Wired Mesh

Mmm... The Nicotini

Chattanooga has yet to join the ranks of cities that have banned smoking in restaurants and bars (Southerners don't go down without a fight), but when it does, we have a last resort... the nicotini. It was invented on Miami's Los Olas Boulevard, where restaurant smoking is newly forbidden, and it is quite the concoction, designed to give the buzz and taste of a Camel. "Soak tobacco leaves in vodka overnight, deaden the juice's harshness by adding a couple other liquors, and voilà, the nicotini." This had better be a very last resort.

Acme Bullpen

If you are a fan of the Boston Red Sox or Chuck Jones cartoons, you will probably find this Bill Rhoden article amusing. (Seeing as I've been in a long discussion of batting clean-up over at Irresponsible Journalism, it's kind of a baseball-themed blog day.)

"What's compelling about Boston and New York is the human dynamic of the elusive Red Sox quest: Wile E. Coyote's eternal inability to wring the Road Runner's neck and the self-inflicted misery sustained in trying. Nothing works, everything backfires. Boston chasing after New York has become a routine that symbolizes humorous frustration: Chasing, just missing. Chasing, just missing."

Monday Mornin' Mormons

A good essay from Salon's Laura Miller, on the seedy underbelly of Mormon fundamentalism. The LDS church is struggling to distance itself from a legacy of polygamy and "blood atonement." (In the most extreme Mormon subcultures, men can pretty much sleep with and kill whoever they think God wants them to. It's a lot like "Bad Boys II.")

Miller notes, "the problem with a religion founded on the idea that its leaders get their marching orders straight from the Almighty is that members who quarrel with how things are being run have a tendency to start receiving their own contradictory commandments. That's why there are around 200 Mormon splinter groups throughout North America -- impressive in a religion that's not even 200 years old."

Marching orders directly from God... No wonder Mormonism is growing so fast in this country. (Mormons now outnumber Presbyterians in the USA.) It's an American individualist religion with the compensations of community. Get messages factory-direct from heaven, enter a loyal, exclusionary social group: it's the shortcut to religious and relational contentment. Sounds shallow to me, but there's no accounting for taste.

Bobos Rejoice!

Chronic Murmuring alerted me this morning to some happy news: the New York Times has hired David Brooks as an Op-Ed columnist. Brooks is a brilliant essayist: his writing seeks out the sociological trends that influence American politics and culture, and he doesn't often get bogged down in partisanship. His book Bobos in Paradise is the most erudite analysis of American culture I've read in years. Simply put, Brooks writes like I hope I can someday. For now, I'll be content to read his essays twice a week at the lunch counter at Jimmy's Diner.

Peter, Paul and Wayne

A Short Essay on Memory

I bought the new Fountains of Wayne album Welcome Interstate Managers two days ago, and since then I've been listening compulsively to a track called "Valley Winter Song." It's a simple, minor key tune with the touching chorus:

The snow is comin' down
On our New England town
And it's been falling all day long
What else is new?
What can I do
But sing this valley winter song
I wrote for you

The song gets to me on multiple levels, but I think it moves me most in how it borrows so well from other songs I like. It's derivitive in the best possible way: it captures the mood of other sorrowful yet peaceful pieces. It has the acoustic guitars of a Badly Drawn Boy track, and an ambient layering of drums and slide that reminds me of the production work of the late Mark Heard.

But what really pulls me in is the first ten seconds of the song: a guitar riff, repeated twice, that I've been trying like heck to place. You know how sometimes you hear a snippet of music, and it puts you in mind of another song that you can't quite remember, but you know matters to you? For the past two days I've been intermittently staring into space, trying to recall where I've heard those sweet, sad guitars before.

Tonight, after three drinks and two more listens, it finally came back to me: the first ten seconds of "Valley Winter Song" are a dead ringer for the guitar part of a Gordon Lightfoot song called "For Lovin' Me." It's a song that Peter, Paul and Mary covered, and I used to listen to it all the time when I was 16 years old, trying to forget (or maybe remember) a girl I had longed for from a distance. It's all coming back now: I used to sit in my second-floor bedroom and stare out the window at the Spanish moss-draped oaks, playing the song over and over on my first CD player. It was on the first album I ever owned.

