Katherine Hepburn died yesterday. She was 96. As James Leer would say, "She was good." She was very good.
My personal favorite Hepburn moment is halfway through Bringing Up Baby, where she cheerfully forces an uncomfortable Cary Grant into singing, "I Can't Give You Anything But Love, Baby," in an effort to calm her trained leopard. (There's something refreshing about the utterly arbitrary plots of 1930s screwball comedies.) She's the picture of blissed-out conviction, as much a force of nature as a character: "There is a leopard on your roof and it's my leopard and I have to get it and to get it I have to sing."
Perhaps it is because my van refused to start this morning. Or maybe it's because for the fifth straight day of work the one doc I need to interview is too swamped with patients to spare five minutes. It might have something to do with the fact that I am soaking wet from trying to jump my car battery in the rain. Maybe Monday seems especially depressing after a weekend of kayaking with Cornerstone pals.
Whatever the reason, I am very grumpy today. So it seems like a good time to pull out an old essay from Nick Hornby on Ryan Adams, which suggests that "some people are at their best when they're miserable."
While you read that, I'm going to try to find a Die Hard.
And so it has come to this. The hit novel in Russia -- the country that gave the world Dostoyevski and Tolstoi -- is a Harry Potter knockoff. Apparently wanna-be Potters are popping up all over the world: in China, India and even Belarus, where "you'll find Porri Gatter and the Stone Philosopher. In something of a departure, Harry's Belarussian clone wields a grenade launcher and re-fights the White Russian wars." You'd think the European continent would be a little less snotty about the Yanks and Brits, considering they can't come up with any popular culture of their own anymore.
Much weeping and rending of garmets from Christian conservative sorts today over the Heap Big Court's decision to overturn Texas' anti-sodomy law. But I'm going to go out on a limb here and say the court made the right choice for the wrong reasons.
Sandra Day O'Connor came awfully close to getting it right in her concurring opinion. She argued: "The statute at issue here makes sodomy a crime only if a person 'engages in deviate sexual intercourse with another individual of the same sex.' Sodomy between opposite-sex partners, however, is not a crime in Texas. That is, Texas treats the same conduct differently based solely on the participants."
In other words, the state of Texas is saying that if heterosexuals want to engage in an act that I will heretofore refer to as "the Rock Hudson," it's okey-dokey. But if gays want to do the Rock Hudson, that's illegal. And in O'Connor's estimate, that law violates the Equal Protection Clause. The issue isn't whether the state can legislate personal morality (or course it can) but whether that legislation is applied to everyone, or just to people you don't like.
But like I said, O'Connor was only half-right. Because it seems to me that a state could ban all sexual acts between people of the same sex, if that ban was based on some transcendent moral standard, such as Biblical injunctions. This would mean the same act indeed would be judged differently depending on who was involved in it, but that distiction would have a moral grounding other than personal distaste.
But if the state chooses to play by Biblical standards for sexual behavior, that means, at the very least, also banning any type of sex, Rock Hudson or otherwise, between anybody who isn't married. However, I suspect that level of consistency would make even a good many conservative Christians a bit nervous. So if even the most religious of lawmakers don't want the government prosecuting "fornication" and adultery, why should they push the government to prosecute homosexual acts? Either stick to a strict moral code, or let people do what they want. And personally, I'm inclined to let people outside the authority of the church do as they like, so long as their actions only affect themselves. That's why we live in America, not Iran.
This doesn't mean that I'm in favor of gay marriage, or any other attempts to "erode the traditional family." As O'Connor concluded: "That this law as applied to private, consensual conduct is unconstitutional under the Equal Protection Clause does not mean that other laws distinguishing between heterosexuals and homosexuals would similarly fail under rational basis review. Texas cannot assert any legitimate state interest here, such as national security or preserving the traditional institution of marriage." The state can define marriage under traditional moral guidelines without prosecuting those who have sex without the sacred bonds. Heck, states have been ignoring heterosexual fooling around for centuries.
Sorry if this is way too much discussion of jurisprudence for a Friday night. I listen to a lot of NPR on the way home from work, and Michelle Norris has been yammering on about this for days now. I promise that tomorrow I will return to frivolity.
