.

I swear it seemed to whisper at us "Ben Affleck has an Oscar for this movie," and "Robin Williams grew a beard for this movie; it must be a real movie. You should definitely watch it. Twice."

So today I had Chiara distract it while I pulled its plug and watched its little red eye slowly fade out. I drove it down to the offices of the cable company, pulled my service ticket and sat down on a hard plastic chair to wait for my number to come up on the overhead display.

I placed the TiVo two chairs to my right. I knew it was powerless without an electrical source, but it was still warm and I found it unnerving to have it in my lap.

When it came to be my turn, I dropped the box in front of the woman and asked her for a replacement TiVo - which she pulled out from a large cabinet and had me sign for in just a minute or two.

I leaned in conspiratorily and said "Make sure this one goes into the 'kill' pile before it becomes fully aware of itself."

The woman smirked at me and laughed. "No, we're training them," she said.

A cold shudder went down my spine as I turned to leave.

If the future history of our war with the machines records that the battlecry of the robot army was the theme song to the Tyra Banks Show, know that I did everything I thought I should at the time to prevent the metal armageddon.

It Still Doesn't Sound Any Good

While watching The Soup tonight, after laughing heartily at Tom Cruise's continuing festival of awkward, Chiara mentioned to me that his movie is number one in Germany.

"You know which movie is number one in Germany?" I asked, incredulously.

"Yes," she said. "It said on CNN that his movie was number one - you know, that one called Val Kilmer."

When I laughed, she demanded to know what the title really was.

I wouldn't tell her. I like hers much better, anyway.

Psychedelectronica

I've always had an arm's length sort of relationship with Animal Collective.

It has never been that I don't like the music they make or that I don't like the idea of them as a band - it was only some sense that I liked it better in theory than in practice - that I would never listen to a whole album of it, even if I could always be happy when someone else had it playing at a party. That sort of thing.

I guess I would say that I've had trouble "getting" Animal Collective.

The songs always seemed about four minutes too long and had more to do with shape than with progression or melody. Sometimes I felt looped out, if you know what I mean.

But I bought the Panda Bear solo record, Person Pitch, and while I almost never listen to it all the way through in one sitting, I love it. It is like a Brian Wilson orgasm. And that is a good kind of orgasm to have.

So after Merriweather Post Pavilion started to get all kinds of rave reviews, and after Tim came by to proselytize to me about Animal Collective for the hundredth time, I resolved to give it a shot.

And it's really good. I haven't quite gathered the enthusiasm for it that some have (I'm not ready, in January, to declare it the greatest album of 2009), but it is certainly the best I've heard from Animal Collective. Anyway, it is the most accessible I've heard them be and, with a band like this, that is really the same thing. I have a feeling it will grow on me the more I play it.

The usual elements are all in place: a dance record buried under multitracked harmonies and psychedelic flourishes, an indie record swimming in electronica touches and anthemic swells of sound. It isn't a record you can slide right into like a warm bath - this one, like all the Animal Collective output, will take some effort - but there are jewels here if you can mine them.

For me anyway, the effort has finally been rewarded.

And yes, the album art does that for me too. It's creepy and a surprisingly good approximation of the music inside (underneath? behind?).

Touche, Tubby

Me: walking down the concourse of the open air shopping center, returning from an eye exam.

Fat Kid: approaching from the opposite direction, wearing a tank top and athletic shorts.

The City: cold. snowbound.

Me: passing the fat kid, "aren't you cold?"

Fat Kid: banging on handheld game with stubby fingers, "I don't get cold. I'm fat."

Me: Sisyphean attempt to laugh in a way that conveyed amusement, but not agreement.

The City: sigh.

Distaff Disappointment

"Why would I spread my legs for that?"

This was the tantalizing snippet of conversation I overheard at dinner last night.

The speaker was one of seven women at a table together, cattycorner from the one where I sat with Chiara and our friends - where I was supposed to be bantering about god knows what. I'm sure my eyes went glassy and my face went slack; I willed all of my blood to my ears and tried to drown out the sounds of a busy restaurant at peak hours. These are the instinctive responses of a machine built by millions of years of evolution to hunt for masturbation material.

Gradually, it became clear that the women in question were talking, in some manner or other, about pregnancy and about visiting the gynecologist.

This is my closing argument in the case I have just decided to accept entitled women have terrible conversations v. no duh.

Or anyway, they don't talk about anything fun when alone together.

Or anyway, they don't when they are near me in a restaurant last night.

The Special This Evening is Waterboarding

Found myself at a dinner with a friend of mine and some of her coworkers.

At one point, apropos of nothing, my friend turns to me and says:

"You're a republican, right?"

I fell off of my chair and was unable to see or taste for several minutes. When I recovered, still in shock, I told her that I "was the most liberal creature she'd ever encountered. I would," I said, "grant trees the right to vote and animals representation in congress. "

she laughed. I continued, feeling on a hot streak.

"I want the government to pay for breast implants and for Obama to swear an oath on a gay baby."

This, it developed, was not the crowd for this sort of thing.

All of my friend's coworkers, I would soon discover, were of the 'double Guantanamo and put the environmentalists there' persuasion. The evening continued in a predictable fashion.

I wish I had been cool about the whole thing - aloof, suave, confident in the resounding victory of my ideology. I wish I'd weathered the "Obama won because the people are so uninformed and it's only a popularity contest," and the "Bush made us safer than we were eight years ago," and "torture is a subjective thing," and, worst of all, the "double standard of the media and the way they reported about Palin" with more aplomb.

