Wired Mesh

A. O. Scott: Not as Cool as Three Little Fonzies

I will now relieve my mind of some random information before I wander home for a Friday afternoon nap.

* Last night I bought plane tickets for Josiah and I: We'll be flying to Pittsburgh next Sunday for a free Wilco show. (We might have driven, but I need to attend a certain office party and I'm getting more than a little sick of ten-hour road trips.) In honor of this impending journey, please enjoy this ridiculously fine Michael Chabon essay about the Pittsburgh of his childhood and the other Pittsburgh of his imagination -- a city of Clemente and Sanguillen, a city on "that high hill, where a race of intelligent, talking squirrels were going to be my friends."

* Since we're on the subject of garrulous animals, Francis offers a truly heartbreaking song by Jonathan Coulton about oceanic self-loathing. That is, if you can find a giant squid heartbreaking, which I grant you is a stretch. "Did the stars come out?" the mollusk sings. "Did the world spin round? Does it matter that much when you're ten miles down?"

* You know, Tony, if someone had tried to steal Elvis Mitchell's laptop and passport at Cannes, he so would have ambushed them, explained to them that they "happened to pull this shit while I'm in a transitional period so I don't wanna kill you, I wanna help you," and gotten his laptop back. (It would have been the one that said "Bad Motherf**ker" on the case.) You know this would have happened. Elvis just has that certain Jules vibe. I don't think anyone can dispute this.

* I'm all moved into the Coptix offices. E-mail's going to be mildly finicky for a few weeks, but that aside, I'm already settled comfortably. So comfortably, in fact, that I'm going to go take that nap now.

You Know What? I'm Going to Sleep in Here, and That Way We Can All Be Together

In another sign of economic downturn, my job has been outsourced to St. Elmo. Fortunately, I am the only person my employers know who can write pretty little sentences about twin growth discordance, so I am being shipped to St. Elmo along with my job.

The Medical Mall office has grown too small to contain me (a complaint that previously has only been entered by a few pairs of pants), and on Monday my boss offered to let me work from home. Suspecting that this arrangement would only inspire to sleep until dusk every day, I suggested that I work out of the new Coptix offices instead. And just three days later, I'm moving.

So now each day will begin with a five-minute stroll from my house, past the Thai restaurant and the gravestone carver shop to Coptix, where I will continue to waste vast swaths of my life reading lists of John Kerry's vice-presidential choices. Only now, instead of enjoying a view of the mighty Tennessee (today's color: grey!), I will have a bay-window view of a funeral home. And I will no longer be able to enjoy regular smoke breaks atop the parking garage, gazing out into the wilds of Ooltewah until it starts to rain. I'll miss that.

But I will have Josiah. And that's a happy consolation for me, although it bodes ill for the serenity of St. Elmo.

Please Stop Ululating On My Movie

Salon's Dave Roos examines the single most annoying trend at the movies: "the vaguely ethnic wail." Need to make your sword-and-sandals epic more emotionally powerful? Have some Middle Eastern lady start screaming jibberish. Repeat every 15 minutes. (The ethnic accuracy of the exotic screeching is, it seems, not a concern: Writing the score for "The Passion," composer John Debney "meticulously researched ancient, traditional Jewish music for several days before declaring that it was too boring for words." He used Indian and Arab motifs instead. And wailing.)

Ghosts, Gomez, and Giant Squid

I've been saving these bits of essaying in hopes that I might eventually find some clever connection between them, but to my knowledge Stephin Merritt has never written any songs about giant squid, nor has Michael Chabon written any novels about sea beasties, and there seems little hope that such inspiration will strike either of them anytime soon. (Although I, for one, would eagerly purchase a copy of "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Kraken.") So I may as well offer these morsels up in random order.

