I Know You Can

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Driving the half-abandoned and therefore eternal stripmall streets of Orlando, I still believe that if the fountain of youth exists, a 20-something idiot will stumble upon it here. Ponce de Leon’s only mistake was that he came to early; he could not possibly recognize the fountain’s source before he saw a Wal-Mart open 24 hours a day, filling acres of empty air with the godless fluorescent white. That’s not to say a Steak-n-Shake is the fountain of youth, but that it would be impossible to locate such a spring in the dark, mortal swamps that covered Florida before the chains. Every time a shop closes in one of these disposable strips of concrete, we admit that the infinite is here and did a much better job with the space prior to our occupation.

I have the feeling that, if only I could stay awake, one of these nights of driving, browsing, and grazing will end up never ending. We now have an unlimited amount of destinations we can find at any time, day or night, where other people are waiting for us. I can drive from one encounter to another, balancing anonymity and friendliness in just the right amounts to keep the illusion up. God can’t keep managing to slip things like death and the sun into the ranks of the constantly retailing and retailed armies. One of these times he’ll be overwhelmed, and all seventy of us or so in Wal-Mart on a Tuesday the week after Christmas will find ourselves separated from divinity, left to our humanity forever.

This song, a sleepy Smashing Pumpkins cover, doesn’t tell my story, but the story of my opposites. Watching a large, half-interested band of 20-somethings play it tells us more about the importance of death than any lecture from God or his emissaries could. We keep this art alive because otherwise truth would become so muddled and manipulated as to be useless. Don’t be afraid to go straight to the source. Take a favorite album, take a new book, take the bible, and go someplace quiet, as far away from a Wal-Mart as you can go. You might even need to get away from those sources, thinned by your thinking. In the case of the bible, you may want to just shut your eyes and dream. In the case of your favorite album, listen to a cover song instead.

The image at the top of this post is a photograph I took with my iPhone of Richard Lippold’s wire sculpture Variation Number 7: Full Moon at the Museum of Modern Art’s AbEx NY exhibit.

Nick Flynn’s Cruel and Unusual Show

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Nick Flynn’s awkward and mercifully brief new foray into poetry, The Captain Asks for a Show of Hands, worried me from the start. The second poem, “fire”, begins, “more the idea of the flame than the flame / as in: the flame / of the rose petal, the flame of the thorn / the sun is a flame” and proceeds in that manner for a dozen more pages. Not content only to copy Gertrude Stein’s nonsense, Flynn also creates an unflattering homage to Galway Kinnell’s masterful “The Dead Shall be Raised Incorruptible” from The Book of Nightmares, stretching out that poet’s shuddering “Lieutenant! / This corpse will not stop burning!” into pages of meaningless psychoanalysis of an Iraq War soldier ordered to torture captured terror suspects.

one drunk night, even now I
wonder-sometimes still I

imagine-was I hit am I
daze, this

dream this confession, hey
little girl is your daddy home, hey capt’n hey

sir am I making any sense?

No. Although I suppose passages like these make too much sense as obvious attempts to illustrate the obvious horror of doing obviously horrible things. But on a universal scale, Flynn’s belief that his caffeinated rant gives us new perspective on these crimes makes no sense at all. Reading this book left me feeling guilty by default, as though I went to an open-mic poetry slam and watched a very bad rapper read a few verses about his tough childhood. How any of the five respected poets whose complimentary blurbs grace the book’s jacket fell for this nonsense, I do not know; I’m afraid I’ve permanently lost a little respect for Franz Wright for comparing The Captain Asks for a Show of Hands to Neruda, Whitman, and Yeats.

When lyrics to Modest Mouse’s “Float On” started showing up at the end of multiple poems, Flynn’s writing process became glaringly evident: get very stoned, put on some indie rock, and just write the words you feel, man. Perhaps the book should come shrinkwrapped with a mix CD and a dime bag, then you would at least be getting something for your money.

Although I could go through and find several dozen examples of nonsense to shake my head at, I want to share with you the most arrogant verses of the book, which also happen to be one of its most concrete images:

the tower towers above us

now, we can see it
from wherever it gives the impression

we will never get lost

Flynn has confidence: the strong tower one can never lose sight of. But that confidence is misplaced in a meaningless gesture. Only the person dreaming of this tower could actually be moved by it. Note that Flynn only gives one word that describes the tower: “towers,” the verb. Like so much of this book, the image is a closed loop, hoping to hide its pretension. Flynn is so set on congratulating himself for thinking of such a great idea that he believes it needs no praise beyond its existence. When a small child makes a totally indecipherable shape out of Play-doh, we praise him or her for their creativity, but only so the child is encouraged to continue. At his age, I’m wary about giving Flynn more of that type of ego-building.

