tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-46295839931776898682024-03-12T18:57:49.357-07:00wewitnessedtheapocalypseUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger86125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4629583993177689868.post-57726338958070782202013-06-15T15:28:00.004-07:002013-06-15T15:31:21.119-07:00THIS IS EVEN MORE OF A DISGRACE<br />
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-PUdUZdPh4zk/UbzobmkF6oI/AAAAAAAAB9g/9N7R6JxHmh4/s1600/IMAG0184.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="180" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-PUdUZdPh4zk/UbzobmkF6oI/AAAAAAAAB9g/9N7R6JxHmh4/s320/IMAG0184.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
Two years after my previous <a href="http://wewitnessedtheapocalypse.blogspot.com/2011/04/this-is-complete-disgrace.html">post</a>, the "New Yorker Weekender Bag" is still a black plastic insult to its readers, but now the magazine has the good sense to have removed the New Yorker logo. It is easy to see why a magazine would not want to be associated with this bag. It is less easy to see why a magazine whose readers conceive of it as the epitome of the upper middle in America would continue to advertise a "gift" of a "weekender bag" to its subscribers that looks and smells like toxic waste.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4629583993177689868.post-85414731485452257072012-10-18T14:01:00.001-07:002012-10-18T14:01:22.031-07:00From the Archives: DiaryThe French have l’esprit, the English have humor. The Russians have
something else, broader, wilder, zanier. Bakhtin called it the
carnivalesque. You can see it imprinted on K.’s face when he’s had a few
vodkas, or even when he hasn’t, this antic spirit that can swing from
sweet boyishness into rampaging vulgarity in a giddy second, all the
while retaining a certain calculated wariness. K. has been, you suspect,
doted on by his elders for being a naughty boy ever since he was old
enough to interject precocious exclamations into serious adult talk. His
grin possesses his face absolutely — thick lips, big white teeth, wide
mouth, heavy brows lifted, round eyes popped wide open — flaunting the
whites — in astonished mock-astonishment, with the promise of mad
abandon perpetually exuding from their depths. His impish drolleries,
taken out of context, are seldom witty or humorous, but each contributes
to the earthily comic atmosphere he strives to maintain. They mean to
convey one message: Fun! An appealling blend of cheerful savagery and
cultivation partaking of a promiscuous mixture of Near Eastern and West
Asian elements, his face, captured in different moments, moods, angles
or lighting, could belong to a Turkish gastarbeiter or an Iranian Pasha,
a Barbary pirate or an Uzbek warlord, an Armenian anarchist or a
Bollywood singing sensation. Or even, for that matter (improbably
enough) — a Russian Jewish intellectual. Like a rough-hewn leading man
of action, he is both handsome and ugly. Always a little bit taller and
less stoutly muscled than you remember, he is always a little bit
swarthier and hairier than you have permitted yourself to believe.<br />
<br />
“I looked inside there,” he said, referring to the common room of the
Sixth Street Community Center, where the interns and their friends had
gathered in disappointingly sparse clusters. “It’s the lamest party
ever!” The absolutist pronouncement is one of K.’s trademarks. At the
last party on the Lower East Side, he had declared that “there are no
beautiful women here,” causing a friend of L. to sputter on the cab ride
home, his face flushing a deep crimson, “I c-c-can’t b-believe he said
that! There were S-SO MANY b-beautiful w-women there!” But this is K.’s
way. Periodically, he will pay lip service to the other side of his
axiomatic worldview in a tentative, bemused way. “Maybe we’re just
schlubs,” he intoned and let the possibility hang in the air for a
pensive moment, tittering and growling nervously under his breath.
“Maybe our superiority to all other writers isn’t so assured.” This was,
of course, an outlandish joke — doubting the superiority, that is.<br />
<br />
“He is an interesting paradox,” mused M. “Of the four of us, who can you
most easily picture running around with an Uzi? And yet, he is many ways
furthest to the left on Israel.” “He is a Bolshevik for Menshevik ends,”
I added. “Well, that does bring up a certain means-end disconnect,” M.
mused. “Maybe so, but maybe it’s also exactly what is needed in times
like the present. The rest of us bemoan our troubled condition, the
corruption and rot that surrounds us, thickening every day. K. asks only
— what is to be done?”<br />
<br />
<br />
Friday, May 20, 2005<br />
<br />
E.B. talks like she writes<br />
<br />
E.B. talks like she writes. Or maybe it’s better to say that she writes
like she thinks. So many colorful anecdotes, so many toothsome ironies
so amiably rendered, in the most off-hand way. When she sits down to
write, she is a transcriptionist of her own internal monologue. All she
has to do is type. Her stories begin like shaggy dog stories, and by
means of the subtlest and most extraordinary transpositions, flirt with
universal significance, and then deconstruct themselves to become shaggy
dog stories again. In so doing, the form of her storytelling mimics the
content of her message, dramatizing the universal truth to be found in
the absence of any universal truth. When she is sitting across from you
at an overpriced Chinese restaurant, her face — big and narrow, and
loose, and exquisitely sculptured all at once — feigning its own
genuine innocence and dissembling its omniscience — is lit by soft
candelight and framed by shadow. Though she is six feet tall and
superbly muscled along her lanky frame — all elongated limbs and torso
— she is a lightweight drinker; a single glass of white wine has made
her giddy. This fact has something to do with how I wound up with EB and
Dr. B.<br />
<br />
“I have to meet my mother, why don’t you come?” she asks, rummaging
through her pocketbook for a pack of cigarettes. “I don’t smoke, except
when I see my mother,” she says. “I worry about my mother, I feel for
her, it makes me nervous, I have to smoke. Would you like one?” We are
standing outside of the Borders Books and Music at 57th Street and Park
Avenue, where she drank a single glass of white wine and I drank four.
We hit things off immediately, having so many important things in
common. Among them: suburban New Jersey, half-Asian violinists, a
certain confidential tone. I mentioned A., a former professional soccer
player who attended the same private school with her.<br />
<br />
“Oh, him,” she remembered. “If I recall, he was the head of the
diversity committee. He used to give speeches to the assembled student
body about the importance of accepting people of different backgrounds.
It was very strange,” she noted. “He has returned to the school as a
teacher!’<br />
<br />
“It all makes perfect sense now,” I averred. “He was a closet
homosexual!” Even as I say this, I realize that it is my own closet
homosexuality that I have inadvertently projected onto the long-limbed,
golden-haired avatar of all my frustrated youthful athletic ambitions. I
recalled the incipient swelling of a man’s musculature beneath his
close-fitted soccer jersey, the flop and sway of his straw colored hair,
matted in sections, flailing in others, as he sliced through defenses
with heedless aplomb. But the conversation soon turns to other things.
“Did you go to Harvard?” she wants to know.<br />
<br />
“No, I went to Rutgers,” I say, with a certain defiant solemnity.<br />
<br />
“Ah, Rutgers,” she begins, with a smile.<br />
<br />
“You are about to say something charitable about the State University of
New Jersey?” I demand.
“<br />
<br />
"No, no. It’s about my favorite English teacher.” She went on to tell a
shaggy dog story about an English teacher at her private school with a
PHd. from Rutgers: how she took EB. and a friend under her wing as her
prized students, how she would assign five page papers and how E would
turn in 40 page essays, and how the teacher dutifully, painstakingly
worked her way through all of it, how the teacher eventually had her
husband abandon her for the mother of the other favored student, how she
wound up last Christmas in that very man’s apartment amid his paintings.