After a productive day of debating the respective merits of CDs and vinyl, Josiah and I sped down to the Bijou to watch "Hulk." There's little I can think to say about it, except that Jennifer Connelly could use a little hulking up herself. Would someone give the poor girl a meal? More importantly, we also saw the preview for "Seabiscuit," which I am eagerly awaiting. This provided us with the opportunity to come up with alternate names for the film which are, I think, quite nice. Here are my favorites:
* Lakemuffin
* Pondcrossaint
* Swampstrudel
* Baybagel
* Oceancrumpet
Feel free to add other name suggestions for aquatic, pastryfed horses. C'mon, you know you want to.
Pabst Blue Ribbon has been my favorite cheap beer since I've been of drinking age (and perhaps even before that...). It's always been the Chattacynics' thing to drink, at least whenever cans go for a dollar. Now the New York Times Magazine has a four-page spread on the nationwide upswing in PBR sales -- a trend that has occured without any marketing from Miller, which owns the brand. Apparently PBR is now the hip thing to drink in cities ranging from Portland to Chicago. Much ink is spilled on analyzing the beer's appeal (is it the authenticity? the grassroots appeal to preestablished communities?), but the most convincing answer comes from some guy in a Portland bar. ''But basically,'' he said, ''we're going to drink whatever beer costs a dollar.''
Amen.
Darn that Anthony Lane. Soon as I finish saying something, he goes and says it better. "From boyhood to martyrdom, [Dietrich Bonhoeffer] was excellent company, a big laugher, and a fine musician, whose confidence in the life to come lent lustre and vigor to his capacity for the life of the moment."
I like to spend my lunch hour, and about four dollars, at the McDonald's across the street from Erlanger. I usually bring along the New York Times or a magazine. I get funny looks from the counterfolk, but that's all right. Today, along with my Crispy Chicken Sandwich, I enjoyed a short story by Garrison Keillor in the July issue of the Atlantic Monthly. Sadly, it isn't online yet, so I'll excerpt a portion, where he writes of things worth being happy about.
"Fresh melon from a roadside stand. An endive and pear and blue cheese salad. A rousing Broadway musical with some classy comic turns and a winsome leading lady and a terrific tap routine in Act II and a grand finale with the whole ensemble dancing with faces aglow and hands in the air. A good medicinal martini with a fellow martinist. Louis Armstrong and His Hot Five. A fine Episcopal mass in a modest and sunny sanctuary with a big banner (LOVE IS TRIUMPHANT) hanging in back and the organist plays quietly and the choir hangs together on the anthem and the homily is concise and you confess your sins and feel them lifted from your back and you commune with the Lord and come away from His Table filled with grace and walk out into the sunny world feeling that you have a fresh chance at life. And the snooze during the reading of the Scriptures is good too."
Life offers few second chances, movie theaters even fewer. Thus I've always kicked myself for missing "Donnie Darko" when it played on the big screen in 2001. Now I need kick no longer: Atlanta's Madstone Theaters Parkside is doing a one-week revival, and now the giant metallic rabbit can be viewed in all its original celluloid glory.
"Donnie" is a hard film to summarize, let alone pitch to someone who hasn't seen it. The title character is a suburban kid, played by Jake Gyllenhaal, saved from untimely death by an man-sized rabbit named Frank, who then warns him that the world will end in "twenty-eight days... six hours... forty-two minutes... twelve seconds." Which is odd, since the film is set in 1988, and the world hasn't ended yet, to our best guess.
I first found out about the movie after it was released on DVD, when I heard Andy Montgomery offer up an interpretation at his brother Tim's bachelor party. Everybody has a theory of "Donnie"'s deeper meaning: Metaphilm offers a mildly incoherent discussion of St. Paul's eschatology, while Matt Allison thinks it's about submission to metanarratives. Everybody agrees the ending is a metaphor for the atonement of Christ, but no one agrees on anything else.
Personally, I find all the dissection frustrating: I love the movie not because of its layers of meaning, but because it's such a visceral evocation of the uncertainties of growing up, and the transcending, painful grace of sacrifice. Even after multiple viewings, the last five minutes of the film still make me cry.
