Nobody Rides For Free

It's been a couple of weeks since my last entry, and let me explain the delay: I've become a Beach Person. I've never been much for the sun and sand, as that usually means (in the US at least) a corresponding presence of shit shops and traffic and overpriced Mai Tais and hi-rise condominium complexes that if you lived in you'd be home now. There's also the fact that I burn salmonpink in bright sunshine, usually in strange patterns (hand-shaped patches on my sides and back, raccoon circles round the eyes) due to insufficient training in sunscreen application. It's not that I don't like sand--I dig on the desert, baby, and no mistake--or water--gimme a cascade and a camera and I'm good for the day. Just that the two in combination invite all kind of unattractive consumerist idiocy.

D has been a Beach Person since forever, so she was psyched to move south for a little while (time becomes quickly meaningless there, compressing and expanding like the tides), first in Arambol (pictured above) and then in Palolem, with bounces in between to break up the excruciating bus rides necessary to cover even the smallest distances (more on that later). We arrived in Arambol as the monsoon was hacking its last rattle against the palmy dunes, and after one overnight storm into our first full day we were blessed with an uninterrupted week of sunny sunshine. After an initial sizzle in near-equatorial rays, we commenced to darken like the natives (or not so much). And during that time spent swimming and relaxing and washing off the stench of Mumbai and my illness in Pune, when our only needs were met by walking the half a click up the beach for late breakfasts and lazy sunset dinners, I converted wholeheartedly to the cult of the Sun God. Count me in, brother, and save me a seat up front. Arambol was everything I've never been lucky enough to experience on any shore of any ocean; it was as peaceful and quiet as any place I've ever been. Shit, man, it was serene.

When was the last time you got to use that word? Been a pretty minute for this soul, I can assure you.

We went from that not-your-average walk on the beach in Goa's far north to another in the remote south in Palolem (pictured below).* The latter is a picture postcard, a tourism department brochure, only the prototypical sun-washed crescent of sand and swaying palm trees. The sun sets every night in a notch made by the northwest headland and the island you can walk to at low tide. We watched the entire village (fisherfolk all) pulling their nets from the cove on our last evening there, all chanting a chorus of heave-ho's local equivalent. Dogs and crows and fish eagles caught a whiff of the goings-on and hovered in their own ways, scoping out their choice of the fish that skipped across the surf in frantic attempts to escape the nets and the baskets and the eventual tandoor ovens. Made hungry by the spectacle, we went out for a seafood dinner and dined heartily on the afternoon's catch for something like $12, a real splurge considering the cost of things here and our budget for this excursion.

But I shall stop painting this particular picture, for if I were the one reading this account instead of the one writing it, I'd be ready to kick the author's ass up the block and around the corner. Don't be hatin', though. Let me tell you a story:

Our last morning in Palolem, we shouldered our packs and caught a lassi near the bus stand so we could wait in the shade for the bus that would take us the 4 km to Chaudi (Canacona). That bumpy road traversed, we waited another 30 minutes in the terminal for the bus to Margao, from whence our train to Hampi (east, in neighboring Karnataka, where I am writing this missive) would leave the next morning. Margao's bus and train stations are the clearing houses for southern Goa, and the city itself is not worth telling you it's not worth writing about. We had planned to make it in time to catch a movie and an early bedtime, but the Fates were against us.

So yeah: we're waiting in Chaudi like 30 minutes and milling in a shuffling queue for the eventual bumrush that is boarding buses here, and the bus pulls in--the same bus, we realize, that we rode to get to Palolem a few days prior. That trip was worthy of mention for being the closest I've been to physical carsickness since I was a wee tyke puking in the backseat of the family station wagon. But I digress... We're at a disadvantage for the boarding scrum because of our backpacks and wind up considering ourselves lucky to occupy the "Ladies Only" seats at the front of the bus. Being a Southern gentleman this wasn't my choice of seats, but did I mention the hellish ride that we had on the way in? Besides, there's a sign painted in the same color as the "Ladies Only" that says the bus will only carry "11 Standing," and I'd heed any fool estimating at eleven baker's dozens the number of standing riders on any one bus plying the backroads of Goa.

Anyway, we're in the reserved seats and feeling lucky when I start to wonder why the bus isn't pulling out. Worse yet, the driver and his whistle boy are beside the truck banging on what might be the engine or the tire or (for all we know) the team of 96 squirrels whose combined legpower fuels each bus over here. They look perplexed (the driver & co., not the squirrels) and they're wiping off what must have been a vital piece of bus at some point, and they're drawing a crowd. Some of the men in attendance wear the khaki uniform of bus employees, some are in street clothes, curious passengers who have gotten down to see what's the hubbub. There's intense conversation outside our window and the minutes pass and they're all smiling and laughing that futile laugh that says in any language "We're not going anywhere soon, boys" and we're still on board, sweating our respective tits off because we're not gonna give up these seats, goddammit. Eventually we've been on for maybe 30 minutes, because the next bus to Margao has rolled in heavy and the rest of our fellow passengers are cramming into its remaining available pockets of breathable air. Having none of such foolishness, we get down and opt to wait for the next ride.

For those of you keeping count, that will have been 90 minutes or so waiting to get on a bus that runs our route every half hour for a two-hour trip. It's now high noon and heating up, and we decide that D will carry on our daypack when we board the next bus and I'll wait behind to stow the heavy packs and hopefully find a seat saved for me whenever I can board. The bus finally rolls in and the plan works and we're on the winding mountain road leading north.

But not for long--oho! Not for long. Because not two minutes after noting the proximity of the passing traffic on our starboard side, our bus winds up at the rear end of a traffic stoppage stretching for half a mile up the backside of the mountains. Opting not to wait it out, our driver decides to turn around with a busload of the travellers from the other side of the jam and head back to Chaudi. We persevere, our refund secured and our packs re-shouldered, and walk down the line of stopped cars and trucks and buses to try to do the same as the marooned pilgrims now riding our bus. Down we go, and the situation resolves itself into a degree of clarity. Here's what happened: gasoline truck marked "INFLAMMABLE" in about five languages on its side has lost a squeeze play with the dump truck that tried, inconveniently, to cross a bridge too narrow for the both of them. The driver's side of the gas truck is peeled back like the ragged rind of an orange. No sign of either driver, but there's an Indian crowd around the accident just milling about and collectively biding time, while we're wondering what and where and how to get there. I see gas trucks in accidents and tend to hightail it the other direction, but the calm blanketing the scene was enough to make me chill even in the heat of the day. There was an Italian couple in front of us riding a motorscooter and trying to convince the locals to help them lift it (there wasn't room on the bridge to drive around the wreck) up on the guardrail to walk/roll it past the collision. We watch this scene with a degree of incredulity--hell, everybody's watching with a smile or other expression asking Will they make it?

Yeah, they make it the length of the bridge and bring the scooter down and ride off, and we follow the crowd past the wreck and eventually find a bus heading back to Margao. Easy-peasy, right?

Except that our new driver is apparently pissed at the refund of half his take for the interrupted trip, and he's tearing down the road like a man possessed. I've been accused of driving recklessly from time to time, I love a fast drive on a winding road, but I have seriously never been so scared in a motor vehicle. The bus was tilting around the corners an easy thirty degrees, and even the other native passengers were looking around like WHAT the FUCK?! We've got an hour or so left on this bus and the driver's moving like his next fix is too many miles down the road, and I'm envisioning scenes of carnage and wondering how many Indians I can lift when the time comes and I have the David Banner/Incredible Hulk moment. Even with the whistle boy collecting the fare like it's another day at the office, my adrenaline is still ratcheted way past F and hovering well in the red. I'm watching towns pass in successive blinks of the eye and mentally drawing a map of the road to Margao and trying to place these towns on it, telling myself it's okay, there's only maybe thirty minutes to go, twenty, ten. Then there's Margao and one last hellbent turn around a flyover into town and we get down and brush ourselves off and hide our piss stains and move on with the day as the sun sets, albeit on shaky legs and aching knuckles.

So let this go to show you, kids: Even a day at the beach isn't necessarily a day at the beach. It's hard work kicking this far back, but it's a good gig if you can get it. The punchline? 60-odd kilometers from Palolem to Margao, and this was our day. Until next time.

*: Of the two days we spent in Calangute and Baga breaking up the journey, let me only say that the food was good and we got a nice room at a cut rate. Those two destinations, huge on the package-tour circuit and just now coming into season, are hellholes on a scale rivaled by your Myrtle Beaches and Panama Cities. Yick.

Don't Think About Pink Elephants

Wow. India. Yeah. It's so...um...Indian here. Where to begin, where to begin...