I have a really bad memory. (I get it from my father, who can't remember movies he's seen a dozen times.) Even when I go back to a physical place where I experienced a defining moment in my life, it's hard for me to completely bring back that time in my mind. Funny, though, how tiny sensory stimuli -- a smell, a strum on a guitar -- can nestle me snugly in the past. It's not that the past comes to me unbidden; instead, I am carried back, willing or not, to that time. I carry back with me the weight of intervening years, the relationships and experiences that have molded me since then. Yet somehow those past feelings still make perfect sense to me, even to the point where I have trouble pinpointing exactly to what time and place I've been carried.

"The past is a foreign country," L. P. Hartley wrote; "they do things differently there." Most of the time, I couldn't agree more. I look at who I was a year ago, five years ago, and wonder who that idiot was. But every once in a while, I am carried back, and I feel right at home.

Draft Tony

It seems so obvious now. The President alienates entire continents and believes himself to be on a mission from God. The Democrats are weak and stupid. Who can America turn to for stable, forward looking governance?

Seriously, though, has anyone else been exceptionally impressed by this man? He's practical, nuanced and eloquent -- everything George W. is not. Yet he's courageous enough to risk the scorn of the vast majority of his countrymen to stand with an American foreign policy he believes to be moral. (In a typically trenchant essay, David Brooks called Blair "the world's greatest Baby Boomer.") He's almost certain to lose his job for his stand. We should give him a better one.

Ix-Nay on Uday and Qusay

U.S. troops have killed Saddam's Hussein's sons Uday and Qusay, the second and third most wanted men in Iraq. The world has lost two of its cruelest psychopaths.

Last fall, Mark Bowden described Uday in an Atlantic Monthly profile.

"Uday Hussein, Saddam's eldest son, is by all reports a sadistic criminal, if not completely mad. He is a tall, dark-skinned, well-built man of thirty-seven, who in his narcissism and willfulness is almost a caricature of his father. Uday has all his father's brutal instincts and, apparently, none of his discipline. He is a flamboyant drunk, and famous for designing his own wild apparel. Photographs show him wearing enormous bow ties and suits in colors to match his luxury cars, including a bright-red one with white stripes, and one that is half red, half white. Some of his suit jackets have a lapel on one side but not the other...

"'At the parties,' says [singer] Ismail Hussain, who now lives in Toronto, 'I would be performing, and Uday would climb up on the stage with a machine gun and start shooting it at the ceiling. Everyone would drop down, terrified. I was used to being around weapons, bigger weapons than Uday's Kalashnikov, so I would just keep on singing. Sometimes at these parties there would be dozens of women and only five or six men. Uday insists that everyone get drunk with him. He would interrupt my performance, get up on stage with a big glass of cognac for himself and one for me. He would insist that I drink all of it with him. When he gets really drunk, out come the guns.'"

I'm sure he'll be missed.

Yellowcake

In which we learn that if you are trying to buy high-quality uranium, you should go not to Africa, but to Canada. Grain bins, eh, Julian? You're not fooling anyone.

Alec Baldwin Blues

Some observations after a weekend of media intake:

1. The TV ads for Seabiscuit are using the soundtrack to Rudy, which is a shrewd move. I mean, has there been a better sports movie in the last ten years? Has there been a better score for a sports movie ever? When I was bunking at Covenant College, I used to pop Rudy into Josiah's DVD player late at night just to watch the last ten minutes over and over.

2. When I was 15, the NFL Quarterback Challenge was really cool, the kind of thing that I would adjust my Saturday afternoon schedule to watch. Now it just seems lame. It sucks to grow up.

3. Watching The Elephant Man for the first time in years, I noticed that the final thing John Merrick does before dying is to complete construction on a model church. That's a powerful image, especially if Merrick is the Christ figure I think he is.

4. It is a disconcerting moment when the character you most identify with in John Hughes' She's Having a Baby is Alec Baldwin as the sleazy, insoucient best friend. I don't know what this says about me, but I doubt that it's good.

5. If Sigur Ros, Radiohead, Spoon and a half dozen other hip indie bands got together, they couldn't write a song half as good for hand-out-the-window night driving as Bryan Adams' "Summer of '69."