So I'm plainning to go to Atlanta either tomorrow or Wednesday evening. "Donnie Darko" is on a double bill with the documentary "Spellbound," a feature about the National Spelling Bee that also looks awesome. If you're interested in joining in, drop me a line.
A group of us Chattacynics went to the free (!) White Stripes show at Stone Mountain Park tonight. Oh, was it good. I have dozens of things to say, but for now, I'll satisfy myself with a Rob Gordon-style top five list of my favorite Stripes songs. Start with subjectivity, eh, Josiah?
5. "Black Math," Elephant
4. "Fell in Love with a Girl," White Blood Cells
3. "The Hardest Button to Button," Elephant
2. "You're Pretty Good Looking (For a Girl)," De Stijl
3. "Hotel Yorba," White Blood Cells
I am listening to this playlist now, and it makes me feel all happylike. I recommend it for all varieties of depression.
While the mega-flick of the weekend revolves around a large, ill-tempered green fellow ("Why couldn't they have just found the 2003 equivalent of Lou Ferrigno and painted him green?" one wag asks. "Who would have been against this?"), there's another movie opening in NYC that looks equally intriguing. It's a documentary on the life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German theologian who actively opposed the Nazis.
The film, "Bonhoeffer," looks fascinating, with the narrator describing the Bonhoeffer family as "conservative in the best way, open to something new but not losing touch with where they stood." This description sounds a lot like the idea of pilgrimage in Paul Elie's book The Life You Save May Be Your Own, a biography of four Catholic writers which I've just started reading. (And which Andy has probably finished by now on his lovely Florida vacation.) Elie describes a pilgrimage as a journey taken after hearing some piece of great news. In other words, it's living out the ambiguities of life, all its complexities, while maintaining a single story as both foundation and destination. For an English major ambiguity-monger like myself, this is a stimulating concept: active faith without oversimplification. I'm curious if the documentary will go in a similar direction -- but even if it doesn't, it's exciting to see a cinematic biography of a Christian hero not produced by Paul Crouch.
So I was driving to work this morning, listening to the Be Good Tanyas on NPR, when the announcer noted that the Chattanooga Market has started a new Thursday Farmer's Market in Miller Plaza. It runs every Thursday from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. This was conviniently timed (I've been coming in tardy for work lately), so I decided to stop by. I ended up buying two small flats of peaches from Gilliland Peach Orchard and bringing them in to work. They look mighty tasty: they're soft to the touch, a deep auburn color, and some are almost as big as my fist. Each flat has at least 20 peaches, for just five bucks. So if you're in the mood for fresh, locally grown fruit, you've still got two hours to head downtown.
I've spent the morning gazing out my eighth-story office window, watching the rain fall on the Tennessee River. The best thing about working in a tall building is the panoramic view you get of weather conditions. I can watch storms drift in over Missionary Ridge or the North Chattanooga hills; sometimes the clouds hang so low, they're at eye-level from my window.
I suppose this is as good a time as any to talk about my job. I work for a medical practice called Regional Obstetrical Consultants, which handles all of the high-risk pregnancies for Erlanger Medical Center -- Chattanooga's biggest hospital. I am the practice's public relations coordinator. I started a month ago. I write, edit and lay out a monthly newsletter that is sent to all the OB/GYNs who refer patients to my company. It's called the Perinatal Post, and it contains articles on new developments in perinatal care, as well as profiles of ROC staff members.
I also write press releases about the latest accomplishments of our practice, and send these out to local newspapers, in hopes that they will be inspired to write a story about us. Sometimes they are, sometimes they aren't. Usually they get the story wrong.
Doing media work is write up my English-major, school paper-runnin' alley, but working for emergency obstetricians is something of a paradigm shift. In my first few weeks on the job, I have had to learn an entirely new vocabulary of medical terms. I am now prone to drop words like "macrosomia" and "neonatal morbidity" without thinking much of it. (Both words refer to things that could happen to a baby; trust me, neither of them are terribly pleasant.) I still haven't quite gotten used to the matter-of-factness of doctors, however. Last Thursday, I joined all the hospital's perinatal and neonatal staff for their weekly lunch meeting, which was catered by a local barbecue joint. We all piled up our plates, then sat down in little desk chairs to watch ultrasound footage. So there we were, two dozen people sitting in a dark room, looking at pictures of a baby's skull deformities while munching on beef brisket. This did not seem to bother anyone.