So I've been dreading writing this entry. I've felt like a duck in a dishwasher over the entire issue. These last ten days have seemed like a month or more, there's been so much new information to assimilate and interpret. I could start with a standby, tell you about the weather: it's fucking hot. Like India hot. Hot and wet. And writing about the weather might lead me to relate how two Americans travelling on a shoestring are smelling these days, how stewing in the heat and sweating out the local cuisine have let us incorporate into our personal aromas the cardomom, the curry, the cumin, the what-have-you that define the food here. And writing about how we smell, I could tell you how everything else we've smelled thus far has been tinged with exhaust fumes. A guy can't write about a billion people without writing about the resultant traffic, the ancient Premier taxis and autorickshaws and motorbikes moving in orchestral anarchy, a postmodern symphony in CO major for millions of two-stroke engines. Or that, trying to beat the crush of vehicular traffic on the crazyhouse streets, you can get crushed (literally, as people do every year) trying to board Mumbai's suburban rail (official motto: "There's always room for one more!").

Hell, maybe I'll just write a full paragraph about what it's like to discover your own asshole at the age of 29. Such are the joys of a land without toilet paper, after all. Until two weeks ago, my anus was kind of like Uranus: the evidence said it's out there, but I ain't had to think about it on the day-to-day. But when it comes to brass tacks, a real man dives in and does what's necessary. And uses hand sanitizer afterward. After all, you'll never see anything in this world if you're not prepared to deal with a little shit. Better your own than anyone else's.

So yeah. Boundaries have been pushed, horizons broadened. I'm writing this entry from Pune, our first stop after Mumbai, and in a few hours we board a bus for the sunny beaches of Goa. The festival honoring Ganesh, the elephant-headed son of Shiva and Parvati, ended last night (or this morning, depending upon your vantage point), and with it goes the incessant banging of drums and cymbals over endless shouts of "Ganapati bappa...morya!" For the unititiated, that loosely translates as "Elephant-headed son of Shiva and Parvati bappa...morya!" No matter what you've heard, enlightenment is thin on the ground over here. I'm as in the dark about the Hindu traditions we've wandered into as I am about the game of cricket. Put the two together, as happened Monday night when India beat Pakistan to win the Twenty20 tournament in South Africa (thanks to Ganesh's intervention, they say), and I'm utterly fucking clueless.

Luckily, though, I got some good advice on our third day here. Invited to a friend's family's place for lunch, we were lucky enough to participate in a prayer chant honoring Ganesh. It was an honor and a privilege, not to mention a complete surprise. It turns out Big G loves the sound of clanging metal, so while all the (Hindu) adults chant, the kids (and us godless white folk) get to bang on handchimes and ring bells. So that we weren't bashing them aimlessly, A's cousin N shared these sage words, words that I decided will be my personal mantra while on this journey:

"Catch the rhythm, then play accordingly."

Indeed. Here's to that.

Farewell and Welcome

I'll make this brief, as I'm catching a flight in a few short hours. So I've been silent lo these many months. Let it be known: there was good reason. Nay, reasons. Ain't much to write about when you're slaving away for the Man fifty-plus hours a week, and not much to do but slave thusly for the man when you're saving for a year-long jaunt through South Asia. D. and I have been hatching this plan for months now, reading and planning and stashing our rupees in the metaphorical mattress. Our tongues have been tied by dizzying foreign names, our imaginations stoked by pictures and dreams and stories and such. And now the day is upon us. Whoa. Wow. Whoosh. Bags packed eyes open facing east. We'll be landing in Bombay on Friday. One-way tickets and no reservations, nothing in stone. Moving fast and lightish, going where the day takes us. Along the way I'll be posting from the road, letting everyone know what we're getting into on the other side of the world.

So this blog is now a travel blog. About time. Too long too stagnant. Time for some fresh air and new ideas, and you'll notice the first at the top of the page. Until we return, welcome to Naked Baby Asian Mice. Many happy returns. Namaste.

Give Us Your Tired, Your Poor, Your Undertechnologized

So this weekend was one of the worst working months of my entire lengthy storied* career in the bar/restaurant sector of the service industry. Friday started innocently enough after a nice lunch and a lobster nap and a rolling-in-early for a change. Everything was simpatico, all greasy wheels and whale-snot slick, and there was even an early finish for This Guy. In bed by midnight and blissful slumber soon after with the help of some Mogwai. But roundabout two-thirty in the HEY!-M the kids roll in with heavy buzzes in tow, shouting my name from the foot of the stairs. This has become a trademark move in our humble household, one to which I am not averse. Especially when awakened from said blissful slumber by the pressing weight of female bodies and carefully placed neck and ear smooches. Makes getting up for bored games more than tolerable. So there were Apples and there were Apples and then there was even blissier slumber, and I roll out Saturday morning feeling peachykeen and ready to rock the heavy crowds.

I should have known something was wrong when I'm sitting at the T-stop and my pocket starts buzzing. Never a good sign, especially just before a workday. There are three people on the planet who might call me at 11 AM on a Saturday, and none of it's usually good news. My place of bidness is the last of the three, if first in frequency. I ignore the ring without an ID-check because Hey, I'm on time and enjoying my book even in the frigid temps** and whatever they're gonna tell me can surely be rectified after the thirty minutes it'll take me to get to the Square. So I keep reading and the train comes and shuttles me quickly (for a change) and with expedience toward my destination across a frozen Charles through tunnel over track and I get off and walk out and down the street and then I see the fire trucks.

Five within two blocks, and I'm thinking What's the rumpus? Kess-kuh-say the hubbub, bub? as I'm walking upstairs and I open the door and am greeted by the sight of a dehumidifier the size of a Samoan dwarf working in our tiny office and high-output fans about the floor of the main room and a soggy splosh announcing every step I take. I'm greeted by our owner, fresh off a flight from Delhi, and our GM and they've been there since like two AM--awakened even earlier and powers-of-ten more rudely than I had been--and it seems our faulty little building in New England hasn't the heat it takes to keep the pipes from freezing when it's colder than a welldigger's ass. The sprinkler line, you see, had frozen and burst and showered ironically unfrozen water upon all that we hold sacred in our cozy little establishment. The bills were wet and the checks that pay the bills were wet and the walls were wet and the floor was soaked and even the paperclip holders were filled to overflowing and, most disheartening of that whole inventory of woe and difficulty, our computer and our point-of-sale server and our phone lines and our DSL and everything we run that separates us from your local Waffle House*** was hopelessly flooded and non-operational Until Further Notice.

The knot in my stomach was palpable, felt like an ostrich egg in a poodle's ass, because I knew what was happening: Come hell or (fuck it all) high water, we would open at some point that afternoon. And we would open flying blind, understaffed and unprepared for our forced reversion to that oldest and most dreaded restaurant technology:

Paper.

I'll digress for a moment: At the German gig on Bourbon Street, we worked strictly paper and dot-matrix roll-register. Every plastic transaction was a carbon-imprint for the first year I was there. It's entirely possible we were the last paper-based booze operation in the Southern 48 at the turn of the millennium, and it was a hassle. We got our plastic tips compiled only every six months, at Christmas (like it was a goddamned bonus) and at the beginning of June, when the slooooow months until Labor Day loomed like forgotten dogshit come the first thaw. It's a helluva sound, the shuh-CHUNK! of a handcranked credit card machine as it thunders in behind the bass saxophone of a Dixieland combo, off-tempo and (at least the former) entirely unnecessary in this modern era. But we did it and we took it because it was a pretty good gig, all things considered.

That was a long time ago.

Since then I've worked non-computerized accounting systems, where whatever we've got in the register goes to the bank in the morning. Less, of course, the couple of hundred in change to get us through the next late night. But there was always a swipe machine that magically teleported one's electronic identity to and from a bank's server somewhere in Dubuque or Bangalore, returning with a hopeful approval for the requested loan to be granted us, the payee, by the bank, which would see to their loan's being remitted at some later date by the cardholder at a substantial rate of interest held over a longer term than the desired effects of any purchase made by said cardholder at our place of business. Where, incidentally, we pushed the last legal drugs accompanied by the sweet soulful strains of some seriously grooved entertainment.

My digression complete, let me reinforce that the prospect of working for an indeterminate period of time sans electronic communications in a high-traffic restaurant in a great location in a major American metropolis presented more than a few challenges. The first was procurement of manual credit-card slips. You know, the kind you only see anymore in gas stations in like Stumbleduck, West Dakota.**** Turns out that one wasn't that bad. The second was figuring out how to get messages to and from the tables to the servers to the kitchen (to the line and the tandoor and the foodrunners) to the bar and still get anything approaching the desired bill of fare to the table for which it was intended. The forms were easy enough to locate, as Staples is just downstairs and had reopened after the same flooding issues. So that's okay, but any practical implementation would mean schooling our FOH staff on-the-quick. Luckily they're rockstars and can hold their own despite the several language barriers in our tiny, borderless restaurant. As a bonus, we scored a hostess and a cashier before we opened at 5, so there was help if only for a few precious hours. All set, right?