As it was, it was all I could do to reassure them all that the coming socialist utopia would have a place for them, too.

Someone at the table eventually was successful in steering the topic to the Superbowl, and I admired them for it. Me, I was itching for a fight and would have liked nothing better than to get to gloat about the potential supreme court appointees. I had already suffered through being told that I only believed what I did because I was clearly a defense attorney (I'm not) and that I didn't understand America as I came from L.A., which was nearly Mexico anyway (that's stupid). I had a hardon to yack about the end of the war in Iraq and Planned Parenthood and the Kyoto treaty and all the other bugaboos of the conservative heart, but I ended up discussing whether or not Kurt Warner would make the hall of fame. (I argued yes, but that he didn't really deserve it. This was only vaguely controversial).

In the end, a man at the end of the table bought drinks for everyone. Everyone, that is, except for me.

I absorb your catcalls. I'll settle for winning the culture wars.

A Man's Life Swallows its Own Tail

So today, my friend says to me:

"My mother wants to be my friend on facebook. I don't know what to do."

And I said:

"Suicide."

Pulpy!

They're racy, they're books, they're art, they're postmodernist, and they're impossible except as photographs, which adds another po-mo dimension to them that I really like.

I think they're all great. Check 'em out HERE.

Noble, But Also Tame

On Noble Beast Andrew Bird has toned down and pulled it back and I don't quite know what to make of that.

The melodies are all there, the whistling too. The lyrics are still winningly peculiar, playing as much with rhyme as with the way words sound and mean differently. It's a very pleasant listen, but it seldom jumps up out of the speakers at you, as I think several moments on his last full length album, Armchair Apocrypha did.

Every Andrew Bird album can be a bit samey and can have a kind of soporific effect, but Noble Beast is especially low-key throughout with really only one song ("Fitz and the Dizzyspells") to leaven the mood.

I heard a radio interview with Mr. Bird where he talked about the recording of Noble Beast. He said they started in the studio with the vocals and worked their way down (or up, depending) from there - and that's exactly what this album sounds like from time to time: like the rhythm tracks were the afterthoughts. It isn't that this quality makes the album especially one thing or another, but it has moments of bloodlessness that have me feeling it will fade in my memory.

I also felt that way about swaths of Bird's album Weather Systems, and to no surprise, this record was produced by the same guy.

Maybe it is only because of world events, or the season, but I find myself wishing for an album of more jagged, angular indie-folk. It isn't fair, I suppose, to impose some kind of particular expectation on the album; I ought just accept it for what it is and enjoy it.

And I am, mostly - the first half of the album especially. "Oh No" and "Fitz and the Dizzyspells," especially, are instantly memorable and chug along nicely. It went well with a glass (or three) of port and a well-stoked fire last night - but I'd be hard pressed to recall more than two or three of the fourteen tracks.

I will tell you this much: I went to see The Shins, Belle and Sebastian, and Andrew Bird at the Hollywood Bowl and Andrew Bird was the best of the lot by far. If you get the chance, go see him and his ridiculous live multitracking - its a lot of fun watching a man juggle a violin, a guitar, a xylophone, and a microphone all at once and still make really lovely music in the process.

Bon Iver's Sonic Snowangel Serenade

I don't know when a proper follow up to this year's For Emma, Forever Ago is planned for release, but I understand the four tracks on Bon Iver's new EP, Blood Bank, were not recorded in the For Emma sessions.

Mostly they are of a kind with the songs on that album, though they also branch out into new sonic territory, grasping for a fuller and perhaps even more insular sound. the song "Babys" particularly comes to mind, with its tense and intense piano chords, and Justin Vernon's autotune on the track "Woods" is unlike anything yet heard from the Wisconsinite (Wisconsonian?).

If you felt, as I did, at the end of For Emma, Forever Ago, that you needed more of Bon Iver and quick, you'll be happy to hear at least most of Blood Bank.

Obamamerica, Day One

Eight years ago, the Onion ran an article about Bush's inauguration. The headline, a quote from the Onionverse's Bush inauguration speech, read "Our Long National Nightmare of Peace and Prosperity is Finally Over."

Who knew then how prophetic the little satiric newspaper would be?

After Obama's inauguration, I think the entire globe let out its breath for the first time in years. We barely got out alive.

In any case, Obama's speech seemed, at times, a thinly veiled rebuke of the Bush years and an only lightly coded message to America and the world that that whole nonsense - the anti-science, the fanaticism, the extra-legality, the unilateralism, the arrogance, the warmongering, the anti-environmentalism, and the anti-regulatory attitude - were all in the past and an aberration at that. Add to this the subtle charge that it was time for America to grow up and leave behind its reckless teenage years and the speech seemed to cover the next four years like a blanket. The rhetoric was not high flying most of the time, but the sentiment was intense and grounded in a way that felt reassuring, even in its sobriety.

I, for one, feel, for the first time in years and years, in awe of my country and civilization. Nothing will come off quite as well as I might dream it will, I'm sure, but everything is going to be better (it would have a hard time being worse).

I've never been so close to buying a flagpole.

America on, bitches.

p.s. how cool is Barack Obama? check out the new Whitehouse website, where you can, among other unprecedented transparencies, read the actual text of any and all executive orders, see the name and appointment of every single person nominated for a job by the executive branch, and read the actual text of the agenda the pres. plans to pursue while in office. I know it makes me a nerd and a wonk, but I get all curfluffled over ethics and civics. Oprah can have her grand love stories and tales of overcoming hardship - give me the simpler and deeper pleasures of an open and responsive democracy any day to get me all misty eyed.

