Wired Mesh

Why, Would You Like Me to Diagnose Your Girlfriend?

So I have the utmost respect for the high-risk maternal-fetal medicine specialists I labor for, would even go so far as to call them heroes, and even if I suspect daily that my projects -- like the newsletter I just finished today -- are pointless, I'm happy to be doing such work for these particular men.

But I swear, the next guy who walks up to me and says, "So, I hear you work for a gynecologist?", says it with that lewd mocking twinkle in his eye, I am going to sock that guy in the nose. I'm not sure if I'm kidding about this.

Sorry. It's been a bad day. This starts to capture a bit of the mood.

On the Air Again

To my great surprise, I have been asked to return to WUTC to read weekly reviews of the AEC Independent Film Series entries. Didn't see that coming, especially after my Pulse cover story in July revealed the management's listener-ignoring plan to shift away from locally-programed music. There seems to be enough turmoil over there, with managers too scared by public outcry to do much managing, that nobody cares that I'm wandering back into the station.

So I'm back, kids. I'll be on Joshua Daniels' show on Monday nights at 8:00 p.m. for the next dozen weeks, critiquing the indie films. That gives you plenty of time to listen before you turn on Monday night football. Tonight I'm reviewing "Garden State." Tune in, if you can.

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Marvin Olasky has offered perhaps the most bizarre take yet on this miserable election:

The other thing both of us [Bush and I] can and do say is that we did not save ourselves: God alone saves sinners (and I can surely add, of whom I was the worst). Being born again, we don't have to justify ourselves. Being saved, we don't have to be saviors. John Kerry, once-born, has no such spiritual support, nor do most of his top admirers in the heavily secularized Democratic Party...

Kerry can't say [he's imperfect] because he evidently does not believe that all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. He and his handlers portray him as virtually perfect in the past and omniscient in the present. In and of itself, that's also not unusual: it's so hard for a presidential candidate not to get puffed up when laudatory remarks follow him as closely as Secret Service agents. But do we want a president who pretends that he can do no wrong and never has?

This is staggering logic on at least two counts. First, as Andrew Sullivan has noted, it suggests -- no, it declares -- that John Kerry's Catholicism is an invalid, even pathetic, version of Christianity. Olasky is actually arguing that because Kerry isn't an evangelical, he isn't saved. He isn't implying it; he's shouting it. That's disgusting.

Secondly, if you're arguing for the re-election of George W. Bush, do you really think his selling point is the humble admission of fallibility? This is a man who declares to his advisors that his policies are the will of God. How can Olasky argue that Bush's savior complex is any smaller than Kerry's? Oh, that's right: Bush is a Baptist and a Republican, which means he must be more pentitent than a Catholic Democrat. Political thuggery always smells sweeter wrapped in a nice coating of Christian piety.

Bourbon-Thirty

My workdays are actually getting packed, a surprising development considering my well-established aversion to getting any real work done. Today was especially tight: three afternoon meetings, one on top of the other, in different sections of downtown, with the Big Purple Van O'Love questioning whether she really thinks this ignition thing is really what she wants to do anymore. All of which makes me grateful that Josiah has established Bourbon-Thirty as an evening ritual. It is a comfort, the shot of Knob Creek in a blue mug, standing in the sunshine, feeling my body uncoil a smidgen. Walker Percy said it best in 1975, in an essay that has become a personal favorite this summer:

The pleasure of knocking back Bourbon lies in the plane of the aesthetic but at an opposite pole from connoisseurship. My preference for the former is or is not deplorable depending on one's value system -- that is to say, how one balances out the Epicurean virtues of cultivating one's sensory end organs with the greatest discrimination and at least cost to one's health, against the virtue of evocation of time and memory and of the recovery of self and the past from the fogged-in disoriented Western world. In Kierkegaardian terms, the use of bourbon to such an end is a kind of aestheticized religious mode of existence, whereas connoisseurship, the discriminating but single-minded stimulation of sensory end organs, is the aesthetic of damnation.

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Thanks to Lang, I've managed to upload the sole extant track from The Guild, that fine Gregory Baus/Paton Williams folkadelica ensemble that rocked the Kudzu world in '97. I doubt this is legal, but I also doubt anybody minds. Enjoy this slice of southern OPC rock n' roll.