And then we open, and then the people start trickling in, and then the trickle turns into the second flood we've seen that day and everybody's running and pretty soon it's like watching pit bulls carrying newborns on full heads of Kibbles 'n Meth. Half our kitchen is out on a catering gig, we've got like three new guys on the fireline, one of our dishwashers is drunk somewhere besides Dish for the umpteenth Saturday night in a row, our waitstaff are dealing with inordinately small tips based (one must assume) on the low-tech hindrances upon the timely receipt of food and checks and drinks and such--

--and I realize that none of this is very interesting to anyone who wasn't there and who hasn't worked in this sector of our nation's economy.

So a Nutshell Chronology: Two AM exit after three hours of hand-compiling checks and receipts and CC slips. Sleep (ish). Back again for a Sunday paper lunch, another pipe blows in the back of the building, no water or dishwasher or flushable toilets for two hours, Are We Gonna Close? Water back on, seating and serving for dinner and still working out the kinks from Saturday night. Another late night leaving. Fitful sleep, dreams of wrongs done past lovers mixed with standard Showing Up At Work Naked And Not Knowing Where Anything Is nightmares. Rolling in groggy and wiped for an unscheduled shift, a paper Monday at the start then (YIPPEE! SKIP!) wires fixed and server working but not until we put paper into 'puter. Day to dusk to dark, no fix that works, slammed and weeded and even have to serve (!) an 8-top. Rush dies down. Servers dance, laugh, have well-deserved pint. More paperwork, closed house, entering weekend’s work into system, Wu bangin' out speakers normally reserved for sitars and Hindi yelping, staring at computers and paper tickets from past three days and quickly going blind and numerically illiterate. Totals. Doublechecks. Triples. Forty bones off for the weekend, considering it a victory. Psyched, if hypercaffeinated. Deposit dropped, cab home to DOT, nip from The Good Scotch, too tired to sleep. Blog.

So here we are, and here I am, writing to you from the corner of Humbled and Exhausted. The latter is self-explanatory, but the former is truly a Statement. I saw (or was reminded) this weekend what a fragile relationship we have with technology anymore. In an age when nobody remembers phone numbers ("Screw it in the ear, I've got 'em in my cell!"), few know how to rock when all systems are not Go. It's a challenge to any of us brought up with Cable TV and Nintendo and Toaster Strudels. There were points this weekend when I wanted to quit my job, to walk out of a place that had been flooded--as far as I was concerned--back into the Fucking Stone Age, but something in me wanted to stick it out. I hate not knowing the ending***** to any story, even the most esoteric and inconsequential. I wanted to see how it all panned out, how we would fare when the river rose and the lights failed and the flints were struck while the youngins searched for dry tinder. Most of all, though, I found I craved the difficulty brought about by a dissolution of our feeble bond with modernity, however brief. Reminded me of the road, a feeling I miss far too often anymore. It was a waist-deep, sewer-stinking slog through waters curried with the spare and broken parts of everything since ENIAC, and it was a fucking trial. Sometimes pen and paper are all a man needs. There's no wi-fi in Shangri-La, after all, but nor are there any decent Indian joints.

Bitch though it may have been, we done good. We done better than I would have figgered. That does not make any of it cool. Come the next localized Judgment Day, that next bus to Thunderdome will leave with me still sitting at the station, listening to my iPod, trying to text some other citified bedwetter about this great new ancient history exhibit I saw that centerpieced the Royal typewriter and the rotary phone and a weirdass musical number featuring an unidentifiable shuh-CHUNK! that may or may not have been totally post-techno.


*: Even if storied only unto myself and coworkers and the occasional roommate/girlfriend/vent-buddy/blog... But a brief sidenote to this footnote: There's sympathy and there's empathy and rarely the twain do meet, though everybody hates The Job at some point or another and the storying of such always leads to oneupsmanship in terms of shitty shitty days at the proverbial Office.
**: Which will soon matter more than they do while I wait in the wind and chill for the Inbound. Read on...
***: In terms of technology. Not to be taken as a disparaging remark on the quality or convenience or sheer waffley deliciousness of that Last Bastion Of The American Breakfast.
****: Gorgeous in March, especially during the annual Snipe Hunt.
*****: But I walked out of Basic Instinct 2 with neither curiosity nor regret. Not even about lopsided falsies.

No Joy In Mudville, Pts. 1 & 2

In terms of opportunities for psychological and spiritual growth, there can be few more strengthening (read: "utterly soul-crushing") experiences than suffering two major defeats in the same six-hour span. Such was the case Sunday evening, when the Saints were hamstrung by Chicago's inhospitable weather (and the Bears) and the Patriots were handed the business end of the proverbial spoon by "The Fucking Colts" (M's words).

Granted, such defeats are only as personal as one allows them to be, and it certainly wasn't me out on the pitch against Brian Urlacher or Peyton Manning. Nor were any of my close personal friends. Yet these defeats are made none the easier by such trifling consolations. When one puts his heart on the chopping block for the three-hour battle that is a Conference Championship, when the laurels of victory mean a ticket to that most hallowed, most super Sunday in all of American sport, one tends to feel the blow of a butcher's blade as if it were less metaphor than reality.

Alas.

There is usually, however, an opportunity for redemption afforded those like myself two Sabbaths hence. He can pull for the team that dusted his favorites, allowing himself the faint rationalization that his team lost to the eventual champions. Or, of course, he can wish those vanquishers fiery deaths in plane crashes and freak microwave-oven explosions. Defeat, then, becomes a test of one's mettle as a sportsman, even one whose proximity to the field of play is distanced by a glowing rack of liquors and an oaken bar.

But what, then, can one do when both of his sides suffer defeat, when his split loyalties are roundly punished by confluences of events and timing and horrible officiating and the like? What is he to do when he can't root for either team without admitting to a key flaw in his fanship?

He can watch the game for the game's sake, free from obligations to adopted homes, but not without a note of bitterness to sour the sweet strains of Prince's halftime program. He can wish either the most impressive defense in the league (Chicago's) or the best quarterback of the last many seasons (Indianapolis') the rewards they deserve for putting up massive numbers against strong opposition. He can revel in the fact that the winningest teams in both conferences are battling for the title in what will likely be a Super Bowl for the books, and not some piddling matchup of less-worthy elevens who may have squeaked through the playoffs unscathed and lucky. He can watch the game without the kind of blinding passion that leads to another Monday morning of horrifying, shuddering realizations of loss and abandonment, such as those he experienced only yesterday.

In short, he can watch some football. And so he shall.

Dispassionately, but with reservations.

Geaux Forth And Be Reborn...

One of my favorite things about bartending in New Orleans was doing so during football season. As pitiful as most games were, the matchups were always epic, even if only in our own minds. The Saints have always been a hard-luck team, and their fans have grown accustomed to the pitfalls of following a side with such a seeming proclivity for ignominious defeat. There's a truism in sports that goes something like Win, and your fans drink to you; lose, they drink for you.

Or maybe themselves. I forget.

Either way, when your city's Eleven can't even muster a .500 season, you tend to do more of the latter than the former. Too many of those seasons have passed in the forty since the Saints entered the league, but it's always been sorta kinda alright by their fans. Given the fact that there are something like 90,000 bars and taverns in the N.O. metro area in which to root and lament whilst watching the game, there has never been a shortage of rainy-day drinking and armchair analysis. Even when said comes from a barstool sans arms.

When I worked the German gig, there were some Sundays when R from around the corner would be the only Saints fan in the joint (myself, I was a mercenary fan whose alliances were dictated week-by-week by the arrival of new and different hordes of tourists, each a dislocated fan of some likely-better team), and he would be relegated to drinking his Beck's in one of the far corners of the room's modest squarefootage, one tiny television registering with tinny mono sound the drubbing his--our--Saints had brought upon themselves by agreeing to play American Football of a Sunday afternoon. I would sneak over in the rare free moment to brush up on scores and lowlights, as the bulk of the bar's four screens and satellite package was dedicated to sugartitting the out-of-town fans of more prominent clubs who had stumbled down Bourbon Street nursing hangovers only slightly smaller than their Saturday nights, each requiring refreshment of either the tomato or sudsy (and sometimes both) variety. R and I would commiserate and discuss in no brief terms the horrendous choices made by our team, be those choices our coach's, or our quarterback's, or our owner's, or a combination of the lot. More often than not, it was the lot.

And after the German gig, there was a time at the Patio when I was more free to nurture my love/hate relationship with our Saints, when our off-Bourbon crowd was more inclined to sit and indulge their native team during its sixteenish ramblings about the Superdome's and other gridirons. There was even a Playoff game in there somewheres, a by-the-book, standard write-off handed us by the Minnesota Vikings in one of the Twin Cities. Not sure which. And not that it matters.