The Jennifer Dispatches II: The Things That Make My Father Laugh (Make No Sense)

My sister sent this email to me today. I can only assume she wanted me to post it here, the curious phrase "off the record" notwithstanding.

"Hey.

Tim and I were up at Mom and Dad's last night. We watched several episodes of Dirty Jobs with Dad, which is a show that makes Tim and I laugh - when it is not about animal hides - then it just makes us feel . . .well, dirty.

So, anyway, we are watching it and Dad is laughing and saying things like "oh my god" - (you know in the way he does where his voice goes up at the end) and asking questions like "now why would he do that?" - (you know in the way that he does). He keeps saying how amazing it is that this guy would do all of these horrible things just to get on TV. He complains and complains, but I swear to god he was laughing so, so hard. Why do you think he pretends to not like things that he does like?!

Oh and off the record, while we were watching television there was a commercial for some random sitcom on TBS or ABC or something like that. I didn't see this clip, I just heard it, but basically there was some joke where the woman says two female names and I guess probably pointed to her breasts or something because then the guy says "You named them?!?!?!"

I'm not exaggerating; Dad laughed for five minutes, and in Dad fashion kept on loudly repeating "You named them?!?!" "You named them?!?!"

Tim and I just looked at each other across the room and tried to laugh a little so that we didn't draw attention to the fact that we were actually both paralyzed with awkwardness and laughing at Dad. It may not be as funny on paper, but I wish you had been there to share in the paralymazment.

Anyway I hope things are okay with you. Talk to you soon. Love you."

It's No Billie Holiday Impersonation

I've only just completed David Sedaris' most recent book of short stories entitled When You Are Engulfed in Flames.

I'm a big fan of his. I can remember laughing - really laughing - at most of the brief essays in Naked or Barrel Fever, but this one left me a little cold.

I kept wondering if it was me or him that had lost something. Had I gotten too used to his cadences and rhythms? Had he become a victim (like so many artists) of the comfort brought with success? After all, comfort and happiness are to be desired in life, but in art they bring often meager rewards.

Whatever it was, most of the stories in When You Are Engulfed in Flames, while perfectly entertaining and droll, failed to really grab me and shake any emotions out of me - least of all the one I most wanted to find between its covers: amusement.

Most of the stories are rather contented domestic tales of life in a French villa. Only the novella length diary of Mr. Sedaris' attempts to quit smoking (which closes the book) really reaches the heights I was looking for.  Maybe it is because that longish cycle of journal entries takes place largely in Japan that it comes off so well - nothing feeds the would-be chronicler of awkward moments like a foreign culture, and, it turns out, nothing is so sure to produce awkward moments as time spent trying to be an unobtrusive, effete, gay man in Japan.

In any case, in reading over this quick thumbnail review, I feel I've been too hard on this little book. If you like David Sedaris, you'll like it. It might not have the power to arrest you with freshness, as did some of his earlier collections, but it is like having dinner with an old friend who always tells funny stories - you might know their shape and the sorts of things your friend is likely to say or do, but that is part of the pleasure in the end.

Rome: So Few Roads Seem to Lead to Our Hotel

After we were married, Chiara and I and some family and friends all drove down to Rome. We were numerous enough that we had to drive three separate cars and, with my father driving one of them, we were all but guaranteed to have problems of one kind or another.

First off, my father drives like an Italian. He drives fast; he drives aggressive; he drives with a kind of emotional certainty that every other motorist, every pedestrian, every feature of the road, and every traffic law is out to thwart him, personally.

I drive like an American who is extraordinarily nervous to be driving in Italy - and this is the surest way to incur the wrath and derision of every Italian motorist within a ten mile radius of my reasonably paced, turn indicating, hesitant-at-intersections automobile.

Now, add to this the either malfunctioning or sadistic GPS unit that we rented, along with the cars, from the counter at the airport. The device was one of those that could be attached to the windshield by a spittle-powered suction cup, specially designed to lose adhesion if you coughed, sneezed, changed lanes, or looked at it hoping to see a map with a helpful arrow displayed on it. It spoke in an antiseptic, rather snooty, English accent when it gave directions (which it only did when it was in the mood, and then often miles after they would have been useful) and because it had the voice of a woman, I could never escape the feeling that it was judging me, or nagging me to pull over and ask some GPS device on the side of the road for better directions.

Each of us had one of these aloof British women in our car, but only my father trusted her completely. He abdicated all responsibility for the operation of his vehicle to this prattling bitch and was content to follow her instructions off a cliff or through a field if she commanded it. It did not matter what highway signs told him or what we would scream into our cellphones as he barreled down some abandoned private road, if the GPS said left in 200 meters, my father turned left in exactly 200 meters.

Even this might have eventually led to a successful delivery of our personages at the hotel in Rome but for Rome itself.

Rome may be the loveliest city on earth. It's vivacious and alive, but also ancient and dilapidated (in the charming sense of the word, if there is one). It has more fountains than really seems necessary and enough churches to bore a nun. Every other building has a good restaurant and the shops overflow with an abundance of pointy shoes and orange pants. I love Rome. I'd live there. But I'll never drive there again.

First off, the roads are really just a warren of intertwining, cobblestone footpaths, seemingly rigged at every blind corner (and they're all blind corners) with some kind of large gun that expels Vespas at fifty miles per hour.