No, Donny, These Men Are Cowards

The Dude abides. I don't know about you but I take comfort in that. It's good knowin' he's out there. The Dude. Takin' 'er easy for all us sinners. Shoosh. I sure hope he makes the finals.

(Too bad Louisville's four hours away. And that festivities are being held on shabbos. I don't drive on shomer shabbos, you know.)

Wretched Writers Welcome

"When the time came for Timothy to fly the nest, he felt the best years of his life were ahead of him, if only because he had spent the childhood ones living in a nest."

Great news for English geeks: The 2003 winners of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest have been announced. The contest is named after mediocre British writer Charles Bulwer-Lytton, who actually coined the phrase "It was a dark and stormy night" in his novel Paul Clifford. Appropriately, "the goal of the contest is childishly simple: entrants are challenged to submit bad opening sentences to imaginary novels." The worst wins.

I've been keeping up with this contest since senior year of high school. I had nothing better to do then and apparently things have not improved. But it's a rare bit of writing that can make me laugh aloud, as the sentence below did:

"She fumbled for her laser gun, knowing that the alien was eager to ravage her, unlike Captain Johnson, who wanted to take things slow since he was coming off the heels of a very painful divorce."

Two-Minute Offense

The NFL has -- how to put this tastefully? -- an exciting new sponsor. We live in strange times.

Post and Pie

Well, today I finally got the first copy of the Perinatal Post, the company newsletter I produce, back from the printer. I'm generally happy with how it turned out -- it's a purple and black four-pager, with nice large photos of adobable babies and concerned doctors -- although the printer did manage to bungle my headline font, replacing Quorum Black BT with Times New Roman. An annoying mix-up, since Times is the Captain's Wafer of the typesetting world (thin and forgettable), but it's probably my fault, and they gave me a free Sam's Choice apple pie with my 2,000 copies. So no complaints here.

It feels good to have the first issue printed: I feel a little less pressure, and the docs I work for now know what I'm doing all day (besides blogging). I celebrated by taking myself to lunch at Lupi's where I consumed a pepperoni calzone and a New York Times article on the making of Scotch whiskey.

When I got back to the office, the nurses had eaten the whole pie. They said it was very tasty.

Auden at the Steakhouse

I have found a new hero, and his name is Leslie Fiedler.

I remember Cliff Foreman mentioning Fiedler's literary criticism in a Covenant College class, and I vaguely recall hearing mention of his death this spring. But today I ran across an amazing Salon interview with him. He talks brilliantly about everything, but especially about the divide between lowbrow and highbrow in the arts.

There's been a lot of discussion about this division in recent weeks thanks to the poularity and critical backlash against the Harry Potter books. A. S. Byatt, for example, recently published a scathing (and confusing) essay on how the J. K. Rowling magical universe is flimsy and populist, which to Byatt is basically the same thing. But Fiedler, who has spent his whole life critiquing Joyce and Shakespeare and who can tell nasty stories about Hemingway, expresses a deep appreciation for the popular novel. And he argues that the very best literature is so high that it seems low, reaching a second simplicity: "And the greatest artists are like that. Shakespeare -- no one was stupid enough not to get something out of his plays. A few people were too smart to get anything out of his plays."

It's those few people that Fiedler really hates. He calls them the "middlebrow," a category that he says includes the New Yorker, John Cheever and anybody who quotes Lacan. These writers are not great, but they try to look great by being pretentious and boring. And they're scared to acknowledge that they will be outlasted not just by the greatest writers but by the fun, popular ones as well. So they scoff at the popular.

Just after making this point, Fiedler tells a story about getting W. H. Auden and William Faulkner to come to Montana for readings. "Auden was a great man. Auden behaved exactly as I wanted him to. We took him out for dinner at a Montana steakhouse, totally macho, full of guys who looked like they would beat any queer they caught coming down the street, and he was feeling 'naughty,' and two girls come through the door wearing homemade gowns from the prom and he said at the top of his voice, 'My dears, I know exactly how they feel -- I used to be a mad queen myself.'"