This Saturday night past, however, there was a rumbling in New Orleans that was palpable (albeit faint and only then through the floor and the soles of one's shoes) even here in the Frozen North. The famously loud Superdome hosted a meeting of men, twenty-two at a time, after which the New New Orleans Saints prevailed and secured for themselves a chilly Next Sunday in Chicago (though that last part was technically determined on the following afternoon). In the forty years of the franchise, this was the first post-season win for the men in black and gold. Sadly, Joe "My Cell Phone Rings Like A" Horn was on the sidelines for the historic event, but Deuce and Reggie made up on the ground what the team lacked in airpower.

But mine is not a sports blog, and this is not an armchair analysis. I have no room in these webpages for play-by-play, and I don't intend to make such room. What I do have is mad space for the things that shake my rafters, that make me shout from the rooftops. And that kind of enthusiasm, at the moment, is reserved for my New Orleans Saints. I have never been moved to root such as I have during these past sixteen weeks for the N.O. Eleven. Seeing them play their first game back in the Superdome on a Monday night, even though I was stuck at the Indian gig, was emotional to the point of ridiculousness. I usually skip halftime shows, but I disregarded more than a few mango margaritas to hear Green Day and U2 pitch and wail in support of a city's rebuilding. Kudos. Bravo. Bravissimo. More power to. Were I at home, tears may have been shed.

Putting my feelings for the city of my growings-up into words has not been easy since I watched it get wiped from off the map after Lady K. It's a feeling of loss that has impacted my being in a way I never expected, and probably more so for the fact that I had moved on by the time She hit. I've been back once since, and it was a rough week. My people were all safe and sound, none drowned in their attics, but there's something about driving through a town one calls home and seeing the Devil's Alphabet on every house in the Ninth Ward, watching the highwater funkline ebb and flow across the fronts of homes down Esplanade and Elysian Fields, knowing that Kermit's on a permanent Texan Tour and Henry's out Colorado way and Shorty's working L.A. in lieu of N.O. gigs because the venues don't exist no more, that makes a man shake out his bandanna and wonder what in the Fuck happened to his nestling place, to his sugarspot, to his home.

That's something for another day, though. On this fine bleary rainy New England morning, there are six days between me and the Saints-Bears game that will require much of my concentration, all of my face-painting skills, and more than a little of my scattershot wherewithal. So until and after then, my best to you and yours, and may your days include prayers and such for a city in Louisiana that was swamped but didn't drown, that died and was reborn, that may be flawed but won't be flogged.

Geaux Saints.

And Peace.

There's Something Wrong With My Pants

So there's been a lot on my mind recently. First there were GREs and LSATs, then there's still work and life and the living of it. And of course there are the eternal existential ponderings, the endless agonizing and ruminating upon the meaning(s) of the last six words of that last sentence. Wrapped up in the midst of all that monkeystuff, I was out of sorts for a pretty minute here a few weeks ago. Just scatterbrained and spentshot. Allow me to offer two brief short tastes with a common theme:

I'm walking to the T on a Monday afternoon, I've worked doubles all weekend and I'm just turning around back to Cambridge after a long night morning afternoon of studying and listening to whatever my iTunes puts to shuffle. There's a switchbacked trail of Tom Waits and Miles Davis and Townes Van Zandt and The Roots and Morphine and Nina Simone and Belle and Sebastian and U2 and even a gentle dressing of Pearl's Jam glazing my brain, and I'm walking without my legs, just a head bobbing atop feet loosely connected to the rest of my body, the hinges that bend doing most of their work simply not breaking their flex parameters and buckling beneath the flaccid heap of my shuffling frame. I get to Savin Hill and sit down at the end of the platform and pull out Cormac McCarthy's The Crossing, which is totally blowing the leftover fragments of my mind still receptive to creative expression. The train pulls in and I get aboard with my index finger holding my place and I sit down and stuff my backpack between my feet because I know--empty as the car is now--I don't want to be taken away from this book when somebody asks me to move my sack from the seat next-to. So I'm sitting there and reading up close (as such works demand) when I notice my fly is down. Even through the boxer briefs I prefer (the freedom of the former with the slim lines of the latter) I can feel the canned air of the train as it makes its way through the opening in my pants, but at this point I've passed a stop or two and there's nothing to be done without announcing to all, "I AM ONE OF THOSE PEOPLE YOU MEET ON PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION WHO HALF-CHEWS AND SPITS APPLE BITS HALFWAY DOWN THE CAR WHILE RATTLING ON TO NOBODY IN SOME STRANGE PIDGIN, OR WHO FARTS LOUDLY AND REPEATEDLY ON THE PLATFORM WHILE TALKING IRRITATEDLY TO HIS WIFE IN THE FISHING CAP WHILE SHE ROCKS WITH HER SHOPPING BAG AND PRETENDS NOT TO NOTICE, OR WHO WALKS INTO THE CAR PAINTED SILVER FROM NOSE TO CHIN AND OFFERS THE WELL-DRESSED WOMAN ACROSS FROM HIM A FIVE-TIMES-FOLDED DOLLAR FOR LISTENING TO HIS RANT ABOUT HOW EDUCATION IS WHAT WE NEED TO SAVE THE GOVERNMENT FROM THE PEOPLE. OH, AND MY FLY IS UNDONE, WHICH MAY OR MAY NOT BE INTENTIONAL AND MAY OR MAY NOT BE EVIDENCE THAT I, MYSELF, AM UNDONE IN MORE THAN THE USUAL WAY. AND THOSE GLOSSY STAINS ON MY WEEKEND-OLD PANTS ARE EITHER SEMEN OR YOGURT. YOU BE THE JUDGE, SINCE YOU WERE HEADING THAT DIRECTION ANYWAY."

I could just give an Excuse Me Smile while I zip up, just another guy on the train who's gotten there without thinking how or in what state of (un)dress, one more Joe on the way to his Average Eking-Out with Other Shit on his mind. But no, I don't. I put the book in one hand, a three-finger split, and with the other I pull my shirttail a little further down from out my zipped jacket, then the jacket down another inch or so until I'm pretty sure I'm covered between the coverage from above (shirt and jacket) and below (open book on lap). And it's about this time that I realize the adjustments I'm making to assuage the suppositions of my trainmates are exactly the kind of adjustments any of my trainmates would expect from someone with lassi spots on his shins and a shifty look in his eye who wanted to keep his fly open without raising too much untoward attention. At that point I give up entirely and just start reading distractedly while counting the stops to Harvard Square, at which point I walk out of the train with backpack in front while surreptitiously zipping with two fingers holding the pull and a pinky anchoring the bottom of the zipper.

So this entire experience wouldn't have stuck with me, nor would it have merited an in-depth explanation, were it not for my time in the security line at Logan International three days later. It's five in the morning and the woman helming the other queue is barking like a Jamaican fishmonger to everyone in the five or six lines not even under her auspices. "Take off dem shoes, chil', and ya belt, sah, and place dat bag flat on de belt, missus..." ad infinitum. Taken as I am by this woman's incessant incantations, I'm unconscious going through the line. I hear her addressing holiday travelers a full thirty feet away, personally and with an authority that only seems to grow with distance. With little more than a "missus" or a "sah," she manages to get the head she intends to turn, to turn. So I'm watching this display and doing what she asks, so as not to draw her attention away from the other, more interesting complaints and requests and suggestions she has rolling out towards the other sheep in the lines. Shoes in my hands, socks sweeping the floor cleaner than it has been swept by the thousands herded in front of me, yet less clean than it will be after those behind me, I unbuckle my belt because it has been recommended by both five years of post-9/11 air travel and the bewitching voice of the woman orchestrating miles of post-9/11 air travelers everyday. But maybe because it's so early or maybe because I've been on autopilot for such a stupefying period of time--and only half disregarding the two hours of sleep I managed to squeeze from the night before--I don't stop there. Before I catch myself from my reverie and sound a reveille I've got my whole pants situation undone and almost below-mast. Around the time I realize this I'm thinking shitshitshit they're gonna corral me in that purgatory past the screeners and the metal detectors and the woman with the voodoo voice and there won't even be any magazines and they'll hold me and search me and wand me and flag me for the no-fly and I might as well have taken up Islam or that whole Sikh thing in college like everyone else 'cause then I'd be able to righteously and rightfully bitch about unfair treatment and cultural biases and maybe by now I'd at least have hair long enough for a turban or one of those gingham-lookin' hats Arafat used to wear even though I can't grow a full beard and I'd never blow myself up for anything but I'd gladly blow up the spot in a second if only I could rhyme or play the guitar and maybe even then they'd get me at security for the long fingernails I'd grown to play those ol' Spanish tunes I like for the loops 'cause now you can't even carry on a nailfile or a pack of Chewels for the gelly centers, even if they hadn't been discontinued in '91.

Around such time I pull myself out of that deep divot of anxiety and hike up my pants and I suddenly couldn't give two shits if the TSA flunkies or my fellow herdees might have witnessed my absentmindedness 'cause goddammit I'm innocent. Like Adam, so am me--though given another minute or two I'd likely have been just as frisky-ass naked as Original Sin and looking for the nearest hot apple pie. No figgy leaf or nothin', just a pantsed white boy wondering where along that windy road behind he'd left his presence of mind. And his drawers.