Then there are the street signs, which don't exist.

And finally there are the Romans themselves, who drive as though they are in a demolition derby but have been equipped with personal forcefields so that no collisions can ever take place - an astonishing technology that only seems to aggravate them further. They are a nation of formula one enthusiasts and they regard even a second's hesitation behind the wheel as weakness. The whole city is a wall-to-wall cacophany of honking and shouting over shaken fists. I felt like a hamster dropped into a rollerderby arena.

A Roman driver will cut in front of you if he or she is given roughly ten percent of the length of their car to work with. Inside three minutes, all of our cars had been split off from one another. The GPS was feeling especially moody it seemed and refused to speak at all once we passed the old Roman Empire era walls around the center of town.

I could sort of follow my father's low sedan up ahead when the road turned in just such a way, but when he turned down a street it was always a panic - would we or wouldn't we guess the right direction? Finally, four or five cars ahead of us, my father turned left, into a street blocked off with those heavy, saw-horse type road blocks and guarded by three carabinieri. I just screamed.

The carabinieri gesticulated wildly and hurled Italian at my father, who was speeding away down the closed street, and one took out a small notepad to write down the license plate information. I gawked for a split second and was jarred out of my reverie by the angry honking of the cars behind me. I drove on ahead, lamely hoping there'd be another way to get left right away to try to follow the spirit, if not the letter, of my father's driving.

Of course, Rome doesn't make half so much sense as that. Instead, we burrowed further and further into the city, past embassies and the river and monuments and the river again. Occasionally the GPS would chirp that I ought to take a sharp right turn into the Tiber or that we should drive a further 500 meters and then veer slightly right to plow headlong into an obelisk. The Cunt.

The final indignity, for me, was when, just at the moment I felt most frazzled and ineffective, we pulled up to a stoplight from which I had to either turn right or left and I didn't have a clue how to decide. I happened to glance to my left at the car pulling up next to me only to find myself mere inches from the smallest little red vehicle I'd ever seen being driven by a twelve year old boy. Another twelve year old boy sat in the passenger seat and, as I stared at them, the driver revved his engine (it sounded like an angry hornet in a jar) and quickly jutted his chin at me in what seemed to me to be a clear attempt at intimidation. The boy in the passenger seat just stared blankly at me - didn't even glance away when I caught his eyes with my own. I barked a laugh to keep from crying.

Finally, after several weeks and a brief consideration of cannibalism, we finally hit on the idea of hiring a cab driver to drive in front of us all the way to our hotel. Explaining this idea to the Italian cabbie required only a further six months.

Eventually, we pulled in front of the large former Russian embassy that was now our hotel, exhausted and full of sour hatred for the Eternal City. My father was there, waiting for us. Naturally, he was furious with me for not following him down the blockaded street.

And that reminded me of a particular detail of the whole ugly procession of the afternoon that had really been gnawing at me. Why had the blocked off street needed three carabinieri to guard it? Why, indeed, had it even need one? It had, after all, those big wooden sawhorse things. I asked Chiara and she screwed up her most quizzical expression and managed to twist it into one of derision smoothly - a feat managed, in my experience, only by Italians.

"Because otherwise," she began, staring at me like I was a rank imbecile, "otherwise, people would get out of their cars and move the barriers and drive down the street."

And this absolutely floored me, because I would have never even considered the idea of moving the road blocks. They could just as well have been something totally impassable, like a brick wall or a pit of lava or a strip of yellow tape that read 'do not cross.' I (and I imagine most Americans) see a road block and the message it imparts is crystal clear and invites no compromises:

"There is no longer a road here, you must go elsewhere."

But as much as it said something quaint and vaguely robotic me, it said something equally quaint and picaresque about Italians:

They actually had to position three police officers in front of two large wooden sawhorses blocking a street because, for an Italian, everything is just a puzzle to be solved or a game to be rigged. Imagine an entire civilization of schemers, wired on espresso and driven half batty by the inadequacy of their roads, and then imagine what that does to rush hour on a Friday.

My father, and Italy, it is not lost on me, has out Steve McQueened me.

At Least behind the wheel of a rented car in a foreign city.

Hypnopop - January 17, 2009

It has been a while since I woke up with a song in my head, but today I did. It's the catchiest song to simultaneously turn me on and depress me in absolutely ages.

MGMT

'Time to Pretend'

Oracular Spectacular

But Fear Itself

Just finished reading The Great God Pan by Arthur Machen. It was really good.

As I've been reading these classic horror novels and short stories I've gradually begun to piece together some thematic elements common to all of them. I can't say what it might have been about the last decade of the 19th century, but there was a sudden glut of terror tales going around and they, all of them, had something rather striking in common; they hide the ball.

The Great God Pan is an epistolary novel (mostly) and, as such, by its very nature, obscures events between the letters which make up the narrative and conceals events not known by the writers of those letters. So, right from the start the reader is fumbling a bit in the dark. Add to this a kind of late Victorian insistence on discretion and you have the makings of a gripping story glimpsed through a glass but darkly.

But all that is by way of explaining the particular reticence of The Great God Pan and does very little to describe what I think is so consistent between all of the stories I've read recently that were written at more or less the same moment in history. What I mean when I say that these tales "hide the ball" is that they resist the temptation to tell the reader what he or she is really meant to be afraid of. The whole story is absolutely chock-full of intimations of horror and rumors of unspeakable events, none of which are ever actually narrated.