As I said, Flynn attempts to justify all this angst by linking it to the Iraq War and, more specifically, the detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib prison. In “seven testimonies (redacted)”, he takes some very moving prisoner testimonials and transforms them to dull sense-poetry through a pointless dada exercise. Helpfully for the critic, the original passages are printed in the back of the book. “The broomstick was metal. I was hit in the face, back, legs at Abu Ghraib,” becomes, in Flynn’s translation, “broomstick was I was / you are we want—”. But why? Why torture us with the senseless beating (gruesome puns intended) of real horror into art school refuse? It comes across as an insult to those who suffered at our military’s hands, suggesting that we can’t see the real meaning of their words until some MFA student wins a prize with them.

Flynn is rightfully angered by the crimes committed at Abu Ghraib, but here he has nothing new to say about them. His poetry lacks the intellectual might required to make any persuasive arguments. While reading The Captain Asks for a Show of Hands, I was reminiscing about one of the most sophisticated works of art examining the Iraq War, the play “Stuff Happens,” a brilliant take on the subtle and viral fears that allow the creation of a place like Abu Ghraib. In a scene in the second act, George Bush’s advisors are debating what concessions they need to make to Tony Blair to entice Great Britain to join the war when Dick Cheney violently interrupts them, hissing, “We don’t need him!” We may be able to round up some polite applause for Nick Flynn’s puppy-dog political poetry, but we definitely don’t need it.

You’re Too Ironic for Foursquare

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The “most annoying” things about those “ubiquitous Zagat reviews” that every “restaurant” has “scotch-taped” to their front windows in the hope that it contains a “magical phrase” to somehow distinguish the restaurant as “better” than “the other 800 totally anonymous and transitory” establishments on that particular block of lower Manhattan are definitely the “scare quotes” that surround the anonymous “review excerpts.” When Mr. and Mrs. Zagat first xeroxed their sheet of critical culinary metadata to hand out at dinner parties (like most soon-to-be successful people their destiny was given away by how fucking annoying they were), they did not know that they had stumbled upon the fundamental building-block of the most-valuable-to-date advancement of civilization: the social network. The two-hand, four-fingered genius of the Zagats struck me when I was considering how disappointed I am that one of the latest,1 and one of my favorite, social networks, Foursquare, seemed to have lost much of its social momentum.

Foursquare, briefly, is a smartphone app that allows you to “check in” where you are – home, at work, at a bar, restaurant, event, anywhere – and see who else is there and who the “mayor” is (i.e., who has been there the most, a rather dubious distinction for Jason P., mayor of the corner Deli near me that smells like mummified cat). The main screen also allows you to see where your friends have most recently checked-in. The whole thing is mildly addicting in its inexplicable necessity, the way any good mobile app is.

I’ve had the same ten friends or so ever since I signed up for Foursquare. I convinced a couple people to join, but then some other people dropped out. So there hasn’t been a lot of growth in foursquare usage among my friends, who, in comparison, have been relatively good sports about Twitter and Google Reader. There is sadness when one’s chosen platform flounders. Like going out to happy hour with your coworkers, and then being the one stuck sitting at the table with your boss, the working mom who complains about her husband’s sexual performance, and the IT guy who gets Fox News updates pushed to his blackberry every 15 seconds so he can get vocally angry about how stupid they are.

But what do I even use foursquare for? Not to see where my 11 friends are, because that doesn’t really change. A.H. is always somewhere where they serve alcohol; K.S. will be at a hipster event like the roller derby or accordion lessons; M.H. will be at work; and my undergraduate intern (who friended me on foursquare even though he has yet to say a single word to me without being forced to by my boss)2 has been checked in at Grand Central Station ever since he returned from Christmas Break eight weeks ago.

What I *do* use Foursquare for is its “tips” section, where other 4sq’ers leave handy information about what’s fun, what’s shady, and what’s obnoxious about wherever I am. I’ve found no group more honest about what to order for brunch at a cafe or which bartender is the meanest, because there’s something about recording observations while you’re at a place (Foursquare makes it hard to review something when you’re not checked in there) that brings out a visceral sincerity. Writing a Yelp.com review three hours after you received an Eggs Benedict with a toenail in it lacks the same fury that you would summon while typing out the review staring at the offending keratin itself.