"There is no tragedy in the death of an old man..."

"There is no tragedy in the death of an old man. Forgive him his shortcomings, and thank him for all his love and care." --from Robert Altman's A Prairie Home Companion, 2006

I remember waking up in my frat-house cell in early 1999, turning on the tube and learning of the death of Stanley Kubrick. His final, tarnished Eyes Wide Shut was due for release that summer, a project I had been anticipating throughout the years and years of its gestation. His first film since 1987's Full Metal Jacket, EWS would prove one of his most divisive films, opening amid rumors of extensive recutting by Certified Non-Genius Tom Cruise and a skirmish with the MPAA over an orgy scene that played as something more Disney than debauchery. I got a little choked up that morning upon hearing the news, mostly for all the films that the notorious perfectionist may have had left in his still-vibrant, 70-years-young mind.

So there was a similar choking-up this morning when I read that Robert Altman died yesterday at 81, until I recalled the above line from his latest work. Altman left us with an oeuvre far more extensive than that of Mr. Kubrick, and for that we can be grateful. His work during the 1970's was some of the most exciting filmmaking of that Golden Age, and his most recent entries (with a couple of exceptions) showed that his ear heart touch had not waned in the intervening decades. Altman's deft direction, his uncanny ability to coax from unheralded actors performances worth remembering, his eye for talent and ear for the subtleties of natural dialogue and its overlapping and interweaving, his ability to shift focus not only with his camera but with the microphones as well, have influenced every filmmaker worth his salt who has attempted to catch more than four people in a frame since 1970's M*A*S*H.

Like Kubrick, Altman never failed to make me wonder How'd he do that? His films employed none of the trickery we associate with most cinematic trailblazers, none of the explosions or fast cuts or CGI or other such recent flash-and-bang. What was remarkable about his films is the way that he managed to be the fly-on-the-wall, immortalizing mercurial, minute exchanges between actors within the infinite confines of a working movie set. He was one of the first directors to deploy zooms on his cameras and radio-mic every actor in a scene while still using booms to capture the soundscape of any given filmic landscape. He could do the long take like nobody in the business, and the sound editing on his films was nothing short of perfection. To watch Altman's work is to view the detonation of a tactical nuclear strike, to see the explosions of a moment amid the controlled chaos of everything surrounding the blast. And "controlled chaos" might be the best description of the man's best films. He was a master conductor on a grand stage, an illusionist orchestrating a celluloid medium in a way that always seemed orchestrated, never as haphazard as so many films nowadays, and yet the haphazardness of his famously improvisational sets was what made the orchestrations all the more apparent in the final product. And all the more amazing to witness.

In the days to follow, you will be able to read see hear any number of tributes to Robert Altman. Perhaps the greatest tribute will be evident in the many points on the broad spectrum of talent and age and The Public Eye that the sources of these eulogies will inhabit. Kevin Kline and Lindsay Lohan and Elliott Gould and Neve Campbell and Donald Sutherland and Shelley Duvall and Ryan Phillippe and Meryl Streep and Robin Williams and Liv Tyler and Tom Waits and Julia Roberts and Tim Robbins and Robert Duvall and Julianne Moore and Clive Owen and Jennifer Jason Leigh and Warren Beatty and Julie Christie and Steve Buscemi and Tara Reid and Rene Auberjonois and Lili Taylor and Richard Gere and Kate Hudson and Tim Roth and Helen Hunt and Kenneth Branagh and Farrah Fawcett and Robert Downey, Jr. and countless others will doubtless all have their say as to Altman's legacy. And that's just a small sample of the casts he put together over the years, and only the actors still living to pay tribute. Most will credit him as the greatest director they ever had the privilege of working with, call it an "honor" and cite either a long friendship or a sadly foreshortened collaboration, but one fact remains: Anyone who could find the time, the patience, the wherewithal to put all of those names into the same career had something special that the casual observer might easily overlook. The fact that his casting call has hit its end doesn't leave me with regret the way Kubrick's did, but rather with the knowledge that any tapestry as rich in detail as Robert Altman's filmography will always stand up to multiple viewings.

R.I.P.

Sometimes Titles Don't Quite Cut It.

Okay. So I’ve seen some pretty fucked-up shit in my day. When I was working my first Mardi Gras on Bourbon Street, a guy walked in at like five in the morning with his scalp hanging over his left eye, cranium visible, sat down at the bar with blood streaming down his face and ordered a Hurricane. I called security, gave him some napkins and sent him to the street. Don’t know how that ended up. When I lived on Magazine Street three blocks from the St. Thomas Projects, gunshots were a nightly occurrence until they razed the complex. I always knew the bullets weren’t intended for me. And there was the time in Lexington this May when I was across the street having a drink and talking with a gangsta rapper from Louisville (of all places, and how gangsta I still don’t know), when somebody at the club next door decided to unload a magazine at a truncated high school graduation party. Gangsta L dropped to the bricks and took off his Wayfarers for the first time that night, while I turned around (a little looped for the Hennessey we were drinking), stood up, and wondered what was going on. Great moment for ignorance and Dutch Courage, me walking around the patio for a better look while thirty people shouted at me to get down with them behind the brick walls surrounding the joint’s sidewalk space. Kids ten years younger than me, growing up in my safe whitebread suburbanized hometown and yet knowing people who fire guns in crowded parties were scattering through the streets like so many…um…frightened children running for their lives from bullets that recognized no names. But none of that compares to what just happened outside our house in the DOT.

That’s Dorchester, Massachusetts. East Coast, represent. Or something.

So I’ve just gotten in from a long night of nothing at the Indian restaurant where I work. Mondays are the cruelest month of the week. Strangely enough, however, I found that my place caters the Wu Tang Clan’s shows when they play Boston. Apparently Meth, Ghost, and GZA love the spicy curry. Who knew? So I’m talking Wu shit with the owner’s son, who has been tight with the Clan for a few years now, been backstage while Meth smoked a pound of bomb grass, been close enough to Ghostface Killah to see that he’s bald underneath the shaved head, been driving lead when the Clan’s driver didn’t know how to get from the Needham location to the show that night. I mention all of this simply because the gangsta beginnings of the evening play into the eventualities that dropped mere moments ago.

Walking home from the T, I’m doing something I never do. I’ve been dropping verses with S. all night while we rehashed the career arcs of RZA and the gang and lamented the untimely (and yet completely predictable) demise of ODB, and I’m walking back through the deserted DOT from Savin Hill reciting “Winter Warz” from Ghostface’s first album, the unfadable Ironman, which I know by heart and haven’t truly appreciated in years. So the first verse is mental, all inside the noggin, and then I realize that ain’t nobody up, ain’t nobody out, it’s Monday night and it’s cold and I might as well drop a rhyme or two on the out-loud tip. Pardon the jargon. It’s a mood. Before I know it I’m rapping out loud, complete with the gaps in comprehension that come with the territory inhabited by the Wu and appropriated by pasty white boys walking through Dorchester, and I’m feeling good. When I reach my door I’ve just finished Cappadonna’s final verse and it all seems ordained to be so. Upstairs I go, out of the workies and into the sweats, and not ten minutes pass before I hear the screech of tires and the breaking of glass outside on the street.

Whitby Terrace is a dead-end, and apparently the folks coming up our way from Godknowswhere didn’t know that much. All I know is that the guy in front was driving a grey mid-90’s sedan and pulled into the driveway next door when he saw that the hill stopped past our house. Behind him came an older, blue/black pickup with room in the bed for a full-size pitchfork. How do I know the size of the bed? Because the motherfucker had a pitchfork. And he was using it.

So Pitchfork Johnny is holding his weapon like a bat, hands clasped just above the tines, when I get to the window to see what’s the rumpus. There’s already been a window smashed (don’t know whose), and he’s beating the hood of his own car with the handle while shouting at the woman who is apparently attached to the dude driving the sedan. The dialogue goes something like this:

Pitchfork Johnny: I know you got my FUCKing money. Gimme my FUCKing MONEY!

Woman: You ain’t nothin’ but a bitch, muthafucka, just a muthafuckin’ BITCH! You lucky my man don’t come out and fuckin’ KILL yo’ DUMB ASS!

PJ: Oh, so the CRACK’s working, huh? You fuckin’ CRACK whore you nothin’ but a CRACK whore with a fuckin’ CRACK WHORE FUCKin’ husband you fuck—

W: Fuck YOU!

Dude In The Sedan: Yeah, FUCK you you punk-ass—

PJ: You’ll be lucky to get out alive you FUCKin’ BITCH. Just SHUT YOUR FUCKIN’ MOUTH or I’ll fuckin’ put this shit right through your fuckin’ EYE!