My office is located in Erlanger's Medical Mall, a large glass-and-brick building that looks like a cross between an ultra-modern university academic building and a Hilton hotel. Every time I walk into the medical mall I am reminded of going to high school conferences at big-city hotels and universities; suddenly I am 16 again, socially awkward and in love with some girl who doesn't know my name. It's a lot of deja vu for a Monday morning. The lobby contains plenty of tile; tall, glass elevators; and a Starbucks stand which has insidiously wormed its way into my caffine-dependent heart. Undergraduate anti-corporatism is no match for my need for a decent cup of coffee at 10 a.m.
To get to work, I must park in the Medical Mall's five-story lot (usually on the roof, where space is always available), wander through the deja vu-filled lobby, and take the elevators up to the eighth story. I have become accustomed to a great many sick, wheezing, obese people accompanying me on this journey; if you want to appreciate your health like never before, start working at a hospital.
I find myself feeling very young and male these days. I work with about four men and twentysome women. No one, so far as I can tell, is under 25. They've all had years of post-graduate medical training, or have been doing nursing for some time. The patients make me feel older, though, since many of the expectant moms can't be older than 18. They all look younger than that, and some of the fathers look 12, with their sad peach-fuzz attempts at mustatches and their button-down polo shirts.
So what do I do on an average day? Not a whole heck of a lot. The amount of stuff I need to do could easily be compacted into two days of work a week, but there's no telling on what days my services will be needed. Each day brings some research paper to edit, or an interview to hold -- but until that comes up, I mostly putter with my blog, read New Yorker short stories, and gaze out the window. Which I suppose brings me full circle.
Okay, I'm going to get some work done now. But here's a little musical something to provide distraction for others. And a little something more, also musical in its way. Both from McSweeney's, both very funny.
This seems rather self-explanatory. I'm especially fond of Pinto MacBean. Perhaps someday they'll put up a giant statue of our noble Canadian correspondent Julian.
I'm trying to avoid writing anything for my job this morning by puttering around the Net and writing about that. (Play, Mark Twain once said, is whatever a body is not obliged to do.) Ruffled feathers on a lot of blogs this morning after Bill O'Reilly went and blasted the lack of editorial control keeping reins on the Internet. One would think a blowhard FOXNews commentator to be the sort of twerp one could cheerfully ignore, but no one seems to be taking that tactic.
What interests me about this is a thought from blogger James Lileks, who sees a growing demonization of all things online:
I’ve noticed that for some “on the Internet” is meant as some sort of sinister intensifier. Like this:
1. Bob Johnson is accused of torturing dogs and taking pictures.
2. Bob Johnson is accused of torturing dogs and taking pictures ON THE INTERNET.
The second one sounds worse; it makes you think of the Temple of Doom in the Indiana Jones movie, a dark fetid cave with people bowing to some mad leering priest showing them unspeakable acts.
An interesting essay from Slate architecture critic Christopher Benfey on why the best monument at Ground Zero would be no monument at all. His prose becomes unfortunately fuzzy toward the end, with lots of high lit references -- but the first two thirds, where he remains practical, is riveting. He notes that in opposition to the tradition of grand, opulent memorials (the Pyramids, Grant's Tomb), is a countertradition of empty spaces, voids to mark the loss of something or someone.
Benfey explains: "When Henry Adams, himself a literary master of absence, traveled to Japan in 1886, he particularly admired the Great Buddha at Kamakura, where a 15th-century tidal wave had swept away the huge temple housing the 40-foot statue. Did the Japanese rebuild the temple? No. Its very absence, with its "footprint" marked by broken pillars, was a powerful presence."
This eastern aestetic is of course in striking contrast to the western ideal of edifices as an aid to memory. But so far as I can tell, that the use of grand memorials to the dead is something that emerges out of a purely pagan context. It was the Egyptians and Greeks, after all, who erected grandiose tombs. And perhaps there's something wanting in the use of such visual aids to remember those lost to us. Ryan Davidson just walked in and suggested that this is "a search for immortality through structure," and I'm inclined to agree.