And I realized that Foursquare will live and die not by its gaming mechanics nor its silly game of follow-the leader, but by the time-tested method of showing us other people’s opinions on our lives. What is Facebook, other than a massive, Zagat metareview of ourselves, with comments on photos, events, and opinions that together form a word-judgement of our existence? Twitter is the same, only that we see the reviews coming together in real time. We value Social Media not to connect but to evaluate and be evaluated. That girl who hated you in high school is friending you just so you can see how beautiful she looked the day she married her hot, rich husband. She is sticking her Zagat’s review right in the window as you walk by.

Every heavy user of facebook believes he or she “is only on it to make fun of other people”, in other words, ironically. But Facebook can only be used ironically,3 because in order to endure its harsh light we must sustain the illusion that we are not asking its opinion even as we beg for it on every last bit of our life.

Foursquare makes it easy to judge and be judged about where you and your friend have been. But it does a poor job of making it seem like that’s not at all what you’re using it for, and so people avoid it. It lacks irony. Try to get someone to join Foursquare and they’ll say, “letting people know where I am makes me uncomfortable,” even though checking in is 100% optional and friend lists are under your total control, and also they will probably post Facebook updates and pictures from that very place. Their real reason is, “Foursquare makes it too obvious that I want people to know where I am.” Facebook’s “Places” app has been met with the same resistance.

So how does this go back to Mr. & Mrs. Zagat and the instantly-reviewed podiatrist’s dream brunch? Our sense of ironic television has been so highly developed by commercial-supported television that we can no longer view public social interactions without considering how we are above them.4 Facebook and Twitter continue the irony of being individual in a gigantic crowd of normalized action, and apps that fall short in this way, like Foursquare, do so “at their own risk.”

—

  1. Someone needs to find a shorter word for “latest” so it’s less likely to lose its meaning by the time you’re finished typing it.
  2. He was “Mayor” of NYU Press for a while until I left a sarcastic foursquare tip about it; he then relinquished control back to me without another word. Did I mention he is 6’4″, 100 lbs, dark-rim-spectacled, and obviously the owner of more than one blog focusing on the slow death of culture in Bushwick? My theory is he had forgotten my name in a fog of fear and friended me thinking I was another intern, and now cannot drop me because of that same fear.
  3. Unless you are over 55.
  4. David Foster Wallace, E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction.

It Passed Right Through Me

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The only emotion I can say I feel on a regular basis is panic, and the relief from panic. There is too much going on in my life, my head, and in my heart. No other feelings have the ability to catch up. I want to take days off from work not to relax but so I can get everything else done so I have time to relax afterwards. To closely approximate this feeling, spend an hour on the internet without any discernible purpose.

Too much analysis starts at this input-driven ADD. But I think the madness stems from what these glowing distractions supposedly are distracting us from. Our society values nothing but achievement and believes we should sacrifice everything for the longest resume. Even people who take on an alternative lifestyle are only admired for the alternative entryway that it will give them to success and fortune. Whether you are an investment banker or an organic radish farmer you are valued only by the ability of your ideas to generate money as an investment. Kudos to those who give away their art and their work for free, they are heroes, however briefly they survive.

Feel my heartbeat

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American Optimism is the new name for my overall world view. It represents a hope for peace and knowledge that does not ignore the selfish needs each of us is undeniably born with. Often, those who believe the world can be totally rid of hunger, war, and repression are labeled dreamers. However, the idea that a home, be it a house or a country, can be perfectly insulated and protected from the “real” world seems to me to be just as delusional. World Peace and The War on Terror occupy the same null space of hopeless hopes. In the argument over gun rights, typically one believes that either banning guns or making them readily available will result in far safer world, with little credit given to the argument that neither creates an ideal safety. The same for nation-building; those who say the government has no place in our lives in America think that it will somehow be able to successfully re-engineer a country like Iraq.

Positive change only comes from a personal politics of kindness, curiosity, and charity. Even those most dangerous to our society can be neutralized if we listen to and help them in a timely way. Helping people is not only a way to make a difference, it is the only way to change the world. Without an evolution of the individual, all else is a hopeless fantasy.

The Dog in the Car

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It only took me five extra days to find the best video of 2010:

There are people in the world who don’t have electricity, running water, or access to basic health care. You are watching a video of cats playing in a band, most likely on your work computer. Perspective is good.