So at this point the tines are pointed at Dude In The Sedan, whose relationship to Woman and PJ is unclear. Seems like PJ might have picked up Woman at a bar, gotten her high, and wanted to fuck. Then Dude In The Sedan comes in, claims Woman, rolls out. Evidently things did not end amicably at their Place Of Worship, as Whitby Terrace became a vehicular Ground Zero for the further goings-on.

Did I mention that the first motherfucker had a pitchfork? Yeah.

So PJ is chasing Dude around his car--wait…I’m getting ahead of myself. So there’s shoving going on between PJ and Woman, she’s getting right up in his face with full fist-pumping fury, he’s shoving her out of his face and keeping her at arm’s-length with the handle-end of the pitchfork. Some more skirmishing breaks out, and Dude gets out of his sedan and tries to break things up. No dice. PJ chases him back into his ride with the tines pointed at him. Dude rolls in the passenger side, slams the door, slides over to the driver’s seat, starts the car and PJ moves around the sedan methodically, stops in front to put the tines (on the third pass, the first two skittering off the glass like water from the proverbial duck’s back) through the windshield. PJ hops over to the driver’s side-—

--and at this point I’ve already dialed 911 on my cell, which patches through to the Staties. They connect me to Boston Metro PD, who ask me twice to confirm that I’m talking about a dude with a pitchfork and not just a knife. I confirm twice that I’m talking about a fucking pitchfork. I’m on tape somewhere, and I’d really love to hear it again sometime. But anyway—-

--and smashes out the window swinging the tine-end of the pitchfork like Big Papi. Dude rolls out the passenger side from whence he came. All the while there is shouting and screaming and people using words like Fuck Bitch Crack and Cunt. Oh, and Whore. Not sure how they all strung together, as I was on the line trying to describe the situation to the proper, incredulous authorities. Can’t blame ‘em, really. The authorities, that is. So…

At this point PJ is chasing both Dude and Woman around both vehicles, his pitchfork held in front of him with the totally-business-end pointing forward, and there ensues a game of Round Robin. They loop a figure-eight or two around both vehicles before PJ decides he’s had enough and stops, slamming the tines down on his own truck to emphasize his own consternation. And yes, I’m dressing up his mood in highfalutin’ terminology. Muthafucka was pissed. AND he was carrying a fucking pitchfork. Did I mention that? Yeah.

So at some point between me hanging up with 911 and the minute-or-so that the whole chasing-around-the-cars-shit happened, I’m realizing something that really sets me off. While I’m not consciously thinking of the fucked-up shit that I’ve seen, I’ve got some kind of moral compass twirling about inside me that winds up pointing towards revulsion. I realize that I can read horrible shit (B.E. Ellis’ American Psycho) and watch dramatized horror (Eli Roth’s Hostel and the like) and be subjected on a daily basis to the fucked-up goings-on in Iraq (3000 American boys dead and Saddam gets a death sentence, but from Gee-Dubs that’s like a Tic-Tac) and generally assume myself to have a pretty high tolerance for the bad shit that the world throws one’s way. But there was a moment there, as I was watching the happenings from the safety of my third-floor window, when I thought I was going to see at least one person impaled by a fucking pitchfork. Maybe two people. And I was shaken, stirred, moved. There was a moment of stark mental daylight at one in the morning when I saw that this was something I did not want to see. It’s strange how human nature operates, how--no matter what you've seen or how jaded you feel walking through the sevenday--your subconscious can clock in and reiterate that none of the monkeyshit floating before your eyes is monkeyshit to which you need to bear witness. I knew that I didn't want to see some sad motherfucker die on a pitchfork. At least not tonight, and certainly not before I had a beer to quell the nausea that would most certainly ensue. Honestly, that feeling was refreshing. Even if it has since deprived me of much-needed sleep.

To cut the long version somewhat shorter, the two parties involved (Dude and Woman, and Pitchfork Johnny) eventually peeled out down the street when they heard sirens roaring their/our way. By the time the cops arrived and 911 called back to have me walk downstairs and explain my seemingly absurd emergency call, the kids in question were probably no longer in the same ZIP. The cops seemed kind of miffed, too, like they missed something they could tell everybody at work and trade off of for like weeks. When I was walking back up Whitby and the cops were backing down the street, three people gave me shouts from open windows in the 35-degree cold to see what happened, who was it, what was being done. Nobody recognized the Dude or the Woman or Pitchfork Johnny. The guy two doors down on the third floor put it well: “They ain’t even from the block. I said to ‘em, ‘Not ‘round here you don’t. Not ‘round here.’”

ADDENDUM: It bears mentioning here, as I draw to a close and am still wired and probably won’t sleep much or well but might still try, that all the parties involved in the fracas this early morning were white and pasty as my Scots-Irish ass. It might be easy to assume differently, depending upon what you know of the DOT and what you assume from any of the reconstructed dialogue above. Don’t. Assume, that is.

Whose Country?

So I've been experiencing recently a long period of severe writer's block. Severe enough to merit electroshock, I was beginning to think. There have been false starts and aborted attempts at making a point and far too many hours spent actually working. You know, for, like, remuneration. In between shifts there was that bit on cats that I never could make work, and another about the trend towards documentary-style television sitcoms that just seemed too late-in-the-game to merit serious discussion, and yet another comparing the POW situation in Renoir's Grand Illusion and our current mess in Iraq. Who knows? Maybe these projects will one day come to fruition. Maybe they won't. Maybe they'll grab my fragmentary interest just long enough at some future time that I'll embark upon some misguided, unsolicited monologue in some crowded barroom somewhere and bore the pants off of every pretty lady in earshot.* Time will tell.

At the moment, however, there's a minor cultural curiosity that has gotten my britches in a serious twist for the past two months. It has aroused my ire, my spite, my loathing of everything easy and calculated and pandering and unoriginal and borderline-plagiarized. But first a quick setup:

This new paying gig I've got has me behind yet another bar on Saturdays and Sundays during our beautiful New England autumn, which means that I manage to catch roughly twenty minutes of every collected hour of American football being played across these United States. Sure, we don't have the satellite packages and multiple screens like we did on Bourbon Street, nor are there rampaging, elderly Aggies kissing after every A&M touchdown and drinking White Cadillacs. That's milk and scotch for the uninitiated, just in case elderly Texans embraced in full wrinkly smooch wasn't enough to put you off your feed on a Halloween afternoon. Anyway.

So seeing all this football means that I've also been exposed to the onslaught of corporate sponsorship associated with sporting events of all kinds. Mostly it's beer ads that deal primarily with the long and storied affiliation of drinking and football,** ads that are normally inoffensive enough when you realize that most every American beer commercial anymore portrays beer-swilling, football-watching males in exactly the "guy's guy" light that most of them fantasize about, no matter how ignorant or counterintuitive that light may seem to the rest of the world and women.

The beer ads don't bug me. Some of them are damn funny. Maybe I'm one of those guys.

What does manage to rankle me into fits of ire that I can no longer contain without venting, however, are the non-stop spots (sometimes six or eight per hour of game-time) of those damnably ubiquitous Chevy ads wanting to sell me big, gas-guzzling trucks, all set to the splendiferous strains of John Cougar Fucking Mellencamp's new hit*** "This Is Our Country."

Were this song merely the soundtrack for an American company wishing to sell me an American automobile, I could dig. At the very least, I could ignore. But that, folks, just ain't the case. Chevy has a number of ads set to this jangly pseudo-rock, the most disturbing of which features footage of a flooded New Orleans and the Pillars of Light at Ground Zero in NYC and WPA photographs of the Great Depression in a montage with sandstone arches over the canyons of Arizona/Utah and other such iconic images of What America Means To People Who Should Buy The New 2007 Silverado.**** I get it, alright? We are a nation that can trip and fall and meet with outsized opposition and rebuild itself. Kudos to us. The Spirit of Renewal is not something I question. What I will question is the wisdom of equating a gas-guzzler and images of Modern Americana at a time when we have American children dying overseas for a FUBAR Oil War that has us accelerating the tapping of reserves in pristine wildernesses like Alaska's North Slope (ANWR) to attempt to stave off the flow of blood and oil to and from the Middle East. Sadly, that's a more accurate picture of America right now.

But that's only sorta here or there. What I cannot, by any stretch of my imagination, get behind is the wholesale plagiarism of Woody Guthrie's "This Land Is Your Land" by a Hoosier hack like Mr. Mellencamp, who completely misses the point while appropriating yards of lyric from that poet of the Dust Bowl. A quick sample of JCFM's new ditty:

The Dream is still alive
Someday it will come true
And this country it belongs
To folks like me and you
So let the voice of Freedom
Sing out through this land:
"This is our country."

From the East Coast
To the West Coast
Down the Dixie Highway
Back home
This is our country.