As novelist Ayelet Waldman writes, "memory is this awful, transient thing. It just withers and slides away, until all you have left is the frozen image from a snapshot, an image that wasn't really yours to begin with, but has assumed a magnitude all out of proportion to its real meaning because it's sitting in a frame on your desk, or in a file on your desktop."
So perhaps what bothers me about creating a bold, active memorial to the 9-11 terror victims is that will begin, by its very "there"ness, to objectify and codify our memories of those our country has lost. I'd rather see us memorialize the deaths for what they were -- a void, a gad ripped into the existence of thousands of Americans. I'm uncertain what this would look like architecturally (Andy?), and I'm not sure it's any of my business, but I'd hope to see a memorial that doesn't objectify the victims, but reminds us that they are lost to us -- at least for now.
My sister Katie writes from Bratislava, Slovakia, where she is interning with a missions organization. I dearly miss her scathing, perceptive sense of humor, nicely displayed in the following excerpt.
Today I went with Sarah and Carol to a medieval festival held at the castle overlooking Bratislava. Medieval history is Sarah's passion; she has a desk decorated with swords and ball-and-chain devices and other similar weapons. (Scary. One hesitates to argue with a supervisor whose desk is graced with a sword). Carol, it would seem, has little interest in this period of history, but being Sarah's roommate and close friend she takes the required medieval field trip at least twice annually. Today I was invited along, and spent no small chunk of time watching fully costumed men and women fight one another with swords and chains. I am told that the correct name for this activity is 'historical fencing' -- not to be mistaken with that derrivative and cowardly institution, modern fencing. No, no, they stand for no petty stick-swords or masks in this business. The limping, bleeding figures that I observed today stood as proud witnesses to the authenticity of the sport.
The chief attraction of medieval festivals, as I see it, is the quantity of cheap beer available. No Civil War re-enactors can claim this kind of diversion, available neat and in handy plastic cups. Admittedly, the pointy-toed shoes and loud brass instruments are a down side to the event. But on the whole, a better excuse for drinking is unlikely to be found.
By the way, if anyone wants to reach Katie, just drop her a line at kmesh@covenant.edu. I'm sure she'd love to hear from you -- unless you're one of those people she really doesn't want to hear from. (Dwell on that for a while.)
My bold Canadian correspondent Julian has alerted me to a major setback for those of us who like to go out on the weekends and toss dwarves. The Canadian legislature is trying to pass "An Act to Ban Dwarf Tossing," after one MPP became aware of the activity taking place in her hometown. Apparently one of the favorite contests at a local strip club was to toss around a dwarf going by the oh-so-tasteful nickname of Tripod. The article quotes the shocked, shocked MPP, Sandra Pupatello:
"I think there are lots of things to look at in a strip club without having to resort to that particular activity. This in my opinion sets us back a generation."
Yes sir, there's nothing the Greatest Generation enjoyed more after a hard month in the trenches than going into town for a little dwarf tossing.
Meanwhile, it has also come to my attention that June is National Accordian Awareness Month. Sadly, we have already missed the big commemorative event, Day of the Accordian at Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco, featuring Big Lou's Polka Casserol. A shame, really.
We all know that Jack White of the White Stripes writes a kick-ass rock song. (I've had "Hotel Yorba" on repeat for days now.) But only in the Believer do we learn of his dark, pre-music days as a Detroit furniture re-upholster. This isn't one of those star-worshipping interviews with a few questions about the artist's quirky past. No sir. This is an in-depth meditation on the dying profession of upholstery, a trade which is apparently going the way of the sweetheart. There's also a good deal about color coordination. "My whole shop was only three colors: yellow, white and black. I had this yellow van, and I dressed in yellow and black when I picked up the furniture, and all my tools were yellow, white and black. It was pretty cool."
And in literary news, Reuters reports that the publishing of Saddam Hussein's latest novel was interrupted by a little scuffle with the Great Satan. (Too bad. I hear Chomsky had written a great cover blurb.) And what a novel it would have been! Entitled "Get Out of Here, Curse You!" -- no, really, that's the title -- the book features a noble Arab who unites the Iraqi tribes and resembles a certain mustaschoed Iraqi dictator. The villian is a Jew named Hisquel, "a foreign intruder who represents greed, evil, and filth but who is extremely attractive to women."