Lastly, how she had gotten in touch with this teacher who relayed all of
her sorrows to her, but concluded that she was once again in love with a
poet.<br />
<br />
“Ah, the last is the most tragic thing of all!” I interjected.<br />
<br />
“So, anyway,” she concluded, “that is what I know about Rutgers.”<br />
<br />
We compared spiritual upbringings – I was confirmed in the Lutheran
Church, her father was a Marxist-Leninist. “So you grew up with
historical inevitability?” I asked. “In the eighties, no less!”<br />
<br />
“No, but we do play this game where we try to see if we can get my
father to say that ‘religion is the opium of the people,” she says. Then
she talks of her mother. A Chinese lab assistant who was fired by her
mother is suing her mother, alleging that it was a racially motivated
firing. “But, in fact, as my mother has pointed out to her – all of her
employees are Chinese!” she exclaims. But then, the employee has shot
back that her mother hires the Chinese because they are docile and can
be exploited. “In fact, my mother loves the Chinese!”<br />
<br />
“We have been talking of all things!” she enthused to K. when he
appeared to check up on us. “The fear of death, the yearning for eternal
youth, the acknowledgment of the fact that one must fulminate against
this corrupt desire, and yet our craven acquiescence to it.”
“E. knows all things, and W. is interested in all things,” says K. with
his accustomed condescension. K. was looking, as always, like a vision
of rude health — swarthy, hairy, compactly massive, and all the more so
for the tall, slender, dark-haired Jewess next to him. Later, EB would
call her “the most observant girl I have ever known.” She certainly has
bewitching eyes. K. went quickly on his way. L.’s amiable mother amiably
nudged us up the escalators and out the door. We emerged into the clear
and warm night air. I let her light me up. We made it the restaurant and
met her Dr. B, who talked about experimenting on monkeys, prep schools,
and her admiration and love for her daughter. The food was awful at $40
a plate, scarcely distinguishable from the slop served at all-night take
out places with bulletproof plexiglass shields. My fortune cookie read:
“You have an interest in Chinese culture and all things Chinese.”
Outside the restaurant, we said brisk and oddly peremptory goodbyes. The
buzz had subsided, and I walked thirty blocks downtown through clusters
of gaudily attired women tottering drunk on stiletto heels to take PATH
station home.<br />
<br />
<br />
Thursday, April 28, 2005<br />
<br />
A foray into the world republic of letters<br />
<br />
After the reading we found ourselves at a sidewalk cafe with a
pushy waiter. Toward the meal’s end M. wondered aloud if there was
anything our man could’ve done to be more rude. Mostly, he tried
to make us feel small for ordering within our means. You imagined
him making wisecracks at our party’s expense in the kitchen,
mimicking the apologetic tone he was able to extort from us with
his imposing height, wiry musculature, and oily smile broadcasting
the chagrin at our reluctance to splurge on expensive bottles of
wine that it affected to hide. You could see how effective it
might have been with people more easily cowed or less defiantly
cheap than our party. There were six of us — the two
subcontinental novelists and their female companions, M. and I,
and we were just geting to know one another.<br />
<br />
P. endured this with exemplary geniality. Ever since he accidentally
bumped into that Times reviewer at that stylish magazine party in Lower
Manhattan, he had had to contend with a reputation for being a
repository of all human virtues. It’s just good breeding, the kind you
get as a matter of course in ancient and proud civilizations like the
one that still flourishes on the Indian subcontinent, but it was easy to
see why it would tempt an American into grotesque hyperbole with an
Orientalizing cast. “Here, surely, was the young Siddhartha Gautama
himself:” our man at the paper of record had written, “a
scholar-sophisticate, a personality both cosmopolitan and ascetic, at
large and at home in the world,” and he followed this up with such
kindly words about P.’s achievement in the book he was reviewing that no
one could begrudge him his self-gratifying reverie. P. really did have a
spareness and translucency of aspect such that never sullying his
digestive tract with animal fats and byproducts (he has never tasted
meat) might imbue, and an easy genuineness to his smile that might
strike a New Yorker grown accustomed to the wheedling, manipulative
grins of his metropolitan adversaries in the scrimmage of appetite as
holy. You sensed that P. didn’t say “We _must_ get together soon,”
without intending to do so, and so forth, none of which should be taken
to mean that he didn’t have a wicked tongue when he needed to, or an
powerful sense of irony, especially toward Westerners that wanted to
make him into a object lesson of some kind or other. And, of course —
let’s admit what boringly commonplace Americans we are and say that his
soft Oxbridge accent tinged with Brahmin spice impresses us too.<br />
<br />
In any case, there was only one Siddhartha at the table, and he was
seated across from me. S.’s novel came out just last week, to good early
notices, though the bulk of them are still yet to come. He is tall and
husky and would be cast in the role of warrior-king opposite P.’s
saint-prince, though he is no less measured and gracious in his speech
and gesture than his peer. The novel he intended to write, he explained
at the Half-King, was the novel he would like to read which did not in
fact, exist prior to his writing it: a depiction of his remote and
war-torn Bengali homeland which would have nothing at all to do with the
metropolitan India depicted in Bollywood musicals or other Oriental
kitsch popular with Westerners. After the reading he was subject to the
inevitable questions. “How many hours a day do you write?” from a pretty
blonde woman, who turned out to be Sebastian Junger’s girlfriend. S.
handled them with his accustomed aplomb.<br />
<br />
At the restaurant, S. spoke about the presence of the West in his
youthful imagination. Growing up in the 1970’s, Bengalis had access to
American movies of theWorld War II era, but the most up to date heavy
metal music of the day: Judas Priest, AC/DC, Iron Maiden. The memory of
long Bengali hair and band insignia etched crudely into the skin brought
a smile to S’s face. Attending an Irish Catholic school in his village,
S. aspired to a cosmopolitan destiny. He went to college in Calcutta,
worked as a journalist for a year and then, in 1998, appplied to the
graduate English program at Columbia University. By phone, Gayatri
Spivak asked him if he wanted to study with her. He responded “No, I
don’t really agree with much of the work you are doing.” She came back
with a bracing candor. “I can see how you’d have your own perspective on
these issues,” she said. “I’m glad that you don’t want to work with me.
In fact, I’m tired of all the people that want to come here and
replicate the work that I do,” S. recalled. She then proceeded to help
him get into the program.<br />
<br />
After reading, S. was approached by one of the Half-King’s waiter who,
in between serving his customers in the section of the restaurant,
peeked in to hear S. read with growing excitement. It turns out the
waiter was a Bengali. “It was clear that he was very excited and
impressed by writers,” S. said. “He said that one of reasons he likes
his job is that the bar is owned by Sebastian Junger, and he gets to
meet and be in the presence of other writers.” We all cooed, enchanted
by that special feeling we get when the humanity of those we might
otherwise ignore is suddenly disclosed. “He wanted to know if I knew
Jhumpa Lahiri. He said he saw her once buying candies in Jackson
Heights. Then he wanted to know if I knew Monica Ali. I had to admit
that I did not,” he said. “His name is Shilling,” S. added to cap it all
off.<br />
<br />
“Shilling,” we asked, inclining our heads, quizzically.
“Yes, his name is Shilling, his brother is named Dollar and his other
brother is named Farthing,” S. said. “I asked him if he wanted to go
back. He said he did not. It was too violent and dangerous, and
depressing. Which is true,” conceded S.<br />
<br />
The talk turned to books and magazines, editorial visions, neocon
projects and philosophies of history. The food arrived; quite good. It
was revealed that J., the proprietor of the much lamented and defunct
magazine had been a man of independent means, the heir to an underwear
fortune. Was it Hanes or BVD? M. was quiet, himself the recipient of a
(much scattered and dispersed) textile fortune himself.