My Lips Hurt

I have now been sick for eight days. This coughing thing is starting to get old, and I'm sure friends have grown tired of me leaving meals to blow my nose. On the upside, I'm starting to sound like Tom Waits.

Another Pulse flick review has sprouted amidst the links -- this time it's Napoleon Dynamite that gets the critical treatment. Liked it, had some reservations about audience identification and a general tone of superiority. Napoleon would probably call me an idiot.

Meanwhile, I'm ready to spring my August music mix upon the unsuspecting world. These days I find that I only decide I'm finished with a mix at the moment when I have an idea for another one. The inspiration for September's mix came early, so here you are.

Be An Echo: The August 2004 Mix

01 The Magnetic Fields – Abigail, Belle of Kilronan
02 The Decemberists – Red Right Ankle
03 Calexico – Sunken Waltz
04 Wilco – Hummingbird
05 My Morning Jacket – Mahgeetah
06 A. C. Newman – On The Table
07 Devendra Banhart – At The Hop
08 Elliott Smith – Waltz #2
09 Scott Miller – Goodnight Loser
10 Wilco – Venus Stop The Train
11 Isaac Wardell – On Your Shoulders
12 Iron & Wine – Hickory
13 Sufjan Stevens – Redford (For Yia-Yia and Pappou)
14 Van Morrison – Madame George
15 Jeff Tweedy – Box Full of Letters

Can You Hear the Greg Baus Singing?

You may know Gregory Baus the Reformed warrior, the good-hearted and combative contributor on Andy's blog. But do you know Gregory Baus the existentialist folk singer? I thought not.

I was flipping through the stacks at Chad's today, admiring Isaac Wardell's classily-packaged record and purchasing the Alejandro Escovedo tribute album, when I found a pile of locally produced CDs. One I immediately recognized as the Kudzu Musicians Sampler #1: 1997. The Kudzu consortium was still kicking around when I arrived at Covenant in 1999, but hadn't quite managed a second compilation (it never did) and was already receding into legend. They were a group of Chattanooga musicians, disproportionally Covenant students, trying to find away to write Christian music that... well, that didn't suck. (I think a lot of the members were also trying to hook up with singer Summer Ray. That was the story, anyway.) They played shows under the Walnut Street Bridge, guitars strumming into spring nights.

Jade Alger loaned me the album, and I listened to it a good bit my freshman and sophomore years at C-nant, especially late at night, editing the Bagpipe school paper. I had no idea who any of the musicians were. None of them seemed to play shows any more, having passed the mantle (if not Summer Ray herself) on to musicians like Issac Wardell, Chris Ammons and Tom Okie. Time passed, a lot more albums were released around town, and Jade took his CD with him to Slovakia.

...And then I stumbled across the record again this afternoon, checked the liner notes, and realized I now know three of the singers: Greg, Paton Williams (a co-member of my church) and Dan Polk (now living up the seaboard, hobnobbing with politicos). It's very, very strange to hear them singing fervently some seven years ago, before they took wives and fathered children, before their lives became entangled with mine in any way.

Perhaps I'll find a way to post one of their tracks on Thursday. Meanwhile, there are still plenty of Kudzu albums in stock at Chad's. If you rush over, you can find some fine, or at least earnest, Presbyterian songcraft.

Can You Hear the Jack Whales Singing?

In the words of Scott Cunningham, "It's here." I think that about says it.

While watching, note that Wes Anderson has managed to build an entire hotel marquee in Futura font. Man, this is like Christmas.

2x4x35MM

So I return from lunch this afternoon to find that Bob DeMarco has left, on my desk chair, a scene for our screenplay project... written in pencil on a piece of 2x4. So there is now a large block of wood leaning against my hard drive, its contents waiting to be transcribed. That's what you get when your screenplay partner is a carpenter who writes on the job.

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There's a good bit of movie news today, not least of which is the unveiling of the fall's AEC Independent Film Series lineup. There's a lot of obscure stuff, some rightfully so, but some real gems too: I'm especially stoked about "Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring" and "Maria Full of Grace." And, of course, "Garden State." We're all trailer junkies now.

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Also, it seems that my lone (unless you count the anti-drunk driving PDAs I filmed with a camcorder when I was ten) foray into moviemaking has made its way onto the Internet. Andy Montgomery and I were partly responsible for the worst part of this short: the story, which builds to a dreadful, tasteless joke about deafness and a record store. So we need to self-edit a bit better. But the Bernard Hermann homage is nice.