This has a two-fold effect; it draws the reader in because he or she is hoping so desperately for even one fleeting look at the nightmare, and it preserves the nightmare. It preserves the trick that all good storytellers work. Because one never really does get explanations or descriptions of the central horrors, one is free to imagine them in all their id-fueled glory without ever having to make them solid and mundane - bound to one shape only to be addressed and overcome.

In other, less windy, words, the terror of all of these classics tales of terror is, quite simply, terror - the emotion itself; the sense that something is stalking you that you cannot escape. The death instinct, perhaps.

Go out and pick up a copy of The Great God Pan. It's all about an experiment gone awry and the progeny of a union between, you guessed it, the Great God Pan, and a mortal woman - a union that has dire consequences for all involved, natch. I felt almost bad for the hit job done on good ole Pan, but I certainly am not clamoring for an audience with goatpants hornhead after reading this one through.

Chiara versus the Moon

When you are single for a long time and possessed of a certain temperament suited mostly to actors, English majors, and suicides, you coat your future romantic relationships with a kind of high-gloss shellac.

You lie in bed and imagine lie-ins with girls whose faces you meticulously construct from those of b-list celebrities. You picture yourself reading a poem or two aloud and her rapt with interest. You fantasize about the conversations you'll have about cinema and the arch witticisms she'll make from behind her novel that she's reading in only her underwear and her knee high socks.

In any case, you prepare yourself for romantic interludes and you imagine you'll be so good at them.

Real life is a series of shatterings of fantasies like these. If you're lucky you'll realize that you are much better off without these things.

Chiara is, in so many ways, superior to any girl I was ever with. She's lovely and sexy in a calm, collected, sultry way that never tries too hard or poses for the camera. She's smart and commonsensical and self-assured. She's easy going enough to forgive my neuroses, but neurotic enough herself to charm. One thing she is not, often to my great delight, is sappy or very much interested in traditional notions of romance.

I tried once or twice to read a poem I particularly enjoyed to her. I even tried in bed. Mostly this was simply tolerated. In the event that the poem in question was any longer than a stanza or three, she'd probably ask me if I could keep it down as she was trying to watch "The Biggest Loser" on television.

So I don't know what I expected would happen that night with the moon.

It was late - the middle of the night. I woke up thirsty and padded down the hall to get a glass of water. On the way back from the kitchen I passed by the window and caught a glimpse of the moon and it was fucking huge. I never saw a moon so full and so large. It was as big as a house seen from across the street and as bright as a searchlight pointed at your head. It positively hummed with proximity and I could feel its gravity tugging on the hairs on the backs of my arms. I remember thinking for the briefest of moments that something had gone horribly wrong in the Earth's orbit and that the moon would crash into us at some not too distant hour.

I rushed to the bedroom and woke Chiara. She'd never have believed me if she hadn't seen it with her own eyes.

She swam slowly up from unconsciousness and asked me what was the matter. I told her that she simply had to see the moon because it was the most amazing moon she'd ever see. Groggily, she got out of bed and allowed me to tug her into the living room where I positioned her between the window and myself. My mouth was slack and I beamed at the back of her head.

"Isn't that the most amazing moon! Did you ever see a moon like that?!" I whispershouted in her ear.

"It's the moon," she said, and turned to shuffle back to bed, "I've seen the moon before."

And I don't know why - now it seems so stupid - but at the time that felt like a real rejection to me. I was hurt and felt like I'd taken some wrong turn in my love life. I stayed a while to look at the moon. As it rose higher in the sky it shrank and faded and I got tired again and went to bed. I felt cheated for a while after that.

But now it all seems so dumb. Every emotion and event and vision and idea isn't going to be experienced by one and one's wife in the same way or with the same force. I know that Chiara would be insufferable to me if she were one of those hearts and roses and diamond rings sort of women. I even know that the story wouldn't exist at all if it had turned out just how I'd hoped that night, and I know that the story is better than some gigantic fucking moon four years ago.

And I further know that if Chiara was prone to my whimsy and impulsiveness and romantic flights of fancy, we'd probably be professional balloonists by now rather than urbanites who pay our bills on time.

Come to think of it, ballooning might not be so bad. I could have a balloon painted to look like the moon. But not the real moon. The sort of Edwardian moon of Little Nemo comics or early silent films. The one with the horrible face and the greenish tint (from the cheese, I expect).

After I finish writing this blog, I'm going to get in bed and tell Chiara my idea for a hot air balloon and she is going to get the most quizzical expression on her face and then she will roll her eyes and nod in that way one does to lunatics when one wants to mollify them.

I'll love her all the more for it.

My Father's Graven Image

Once, on visiting my parent's house, I found my mother working with some old boxes of photographs.

They were all from the early sixties - from the early days of my parent's relationship. In them, my mother is (I hesitate to say it) beautiful. She's thin and blonde and smiles like a sphinx with the head of Farrah Fawcet.

My father, on the other hand, is the dorkiest creature to ever pour himself into a pair of sideburns.

And what sideburns! They are like the eyebrows of a giant!

He looks like a contest winner who cut out enough UPCs from Boyslife Magazine to get to meet a real live girl. Actually, in this particular photo I'm remembering, he looks like the contest winner who won the chance to meet the girl, but really wanted the hovercraft made from a vaccum cleaner motor.

I laughed and laughed. I asked my father what kind of mickey he slipped her to get her to go out with him.

"What do you mean?" asked my father, in reply.