<br />
<br />
Later, taking a last drink after the two couples had left, M. offered
his appreciation of the Indians. “They are educated men, and they know
it,” he said, “and they do not apologize for it.” He had recently
published a beautiful essay about smoking that has rewarded repeated
re-reading. Certain phrases from it flit through my subconscious,
especially this one: “The more I smoke the less I’m actually alive and
the more I become a hysterical medium for other people’s lives.” This
captured something I have been wanting to say. After all, none of us are
real people, we are merely surrogates for the insubstantial motives and
agendas of others, equally unreal, and they of ours. The effort to
convince ourselves otherwise is the source of so much trauma, and yet we
can never be free of it. Amid all this, lives build up all around us,
even those of us that have done our best to hold any particular life at
bay. M. bought a pack of cigarettes — $7.50! — apologized for “doing
the bourgeois thing” and hailed a cab to whisk him uptown. I walked to
the 23rd St. PATH station through the lingering brisknes of the
softening late-April air, and, finding myself short of funds, jumped the
turnstile.
posted by wesley<br />
<br />
<br />
| 7:28 PM
Wednesday, April 20, 2005<br />
<br />
At the National Arts Club The Women Come and Go<br />
<br />
<br />
V. comes dressed in a pinstriped suit of antiquated cut with a splash of
red fabric around his neck. He has been handing out dead flowers all
night to the proprietors of the upstart literary journal and the
concentric rings of their friends, acquaintances, and readers who gaze
searchingly at one another, wondering whether they can count themselves
as a milieu. The opulent surroundings help; we are bathed in the amber
light from the chandeliers of the National Arts Club, surrounded by
luxurious appointments softened by the gentle deliquescence of just the
right kind of neglect. Good cookies, free red wine, shabby gentility,
well-dressed peers, and at least one young woman with a face the sight
of which can, simultaneously, induce in the spectator an eerie dreamlike
silence and stillness, and a sense of falling into an abyss. Every now
and again a face pops out of the sea of our drab, common humanity and
reminds one of the power that the human visage can exert over the
adrenal glands. Think of the special fondness that a lifetime shared
with a woman you loved and built a life with would inculcate, the dear
familiarity of its ever-changing moods, each instilled with imponderable
depths of sorrow and joy. Now imagine having all this reduced to
nothingness by a glimpse of a strange woman’s face across a hallway. I
stuff a third cookie into my mouth, savoring its fatty richness.<br />
<br />
You could say that V. is the upstart journal’s number one fan. By the
stairwell we are talking about revolution, V. and I, the attractive
sociologist, and B., the young novelist with the golden hair and the
gracefully self-deprecating wit. Self-deprecation in its contemporary
form usually signals distorted aggression against the self and others,
televisual japing with an edge of hysteria. In B., it assume its
classical WASP poise, signifying a superfluidity of self-esteem
playfully dissembled. A man of genuine and tortured conscience, B. is
susceptible to the blandishments of success and cheerfully admits to the
naked hypocrisy of this, knowing you will be charmed by his candor. And
though you know he knows, and he knows that you know that he knows, and
though you are determined not to be charmed — you are charmed. This is
charm! Stephen Jay Gould has written about the special proportions
shared by all baby mammals — the head large in proportion to the body,
the eyes large in proportion to the head — and how these dimensions are
universally appealing to the protective instincts of adult mammals. B.
is embarrassed by the lottery he won at birth, but there are many
compensations for this embarrassment.<br />
<br />
The talk, as it often does, has turned to Ayatollah fanciers, Stalinoid
apologists, enthusiasts for Che, Mao, Kim Il-Sung. And what of the
revolutionary hopes of the present? Have they all been extinguished?
Hugo Chavez, V. insists, only advocates the nationalization of industry
and the distribution of jobs to the previously disenfranchised. Though
he grandstands as a revolutionary, his meliorist ends incite no
revolutionary passions elsewhere.<br />
<br />
“It’s enough to get him killed by the CIA,” I aver.<br />
<br />
B. notes that, frankly, there aren’t enough Venezuelan intellectuals of
the upper class to host an international brigade of liberal
intellectuals in their accustomed style. “You’d have to go live in the
huts with the people,” B. notes, his eyes twinkling mordantly. “That
doesn’t sound like much fun. Now Argentina! That’s where you want to be!
The dollar is very strong over there. You can live well, and help with
the march of progress!”<br />
<br />
And then V. steers the subject abruptly to the avant-garde. “I come from
a very bourgeois upbringing, a very proper Russian bourgeois education,”
he says.<br />
<br />
“Yes, well, it’s a rare avant-gardist that does not come from the
bourgeoisie,” B. notes.<br />
<br />
“Yes, yes,” says V. “Well, the truth is — if you want to have an
intellectual avant-garde, you will have to deal with people like me!”<br />
<br />
It was the line of the night, and we told him so. Was it spontaenous? He
admitted to sitting in his bedroom and thinking up aphorisms, like Oscar
Wilde.<br />
<br />
“It’s true that Wilde was hardly spontaneous,” B. notes, “but did he
admit it?”<br />
<br />
“Probably not,” conceded Vlad, and then produced from his inner jacket
pocket a bottle of vodka and proceeded to swig from it. He offered it to
each of it. We politely declined.<br />
<br />
Later in the evening, after we have decamped to a bar, M. is scathing on
the subject of V. Yes, he is merely a 20-year old kid, and wasn’t I
pretentious when I was that age? M. asks, making the desultory case for
tempering scorn with affection. But really, M. asks — what is he doing
here? Why is he acting this way? V. proposed to write a manifesto for
the upstart journal, M. discloses — a hodgepodge of shopworn ideas
riddled with spelling errors that spellcheck could have easily caught.
“This is not how it is done,” declares M. “It takes real work, real
seriousness, not coming here among us and acting like an operator.”<br />
<br />
I overhear V. imploring B. to come to some event of his, and listen as
B. strains the limits of his gracefulness to once again decline without
giving offense. “If I were a woman I would gladly sleep with B.,” V.
declares soon after B. leaves the bar.<br />
<br />
It is in the fatal narrative logic of such things that someday V. will
put on a vivid display of his humanity that will make everyone cringe
and recoil. His self-deprecation is a constant threat of this breakdown
that extorts scrupulous politeness, and it is this extortion that breeds
resentment. We get an inkling of the way that fraternities and football
teams must feel toward their callow aspirants. We feel the root of the
urge to haze. But we are not frat boys or callous people, so we keep our
hazing to the level of bemused irony that V., not unintelligent by half,
is smart enough to discern. “We’re dealing with you, V. — but there’s
no intellectual avant-garde,” I say.<br />
<br />
What does he want?. V. wants acceptance. He wants mentors and friends,
he wants to be a part of an intellectual avant-garde, and he lacks the
negative capability to discipline his impulses. To him, this threabare
improvisation of an upstart journal, “an absolute life-raft,” as M. puts
it, is all he knows of glamour and worldliness, and he is hamming it up
in a way that matches his own fantasies. He is unabashed about the
wishes we have learned to dissemble, naked about the things we
painstakingly clothe, and precisely because there is a little bit of him
in all of us, he must be cast into the outer darkness where we strive to
keep our own obscene human need obscured. Knowing this does not change
the fact that this is so.<br />
<br />
<br />
Monday, July 11, 2005<br />
<br />
K. is sipping her coffee<br />
<br />
K. is sipping her coffee beneath a portentous, a slate-ochre,
cloud-streaked summer sky. She watches me approach with staring, myopic,
and unblinking eyes. “Watch the OC!” I urged in a hand-written note
scribbled on the back of a postcard bearing a caricature of Mary
McCarthy issued to new subscribers by the New York Review of Books.
“Villainness Julie Cooper has your drowsy-intent, feline-myopic eyes!”