First, a really lovely New Yorker essay about one scientist's ongoing search for the giant squid, a creature that has thoroughly terrified me since my family got stuck on a replica submarine at Walt Disney World when I was six. (Damn you, Jules Verne knockoff theme park attractions! You have doomed me to a life of fear!) I still find this creature wonderfully chilling, like nothing else really. It's got all the pefect elements of gothic horror: "Though the giant squid is no myth, the species, designated in scientific literature as Architeuthis, is so little understood that it sometimes seems like one. A fully grown giant squid is classified as the largest invertebrate on Earth, with tentacles sometimes as long as a city bus and eyes about the size of human heads. Yet no scientist has ever examined a live specimen—or seen one swimming in the sea. Researchers have studied only carcasses, which have occasionally washed ashore or floated to the surface. (One corpse, found in 1887 in the South Pacific, was said to be nearly sixty feet long.)" Yikes. What could be worse than being attacked by this: a massive, slippery, tentacled thing that almost no one has actually seen?

And I suppose there is at least some connection between that monster and the next essay, a Michael Chabon piece on the legacy of gentlemanly ghost-story writer Montague Rhodes James, whose unseen, accidentally summoned horrors often sport the sort of fleshy protrubances that one generally assosiates with either squids or sex. Chabon compares James with the more famous writer he inspired, H. P. Lovecraft: "The contrast is particularly stark when it comes to their portrayal of the unportrayable. Lovecraft approaches Horror armed with adverbs, abstractions, and perhaps a too-heavy reliance on pseudopods and tentacles. James rarely does more than hint at the nature of his ghosts and apparitions, employing a few simple, select, revolting adjectives, summoning his ghosts into hideous, enduring life in the reader's mind in a bare sentence or two." Chabon goes on to make a too-short but still-rather-convincing argument that all short stories are, to some degree or another, ghost stories, depending as they do on a character's confrontation with a mentally buried past experience. (Flannery O'Connor might add that the form, ghostly or otherwise, hinges just as much on an encounter with the Other.) M. R. James has now taken a prime position among the books I hope to read this summer.

Finally, I am happy to report that Stephin Merritt, better known for his own brilliant musical work, has returned -- if only for a brief moment -- to excoriating the work of lesser artists, and noting the unsung talents as well. He gets a nice, thick column in last Sunday's New York Times, wherein he pans Morrissey's backup band and praises Gomez, Delays and The Real Tuesday Weld, of whom he drolly raves: "No style or tempo lasts more than four minutes, making the record fun for actually listening to, without feeling one should really do the dishes now."

A Drunken Revelry in the Greek Tradition

Now that the hangovers from this graduation weekend have settled to a managable throb, I just want to say thanks to all the people who cleaned houses, played guitars, bought me drinks, purchased food, and spent time celebrating with me. I am amazed by the generosity of my friends. May we always find time to dance together.

(The photo, of course, is from Andy.)

Brooks: "We Can't Do Good Without Losing Our Innocence"

David Brooks has always been one of the smartest, most perceptive voices in journalism. But in the last week, the New York Times' conservative columnist has also become one of the bravest. He has written two pieces admitting that he and other advocates of Iraqi regime change were "blinded by idealism," that they didn't see what the results of U. S. power would be on the people our soldiers tried to liberate. With his usual eagle eye for historical precident, he looks back to the nation-builders following World War II:

They took a tragically ironic view of their situation. They understood that we can't defeat ruthless enemies without wielding power. But we can't wield power without sometimes being corrupted by it. Therefore, we can't do good without losing our innocence.

We didn't understand the tragic irony that our power is also our weakness. As long as we seemed so mighty, others, even those we were aiming to assist, were bound to revolt. They would do so for their own self-respect. In taking out Saddam, we robbed the Iraqis of the honor of liberating themselves. The fact that they had no means to do so is beside the point.

This is profound writing, not least because it's an admission of failure without a loss of hope. I can feel the pain seeping from every word here, particularly Brook's tired conclusion, "From the looting of the Iraqi National Museum to Abu Ghraib, this has been a horrible year." The writing is so good, in fact, that I think the lessons in these essays are not simply political. What Brooks is talking about is the hard admission of failure, as a nation or as a person -- the realization that something in you is flawed and that your refusal to see that flaw has caused pain all around. Idealism has its place -- its active, heedlessly euphoric place -- but the time comes when you have to admit that your righteous intentions don't insulate you from joining the ranks of the evildoers. As Tom Bissell memorably wrote in a recent Believer, "we are all, as Solzhenitsyn insists, capable of evil. I am capable of evil, you are capable of evil. Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz and Noam Chomsky and Gore Vidal and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn himself are capable of evil. Our capacity to recognize this is what separates us from all the beasts of the field."