I think Fiedler's story, about a great poet just having a good time, perfectly reenforces his point: The greatest writers were great not because of their elitist distance and cynicism, but because of the way they invested themselves so completely in life. Only the mediocre need to be elitist.

When thought of this way, writing becomes not an end in itself, but a pathway to more important matters of belief and living. Dorothy Day, the Catholic writer, talked about her greatest sins as sins against her writing, because her writing was so much a part of her life's service. And her writing was in service not to some ideal of art, but to the poorest people in New York's Bowery. This kind of writing starts to sound like a way to be more like Jesus.

The greatest writers are like Auden at the steakhouse and Day in the Bowery: Their brilliance is invested in the everyday. They don't snub the populace, they elevate it. And their eyes aren't jaded by cynicism, but open to the joy of belief.

Oh, and before I forget: at the end of Auden's visit, he gave Fiedler "a book nobody had heard of in America yet: 'The Lord of the Rings' trilogy. And I gave him the American equivalent, 'The Wizard of Oz.'"

The Courtesy Cab Guy

Today, as I was returning to the Medical Mall from my afternoon smoke break atop the parking garage, I was offered a ride in the Erlanger Courtesy Cab. The Courtesy Cab is a roofless golf cart with cushioned seats for six and a small American flag flapping merrily from a pole on the back bumper. It is a free shuttle generally used to transport the sick and elderly to their doctor's appointments in the Mall.

"You want a ride?" asked the driver, a middle-aged man in an orange shirt.

"Well... sure," I replied, suddenly seized with the desire not to have to walk the breezeway from the garage to the main elevators. I am neither sickly nor aged, but I am glowing like a Halloween jack'o lantern after watching two Lookouts games without sunscreen yesterday, and sitting in a cart sounded enticing.

So I hopped in. He asked me where I was headed, and I told him just to the C Elevators.

"That's far enough," he said in a casual Southern drawl. "It's a longer walk than you think. It's 150 yards from the entrance to the information desk. That's more than a football field."

It is a fact that every person in the world has an arena of knowledge, no matter how small, over which he or she is master. It began to dawn on me that for the Erlanger Courtesy Cab Guy, that arena is the Mall breezeway.

"It doesn't seem that long when you look at it," he continued. "I guess it's about 100 yards through here" -- he gestured to the walkway -- "and 50 more through the doors to the desk."

We were nearing the desk now. "Do you do this all day?" I asked.

He turned left to the elevator bank. "I'm off at two-thirty, thank goodness."

It began to occur to me that I had seen the cart in the breezeway almost every time I walked to or from work. As I got out of the cab, I asked him if he traveled the same route all day long.

"Round and round, buddy, like a rat in a maze." And off he drove.

Somwhere, Sigmund Freud Chuckles Knowingly

You know what I love most about Major League Baseball? It's not the popcorn, the summer breeze, or even the call of "let's play two!" It's the Pirates player clubbing the Brewers' giant Italian Sausage mascot in the back with a bat. I've watched the video half a dozen times, and I want to watch it for the rest of the day. It gets better each time.

Cigarettes and Coffee

This afternoon, as I watch the Tennessee River roil outside my window and try to avoid writing an article on intrahepatic cholestasis, I have come up with an exciting new game: Guess The Blog Subtitle Source! (OK, maybe it needs a catchier name.) Your task is to identify the person who said the line at the top of the page, and in what song/movie/book that person said it. The first person to get both answers right will receive a signed personal copy of the Wired Mesh Daily Survival Kit: a pack of Camel Lights and a two-liter bottle of Diet Coke. If the winner for some crazy reason doesn't like those blessed items, a caffinated beverage and tobacco product of equal or lesser value may be substituted. Cheating by checking the Internet is discouraged, although since I'll have no way of catching you, you might as well go on ahead.

Garrison Redux

"T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land fell into a hot bath and the ink washed off and he had to rewrite it, and when he did he made April the cruelest month instead of the 'coolest,' which it had been before. Robert Frost once wrote a poem that was eaten by a dog who ran off into the woods, chased by the poet, and only then did he decide to change the poem to 'Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening' instead of 'Stopping at the Dew Drop Inn on a Wednesday Night,' which is what it was when the dog ate it."