K. is a bundle of nerves, anxious and alert, a burnt-out filament that
still manages to issue a wobbly light. In a few days she will hear back
from the human resources woman and discover that she has gotten a job
that will roughly quadruple her salary. This will occassion an anxiety
attack of an intensity such that she hasn’t endured in years.<br />
<br />
“Why can’t I just take good things for what they are? I’m upset with
myself for being so upset,” she will say over the phone, her voice
breaking. K. doesn’t slur her words or mumble. She enunciates. And she
does not have the apologetic tone of her peers. For now, picture her
underneath the shade of that awning. Tiny and nimble with chestnut hair,
pillowy lips, pale skin and those gray-green eyes softened by sadness
and pain, slightly clenched with the effort of seeing, never quite
managing to focus.<br />
<br />
K. has been accepted into the MacDowell artist’s colony in the fall. L.,
who has a book contract was not. Who can say why? “She accused me of not
showing her one iota of sensitivity to the fact that she needs that time
to work on her book. I don’t know what more she wanted of me. I told her
I was very sorry that she didn’t get it. What else did she want me to
do? Hand over my spot to her?.”<br />
<br />
“I think that’s exactly what she wants.”<br />
<br />
“Well.”<br />
<br />
I tell K. how much I enjoy people’s humanness when they expose it. On
the one hand, I want nothing to do with it. Please, world, spare me any
visible indications of your human needs and desires. On the other hand,
it is charming in its way. I tell K. that I have resolved to learn how
to love the people I hate. I tell her that I intend to write about
incest. This excites her.<br />
<br />
“People tease me that I am in love with my brother. D. says that if he
marries me he’ll have to live with the fact that I’ll never love him as
much as I love my brother.”<br />
<br />
“So then your brother makes you glow in a way that your boyfriend does
not. They have met each other.”<br />
<br />
“Yes, they have met, and it was a painful experience for D. But listen,
my brother is hilarious, everything he says makes me giddy.”<br />
<br />
“Is he hot?”<br />
<br />
“He is very handsome. Women love him. I acknowledge his sexual allure,
but I am not myself in love with him.”<br />
<br />
“But maybe you are in denial. Are you in denial?”<br />
<br />
“How can we know if we are in denial? I don’t think so. My feelings for
him have always been more maternal than romantic.”<br />
<br />
When K. was in her early 20’s, K.’s mother got breast cancer and died.
“I was embarrassed by how badly it affected me. I mean, everybody’s
parents die eventually. But it took me many years to learn to deal with
it.” I put these pieces together; the dying mother, the elder sister who
shepherds her brother through adolescence.<br />
<br />
K.’s brother is on his way to getting married. During the transition
period in which K. ceased to be the most important woman in K.’s life,
he took painstaking care to make her feel included— as a consultant on wedding issues.. “He did it with such sensitivity,
and I am grateful to him for this. I have these emotions, and sometimes
they are dippy and they are the grist for women’s magazines essays. But
they are no less real for that.”<br />
<br />
When she tells me that she has gotten the job that she longs for and
dreads, the one that will deliver her into a life of middle class
respectability, I ask her the question that each of us is thinking.
“Will K. become one of those Conde Nast girls?” “I say this, K. so that
five years hence, as you are air-kissing Diane Von Furstenberg at
Elaine’s, you will experience a melancholy frisson, thinking of all the
innocence you have left behind you.”<br />
<br />
“Joan Didion also began as a Conde Nast girl,” she mentions. “But she
came from a different place. She started self-entitled, and I am the
opposite.” “I might seem self-entitled,” she goes on to say, in her
confident, confidential tone, “but really I’m not. I come from the
middle middle class.” Dear K. you don’t seem in the least bit
self-entitled. You seem too marvelously human to be true.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4629583993177689868.post-54891180727419681182012-09-05T13:43:00.001-07:002012-09-05T13:43:27.771-07:00<br />
The following letter, published in 1986 in the New York Times,articulates what has always seemed instinctively correct to me about the teaching profession:<br />
<br />
Feminism and the Decline of Teaching Published: July 25, 1986<br />
<br />
To the Editor: Your article on the differences in the lives of Radcliffe women and Harvard men of the class of 1961 (Week in Review, July 13) brought to mind my own recent high-school reunion, class of 1956. After rummaging through the biographies prepared for the occasion, I was surprised to discover that fully two-thirds of the women who went to college and ended up in the work force became kindergarten to 12th-grade teachers. I remembered many of these women, who graduated from college in 1960, as being among the brightest people in our class.<br />
<br />
Naturally, this was the pre-women's liberation era, and so graduates from places like Wellesley, Barnard, Cornell and Tufts had limited vocational options. In addition, further professional training was out for many who had to bring in a paycheck to support their husbands in medical and law schools. The school systems of the period were the richer because they recruited from a captive pool that contained many of the best women graduates from our universities.<br />
<br />
Today, task forces and blue-ribbon panels decry the declining quality of teaching in the public schools. Part of the problem has to be the laudable success of the women's movement. Why should women graduating at the top of their classes from the best universities choose teaching when all the other more glamorous and better-paying professions are at last open to them? No one would turn the clock back to the time when most college-trained women were locked into teaching careers. Yet, clearly, one unintended consequence of the women's movement has been the general decline in the quality of classroom teaching.<br />
<br />
MELVIN SMALL Detroit, July 13, 1986<br />
<br />
The writer is chairman of the history department, Wayne State University.<br />
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4629583993177689868.post-61209110802848321542011-08-04T10:21:00.000-07:002011-08-04T10:23:59.941-07:00Sex, Lies, and Data MiningI <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/31/books/review/a-billion-wicked-thoughts-by-ogi-ogas-and-sai-gaddam-book-review.html?_r=1">reviewed</a> a book about Internet pornography by two computational neuroscientists for the <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/31/books/review/a-billion-wicked-thoughts-by-ogi-ogas-and-sai-gaddam-book-review.html?_r=1">New York Times Book Review.</a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4629583993177689868.post-47706209968851503662011-06-09T12:36:00.000-07:002011-06-09T13:29:20.294-07:00Rage of the Loser ClassI've only written two pieces having anything to do with being Korean. The second piece was the New York Magazine cover story titled PAPER TIGERS.<br /><br />The first piece, which was titled <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Face-Seung-Hui-Kindle-Single-ebook/dp/B005405VSC/ref=sr_1_64?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1307648166&sr=1-64">THE FACE OF SEUNG-HUI CHO</a>, appeared in a small journal called n+1. n+1 asked me, as it does of all its writers, to write as fearlessly and ferociously as I could on a subject that felt urgent to me. It touched on Asian-American identity only obliquely. <br /><br />I was reluctant to write this piece, and then to publish it, for reasons that should be plain to all who read it. But for anyone who was puzzled by the strange and combustible hybrid of reportage, criticism, and memoir that was PAPER TIGERS, THE FACE OF SEUNG-HUI CHO may provide some insight into who I used to be and how I came to be the unusual writer and person that I have since become. <br /><br /><a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2008/01/-the-face-of-seung-hui-cho/47857/">Matthew Yglesias</a> called it "by far the best thing I've read in a long while" back in 2008. <br /><br />Jenny Schuessler, an editor at the New York Times Book Review, <a href="http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/02/08/writing-dangerously/">blogged</a>about it NYT's ArtsBeat blog. <br /><br />Amazon's staff reviewer described the 10,000 word essay thusly: <br /><br />"Amazon.com Review<br />Wesley Yang has an acrobatic way with a turn of phrase. Whether he's describing "lips with the puckered epicene aspect that speaking the French language too young will impart to a decent American mouth," or "sycophants, careerists, and media parasites… redefining mediocrity for the 21st century," he employs this penchant for vivid, snapping description liberally. ("Liberals! They'll hand over the ammunition that their enemies will use to kill them.") Here Yang puts his considerable talents to work in a wandering essay that purports to recall the sad story of school-shooter Seung-Hui Cho, but is in fact about much more. Throughout, Yang unleashes short, summary judgments so eloquent that it hardly matters whether you agree with him. Touching on indie rock, identity politics, or the artistic ossification of Nikki Giovanni, Yang's laser-guided cultural lens focuses the reader's attention equally on his own coming of age, his ostensible subject, and ourselves. --Jason Kirk"<br /><br />The essay, which has for years existed only in print issues of n+1, was selected for inclusion in the anthology BEST CREATIVE NONFICTION of 2008. <br /><br />It is now available as a <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Face-Seung-Hui-Kindle-Single-ebook/dp/B005405VSC/ref=sr_1_64?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1307648166&sr=1-64">Kindle Single</a> at Amazon.Com for $1.99.