"I mean," said I, "Did you take a correspondence course in hypnotism or something? How on earth did you convince this girl to go out with you. Look at yourself!"

My father leaned over and looked at the photo.

"What sort of thing is that to say?" he asked me, his brow furrowed.

"C'mon," I said, widening my eyes and slumping my shoulders, "No way were you good looking enough to go out with a girl like this. What was Mom thinking?"

My father grew angry. Not smirk and roll your eyes and snort with derision angry, but actual, honest to god, hate you angry. He told me that was a terrible thing to say and that he didn't understand why I'd say something like that. He huffed off to the den to watch television.

He wouldn't speak to me for two days.

I wish to everything I hold dear that I had a scan of that photo to include here. Maybe one day I can pilfer it and upload it to this blog. Check back from time to time.

But all of this is just a way of imploring, through metaphor, any who should happen to read this blog to never, ever, explain to my father what a blog is, how to find one on the internet, or that his son has one in which he figures sporadically.

He would not understand.

A Kind of Lovecraftian Deliverance

What is it about traveling down a river with a friend that lends itself to all things horrific? I feel like I've been on river trips and the worse thing that happened to me is that we capsized and I lost the Spiderman figure I had glued to the prow of the canoe.

Anyway, as part of my sudden binge on classic horror stories, I just read a collection of them by Algernon Blackwood. (Seriously, did his parents expect him to be anything other than an Edwardian horror writer?)

The best story of the bunch was called "The Willows" and it was H.P. Lovecraft's personal favorite story. I am hardly surprised.

Its about two guys on a trip down the Danube in a canoe who camp overnight on a mysterious island overrun with, no duh, willows. But that's not all - the island is full of strange goings on and genuinely creepy stuff. There is a strong suggestion that the island is some kind of a gateway between this world and something else and that the things in the other world don't like the things from our world very much. I dunno. You should read it. I'll post the link to it below.

It was written in 1907, but it still has real punch. I was honestly creeped out by it and found the narrative suspenseful enough to read it through in one go. It has a light touch where it ought to and never gives away the nature of the particular horrors the characters are up against. That kind of restraint serves it well, and left me satisfied in ways that Lovecraft himself often does not.

In any case, if you have a thing for classic horror stories, you can see for yourself whether this hundred year old short story has the juice:

The Willows by Algernon Blackwood

Updates From the Front (or Rather, the Lower Flank)

Lately it is quiescent.

I can only assume it is crouching in the moist darkness, waiting for the opportune moment to launch another spasmodic orgasm of pain.

I'm considering shrinking a group of doctors and ingesting them (along with their submarine, of course).

Know any good nephrologists who are handy with a shoulder-mounted laser?

When I Lived Alone

I used to live in an apartment on the top floor of a smallish apartment building. I had to carry groceries up all the flights of stairs because the building had no elevator, and the walls were so thin I could follow the neighbors television shows from my bedroom, but all of this was made worthwhile by the view and the little buzzer I had on my intercom that would open the door for visitors down below (like in Seinfeld!). Also, the apartments were brand new and had really nice kitchens. The bathrooms, however, had carpet and I never did get over the sensation of stepping out of a shower, soaking wet, onto a plush, synthetic fiber carpet.

In any case, the apartment directly below mine was one of those cursed units that could never hold a tenant for more than a couple of months. I had fighting couples, sad-sack bachelors, elderly divorcees, and, once, even a fashion model. The worst downstairs neighbor I ever had (who was, in fact, one of the precipitating factors for my moving out of the building, finally) was a nameless and shirtless man who resembled nothing so much as a whaler from the nineteenth century.

I don't mean that he had a captain's hat and a pegged leg, or that he smoked a scrimshaw pipe and had a mustache-less beard, but rather that he looked as whalers actually looked in those days.

He was shirtless and grizzled and scarred and absolutely covered in tattoos. He even smelled a bit like whale blubber. And though he didn't ever smoke a scrimshaw pipe in my presence, he most certainly did smoke. He smoked pretty much all day. He smoked early in the morning and in the middle of the night and in seemingly every room in the joint. I could follow him around in his his apartment from my apartment by walking, hunched over, and sniffing incessantly at the vents in my various rooms, chasing the scent trail from the living room into the bathroom and then back into the living room and then the kitchen.

It was maddening. I'd take showers sometimes three times in a day just to get the scent of his cigarette smoke out of my hair. I couldn't prepare a meal without feeling sure that I could taste smoke in it. I'd wake up in the middle of the night, thrashing in anger because my bedroom smelled like an O.T.B. I used to jump up and down on the floor when the smell was especially potent, hoping against hope that the banging noises from upstairs would be interpreted as the histrionics of a much heavier and thoroughly insane upstairs neighbor and that I'd get a respite from ashtray life, if only for long enough to eat a plate of Totino's Pizza Rolls.

Did I call the landlord? Of course I did. I was always assured that it had been taken care of. It never was taken care of..

Did I go downstairs and demand that he stop with the smoking? I did not.

Why didn't I? Because I was afraid of him.

But at some point, my cigarette smoke induced madness overwhelmed even my self preservation and I went downstairs, loudly, stepping heavily on every step and plodding with what I hoped was foreboding down the hallway to his door.

I rang the bell. I tried to stand to the side a bit, hoping to be out of the view of the spyhole. I wanted the element of surprise. (When you are five foot eight and itching for a fight with a six foot harpooner, surprise is often all you have).