Now take that bit and place it in context: a car company selling a huge truck to people who may or may not need a huge truck, in a country that places some momentary value on having a huge truck so as to better ramble through the nameless-and-named territories of a country built for just such a huge truck, propping JCFM's lyrics up against images (when not of destruction) of the kind of country through which such a huge truck might conceivably ramble and gambol. Might the next verse sound something like this?:

As I went walking
That ribbon of highway
I saw above me
That endless skyway
I saw below me
That golden valley
This land was made for you and me.

When the sun come shining
And I was strolling
In the wheat fields waving
And the dust clouds rolling
A voice come a-chanting
As the fog was a-lifting:
"This land was made for you and me."

This land is your land
This land is my land
From California
To the New York Island
From redwood forests
To the Gulf Stream waters
This land was made for you and me.

Yeah, but that would be Woody's work. And that's where the visual of Chevy's ad breaks with the lyric of JCFM's version of events and strays hamfistedly into Woody's original. JCFM doesn't quite get the open-road vibe that Guthrie understands, mostly because JCFM's never been there. Not in his songs, at least, and certainly not in the last twenty-odd years. This is a man who doesn't even have about him the prescience of your Lee Greenwoods or your Toby Keiths (the latter of whom, BTW, is "Built Ford Tough"), a man who waits five years into a shite global situation to offer his "Real American" take on the drama unfolding. And let's not forget that the "our country" of which he speaks, the red states to which he panders, are the same God-fearing Americans willing to ignore homosexuals in their bid for equal rights under law, willing to kick out every immigrant making up a workforce that currently puts almost every pound of fresh American produce in their horns-of-plenty. What we're left with is a sad, dwarflike, pompadoured opportunist jumping on a rickety jingoist bandwagon as it passes him somewhere on Sunset between Hollywood and Horseshit.

So corporate synergy makes a certain kind of sense, and timing is everything when you're a has-been rocker whose best days are behind you even as your newest album is about to drop, but I could go the rest of my best days without hearing another strained strain of JCFM's forced bid at red-state appeal and still consider myself an American, albeit of a different sort. The sort who wants to catch Game Two without calculated, corporate-sponsored flag-waving intruding before the first pitch, the sort who wants his football uninterrupted when he has better things to think about than what keeps an aging "musician" in the limelight when "Pink Houses" (yeah, but ain't that America?) slides ever backwards in the rearview.

Happy Halloween, America. There's nothing scarier than the monkeyshit we don't call out and fight against. Get out and vote next Tuesday, and don't set your personal soundtracks to anything involving John Cougar Mellencamp. I leave you with this precious snippet, from his latest's first verse:

Well I can stand beside
Ideas I think are right
And I can stand beside
The idea to stand and fight.

Here's to better ideas, in or out of context. In the meantime, stand and fight such egregious pop trash. Peace.


*: Incidentally, "boring" is not the best means of getting the pants off of every pretty lady in earshot. Like, y'know, just FYI.
**: Less acceptable (though just as appropriate) tie-ins, mostly for their illegality: Michael Irvin as corporate spokesman for the Medellin Cartel ("I'd like to snort the world of Coke..."); Leon Lett proselytizing on behalf of marijuana use and its memory-defeating properties, allowing the user to get nabbed twice for inter-state trafficking within a four-month period. And that's just ex-Cowboys, folks. No mention here of Mark Gastineau (for domestic violence) and Ray Lewis (for totally not stabbing some guy) and Lyle Alzado (for blaming steroids to cover up the whole dying-of-AIDS thing) and Brian Bosworth (for making horrifically shitty action flicks while rocking that notched-upper-sideburns-and-pink-mullet look).
***: Yeah, it's a "hit" before it even comes out as part of some schlocky new album, strictly for its inescapability. By that notion of "hit," Stalin's Purges were a big "hit" in Russia, genocide has been a recurring "hit" in Europe and Africa and Southeast Asia and the American Era of Expansion, and Microsoft Windows is a huge "hit" regardless of how many times it crashes your whole shit. Here's to "hits."
****: I will not post any links to these TV spots, as they are so readily available to anyone watching television for the next three months. If you feel the need to seek them out online because you watch neither television nor American football and you're single and female and scorchingly attractive, feel free to drop me an email and we'll discuss. You'll find a link in the column to the right. Include photos.

Crikey.

By now everyone on the planet, Down Under and Up Here, has heard of the untimely passing of "The Crocodile Hunter." Barbed through the heart by a stingray in shallow waters off the coast of his island-continent, Steve Irwin went out doing what he loved: bringing Australia's native fauna into the world's living rooms. He has been publicly mourned by his Prime Minister, by the devoted fans who've set up a floral shrine outside his Australia Zoo, by Russell Crowe, and by millions of people the world over who grew to love his quirky, controversial, frontier approach to wildlife conservation. His death came as both a shock and an inevitability, for this was a man who thought nothing of sidling up to 16-foot saltwater crocs, of handling taipans mambas vipers cobras, of diving with every predator of the deep.

The saying goes that we make our own fun, and everything else is entertainment. Steve Irwin made his own fun, crafted a life around bringing that fun to every couchbound entertainment-seeker who caught his show. You could see the gleam in his eyes when he had some monster in a close-up's foreground, the twinkle of a kid bringing home a frog in his lunchbox. "Isn't she a beaut?!" he would whisper with that ripe-for-caricature Aussie awe. "She's gorgeous!" For many, Irwin's exploits were legendary in the pop-culture sense of the term, marveled over for an hour or so and forgotten as soon as the channel flipped. There might be a lingering awareness of the fact that he had his smiling mug in the mouth of a huge reptile, or had grabbed a venomous snake by the tail, but the specifics could tend to fade with each successive televisual moment. Entertainment is, after all, entertainment. It is evanescent and mercurial by nature, lasting only as long as the pixels flicker before the eye.

For the rest of us, Irwin was--and remains--a hero by every definition. He did what we could only hope to do, given the opportunity and the balls-out willingness to stare Death in the face and say, "Not just now, thanks. You'll have your chance soon enough, but not just now."

"Daring" is a word too often used in this entertainment-driven world, a term applied most frequently to trivial pursuits of the mind, of creativity and essential passivity. That last Michael Winterbottom flick was daring, say, or the most recent frame hung on the walls at MOMA. Steve Irwin was Daring. His life required capitalization and, if available, block letters and boldface. And yet he also managed to come across as the most down-to-earth, self-effacing daredevil. He was wired differently than most of us, and it showed.

There's another cliché out there, that you should dress for the job you want, not the job you have. My fondest memory of Steve Irwin, the one I would cite to anyone who mentions his name, is of watching him snorkeling with sea snakes and diving to follow them--clad not in wetsuit trunks Speedo, but in his trademark khaki shorts and shirt. Underwater. Steve Irwin dressed for the job he had, and he did it well. If the clothes make the man, The Crocodile Hunter was more of a man than most of us can ever hope to be--and without ever sacrificing that childlike twinkle. The world is better for his having been here.

Crocs rule. R.I.P.

"everyday"

My good friend J. sent me the above link late last night, and it's easily the coolest thing I've seen all week. Noah Kalina has taken a candid self-portrait every day for six-and-a-half years (and counting), stitching them all together over some really ominous piano. It's a fascinating glimpse into a person's life. We are privy to his changing hairstyles, living arrangements, random friends/acquaintances in the background, clothes worn and discarded that magically move from desk to floor to back-of-chair, etc. The expressionless camera-presence is the only relative constant.

There's something about the immediacy of Kalina's face in these frames, the contextualization of a life-in-progress that goes on in the periphery around the static, almost serene center. It grabbed me in an unexpected way--much as van Gogh's Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear [below right] draws me in, or Schiele's Self-Portrait with Black Vase [below left], or any of Rembrandt's self-portraits with their luminous-yet-still-murky backgrounds. Each of these works makes me stare into the eyes at the same time I'm looking at what else is in the frame, curious to discover how the mind behind a famous face describes itself by what it makes available in the mise-en-scene.

But Kalina's photography here is more raw, less contrived than a painted self-portrait, where the artist must consider each individual brushstroke. To add another layer of reference to this deconstruction, the animation of his snapshots strikes me as almost pointillist. Like Seurat or Lichtenstein, the overall effect when one stands back from the framed work (or, here, the 6 minutes or so of animation) is something greater than the sum of its individual dots. The viewer is left to infer any stories implied by the changing periphery, and the questions that arise etch the piece with all the contours and textures of a 3-dimensional, 360-degree, "real" life: "Why the beaded necklace near the middle of the piece? Who gave it to him? Why did it suddenly disappear?" "Etc., etc., etc..."

everyday is also a declaration of the power of editing and scoring to alter the meaning of any individual frame in a film. As we have seen recently with the burgeoning craft of "alternative trailers," the image on celluloid is only part of the picture. [My favorite example, taken from one of my favorite films, follows at the end of this post. -N.] By changing the music or the surrounding visual elements of a filmic image, one can effectively re-invent any work in the medium. The Russian film pioneer Lev Kuleshov first described this phenomenon, what would later be called "The Kuleshov Effect." He showed static film of a man's impassive face, then a bowl of soup, then the man's face again, then a coffin, then the man's face, and on and on. Between juxtapositions he would ask his audiences to describe what the man might be feeling. The reaction was overwhelmingly uniform across several versions of the experiment: after the shot of the soup went back to the face, the man was happy because he could eat; after the coffin, the man was sad because someone he knew had died. Keep in mind that the shot of the man's face was the same, changeless and betraying no emotion. What the audience registered was the power of montage, of a filmed moment's context within an edited work rather than as a moment in and of itself. Kalina's blank stare asks his viewers to work the same sort of deduction based on the changing information along the edges of the frame, but at a pace much faster than Kuleshov ever considered.