But once we've admitted this, once we've acknowledged the evils worked in the blindness of our own idealism, what then? Brooks suggests continuing to fight for the good, while giving up any efforts to save national face. "That means the good Iraqis, the ones who support democracy, have to have a forum in which they can defy us. If the insurgents are the only anti-Americans, then there will always be a soft spot for them in the hearts of Iraqi patriots... If the Iraqis do campaign this fall, then at their rallies they will jeer at us. We will still be hated around the world. But we will have succeeded in doing what we set out to do."

Once again, I think this is the kind of wisdom that not only is a significant and eloquent geopolitical truth, but something that translates to each one of our lives, and maybe even to how we relate to Jesus. When we fail, when our best intentions flounder in our weaknesses, maybe the thing to do is not to defy our failings, but to embrace them as the way in which we will reach our greatest goal.

Or maybe none of what I've said makes any sense outside of my own stressed-out head. I have no idea.

Consider This Blog Chock-Full of Trademark Stephin Merritt Pauses

So I'm belatedly graduating from college this weekend, but let's not worry ourselves over such piddling matters. The new Magnetic Fields album is out! I went trolling through the music departments of Gunbarrel Road bright and early Tuesday morning, and found a copy of i on a stock cart in a Best Buy. I was happy.

It's an odd little album: not as obviously tuneful as the Fields' 1999 classic 69 Love Songs, and without the depths of sorrow or heights of genre-and-gender-mixing chaos that places that record at the top of my personal favorites. This new record is a mere 14 songs, and it feels a bit like a collection of lost Roxy Music tracks -- or covers of such tracks from a unusually classy gay piano bar. The lyricism, of course, is still pure Stephin Merritt brilliance. He is the most virtuoso songwriter working now, with the possible exception of Jeff Tweedy, and here he continues his string of perfect couplets ("I don't have to love you now if I don't wish to / I won't see you anyhow if that's an issue") that first make me laugh, then sink in with a strange weight. The tone of songs here is more obviously jaded than in Love Songs, where many of the characters were heart over heels, and glad to declare it. With i, Merritt seems to be taking on the role of the time-hardened broken heart. Still, under the surface lurks the sense of duende -- "the haunted premises of longing that the true Love Song inhabits," as Nick Cave put it -- that always flows in and out of Merritt's work. "I had a dream and you were in it," Merritt sings. "The blue of your eyes was infinite. / You seemed to be / In love with me / Which isn't very realistic."

In honor of such lovely gloom, I offer two very nice Magnetic Fields articles. First, a Believer piece by Rick Moody which discusses, at various points, reading aloud to rock fans, Joni Mitchell singing Charlie Mingus and, most importantly, the attempt to winnow 69 Love Songs to one diamond-sharp 31-song album. If you're willing to sift through the advertising, there's also a more current Salon interview with Merritt, in which he discusses i and his general disdain for Bjork. (The piece obliquely references Merritt's fascinating side project The Three Tenors, who apparently only perform special shows, such as "The Three Terrors Sing the Saddest Songs They Know for Valentine's Day.")

Finally, both articles make note of the Trademark Stephin Merritt Pause, which is developing an epic air of mystery in my mind. "Does it come from a youthful obsession with Harold Pinter?" Moody wonders. "Is it neurological? Is it a leftover expression of Merritt's childhood epilepsy? All I know is that Merritt takes longer to reply to a remark than anyone you know. He is two or three beats longer in reply than all your hardcore aphasics. You will be tempted to append further wasted verbiage to your initial remark. Do not do this. It will confuse things. Wait patiently. Then, at last, you will get the acerbic, laconic reply." This must be some pause.