Rant about Stanley Fish and Internet Anonymity

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Stanley Fish dislikes that the internet is not peer-reviewed, since peer-review is his only source of power, and he has found a creative new way to complain about it in the New York Times. He suggests that we should end “anonymous” posts on the internet by forcing internet service providers to be responsible for them. This is like suing New York City because all the “anonymous” people who throw gum on the street are messing up your expensive loafers. But dammit, Stanley Fish should be able to walk anywhere he damn pleases without looking down:

The idea (which goes back at least as far as Milton’s Areopagitica) is that false and defamatory speech openly published will provoke counter speech and lead to correction; the truth will ultimately prevail. (Justice Louis Brandeis: “Sunshine is the best disinfectant.”) But however likely that happy outcome may be in the world of books and newspapers (and I have always thought it extremely unlikely), the special conditions and powers of the Internet conspire against it and the more likely outcome is the one prophesied by Alexander Pope in the final lines of “The Dunciad”: “Light dies before thy uncreating word . . . / And universal darkness buries all.”

You must be wildly out of touch with how people use the internet to make a statement like that. When I read something outrageous online – for instance, a comment on the above article saying “Stanley Fish was never convicted for murdering those prostitutes, but everyone knows he was the only one with that much frozen salmon,” – I can fact check it immediately on one of the thousands of other websites with information on Stanley Fish. I’d start at Wikipedia, or maybe just google “Stanley Fish kills hooker with salmon” to see what comes up. If I find no evidence, then I’m going to disregard the claim. The beauty of the internet is that even if there is a significant conspiracy to spread a lie about someone, there is going to be a significant and google-able record of people arguing against that claim. The internet loves an argument, and is a better to evaluate the veracity of speech because of it. On the internet, you don’t need to buy a rival newspaper or go to the library to discover when someone is full of shit, because you can bet your ass that someone has already registered StanleyFishsDetractorsAreFullOfShit.com or its close scatological equivalent.

And no, that doesn’t mean you must fact-check every claim you read. First, we are not all researchers, and impact of us not knowing the full truth of Stanley Fish’s life is minimal. We can let these things go either way. Like most people who would care about Stanley Fish, I have a decent eye for specious or malicious factual claims. This intelligent evaluation begins with not believing most negative comments left on New York Times blog posts. The responsibility to debate and preserve the truth falls on readers as much as it falls on writers; both must be intelligent and careful. It’s your responsibility to not step in the gum. Suing internet providers will not encourage intelligence or compassion, but making the internet a free and accessible place for speech and content will.

Your Ride Home

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My cynicism teaches me the most. It leads me into mistakes and false assumptions, and when people tell me that everything isn’t as stupid or useless as I think, I learn through error and remember by embarrassment. Today, a girl named Ally sat down next to me near the payphones in the Delta Baggage Claim at JFK. We were sitting on the floor by the only two plugs in the whole place. She was also from Central Florida, and she was very friendly. She was waiting for her friend so they could go to Times Square for New Years’ Eve. I told her immediately how awful I thought it would be, and I could tell she was disappointed I didn’t share her anticipation. She said it was a trip that had been planned before, and cancelled. It meant more than the ball drop.

And I said, aloud, that it was extremely rare to see that many people assembled for a joyous occasion. It might be one of the only secular gatherings of that size in the world. But I had lost Ally’s trust by that time, and she disappeared into her iPod to let me think about what I did wrong.

Wikipedia: Clear-air Turbulence

Want you Back

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If you believe destiny brings people together, you have to admit that it can also keep them apart. You could be about to bump into your future wife on the street, spilling her coffee and giving her your number to pay for the dry-cleaning, when an extremely ornery emu that escaped from a private zoo runs into her instead, severely injuring her knee and leaving her scared of anyone about five feet tall with a skinny knee. So maybe in a long distance relationship, one weekend canceled because of an errant blizzard grounding a plane is the weekend that would have sealed the deal. Instead, doubts grow. And I don’t even think this song is about love, it’s about friendship. It’s about how lucky and unlucky we are to know the various people we know, and how if we lose a friend, we lose something irreplaceable.

So, I’ll risk embarrassment and failure to get back a friend. Or I will play them a concert in the back stairs.

Wikipedia page of the day: Nothing

Won’t Change You

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This blog is named after the chorus from the Talking Heads song above. In the song, David Byrne is frustrated by his inability to change a mind. It’s unclear whether the mind in question is severely warped, or completely typical of society at large. In the same way, it’s unclear whether this blog is aimed at changing my own mind, or yours. Perhaps it’s a battle and we’ll see who wins. If nothing changes, I think that may be the worst sign. Good music, good writing, good art, by definition it must change us. It may be the only way we do change.

Wikipedia page of the day: Frost