Well, we do what we can.
Meanwhile, continuing with today's Atticus Finch theme, here's a bit of To Kill a Mockingbird satire from McSweeney's. "The penguins were just so fucking charming, there was no way Atticus was going to harm them. Everyone hated the penguins. "
Gregory Peck died late last night, just four days before Father's Day. The timing seems appropriate. Peck has often been described as the most heroic of American actors, but in my mind he was a nation's cinematic father figure. He was everything we idealized our own fathers to be (or wished they were): strong, taciturn, kind, yet reserved about his deepest feelings. Whenever he demonstrated onscreen affection, amorous or filial, his emotions seemed grounded not in need or desire, but in an overflow of solidity. Part of me thinks that when God appeared to Moses during the Old Testament, He looked a little like Gregory Peck.
Most of my feelings on this matter emerge from one Peck movie: To Kill a Mockingbird. I'm not sure when I first saw this movie: it was sometime before adolescence, and it was one of the first movies I saw that wasn't made just for kids. I didn't know anything about the plot, and I remember literally jumping up and down when Peck gave his "In the name of God, do your duty" speech to the jury. I remember being stunned when Peck lost the case, when Tom Robinson was shot, when Jem and Scout were attacked. And I remember how all of that excitement and shock faded into the comfort of the final image of Peck at his son's bedside. I wanted to be comforted by Atticus Finch. But perhaps even more strongly, I wanted to grow up to be Atticus Finch.
I still do.
I suspect I'm not the only one. Peck was often cast as the source of heroism that screenwriters could envision but couldn't live out. He was the image of stoic calm, of grace under pressure, and it's no wonder he starred in two Hemingway adaptations. He wasn't so much playing Hemingway's autobiographical characters as Hemingway's ideals: men who struggled with knowing "how to live in it," but who ultimately found a solid core within themselves. Even when a Peck character cracked up, as in "12 O'Clock High," the feeling was that external pressures had finally proved too much for any man to handle, no matter how firm of mind.
I've been thinking a good bit in recent months about issues of gender, and what a deep masculinity or femininity might look like. I just don't know what it is to be a man in this era, and few examples come to mind that aren't undermined by macho bluster or weak-willed overanalysis. Which is why the loss of Peck, an icon who represented everything we associate with real manhood, feels like a noticable loss. He wasn't one of the century's great actors: he had very little range, and he could be hopelessly wooden (try sitting through his "Moby-Dick"). But he was the exemplar of an era where men had an ideal to shoot for, even if it was an unrealistic ideal -- and one that could easily be warped into cold distance.
He was a father -- with all the respect and baggage that word carries -- and I will miss his voice.
The Guardian reports one of the most bizzarely disturbing stories I've read in a long time: A five-year old German girl died this weekend after being swept away in the ropes of a runaway helium balloon. It sounds like a bad joke from an Edward Gorey book.
And as if that isn't enough unpleasant absurdity for one day, the paper also reports that in an effort to end a four-year tribal war that has killed 4.7 million people in the Congo, the United Nations is sending in... the French.
And it's not even an enthusiastic French military effort (assuming that were possible). The French military briefs suggest that the peacemaking campaign will cover very little territory, and all troops will pull out by the end of summer. "A European military planner who was issued a copy of the French document said: 'This is the most cynical military briefing I've read in my entire life. Everybody is just laughing at it.'"
It gets worse. "A brief patrol by the French troops yesterday made the mission's modest ambitions apparent. Four jeeps packed with infantrymen drove 200 metres through the town centre [of Bunia], accompanied by as many western journalists. For 20 minutes groups of children sang for the cameras, then the troops rolled back to their airport base."
As Conrad at the Gwielo Diaries puts it: "Drop in, generate a little internationalist propaganda, then get the hell out of town and let the slaughter resume. Jesus wept. I don't know what else to say."
I say we return the Statue of Liberty, pronto. Freedom fries may have been a stupid propaganda ploy, but at least our troops don't let little kids sing for them, then leave them to die.
