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.