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4629583993177689868.post-55420617055097539162011-06-04T08:24:00.000-07:002011-06-04T10:18:18.887-07:00A Reply to the Korean[This is in reply to the very interesting and impassioned reply to my piece in New York Magazine called "Paper Tigers", written by the blogger who goes by the name <a href="http://askakorean.blogspot.com/2011/05/why-you-should-never-listen-to-asian.html">"The Korean".]</a><br /><br />New York law firms have more Asian associates than they do associates of any other minority group. But those Asian associates make partner at a rate lower than any other group. That includes blacks and Hispanics. This, too, is part of the scoreboard to which the Korean is gesturing. <br /><br />So, racism can't be the only explanation for this gap. We all agree that blacks and Hispanics have it worse in terms of the perception of others than Asians. Asians are perceived as competent, hard-working, and technically skilled. Thus, in the same leadership study I quoted in my piece, the same engineering resume with a white name at the top would get a lower score for technical ability than it would with an Asian name at the top. <br /><br />And yet, for just this reason, all that hard work and competence can often get turned against Asians in an insidious way that really discloses how race functions today. We no longer face the enemy in riot gear with water cannons. We don't face an enemy at all. Instead, we have these fugitive impressions that subtly undermine women, blacks, Asians in the workplace. We have racial communities that are divided within between the Asians, and blacks, and women, who have a demeanor that fits with the normative American leadership culture, who are not perceived as racially other at all, and those women, and blacks, and Asians, who do not fit into that culture, and who hit a ceiling. <br /><br />Asians have bought into grade-based meritocracy more intensely than any other group, and have mastered grade-based meritocracy better than any other group. And yet, this very mastery is turned against them as a mark of their deficiencies in other areas of life. <br /><br />This is not my observation, but the observation of Tim Wu, and Jane Hyun, and thousands of graduates of Leadership Education for Asian Pacifics. LEAP teaches Asian people: these stereotypes exist; they are applied to you by others whether or not you fit them; and even though they are half-flattering, they can easily end up being used against you, and get you cast as follower and not a leader, a technical grunt and not a creative visionary. And yes, I would add, and a great many Asian men would concur in this – a harmless nerd and not a person you'd want to go to bed with. <br /><br />This is an extremely subtle predicament that nonetheless ends up tripping up Asians, not just in banking and finance, but in every other field as well. And when these subtle micro-politics work themselves out over time, they produce these racially disproportionate effects, where 17 percent of an associate class at PwC are Asian, but only a handful of them can expect to make partner. These numbers obtain across the board, not just in the corporate world, but in government, academia, and elsewhere. <br /><br />Another study found that a white American engineer given a math test will ace that test if he is told that he is being tested for quantitative ability in contrast to women. He will, however, do markedly worse on the same test if he is told that he is being tested for quantitative ability against Asian men. <br /><br />Social psychological experiments like this are bringing to the surface all the hidden stereotypes that people carry with them, and they are showing how harmful they can be to the performance of the people who labor underneath them. We can also see the expression of these stereotypes by examining certain statistical regularities and irregularities. The bias toward height expresses itself: 58 percent of CEO's are over six feet tall. <br /><br />My piece was, at its core, an inquiry into these racially inflected social dynamics as they affect Asian people. These stereotypes mean that Asian SAT scores are discounted to the tune of 140 points. Because when the deck is not stacked against them, they make up 72 percent of the school. <br /><br />The controversial part of the essay, and the thing that has set the Korean off is that I also inquire into the relationship between those stereotypes and the reality of the way Asians behave. I do this not on my own initiative, but following the analyses and prescriptions of LEAP and Jane Hyun and other observers of the white collar workforce like them. <br /><br />There is a dynamic relationship between stereotypes and the behavior upon which these stereotypes is based. We should acknowledge that relationship. Jane Hyun interviewed a group of 40 white executives about their perceptions of Asians. She found that it was the perception of these executives that Asians were hard working, cliquish, passive, unassertive, and tended not to speak up at meetings. These executives, I'm sure, were governed partly by stereotypes. They were also, I'm sure, observing things that were really happening in the actual behavior of their Asian employees. <br /><br />These are the racial micro-politics of everyday life. Everybody gets their share of them - blacks, whites, women. Asians too. We can argue about to what extent the perception of Asian people is based only on racist projection or only on the behavior of Asians. There can be no definitive answer to this, since the answer only exists hidden in the minds of others. From one perspective, it looks like one thing. From another, it looks like another. <br /><br />My piece tries to present a balanced view. It tries to flush out the racism of white people with the confrontational tone it takes at the beginning. It also tries to examine the behavior and values of Asian people for those aspects of the Asian demeanor and approach to life that don't work in an American environment and that require adjustment. <br /><br />The fact is that it's a little bit of both. There's a way you're supposed to defer to a Korean authority figure in a Korean workplace or in a Korean home that is just different than the way you're supposed to act in America. And if you do the Korean thing in an American workplace, because that's how you were trained at home, the fact is that you're not doing yourself any favors. That's just true. <br /><br />Now, lots of Asian people do make this adjustment seamlessly and without any need for outside intervention, and if you're one of those people, great. These people make up the 0.3 percent of corporate board members who are Asian, the 10 percent of managers in Silicon Valley firms, (which are 30 percent Asian among the engineers), etc. We need more of you and the likelihood that more will emerge with the passage of time. <br /><br />But lots of Asian do not. If they did, we would not have any Bamboo Ceiling type numbers. We would not need a group like LEAP. <br /><br />Another controversial observation I made was that just as Asians are over-represented in elite high schools and colleges, they are also overrepresented in pickup classes. Now, pickup classes are not a normal thing for any group. I'm not saying that all, most, or even more than a tiny handful of Asian guys do it or need to do it. <br /><br />I am saying, however, that when Asian Playboy explained what an "Asian Poker Face" was, and gave the example of being at a a party and having a white dude ask him "Dude -- are you angry?" -- a packed room full of Asian American students at Yale burst into laughter. Did they do this because they did not know what AP was talking about from their own experience? Or did they do this because they did? I will submit to you that they laughed because the same thing had happened to them. I can same this with confidence because the same thing has happened to me too. <br /><br />Did the Yale Asian American Students Assocation invite Asian Playboy to speak at a Master's Tea in Silliman College because they thought he was a creep who was bringing a message that had no relevance at all to the lives of Asian American men? Or did they invite him to speak at a Master's Tea in Silliman College because they thought he was a creep who was bringing a message that had some relevance to Asian American men, such that a roomful of Asian American Yale students would pack into the Master's living room, making for what the Master told me was the largest and liveliest such event of the year? <br /><br />Does this mean that I am calling the Korean or any other Korean man a "dickless slave"? No, I wrote about AP because he was funny and great copy, not because I endorse his message, or because I think it applicable to anyone in particular. It is applicable to the readers whom it is applicable to, and the response I've been getting suggests that those people are not few in number. <br /><br />But the aspect of my piece that angered the Korean, and most of my detractors the most, was obviously the personal material. I open by saying that it feels strange to be reminded by my reflection that I am Korean because I never bought into any of the cultural things that are supposed to define Koreanness. This is how one man -- me -- feels, though I know for a fact that I am not alone in this feeling. I'm entitled to express that feeling, as the Korean acknowledges. So, when I say Fuck this and Fuck that, I'm demonstrating rhetorically on the page how much I break from these values, because no person who bought into them could possibly write and publish that passage. I say this not because I want to boast about how unique I am, but because I am identifying myself as a part of the relatively large fractions of Asian American who feels as I do. <br /><br />But. I still have a Korean face, and I am considered by others to be this thing that I am not. Saying fuck these values does not mean that I think Asian values are the reasons that Asian people face problems in the workplace. The problem is, as I explain in the LEAP section of my piece, is that these values lead to behaviors that are interpreted by white people in a certain way that leads them to perceiving Asians in a certain way. <br /><br />They then impose that perception on all Asian people -- including people like me, to whom they really do not apply -- which adds