Well, it looks like we're going to have a lot more women named Madison running around in twenty years or so. Here's the list of the 100 most popular baby names for boys and girls in 2002. There are lots of interesting sociological observations one could make about this list, such as the increase of Hispanic-sounding names as compared to the 1990s list, or the 2001 list. Or you can check to see which names do best in which states. But I'll be honest: This sort of thing interests me mostly to see if my name is still popular at all. (No worries: "Aaron" is positioned comfortably at 51.)
A large crowd of us Chattanooga post-college malcontents strolled down to the Bessie Smith Strut on MLK Boulevard tonight. At least 12 blocks were closed to traffic, and filled with so many people that walking was a slow, bumpy process. It was one of the prettiest nights I've seen in weeks: the sky was a blend of pink and silver, with navy edges on the clouds. Food smells were everywhere -- mostly barbecue and slaw, but mixed with whiffs of hamburgers, spilled beer and the occasional drift of marajuana. Everyone seemed happy; it was as if Chattanooga were suddenly one big neighborhood of smiles and tight tank-tops.
And race didn't seem to matter. We were in a predominantly black, low-income neighborhood, but there was never any sense that we, a bunch of white quasi-yuppies, were unwelcome. (Looking back on it, we were mostly just ignored.) Ryan Davidson remarked more than once that he was amazed how the city could pull off such a cohesive, communal block party, and that it really made him appreciate the south.
Of course, not everyone was happy: There was a massive contingent of police and sheriff's officers, and a SWAT team, complete with what looked to be a miniature tank, was stationed off the street. At the corner of MLK and Georgia, we saw at least two police snipers nestled on top of an office building. It was about 10 p.m.; we decided to go to Taco Mac for drinks.
This was good timing, since about 10 minutes later, somebody started shooting, and an Erlanger employee died across from Memo's Tavern. At least 100 people armed with sticks (!) faced off against a police riot squad. In this morning's Times Free Press, the sheriff was quoted as saying that "some serious consideration about the future of the Strut will take place after tonight." So my first Bessie Smith Strut might be the last.
It just seems strange to me: the festival seemed so happy when I was there, and the police presence seemed almost pointless. I guess I'm having trouble linking the night I saw with what eventually happened. To some degree, death and violence are still only things I see on TV.
Christopher Hitchens is wry and bracing as usual today in his Slate column. He's talking about the burgeoning anti-semitism on the left, a trend that has been noted before in the Chattablogs cosmos.
I don't have anything profound to say about this today. It just pisses me off.
This is shaping up as quite the week for my friends...
My friend Chris Holton got married on Saturday in rainy Macon, GA. It was a lovely ceremony, very Old South, with trumpets at the ceremony and sweet peach tea at the reception. Lately I'm finding the whole marriage deal increasingly wonderful and mysterious. The whole idea of making a permanent commitment to another person seems so antithetical to the mood of my generation. We struggle so much with the whole High Fidelity "one foot out the door" pathology, so I'm always impressed when someone leaps right past it, and gives himself completely to someone else. Can't see myself pulling that off anytime soon.
Meanwhile, my best buddy Josiah Roe is celebrating his 24th birthday today, and we're marking the occasion by taking him to the Bessie Smith Strut in downtown Chattanooga. All of MLK Avenue is roped off tonight for a blues festival with lots of barbecue and beer, all in honor of the late, rarely sober blues singer Bessie Smith. And also in honor of the living, mostly sober Josiah Roe, at least this year. We're meeting at 8 p.m. at Andy Montgomery's place. If you love Josiah, or once met somebody who does, then you should be there.
When I was a kid -- aroud ten years old, I think -- I used to go to my Lake Wales, Florida backyard and pretend that I was Indiana Jones. My sister and I made up all sorts of new adventures for the daring archeologist (a time bomb inside a stuffed penguin, etc.), even though I had never actually seen the movies. I had my own little fedora, a brown belt that I used for a whip, and a cat that would occasionally become embroiled in plot developments.
So tonight at Isaac Wardell's country-rock concert, my friend Lang told me about some other kids in Biloxi, Mississppi who did the same thing. Only these kids had seen Raiders of the Lost Ark, and loved it so much that they decided to remake it, shot for shot, with themselves as stars. And somehow, between 1982 and 1989, they did it.