The Garrison Keillor short story that I mentioned enjoying with my Big Mac last month is finally available online. You probably don't remember this story. You should still read it.

Gobush

From the Department of Creating Your Own Bad Omens: Presidential candidate Joe Lieberman's newest addition to his staff is named Matt Gobush. The White House was unavailable for comment, since all staffers were presumed to be doubled over with laughter.

Hands to Larger Service

4-H camp was never this exciting when I went. Well, Florida 4-H's Camp Ocala did have a counselor who did an impersonation of Donald Duck receiving certain favors. And late at night, a lot of the boys would sneak out of the guys cabins to meet girls down at the lake for after-dark games of hide and seek. What they were seeking was unclear to me at the time, although looking back I have a strong suspicion.

So to recap: My 4-H experience had more gratuitous sex, less violence. A satisfactory tradeoff, I think.

Led Zeppelin’s Chacona

New Yorker music critic Alex Ross has a terrific piece about the rise of pop-music studies in academia. The combination of post-structuralist jargon and rock 'n roll is pretty funny (“Another Book in the Wall?: A Cultural History of Pink Floyd’s Stage Performance and the Rise of Audiovisual Gesamtkunstwerk, 1965-1994”), but the article really hits the ground running when Ross starts discussing "memes," universal musical motifs that somehow manage to convey the same meanings across time, genre and culture.

The article's a good 30-minute investment, but here's quick sample to whet your whistle:

"I got to thinking about the tangled history of the chacona, or chaconne, which has appeared in so many diverse places in the past five hundred years that it could be considered one of the iconic images of the universal language. It is identifiable by its bass line: a constantly repeating, often downward-plunging figure, over which higher instruments and voices play variations... Descending chromatic basses gave a slow-marching power to some of the more ambitious rock songs of the sixties and seventies—Dylan’s 'Ballad of a Thin Man' and 'Simple Twist of Fate,' Led Zeppelin’s 'Dazed and Confused' and 'Stairway to Heaven.' Somehow, four centuries after the lamenting bass surfaced, its meaning remained the same. It summoned up the dark comfort of heartbreak and depression: the heart descending step by step to the bottom and going back up to repeat the journey.

"If you could bring together a few seventeenth-century Afro-Cuban musicians, a continuo section led by the Master Bach, and players from Ellington’s 1929 band, and then ask John Paul Jones to start them off with the bass line of 'Dazed and Confused,' they would, after a minute or two, find common ground."

Go to Huntington

I have returned from Huntington, West Virginia, and Jarrod Taylor's wedding all in one piece. Which is remarkable, when you think about it.

I arrived in Huntington at 1:30 Friday morning, and met up with Jarrod's bachelor party at a club called Fluid. I had been driving for eight hours, and in my exhaustion the night took on a surreal quality: I walked up to the club and a massive football-player type was projectile vomiting out of a pickup truck and I walked inside and Jarrod was lifting me into the air and loud 50 Cent-beats were beating and a well-proportioned waitress was feeding me jello shots out of syringe and the bouncer was throwing some drunk frat boy out of the club and the frat boy was saying he'd call his dad who would sue and the bouncer was pushing the frat boy about ten feet down the sidewalk and the frat boy was trying to recover his shoe and the bartender who looked like Vin Diesel was threatening to kick the frat boy's ass and the frat boy was retreating across the street and was smoking furiously while staring in Vin's general direction and Jarrod's wedding party was standing around and drinking and taking bets on the standoff and trying in certain cases not to throw up.

So that was the first half hour.

I would like to say that the morning continued in this pleasantly debauched fashion, but unfortunately I was one of the only sober guys around, jello shot notwithstanding, and it became my task to chaffeur the bachelor party to the World's Worst 24-Hour Restaurant. That wasn't what it was called, of course. It was called Dwight's, and if you are ever in the area I highly recommend that you not eat there. There were about 30 people in the place, including our 15-person party, and we sat for an hour and a half waiting for our bacon and eggs. At which time the waitress emerged to let us know that the kitchen was about to begin working on our order. We passed the extra time escourting Jarrod's brother-in-law, a seminary student with a low alcohol tolerance, to the bathroom. By the time we got back to the hotel, the sun was up.