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Finally, we can only hope that Nick Cave's screenwriting venture turns out better. It's a Western with Guy Pierce. Safe to assume it's brooding. Gothic and redemptive, for that matter. I'm there.

Because She Falls In Love With Everyone

About two weeks ago, I stumbled across a musical Shangri-La: the much-discussed, little-heard Yankee Hotel Foxtrot Demos. There's some tremendous stuff here; about half the tracks are as good or better than songs from the finished Wilco album (which is saying something, since YHF is still the best album released since the century turned). This week's Thursday MPThree is my favorite Demos track, "Venus Stop The Train," one of the saddest songs Jeff Tweedy has ever penned.

In his sparkling PopMatters essay on the Demos -- which you simply must read, even if you are operating heavy machinery -- Chuck Hicks decribes the sorrowful attraction of "Venus":

By far the most devastating song on the Demos is "Venus Stopped the Train", a track surely destined for most acclaimed in Wilco's unpublished portfolio. It appears to be the tale of a runaway (or homeless) girl, perhaps a prostitute. But apart from the revelation that her father "reached out to her / when her mother slept", we aren't fed lurid details. Instead, Tweedy and Jay Bennett (who shared credits for this song) express her anxieties in abstractions that are vastly more chilling:

A creaky, pedal-laden piano adds to the solemnity of this sympathetic portrait of this ultimate symbol of infidelity. After stating "I kept my distance" Tweedy sings, "I'm polite to her / I reached my soft hand out to her..." and you can feel the empathy as well as the irony in his voice.

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Speaking of Wilco, many of my friends have talked about going to one of the band's Southern shows -- Nashville, Atlanta, Asheville -- or even hitting all three. But I haven't seen much initiative on this crucial matter. So, let's just make my blog the central headquarters for Chattanooga's Wilco-Following Fest '04. Who wants to go to these shows? Which shows do you want to hit? Has anyone bought tickets yet?

If Music Be the Food of Regional Journalism

Well, play on. It's a particularly good issue of the Pulse this week, with an engrossing cover story on Chattanooga after midnight, and two (count 'em!) CD reviews by Totten. I also churned out a couple of pieces, both available in the Published Mesh links. One is a feature on Isaac Wardell's recent collaboration with Mason Neely, which resulted in a perfectly lovely album. (By the way, be sure to catch Isaac in concert with the Totten Bros. at Lamar's Sunday night. It'll be the best show in months.) The other article is equally musical, if less positive: a sardonic review of the drab Cole Porter movie "De-Lovely." Feast away on the tuneful treats.

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I have a nasty cold, have cancelled my appointments, and am going to lie upon my couch and watch the Olympics with a glass of orange juice. Just wanted you to know.

For Relaxing Times, Make It Yaegashi Time

I'm late to the party in noting this, but Morris Yaegashi has returned from Tokyo, hair dyed auburn, toting a backpack filled with gifts. ("Yo, yo, yo," he chortled.) I am now the proud owner of a bottle of Suntory whiskey -- yes, the same beverage that Bill Murray glumly touted in "Lost in Translation." It's wonderful to see Morris, and especially nice that he breezes into town on the heels of Japan's gymnastic triumph. The Jap always did have great timing.

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My mother and sister have returned to Lake Wales, where they will not be reading this, since the town still has no electric or phone service. At least the Mesh house has water.

Choo-Choo Charley

Hurricane Charley barreled into Florida like a freight train last night, and my hometown, Lake Wales, took a direct hit. My family had always assumed that such a thing wasn't possible, that any storm would disintegrate before it reached the center of the state. We were wrong. Charley was still a Category 2 hurricane when the eye passed over Highway 60 (about ten miles west of my childhood house) last night around 7 p.m. That means the northeast eyewall smacked right into my neighborhood. This from the Lakeland Ledger:

Over land, Charley lost some punch but still pummeled Lake Wales with gusts up to 101 mph and sustained winds of 95 mph for about 45 minutes, according to the Lake Wales Fire Department.