another layer of difficulty and complication. So if you fit the stereotype as defined by others, as many Asians do, they put you in a box and give you math problems to solve. And if you break from the stereotype, as many Asians do, they might say, as they did to Eddie Huang "You have a lot of opinions for an Asian guy." You're damned either way. Unless you are a very good and very adept, you're going to struggle. And the percentage of people who are adept in this way is going, by necessity, to be lower than the percentage who manage to do well on tests. <br /><br />This is a kind of "post-racial racism" that I find fascinating. I told you about myself as a set up for the section in which I showed how it applied to me, despite my disavowal of these values for myself. I don't have Asian values, but I do have an Asian Poker Face. Not all Asian people have Asian Poker Faces. But as it turns out, I do. And this Asian Poker Face really was acting as a barrier to trust and acceptance by people who thought my demeanor meant one thing when it really was just my ordinary Asian face. <br /><br />Lastly, I want to clear up something about my alleged "bitter loserdom." I am not a bitter loser. I am, in fact, more successful in my chosen field than the Korean is in his. Writing is poorly paid, and often involves a period of financial hardship at the beginning. It is a field in its way, just as competitive as finance or law. My period of hardship lasted way too long. But I've been doing well over the last three years and, with my contributing editorship at New York Magazine, and the recent sale of my last feature for New York to Scott Rudin and Sony Pictures, I've been doing even better this year. Writing is not steady work with a steady income, but once you've made it, it gets a lot easier. I now have a strong voice and a visible platform, and I can do and say what I want, which is all I ever wanted out of life. <br /><br />So, during the years when the Korean was racking up tons of law school debt, and working 70 hour weeks to pay it down, I was leading a confused bohemian existence in which I was poor and unhappy and during which I both bitterly regretted not becoming a well-paid white collar worker, and remained determined to make it on my own terms as a writer. For the last three years, I've been making it on my own terms as a writer, with the expectation of more success to come. I also have a wonderful girlfriend. So, things have worked out for me. <br /><br />I'm not saying this because I want to brag or compare my happiness to the Korean's. He's making six figures, and has a happy family and beautiful wife. We're both Korean American success stories. Hard work and discipline contributed to my success as surely as it did his. But, in the end, a certain cultural brashness contributed to my success even more than hard work did. That's just the fact. I respect his success and would never write anything designed to tear it down. In fact, I would celebrate it. I say in my piece that there are areas of Asian-American devoid of alienation. If he and his friends live there -- great. But I also say, contrary to the Model Minority stereotype that says that Asian people have no problems and face no racial obstacles, we do still have the Bamboo Ceiling, which ensnares many, and we do have this weird William Hung-style baggage that affixes to men. These problems might seem silly and inconsequential to people who view them from a distance, but to the people who are living these problems, they can really suck. <br /><br />So, all the people who are saying that my piece is a bitter loser blaming Asian values for my failure are simply missing the point, and distracting from the real issues my story raises, which I think is a shame. I'm not a loser, and since I never embraced Asian values in my life, I can't possibly, and thus do not blame them for anything having to do with my life, either good or ill. <br /><br />I do, however, know that having an Asian face -- an Asian Poker Face -- definitely had something to do with protracting the length of the period of social alienation I endured. I did not go through three years without a woman only because I was Asian. I went three years without a woman because I was poor, and struggling, and unhappy, and alienated, and too proud. That's all obvious and present in my piece. But you know what? During all that time, I was nevertheless always a strong, healthy, well-educated, well-spoken, variously talented man in the prime of my adulthood, and dudes like that, if they are white, even if they are total losers, or assholes, or drunks, or drug-addicts, or on a half-dozen psychotropic drugs, always have some girl wiling to bed them in this city where I live in and everyone knows it. And that's just reality too. So would I have gone three years without touching a woman if I were white instead of Asian? Of course I would not have. I'm sorry, but it's true. And thus I understand well enough what the 26-year old Asian virgin is facing, as do must Asian American men who are not in denial. <br /><br />That's why I had empathy for the people whose stories I told in my piece, and that's why I thought an inquiry into the social dynamics that disfavor them, and me, and all of us Asians, was worth doing. I think it's sad but not that surprising that the people who have the least empathy for these guys and want to dump the most contempt on them are other Asian people. And I think it's sad, and paranoid, that so many Asian people think that my inquiry into these issues was an attack on them personally, and I think it's grossly ironic, though not at all surprising, that these are the same people that are calling my honest, vulnerable, painstaking self-accounting in my piece solipsistic or narcissistic. These people should spend a little more time regarding themselves in the mirror. <br /><br />All this said, I enjoyed reading the Korean's response to my piece. Something that all people who think Asians are nerds and weaklings that they can pick on with impunity sometimes discover to their detriment is that Korean men, in particular, are angry, violent people who will fight and fight dirty. <br /><br />So I think in certain ways, the Korean and I are more similar than we are different, in that we are both combative Korean men, even if he is a corporate lawyer married to a Korean violinist and I am a freelance writer dating a Jewish journalist. I just want to point out that the Korean's anger is totally misdirected, fratricidal, and aimed at a person who is on his side, which also makes him, in the end, also a very typical Korean.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4629583993177689868.post-51503124811327977732011-04-24T16:58:00.000-07:002011-04-24T17:05:10.055-07:00This is a complete disgrace<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-y3rQhTduzh0/TbS5uuZz27I/AAAAAAAAAvE/gpKQrCynyYw/s1600/IMG_1050.JPG"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-y3rQhTduzh0/TbS5uuZz27I/AAAAAAAAAvE/gpKQrCynyYw/s320/IMG_1050.JPG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5599304449109777330" /></a><br /><br />If the New Yorker promotional department could not afford to give out anything more expensive than a tote bag, it ought to have sent out handsome promotional tote bags, instead of this ghastly "New Yorker Weekender Bag" that smells like a gas station, whose material is perhaps one and a half increments in quality away from a trash bag purchased at a dollar store.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4629583993177689868.post-61843537593817600732011-04-10T00:09:00.001-07:002011-04-10T00:09:21.676-07:00<iframe title="YouTube video player" width="480" height="390" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/uUIpCqxRh_M" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4629583993177689868.post-90153267495980453742011-03-11T17:31:00.000-08:002011-03-11T17:31:40.297-08:00c hotel<iframe width="425" height="344" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/n-TIV-NVeKo?fs=1" frameborder="0" allowFullScreen=""></iframe>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4629583993177689868.post-45317629380165646292011-02-17T18:23:00.000-08:002011-02-17T18:24:15.183-08:00fuck and run<iframe title="YouTube video player" width="480" height="390" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/eih_dkbT0K0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4629583993177689868.post-59673365731518302782011-02-04T23:16:00.001-08:002011-02-04T23:16:40.542-08:00My Father's House<iframe title="YouTube video player" width="480" height="390" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/R-cDBMafmIU" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4629583993177689868.post-52956493590505462942010-11-03T23:13:00.000-07:002010-11-03T23:18:38.059-07:00<object width="480" height="385"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/b5zTmpFLThA?fs=1&hl=en_US"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/b5zTmpFLThA?fs=1&hl=en_US" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="480" 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height="385"></embed></object>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4629583993177689868.post-25550344459423755032010-11-03T23:08:00.000-07:002010-11-03T23:12:49.891-07:00<object width="480" height="385"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/XKS8gmXGCT4?fs=1&hl=en_US"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/XKS8gmXGCT4?fs=1&hl=en_US" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="480" height="385"></embed></object><br /><br /><object width="480" height="385"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/7O4GagrfqO8?fs=1&hl=en_US"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/7O4GagrfqO8?fs=1&hl=en_US" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="480" height="385"></embed></object><br /><br /><object width="480" height="385"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/8m2JyiggwAU?fs=1&hl=en_US"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/8m2JyiggwAU?fs=1&hl=en_US" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="480" height="385"></embed></object>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4629583993177689868.post-29052865407341365092010-11-03T23:06:00.000-07:002010-11-03T23:07:45.624-07:00<object