A large crew of post-Covenant sorts piled into two rooms at the Ramada Inn off I-64, about seven to a room. The hotel's front driveway became home office for the men's side of wedding preparations, which for most of us consisted of sitting on benches and smoking. At regular intervals one of us would wander across the parking lot to the Chevron to buy more Kamel Red Lights. Eventually the front courtyard was no longer able to fill the smoking needs of a dozen twenty-something men, and Sammy Glaser taped a plastic bag around the fire alarm in room 328. It is probably still there.

We spent the Fourth of July at a pool party thrown by a grandmother named Jean, a wonderfully tough old Southern woman with an alarming penchant for gin and tonic. We then returned to our office to await three Papa John's pizzas which took, in good Huntington fashion, two full hours to deliver. John Perkins remarked that hell was probably much like waiting for food in Huntington, West Virginia.

"No," Dan Polk opined, "Hell is dating in Huntington, West Virginia." (Two nights spent observing the opposite sex at bars and pool parties had led most of us to conclude that Huntington women combined the qualities of spoiled Southerner and skanky lack of modesty in measures rarely seen. Some of us were trying for digits anyway.)

"Perhaps," I offered, "Hell is just Huntington, West Virginia."

So eventually there was in fact a wedding. And it was quite lovely, if a little broiling inside the church. The reception was held at a Golf and Country Club, which provided smoking tables right next to an unlimited supply of margaritas and gin and tonics. So we had that going for us, which was nice. There was much kindness, camraderie and falling into the arms of friends, which the cynical might argue tends to happen when you drink at 85 degrees, but which I chalk up to closeness and honesty among that crowd of men. It was nice to be a part of, even on the fringe.

This was followed by a trip to another dance club, which involved a lot more 50 Cent and a good deal of ass-shaking by bridesmaids. It was a striking shift to come from a ceremony centered on the exclusive commitment of two people to each other, only to end up at a joint dedicated to hooking up. This was depressing to think about, so I tried not to.

Sunday morning I drove four of the guys back to ChattaVegas, an unremarkable trip highlighted by a lot of smoking and my realization that Peter Gabriel is a highly underrated artist. That about brings the story up to the moment. Jarrod is married, and has left Huntington, both of which seem like good things to me.

Amber Waves of Grain

The ROC newsletter is off to the presses, and I'm off to Huntington, West Virginia, for the 4th of July weekend. My friend Jarrod Taylor is getting married in Huntington on Saturday, so I, along with Lang, Andy and others, will be spending the holiday weekend in the home of the Marshall Thundering Herd. Since I hope to take my time coming back, you won't be hearing from this space for a few days.

I'll leave you with these thoughts from my sister and Slovak correspondent Katie, who rather absurdly celebrated the 4th of July on the 28th of June, at an American Chamber of Commerce party held in a castle overlooking Bratislava.

"The Am. Cham. celebration in Bratislava was stunning. Not exactly what I would percieve as American, but along with the camel rides and American country music performed by Slovaks there was an unlimited amout of free Jack Daniel's. After two Jack & cokes and and something that I think, in retrospect, must have been a flavored vodka, my patriotism soared. This was joined by (what I think was) a more sincere consideration of what makes America my home. I have a somewhat limited sense of place, I think. But the little national pride I have comes forth with the first verse of America the Beautiful.

"Let freedom ring."

Small Business, Southern Style

As I struggle with comprehending the CMYK colors on Quark in a futile effort to finish my office's newsletter, the discussion of community and economics rages on. Matt has noted the importance of economics in this matter, so it seems worth noting that some guy named Philipp Harper has released a list of the best and worst states to start a small business. The top ten are all in the south and west which, not coincidentally, are also the places that have been heralded as most conducive to vibrant community. The northeast doesn't do so well. Surprise.

Bryan Adams vs. Singing Nuns

Today I arrived at work to discover that the practice's billing department was holding a meeting in my office. (This is what happens when your desk is the conference table.) So I've been biding my time in a co-worker's office for an hour now, puttering around the Net and finding little of interest.