There's another element at work here that subverts the essential voyeuristic nature of film even as it exploits it. Sure, we have this peek into another's life, and he can't see us watching--but he is staring directly into our eyes from the middle of the frame. It's rare in narrative film to have a character looking directly into the camera (Jonathan Demme uses the technique most unsettlingly in The Silence of the Lambs). It happens more often in documentary film, but for a person to offer, without stutter, "Welcome into my world, my life, my home" from the simultaneous remove and immediacy of a piece like everyday is startling, to say the very least.

Film history lectures aside, a brief admission: it's early yet this rainy Boston Sunday, I've only now hooked up my morning coffee, and everyday was the first thing I saw upon waking after a night of fitful, talkative sleep. I had a definite moment of existential crisis while viewing the piece, wondering where the last six-and-a-half years of my own life have gone while I watched those of another passing before my eyes. I have no doubt that my morning would have been considerably less thoughtful had Kalina scored his epic transformations with, say, The Black Eyed Peas. "Let's Get Retarded" would impart upon the viewer a completely different impression of his work and life than does the current piano score by Carly Comando. Were there also more glaring changes in angle and framing, I probably wouldn't have taken time out of a grey day to write this entry. Behold the power of film, right?

As it stands, this is the kind of project I would advise my kids to undertake as soon as they can wield a camera. It's the perfect complement to a written or video diary (or blog, for that matter), but without all the pressure that a daily catalogue of one's feelings tends to exert over time. A literal fraction of a second each day, and there exists in the digital ether a record of your life in stop-motion. Amazing. Wish I had thought of it years ago. Might start tomorrow. Cheers in the meantime to Mr. Kalina for having the bravery (nay, balls?) to show us the blink-and-you-miss-it passage of time as one man experiences it, at just under 24 frames-per-second.

Things I'm Not Going To Write About

[zzzz. zzzzyzzzzx. zzzSNAP. What the... Poopytrip! What month is it? September!? Okay... wellywell... Time for a bit of the ol' pipecleaner on the brainside. Don't we all need that from time to time? Like when it's been six weeks of monkeyshit in between you and your last blog post? I owe apologies to everyone who has logged on and been forced to witness the Basketcase-esque abomination that is two Wayanses latched together in a frontal-papoose-style arrangement. Scusilo. Je m'excuse. Et cetera. Ad infinitum.... So here's what I've been working on that will never get a full-length, exhaustive (read: boring) examination in these pages. Consider these open letters as being written to whomever* might be the intended recipient. Peace.]

Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones and NASCAR: There was an ad that hyped the TNT (read: AOL-Time/Warner) airings of NASCAR races, which are in the first place incomprehensible; in the second, inexcusable. I write this, mind you, as a man who spent his formative years in the American South. So take it how you will: am I merely offering apologia for My Redneck Past, or am I genuinely perturbed by Our Red States' Obsession With Men Turning Left? Take the latter. Anyway, the Stones are singing about a woman who's "Driving Too Fast" in this tune, and I can't help thinking it sounds like exactly what I'd expect from a group so...so...septuagenarian? It's a 6-minute track if you steal it, and it's only worth half that. The opening chorus goes something like: "I love you baby I love you too much. / I love you baby that I can't stop the fuss." The "fuss?" Is this some Britslang I ain't party to quite yet, or is it just lazy writing?

MJ: "Hey, Keith, what rhymes with "Much?"

KR: "Er...zzz...wha--Poopytrip! 'Fuss!'"

This is a band that rocked for a few good years (until around 1981ish) on riffs and beats lifted from The Great American Bluesmen. Now they're relegated to the rubbishbin of pop-redneck, corporate-salaried, AOL-Time/Warnerish hackery, re-examining a theme I thought Prince had killed with "Little Red Corvette."

P: "Baby, you much too fast [You got to slow dow-own!]."

Sure she drives too fast, Mick. You're old and crotchety and every old, crotchety man claims that everyone else--hot women included--drives too fast. Show the kind of restraint that Jimi and Bob and Kurt and Janis and Stevie and Hank and Woody and Buddy and Axl did and roll out with some dignity, okay?

Axl?: I'll believe he's still breathing when I hear Chinese Democracy.

Keith Richards and the 1967 Rolling Stones Death Pool: How. I mean. Really. Is it just your cholesterol's low, or what? Were it not for the smoking cigarette dangling from your lips at the Super Bowl, I would have assumed animatronics and Disney-style floofaroo. Kudos if you're not already animatronic. If you're already all gears and pulleys, then you aren't even reading this. With that in mind...

Animatronic Rolling Stones: It's really the only stop after Johnny Depp claims your swagger as his own in a movie based on a theme-park ride. Like Gibson did with his whole Man-On-The-Cross shit.

Mel Gibson? An Anti-Semite? Nah...: Really the ugliest story, but also the most predictable. Here's a guy whose father put out white-power, pro-Nazi newsletters as part of a radical-Catholic movement in Australia while Mel was off growing the Ubermullet that would eventually gain him Lethal Weapons 1 through IV. So when William Wallace switches from beer to SS-and-Sevens, all manner of donkeypiss spews forth. It's wildly ironic that the man who made the most wildly anti-Semitic movie of all time (The Passion of The Christ), when pissed, flails on and on about every Hebrew who's not already his Lord and Saviour. Pick a Jew and stick with it, Mel. Please. I liked The Man Without A Face, really. Cross my heart. No, not that cross, Mel. Just climb down and we'll talk.

Crosses: Better than crescents or Mogen Davids? Who decides? (5 USD on the latter...takers?).

War In The Middle East: Seriously, Lebanon. What? Rocks only beat scissors, and the paper comes from Washington. Be happy with the land you have and just be done with the rest. Thanks.

Nukes In The Middle East: Oh. What? I thought that was just North Korea and Libya and Iran and India and Pakistan and aren't all of these people just pissed off at each other? At US?!?! Okay. Lebanon, listen up: Sorry about that whole last shit. We're cool as long as we're cool, y'know? Just don't do anything I wouldn't, and leave a full tank when you drop off the keys. Rightyroo, rocknroll. Speaking of...

Plane Crashes and Emmys: Congrats, Monk. Congrats, Mister Carell. Congrats, Jon Stewart. O'Brien? Nice show. Don't hold you accountable in any way for anything that happened during that telecast. Your timing's never been flawless (but neither was Johnny's), but this time the flaws found a momentary audience. Fear not: Like the Emmys, the controversy and the crash will fade into distant memory soon enough...

Oliver Stone and World Trade Center: ...until Ollie comes out WAAAAY after the starting bell, murmurs a barely audible "Poopytrip!" and sets to work assassinating your character in 2011. On peyote and Cuban hookers.

Peyote and Cuban Hookers: Um... Yeah, how much por la noche? And how much if you don't melt into David Crosby?

Robert DeNiro: Really, Bob. Dead to me. Don't even bother calling this time.

John Mark Karr: "She loves me, she loves me not. She loves me, she loves me not. I was there in the room, I wasn't even in the state. I just wanted a hug from police officers, or the FBI." Can't skinny and goofy-looking qualify as a capital offense? Please? Just once?

The Chicken I Raped With A Beer Can Last Night: Sorry. I can only imagine how that hurt. If it helps matters any: you were delicious and you were dead. And I promise I'll work that entire carcass into a bitchin' leftover-chix soup. I try to roll like a Plains Indian (feathers, not dots) with that good shit, y'know, use every part of the proverbial buffalo. Even though you can't hunt them anymore, except by private arrangement. Buffalo, that is. Black gold, West-Texas plea. Yeah, um...

Buffalo: Sorry. I meant "bison," and never meant to understate your car-knocking-over ability. Kudos to great SUV-relocation potential, and long may you prosper.

My Pillow: A great place to spend the night. Cheers and

[zzzz...zzzzyzzzzx...zzzSNAP!]

*: Oh, or is it "whoever?" Did you really scroll all the way down here after the asterisk? There are greater problems on the horizon, mi amigo, than my grasp of interstitial M's. Focus.