width="480" height="385"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/whSYTSXm8wo?fs=1&hl=en_US"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/whSYTSXm8wo?fs=1&hl=en_US" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="480" height="385"></embed></object><br /><br /><object width="480" height="385"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/oQ1vQPEBlnI?fs=1&hl=en_US"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/oQ1vQPEBlnI?fs=1&hl=en_US" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="480" height="385"></embed></object><br /><br /><object width="480" height="385"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/-3ETAZSFWWs?fs=1&hl=en_US"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/-3ETAZSFWWs?fs=1&hl=en_US" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="480" height="385"></embed></object>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4629583993177689868.post-91180039816562668122010-11-03T22:40:00.000-07:002010-11-03T22:43:00.709-07:00<object width="480" height="385"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/TWX5yXMqxeA?fs=1&hl=en_US"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/TWX5yXMqxeA?fs=1&hl=en_US" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="480" height="385"></embed></object><br /><br /><object width="480" height="385"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/PIb6AZdTr-A?fs=1&hl=en_US"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/PIb6AZdTr-A?fs=1&hl=en_US" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="480" height="385"></embed></object><br /><br /><object width="480" height="385"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/DYp2LGKOF_M?fs=1&hl=en_US"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/DYp2LGKOF_M?fs=1&hl=en_US" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="480" height="385"></embed></object><br />javascript:void(0)Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4629583993177689868.post-64213189560102254632010-11-03T22:28:00.000-07:002010-11-03T22:31:36.017-07:00<object width="480" height="385"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/M3ov78kAMNg?fs=1&hl=en_US"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/M3ov78kAMNg?fs=1&hl=en_US" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="480" height="385"></embed></object><br /><br /><object width="480" height="385"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/QM7LR46zrQU?fs=1&hl=en_US"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/QM7LR46zrQU?fs=1&hl=en_US" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="480" height="385"></embed></object><br /><br /><object width="480" height="385"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/qpJ0cyXbMbI?fs=1&hl=en_US"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/qpJ0cyXbMbI?fs=1&hl=en_US" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="480" height="385"></embed></object>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4629583993177689868.post-85083513656234962822010-10-21T20:03:00.000-07:002010-10-21T20:07:27.781-07:00One playable CD mix<a href="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/6864027/MIX.rar">Click here to download</a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4629583993177689868.post-88794116977682340082010-09-15T15:20:00.001-07:002010-09-15T15:20:24.062-07:00TS Eliot"In an interesting essay in the volume of ESSAYS ON THE DEPOPULATION OF MELANESIA, the psychologist W.H.R. Rivers adduced evidence which has led him to believe that the 'civilization' forced upon them has deprived them of all interest in life. They are dying from pure boredom. When every theater has been replaced by 100 cinemas, when every musical instrument has been replaced by 100 gramophones, when ever horse has been replaced by 100 cheap motor-cars, when electrical ingenuity has made it possible for every child to hear its bedtime stories from a loudspeaker, when applied science has done everything possible with the materials on this earth to make life as interesting as possible, it will not be surprising if the population of the entire civilized world rapidly follows the fate of the Melanesians."Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4629583993177689868.post-3639360887942202392010-08-29T22:25:00.000-07:002010-08-29T22:26:02.201-07:00Professor Longhair<object width="480" height="385"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/TMugCUDDxL0?fs=1&hl=en_US"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/TMugCUDDxL0?fs=1&hl=en_US" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="480" height="385"></embed></object><br /><br />But even as Ahmet began to produce music using pieces of the knowledge he had acquired as an enthusiast, he continued to look for the inaccessible thing, the thing with authority, the thing that did not need his help. “Herb Abramson and I went to New Orleans,” Ahmet told me. “And we heard about this Professor Longhair, and the very name fascinated me, you know. But I didn’t know where to find him. He didn’t have a telephone. We were taken to a place where he usually hung out, but he wasn’t there. They told us he was going to play that night. We took the address, and we thought that the address was in town—you know, a local address. But, as it turned out, that evening when we got in a taxi and gave him the address the driver said, ‘That’s across the river. You have to take a ferry across the river. And I won’t go there anyway, because that’s a niggertown.’ So the driver took us as far as the ferry. And when we got across the river it was very dark, because there were no street lights on the other side, but there were a couple of taxis. So we took a taxi, a white taxi, and we told him where we wanted to go. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘I can’t go there.’ So I said, ‘Well,’ and I made up some story. You had to make up stories in those days, because they were strict Jim Crow, you know. If you went to a Negro section of town, you’d have to have an excuse. If you said you were from a record company, that didn’t always work, so sometimes we’d say we were from Life magazine, or something like that. And so I made up a whole story. The man said, ‘The best I can do is take you near there, and you can walk over.’ He said, ‘I wouldn’t go in there for anything in the world,’ and so on and so forth. We said O.K. So in the middle of the night he took us and stopped in the middle of a field, it looked like, you know. Fields on both sides. And I wasn’t sure whether he was just, you know, taking some sort of revenge on us or something. So I said, ‘Where is it?’ So he said, ‘Well, you have to walk right across this field over there about a mile.’ Far away we could see some lights. He said, ‘That’s it over there, you see. This is as close as I can come.’ Well, I tell you, we tramped through this . . . field, in this pitch black, in the middle of the night. There was a bit of a moon out, so we could see our way. As we approached this village, we saw this house, which was bulging in and out. All the windows were brightly lit. A lot of light was coming out of the house. It was right in the town square, the main intersection, and from far away it looked, actually, as if people were falling out the windows. The music was just blaring. We thought this must be—‘My God, there’s a fantastic band in there!’ You know, there was a great sense of discovery to . . . tramping through this field and hearing this music from far away in this ugly black village, you know. ‘My God, Herb, we’ve really come upon a great discovery. It’s just what you dream about.’ When we arrived in the square there, people saw us, and a couple of people went running immediately into this house—this was a club, you know, where he was playing—because I guess every time they saw white people it meant trouble of some kind, you know. So we walked up into the place and we said, ‘We’re from Life magazine.’ And the guy at the door said, ‘Just a minute,’ and so on. ‘We’re also from this record company in New York,’ and so on, ‘and we want to see Professor Longhair.’ And there was a big row at the door. Some people ran out the back door. They weren’t quite sure. Thought we might be the sheriff or something, you know. After a few minutes’ talk, they let us come in and sit behind the piano, and— Oh, the thing that struck me when we arrived there, when we walked in, what I thought had been an R. & B. band turned out to be just Professor Longhair by himself. He was sitting there with a microphone between his legs. He used to play an upright piano, and he had a drum, kind of a drum, attached to the piano. Not a drum but a drumhead, you know, attached to the piano. He would hit it with his right foot while he was playing. He made a percussive sound. It was very loud. And he was playing the piano and singing full blast, and it really was the most incredible-sounding thing I ever heard. And he was doing it all by himself. And it was one of the most primitive dance halls I’d ever been in. There was just like . . . a club, you know, but people jammed in there dancing and this wild thing going on, and they hid us in the corner there and we were listening to the music. I thought, My God, we’ve really found an original—nobody’s ever heard this man. He played like nobody I’d ever heard. Had some of the characteristics of some of the early boogie-woogie piano players, but with a strong Latin influence. He had a little bit of Jelly Roll Morton, a little bit of Yancey, a little bit of— But he played in his own time. He kept a very strange, different tempo. And a lot of Spanish influences—West Indian, you know. And it was just a strange mixture but the most marvellous thing I’d ever heard. And I said, ‘My God, no white person has ever seen this man.’ So as soon as he finished, Herb and I, very excited, said, ‘Look, we have to tell you, we’re just astounded by your playing,’ you know, and shaking his hand. ‘We want very much to record you.’ He said, ‘Oh, what a shame. I just signed with Mercury.’”Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4629583993177689868.post-83386851039234046222010-06-18T22:14:00.000-07:002010-06-18T22:23:58.145-07:00songs<a href="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/6864027/wes.htm">Playlist<br /></a><br />Follow the link above to see the 50 songs that I've listened to the most over the last two years. Statistics tell us what we really like instead of what we think we like. It's a little disconcerting. What does this list say about me as a person?Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4629583993177689868.post-60438114733207790562009-10-27T04:39:00.000-07:002009-10-27T04:51:30.894-07:00Responses<a href="http://stuartschneiderman.blogspot.com/2009/10/new-sex-andor-dating-game.html"></a><br /><br />http://stuartschneiderman.blogspot.com/2009/10/new-sex-andor-dating-game.html<br /><br />This post, written in reply to my New York Magazine cover story on the Sex Diaries, seemed weirdly intelligent, and literary, from someone who identifies himself as a "life coach."<br /><br />It turns out that the author is a former psychoanalyst who studied with Lacan in Paris and wrote an important book about the master for Harvard University Press. <br /><br />But with the declining public interest in psychoanalysis, he has reinvented himself as an executive life coach. I find this act pretty interesting -- and of course, perfectly consistent with the doctrines espoused by life coaches. So one can have no doubt that Mr. Schneiderman in fact practices the practical credo he preaches.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4629583993177689868.post-61614209560452282342009-10-04T23:27:00.000-07:002009-10-04T23:38:20.213-07:00I threw a party on Saturday nightIt has always been my feeling that a party will reflect the character of the person throwing it. I threw a party on Saturday night. It would be false modesty to suggest that the party wasn't a reflection of my character. If the principle is true generally, there is no reason not to apply it when the person throwing the party is you.<br /><br />And so, to all of the guests who attended my party, and helped to make it the pleasing occasion that it was, I would like to say: Thank you for providing a fitting reflection of my character.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4629583993177689868.post-29901753111201365852009-09-04T12:39:00.000-07:002009-09-04T12:40:51.704-07:00Latest story at Tablet MagazineI wrote about the Dreyfus Affair and Guantanamo Bay for Tablet Magazine.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.tabletmag.com/arts-and-culture/books/15116/the-end-of-the-affair/"></a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4629583993177689868.post-78857729659428899752009-08-30T15:42:00.000-07:002009-09-02T07:44:48.767-07:00Back by Popular DemandA few years ago, I posted some videos onto YouTube. Filmed on the cheapest webcam extant, they portrayed a pixellated image of me wearing two buttoned-down shirts -- a black one with epaulets superimposed atop a blue one with white pinstripes -- bashing through acoustic cover versions of a handful of popular songs: Springsteen's Factory; U2's Van Diemen's Land; the slave ballad Old Black Joe; Leonard Cohen's Chelsea Hotel; and the traditional Irish drinking ballad Whiskey in the Jar, in the somewhat grandiloquent baritone I was affecting in those days.<br /><br />The audio and video were improperly sync-ed, the performances were too fast, and the guitar playing was hopelessly thrashy, max-ing out the levels and tipping the sound at certain important junctures of each song into that peculiarly wicked digital feedback that sounded like that moment in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Infocom game when, with the aid of the Infinite Improbability Drive, you wound up materializing inside of your own brain.<br /><br />I received a surprising amount of feedback, a striking share of which did not consist of race baiting and abuse, and thousands of hits. It was a small satisfaction for a period of life in which there were no larger satisfactions on offer. It was understood by all, and most of all by me, to be a fairly pathetic thing to do -- on YouTube, one could participate in a perpetual coffee-house amateur hour to no tangible end, broadcasting around the globe the image of the earnest loser one no longer had to fear becoming, having become it -- and an even more pathetic thing to derive one's satisfactions from. But I was coming to understand that one would have to take whatever satisfactions one could get in the form that was given, and the Internet was rapidly extending the range of miniscule, nugatory, and ultimately self-undermining satisfactions which one would not have the self-possession to refuse.<br /><br />You see, the videos went up right around the time it was clear that I was never going to attain the very modest ambitions I had once attached to music. I had pursued them desultorily, and without the requisite spirit of enterprise, and yet with a certain belief that I did, in fact, as a performer and songwriter, have something to offer the world. If you Google my name, you'll see that I am credited with my writing partner, G F McN, with a song that aired on the pilot of the television show the Gilmore Girls. I wrote, performed, and recorded that song. It's pretty good -- as competent and well-crafted as any album track on any of the large majority of major label releases; indeed, probably better than most. We recorded more than 30 songs on 4-track tape and even a handful at a small project studio run by a locally successful Central New Jersey band.<br /><br />We were not good enough, maybe, to have made ourselves the next whatever whomever. But we were good enough to, you know, maybe do some regional tours, release some records on some indie labels, perhaps, even engage in the intermittent act of sexual intercourse -- disappointing in itself, but gratifying in what it signified, or in any case, gratifying inasmuch as it was preferable to its alternative (masturbating alone, desultorily, but then oddly, unaccountably, in tears) -- with a fan. We did not look like anything that anyone was going to pay much attention to,<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_wM52yfIS6b0/SpsRocb9irI/AAAAAAAAABQ/2jX1-RdCPxA/s1600-h/bands1.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 207px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_wM52yfIS6b0/SpsRocb9irI/AAAAAAAAABQ/2jX1-RdCPxA/s320/bands1.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5375909966722730674" /></a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />and we did not sound like anything that was presently in vogue, <br /><br /><object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/eiblDd2_3hk&hl=en&fs=1&"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/eiblDd2_3hk&hl=en&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object><br /><br />and the combination of our sound and image did not tap into some deep structure of shared desire among the sensitive liberal youth who would have been our prospective audiences, if we did not abhor them even more than we did the mainstream audiences who seemed so distant from us in sensibility that their existence could easily be forgotten. There would always be some male music nerds -- short, black-clad, pudgy but solid -- who would give us respect for sounding like we did, without any real passion, and then the beautiful girls -- neurasthenic, with diaphanous skin, invariably trailing some haughty ephebe -- who would watch for a while, and then turn away. <br /><br />Right around then, these bands were emerging in New York City -- principally the Strokes -- who were creating a gorgeous pastiche of everything that excluded us. They were rich and urban and sophisticated, smart but anti-intellectual. They hung out with models and fashion people, while we were awkward, angry, suburban, and thwarted before we had even entered the contest. And we knew that they had everything that was going to rocket them fame while we could only remain forever mired in obscurity, and we had admit that some of their songs were just perfect, and so good that we were never going to match them.<br /><br />There will be more to say about all of this, and further documentation of it all, when I can figure out how to post music and pictures, but for now, what I'm getting at is that I'm back up on YouTube. You see, I bought this great new digital camera, and the video I took has all these different shades of mustard and amber, and is pleasing to the eye for that reason.<br /><br /><object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/Hp3x6t7iEFM&hl=en&fs=1&"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/Hp3x6t7iEFM&hl=en&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object><br /><br /><object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/ddz8O3ggB3c&hl=en&fs=1&"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/ddz8O3ggB3c&hl=en&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4629583993177689868.post-34519572384663654102009-08-15T19:08:00.000-07:002009-08-15T19:11:32.468-07:00Delightful Afternoon<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_wM52yfIS6b0/SodqRXfIZJI/AAAAAAAAABI/yO5ePA7KEk4/s1600-h/losers.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 192px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_wM52yfIS6b0/SodqRXfIZJI/AAAAAAAAABI/yO5ePA7KEk4/s320/losers.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5370377927257515154" /></a><br /><br /><br />This was a spontaneous gathering of young people on Lafayette Street. It emerged that all of them had something strongly in common that drew them to stand in single file, gesticulating toward an imagined crowd of of onlookers, and beaming those inimitable smiles. Maybe it was the cheerful and complementary colors of their swimsuits, the very small breasts on the women, or the highly toned mid-sections of the men, none of whom had done so much as a sit-up since passing the President's Commission on Physical Fitness in the eighth grade. But glimpsing one another in that transitional stretch of road between Prince and Spring Street, on a lovely Sunday afternoon, their pale bodies glistening in the sun, all of them felt drawn to one another and came to understand, instinctively, that they would share a common destiny.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2