There is some happy news for our intrepid Canadian correspondent Julian: Vancouver will be hosting the 2010 Winter Olympics. The Canucks wowed the judges with a multimedia presentation marred only by a Bryan Adams song. This error in taste and wisdom apparently didn't hurt them, especially after Salzburg, Austria brought out "opera diva Grace Bumbry -- who sang 'Climb Every Mountain' from 'The Sound of Music.'"

(Shudder.)

I think we can all be grateful Vancouver won.

Engaging Hardee's

Thanks to Matty's love of Wal-Mart's constantly falling prices, we Chattacynics have fallen into a great discussion about the nature and management of community. To follow the conversation, it's best to start with the comments on Lobsters in a Bucket (pay special attention to Josiah's final post), then read Ryan's take over at /dev/null.

I was planning to simply comment on Ryan's piece, but my comment kept growing in a disconcertingly Eric Bana-like manner, so I'm just going to post it here. (Isn't inter-blog correspondence fun? I feel like a gay Catholic Canadian!) My post is written directly to the Rye-Diggity, so you'd better read his piece first.

Ryan,

You've been in a community with an exceptionally strong center: Covenant College, and its chapel program. You may have hated it, you may have loathed everything it stood for, but it was the place where most members of the collegiate community gathered for half an hour, five days a week. Everyone saw their friends, boys and girls flirted (and more), people caught up on each other's lives, and every once in a long while the whole room focused on the same speaker.

Chapel had it's obvious drawbacks (uneven quality of programming, the transitory nature of the college years) but it still serves as a good example of what sociologist Ray Oldenburg calls "third places": the informal gathering places where people leave their work (their "first place") on the way to their homes (their "second places").

In my life, I've experienced dozens of these places. Some I've been "a part" of: chapel, of course, but also the clothing/toy store in my hometown, the 4-H center where all the redneck and homeschool parents brought their kids, and a couple of bars in Chattanooga where I've been something of a regular. Others I've only observed: the Tiftonia Hardee's, the Trenton barber shop, Lucky's 777, and -- horror of horrors -- the Hamilton Place Mall on a Friday night. Some of these places appeal to my aesthetic. Some piss me off. But that's not the point. The point is that, at least in the South, these places exist.

Matt makes a great point that some of the most vibrant "third places" are in fact chains, architecturally anonymous hangouts far from city centers. I guess the question is whether these chains are creating new "third places" or erasing old ones that were better at bringing people together for meaningful interaction. This question is why God made urban planners. I am not one, and I don't know the answer. (I do know that the toy store I mentioned eventually moved from downtown Lake Wales to a mall; now it specializes in educational toys, and no one gathers there.)

But it does disconcert me when Hardee's centers its advertising campaign around two old men complaining how they used to sit all day at the chain, but they won't anymore because of the new rock music on the speakers. It's an obvious case of capitalism/populism trumping community, and it appeals strongly to today's society. This is why I have a hard time trusting the motivations of Wal-Mart and other massive conglomorates: they appeal to the parts of our society that I fear are most destructive of meaningful interaction. I could be wrong, but I'm afraid I'm not.

But the discussion of whether malls and fast-food chains can ultimately foster both convenience and community ignores your basic question: Where are these "third places," and why haven't you seen them? Which brings me back to my opening: I think you've been in them; the question is how much you are willing to engage. You and I are both extreme examples of a generation with a penchant for detatchment - this is what we really mean by "irony" when we misuse the word. Communities aren't closed systems; they're nebulous, and you sit at the edge of a great many. The issue is to what degree you and I choose to jump into those communities, whether they be chapel or a bunch of bachelors bumming in St. Elmo. The structural questions about "third places" are tremendously imporant, but they come after that decision to engage.

Communally,

-a.

COPS: The Musical

Some advice to corrupt police officers: if you're planning to steal ammunition from the department's firing range, it's best not to sing loudly about your plans. Trust me on this.

Live Large, Live Free

"The hotel buildings are just one story high, the chairs are armless and our sun beds are very comfortable." Yes indeed, it's Freedom Paradise, the Cancun resort designed for fat people. After all, there's nothing better for your self-image than being sequestered to your own fat-person hotel. This depresses me in ways I can't begin to explain.