When the burly, shirtless, chimney came to his door, I lost all of my nerve. He was taller and broader than me. His face was deeply lined with furrows and cracks. His shoulders had tufts of graying hair sprouting from their tattoos. He had a beer in one hand and a look on his face that suggested he might rather be doing something else at that particular moment - something like, say, tearing a puppy from limb to limb.

"Hey, I'm from upstairs," I said.

" . . . " said he.

"Look," I said, "Is there someone smoking down here?"

And I took the opportunity provided by my sentence to glance around at the apartment. It was terrifying. There was no furniture. I mean, not a stick of it. But all over the floor, sitting alone in the middle of a carpeted expanse or clumped in balls of two or three in the corners as though they'd been blown by the wind, were plastic grocery bags. There must have been hundreds of them. There was even a plastic grocery bag hanging from the faucet in the kitchen, waiting for its starring role as the world's saddest watering can perhaps, or for its nightly duty as world's least effective drinking implement.

What kind of monster lives by himself, surrounded by plastic bags, in an otherwise nicely situated and costly apartment? I shuddered to think. He seemed to read my thoughts and shut the door maybe half a foot so that he occupied the entire space of its openness and all I could look at was his hairy and graffiti covered chest.

"Nobody's smoking in here," was all he said.

"Well, its just that I smell smoke upstairs coming through he vents, so look, if anyone is smoking, please have them do it outside, okay?"

"Yeah, but nobody's smoking in here."

"All right then, thanks." and I made for my apartment, suddenly convinced that I'd be murdered with a gaff-hook in my sleep.

The smell never did go away. I made plans to move out. One night, four days before I actually left the building, the police arrived and, after much commotion, arrested the old whaler and two other guys. I never did find out what for, but I have wracked my brain for years trying to figure what the plastic bags had to do with it.

The Motif of Harmul Sensation

An always delightful literary device, the motif of harmful sensation is present in what are some of my favorite stories. The basic idea is that an object can have an effect on a person simply by virtue of being seen or heard or touched. Usually that effect is one you'd rather not have had.

Some examples:

The Zahir by Jorge Luis Borges

Medusa, in the Myth of Perseus

'The Funniest Joke in the World' sketch by Monty Python

Folk tales are full of these sorts of things: the evil eye, the danger of looking directly at a god, the once popular idea that anyone who read all of The Thousand and One Nights would go mad.

One of the great exemplars of this small but charming genre is The King in Yellow, by Robert Chambers, which I have just finished reading. It is a book of loosely connected short stories all featuring (either in passing or in the forefront of the narrative) a fictional book called, surprisingly enough, The King in Yellow. Anyone who happens to read this insidious book either goes slowly mad or dies soon after.

The stories were all written in the late 1890s and one can tell. They have a kind of Victorian quaintness and perhaps even stiffness about them that is a dead giveaway. Chambers wrote scores of sappy romance stories when he wasn't penning horror tales and that influence is also keenly felt. Still, they go down easy, are creepy enough, and were terribly influential on H.P. Lovecraft and Arthur Machen and guys like that, so they have plenty to recommend them.

I haven't put much thought into a review of the book, but it is easy to at least say the following two things about it:

Anyone who is a fan of classic horror stories would get a kick out of these.

The King in Yellow isn't high literature, but it made for a really pleasant snack of a read and I don't regret the afternoon spent on it.

Hypnopop - January 12, 2009

I hate to admit it, but this is the song that I have had stuck in my head since I woke up this morning. I can't recall having heard it in ages, but there you go. My brain can play low level practical jokes on me, same as my iPod.

Electric Light Orchestra

'Living Thing'

A New World Record

My Reagan Era Threeway

So let's say I've decided to seduce these two P.Y.T.s after successfully picking them up at a discotheque.

The first thing I'd need to do is get them comfortable in my loft apartment. I'd seat them on my black leather sofa and get them each a glass of merlot. I'd casually mention that the cocaine (I'd probably call it "blow") was in the tastefully african decorative box on the glass coffee table and I'd go to remove my skinny tie (taking the opportunity to make sure my bathroom and bedroom were in order). A little dash of Drakkar Noir and I'm back in the room, checking to make sure the ladies are okay. They are.

I put some music on my Blaupunkt:

After this, the merlot, and the blow, we'd probably adjourn to the bedroom. I'd put Ladyhawke in the vhs player and turn the sound all the way down. The light from my neon clock radio would play off of all the reflective surfaces in the room - the metal furniture, the tempered glass television stand, the poster of the lamborghini countach.

Hopefully, in the morning, I'd be able to get them out of the place early enough that I could still get in a jog before I had to get to my job working on Wall Street or in an Advertising Agency.

Probably when I came home at the end of the day, I'd find a single shoulderpad one of them had "forgotten" under my pillow. The other one of them would likely have "forgotten" her high-waisted panties.

I'd unroll the sleeves of my blazer and pop open a wine cooler before settling in to watch Airwolf.

Hypnopop - January 7, 2009

Today I woke up with this song in my head. I couldn't even remember what it was. I only remembered the drums and the nasal. I had to comb my iPod for the answer. Like finally finding the peg that fits the hole, it was immensely satisfying to finally hear those drums and the nose of Dan Bejar.


Destroyer

'Painter in Your Pocket'

Destroyer's Rubies




p.s. god, that's a great album cover.

Hit Me with Your Best Soup

Stepping out of the car this morning at the gas station (happy to get a brief respite from the pungent smell of tomato soup that Tim carries with him every morning; a smell-scarf he wraps around his head before he leaves the house), I walked past an enormous tan-colored Chevy Suburban with Wyoming plates idling in the parking space in front of the little convenience shop.