And they did it stunningly well, even though they started when the were 10 years old. Sarah Hepola writes: "The film is a crowd-pleaser, turning all the Raiders action -- clichéd after 20 years of imitation -- into a new and genuinely startling viewing experience. How will they do this next scene? How can they pull that stunt off? And don't forget that these kids are literally growing up in front of the camera. Voices deepen, hairstyles change, and though writers abuse this phrase: It's like nothing you've seen before. The hero grows stubble, and the heroine grows breasts."
They made fake boulders. They did stunts on moving trucks. They had a friend play all the Nazis, and get killed over and over. They almost burned down a house. And last week they finally screened the movie at a theater in Austin. The VHS was in circulation underground for years (even Spielberg saw and loved it), and now the trailer is online. Hopes are the full film will soon be coming to a theater near you.
I'll be there. And I'll bring my belt.
One last first-day post before I head to Brother Holton's bachelor party...
Sasha Frere-Jones and NYTimes Mag editor Gerald Marzorati have been arguing heatedly all week over on Slate about the new Radiohead album. Today Sasha makes an interesting shift in the debate, pointing out "an overdeveloped and unfortunate correlation between a band's stock rising and that band increasing its store of avant foolishness."
He blames the Beatles for this: "I mean, before the Beatles, would anybody have even sat still for Sigur Rós?" I am more tempted to put the blame on Pink Floyd, but whoever you make the patsy for pretentiousness, there's no doubt that this is a discouraging development in rock and roll. Take Wilco as an example: Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is one of the finest albums of the new mill, but how much better would it be if it weren't so muddied up by reverb and abient noise?
Or would it be better at all? Part of me wonders whether the electronic gussying up is worth more than Sasha gives it credit for, if (and only if) it serves to accentuate the beauty of the tunes underneath. I just want bands to be unafraid to make pretty music. Don't worry, kids. You won't turn into John Denver. Really.
A lovely bit of satire from the New Yorker. "By the way, the Meat Lover’s Skillet is a fine piece of work. Thank you for putting that together."
With help from the machinations of Josiah Quintus Roe, I am now the proud owner of my very own blog. But already I am concerned about the risks of turning into the Airport Bar Guy. You are very familiar with this man. The minute you sit down at the bar with an hour to kill before your hop to Boston, he plops down next to you and proceeds to inform you of the story of his life, which is never terribly happy, and often involves the insurance company not paying, the bastards. These are never fun people, the Airport Bar Guys. (The only exception I've seen is an old man I overheard in a 24-hour Kinko's recounting with great zest the story of his wife's departure: "Thank God and Greyhound she's gone.")
There's something about an online journal that inspires just this sort of gushing. It will not happen here. My hope is to battle such solipsism by turning this blog into a forum for impassioned communication. Here's an attempt at explaining:
We live in a world that is wonderful, scattered and sad. Walker Percy once described the postmodern condition as living in a place scrubbed clean from the baggage of past systematic certainties, a place cruel and dangerous but also fresh and full of the possible. It's an era filled with information and almost no way to organize it, with the possible exception of an engorged sense of irony. (We laugh so that we may not faint.) It's not that our lives are dichomized so much as ripped into a thousand pieces, with each piece declaring some sort of message that we suspect is urgent, even if that message is to only buy ourselves a nice yurt. And many of us, Christians or not, are filled with a sense of longing: both God and Greyhound seem to have pulled out of the station five minutes ago.
The Net is, of course, only a microcosm of the PoMo problem. It provides us with so much stuff: so many things to look at, and most of them both beautiful and devoid of context. It seems to me that the only solution for not drowning in these things is to share them, to make them part of a larger conversation, and perhaps by means of that conversation to gather clues about the larger meaning these things hold in this fresh, clean era. The only other option is for each person to make themselves, their own daily feelings, into the object of their longing for context. And we all know what that leads to. The Airport Bar Guy. (And to a great many bloggers, but let's not talk about that.)
So my hope is to use this site to enter into conversation with anybody out there, to share a few things each day that seem meaningful, or at least fun, and see what happens. So here goes nothin'.
P. S. You will note that I have told you nothing about myself with this supposedly introductory post. Patience is a virtue.