My father rode the storm out, crouching in the downstairs bathroom with our two dogs and a cat. (My mom's in Chattanooga this weekend.) I talked to him around 10 last night, and he said we'd lost a lot of trees, at least one of which fell onto our screened-in patio. One of our driveway light posts was crushed by debris. He didn't know much more than that, and I haven't spoken to him today; phone lines are down or busy across Florida. He did mention that one point last night, a rumor had gone over the radio that Bok Tower had simply fallen down. That now seems false, but it's a measure of the storm's force that for a time the idea appeared reasonable.

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UPDATE, 1:10 P.M.: I just spoke to my dad, who is well. He says Casa Mesh and the nearby duplex property he owns both endured the storm well. (The houses he built "didn't even shake" when the eyewall hit, tenants reported.) He managed to clear our driveway of tree limbs this morning, and is trying to clear a road at his property before the afternoon thunderstorms hit. So it seems we made it through okay.

Please pray for the people of Punta Gorda, who did not fare as well. This storm cut a path through one of the state's largest concentrations of trailer parks, and there was a lot of death.

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UPDATE, 1:31 P.M.: I just went to the Web site of the News Chief, the paper I interned with in high school, and found this photo of New Life Fellowship, the church I attended for much of elementary and high school. I think that's the church sign fluttering in the grass.

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UPDATE, 2:04 P.M.: The Ledger reports widespead damage in Lake Wales: collapsed houses, uprooted trees, downed power lines and the roof lifted off a nursing home where I used to visit residents as a high-school service project. "Many oaks in a park around Lake Wailes were uprooted, bleachers and press boxes were damaged at the city's baseball and softball facilities, and many of the newly restored windows in the 1919 Junior High School Building were broken... 'Bad, bad and worse,' J.T. Terrence, the city's Emergency Operations Center coordinator, said this morning."

Great Scott

A. O. Scott's recent reviews have felt a bit padded to me; he's been indulging his tendency to pontificate at too much length about ephemeral ideas. But he's still the most perceptive analyst of acting, and his thoughts on Mark Ruffalo in today's Times are spot on:

The willingness to appear weak — to represent, in other words, a familiar variety of real, contemporary American man — may be Mark Ruffalo's great distinction as an actor. Even when he plays cops, in pictures like Jane Campion's "In the Cut" and Michael Mann's "Collateral," he does it with a visible tremble of hesitation. In Kenneth Lonergan's "You Can Count on Me," the film that first brought him widespread attention, Mr. Ruffalo's character was generous and sweet-natured, but also feckless, selfish and unreliable, in perpetual flight from maturity.

I love this kind of criticism: not flashy, but original, concisely capturing what makes a particular actor appealing. It's like a written variation on candid portrait photography.

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On a separate-though-still-literary note, Qwantz has been kind enough to provide a six-panel summary of Lolita. And there's a twist at the end!

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I'm starting to enjoy this daily-blogging thing. Maybe I'll even post something personal someday. I wouldn't hold my breath, though.

Greaseball Heaven

I don't know where exactly I stand on that crucial world issue of file sharing, but I do know that I don't see much need for it, not so long as there's a truckload of fantastic music on the Net that's both free and legal. I've been stacking my iTunes collection for the last few weeks, thanks mostly to a spectrum of MP3 blogs. So it seems like time to join Andy in offering a free download of my own each week. If you scroll down the menu at right, you'll see a new category, The Thursday MPThree. Just stop by each Thursday, right-click on the artist icon, and select "Save Link As" to take home my favorite bit of tuneful goodness for the week.

I don't know much about Devendra Banhart, other than some odd biographical details about a childhood in Venezuela. I wasn't a huge fan of his last album, Rejoicing in the Hands. I found his little-boy-lost voice distracting; he sounded like he was hyperventilating on each folky track. But I haven't been able to stop listening to "At The Hop," a song from his upcoming release, Nino Rojo. It's got some kick to it, a tiny, slapping backbeat in the first few moments that breathes rhythmic life into Banhart's always-lush guitars. If Victoria Williams and Sam Beam had a child, and said child grew up to record doo-wop records, this would be one of his songs.

Midweek Miscellany

Is there anything more subtly grating than a child standing at your desk, plucking snap tabs from your Diet Coke cans? Don't bother answering. There is nothing.