In the driver's seat was a burly, cowboyish fellow, late thirties/early forties. Wafting from the vehicle, like the smell of soup off of a Tim, was Pat Benetar's "Hit Me with Your Best Shot."

I went into the little shop and bought some window washing fluid. I paid and then made my way back to my car, all the while being implored to "fire away-ay!"

While I was filling the reservoir under the hood, I had a chance to hear most of the song. When it finally faded away, I waited with pronounced interest to find out what this guy would be listening to at full volume next. To my surprise, it was Pat Benetar's "Hit Me with Your Best Shot."

I finished refilling the fluid in my car, closed the hood, and crawled back into the driver's seat where I was greeted with a nearly palpable rush of soup. (what IS that, anyway?)

Kidney Stone Again

Spent Saturday night writhing on the floor (and other surfaces) of the emergency room in high comic style - clawing at the walls, mewling and moaning, tearing at my hair, and just generally making a spectacle of myself.

It was like nothing so much as a community theatre presentation of Altered States, and I was William Hurt in the big climax!

At one point I wept openly in front of a doctor and two nurses.

After being loaded up with Morphine and Tramadol, I was able to stop thrashing enough to speak in complete sentences and eventually I was sent home where I vomited for the fifth (a personal record) time that day.

Chiara was really great and didn't complain about sitting by me in the hospital room even once in all those hours. At one point I encouraged her to explore the building and report back to me if she found the morgue. She resisted even this seemingly irresistible opportunity so as not to miss a minute of my swearing, gnashing, clutching, wheezing, weeping, torsional performance as Jeff, Amateur Werewolf.

I'd like to think I did her proud, especially when, in my incessant and agonized contortions, I nearly twisted the hospital gown right off of me whilst the vaguely granola nurse took my blood pressure. Chiara did her best to keep the garment covering what all (her included) would rather not see.

If I had been a sentient creature at the time, I would have thanked her.

That night, at three thirty in the morning, when we finally crawled into bed, me in a percocet haze and still raw with pain and her bleary eyed and sore from a day working and then tending to her Gollum-like husband, I slept rather well.

She, on the other hand, had nightmare after nightmare. In the morning, she wouldn't tell me about those nightmares, but I knew what they were: dreams of unspeakable things - things like the brief glimpse of lint revealed in my navel as I arched on a hospital bed. Things like the sound made by a thirty year old man when he hiccups at the same time that he sobs and grunts in agony.

But then, these are the things every girl dreams of in a husband.

You're welcome, Chiara.

Hypnopop - January 4, 2009

As I've mentioned before on this blog, most days I wake up with a song already stuck in my head. Usually it isn't a song I've been listening to or have any discernible reason to be thinking of at all. Here's today's:

Grizzly Bear

'Knife'

Yellow House

My Father at Christmastide

He watches The Gilmore Girls. He Tivos The Hills. During the whole of Christmas afternoon he sat contentedly in front of the fire, watching lifetime original movies on his 50 inch TV screen while Tim and I stood nervously nearby, hoping to catch the first snore of his inevitable nap so that we could connect the Xbox and chainsaw some aliens.

He knows no sin greater than to serve salad at the same time as the main course. He has left a trail of bloodied and broken waiters and waitresses behind him in his never ending quest to rid the world of this most heinous of wrongs. Once he flatly refused to eat (or pay for) a large porterhouse steak that was brought to him whilst he was still eating his salad. He insisted, loudly, that the waitress must throw away the steak he had been brought and have another prepared for him to be ready after he had finished his lettuce. And woe be unto him who should suggest that he 'calm down' or that it is 'no big deal.' The road to disinheritance is paved with such blasphemies. At Red Lobster the other night (yes, I know), he turned heads when he almost launched into a scathing rebuke of our Croatian waiter for bringing the salads at the same time as out order of coconut shrimp. Only some fast conversational footwork to get him reminiscing about a particular black bean soup he used to get for lunch twenty years ago saved the evening.

While watching a football game on television, he saw a player who had just barely missed an interception clap his hands once, forcefully, in frustration. Apparently never having seen humans behave, my father insisted that someone explain to him why the player in question would clap about missing an interception. Was he happy? What's wrong with him? It was explained to my father that a clap of the type he witnessed was a common way to vent the feeling of 'almost, damn!' and that people did this all the time, ourselves included.

He refused to accept this. He insisted that he had never seen anyone do that ever and that we must be wrong.

But he works really hard to put together a nice Christmas every year. He puts up a ridiculously tall tree (mostly to satisfy my sister's arboreal penis envy) and is willing, bless his heart, to watch the same insipid films every single year just to soak it all in. And all he asks for in return is at least one gift which contains something black and leather.

Oh yeah, he seems to have some kind of poorly developed leather fetish, as well.

Janus

God of Doorways; of comings and goings.

Bet he's happy to turn (one of) his face(s) from 2008.

Was the most schizophrenic year I can recall.

Moved into our new house. That was nice.

Economy. (boo!)

Obama. (yay!)

Hoping 2009 is a better, rounder, more upward moving year.

Hypnopop - January 1, 2009

Most days I wake up with a song in my head. Usually it isn't a song I've heard recently or have any reason to be thinking about. It is always a different song.

Here's today's:

Bon Iver

'Re: Stacks'

For Emma, Forever Ago