In case you hadn't noticed, Leon Wieseltier got all hot and bothered in the NYTimes Review of Books about the new Nicholson Baker novella (called it a "scummy little book," I believe) and then a bunch of bloggers got all hot and bothered at Leon. Such angry words over a little story about shooting the president...

My latest review, a li'l somethin' somethin' on Before Sunset, is now available amongst the published materials links. I'll be updating those links every Wednesday from now on, so you should make a point of stopping by. At least if you're bored, or trying to avoid commitment, or whatever your deal is.

Going From This Land Here to That in a Sailor's Suit and Cap

Charles Taylor is always an interesting read, in part because he is so often profoundly wrong. (He once memorably insulted Anthony Lane and praised "Showgirls" in the same sentence, which should be rightly considered some sort of heresy.) But he has a pretty accurate essay in today's Salon on the new cinema of alienation and dislocation. I have no idea why he feels some need to fit a Tomb Raider movie into his argument, but I think he's right in saying that today's most memorable movie heroes are not those who are comfortable in the world (a la Bogart) or challenging it (Nicholson), but simply lost in it.

As opposed to the visual frenzy and clutter of most of our movies, the recurring image in many of these pictures is someone sitting in a room -- Lee Kang-Sheng in his bedroom in "What Time Is It There?" or Johansson in her hotel room looking out at Tokyo through a pane of glass in "Lost in Translation" or Samantha Morton in her Shanghai dwelling, more a cube than an apartment, in "Code 46." They all look as if they are trying to work up the nerve to venture outside. And when they do, there's a sense that they are on the verge of drifting away.

Greetings From Christendom

Sufjan Stevens preaches to Pitchfork:

Can you be a liberal, enlightened, modern person and still believe in God? That's a really big question! I think that's what people are asking me, and honestly I'm incapable of answering. I have no idea. I'm as confused as they are. It's a much deeper conviction; it's much larger than just you and me.

But You Can Know What I Write and Listen To

My online presence has greatly increased in the last few days: The Pulse has finally gotten around to establishing a Web site, and my weekly film reviews now have their own cozy little page. From this time on, I won't have to bother with posting my reviews here; there's a new link at the right that will inform you when a new critique is up on the Pulse pages. It's a radical change, I know, but I'm sure we'll adjust together.

Also, Josiah has been kind enough to set me up with my very own Audioscrobbler page, so the whole world can know what song I'm enjoying on iTunes at any given moment. At the moment I'm comforting myself with some Red House Painters, having endured eight hours of slowly losing a poker game last night. I want to go back to bed, but this will do.

You Don't Know Me

I couldn't resist. Sorry.

Laura Bush vs. the Blue Beetle

Lots of good reads today, if you're killing some time between voting for Uneva Shaw for the second and third time. First, you've probably heard about the Tony Kushner one-act in which Laura Bush argues with an angel about the proper hermanuetics for Dostoyevsky. But have you read it? You should. Yes, it's anti-Bush propaganda, openly so, but it's Kushner, which means it's ridiculously good, blending political diatribe with the subtlest of moral gradations. Take this Laura Bush monologue as an example:

"And because it's genius literature of the first rank, and not some magazine article, your eyes sometimes reblur all over again as you're reading the twisty words, and all of a sudden you don't agree with the Inquisitor, he's the devil again, talking talking, but suddenly something has happened and it's not the people you are used to thinking of as evil totalitarian people who are the evil totalitarian people who are the pals of the Inquisitor and, well, the devil! You think wait a minute, isn't this Grand Inquisitor starting to sound like (whispers) John Ashcroft, who just between us -- (she shudders violently) Cuh-REEPy. You lose track of who is who, your compass is gone all screwy, you started out knowing for sure, and you end up adrift, and the more you think on it the more the clarity of the argument sort of melts like people in 900-degree Fahrenheit heat, and all you can see anymore is pain, pain and more pain, like it's not about ideas anymore, it's just about raw naked SUFFERING, and..."

You really should go ahead and read the whole thing. It'll take you twenty minutes, and if you're a conservative you'll get your blood pressure going for the rest of the day. You'll be all pumped up. It'll be good for you.

No? OK, then try this speech by Michael Chabon at the San Diego Comic-Con, an event that I would never have expected to link to, but there you are. Chabon mourns the shift away from writing comics for kids, then offers some suggestions on how to bring children back to the "greasy kid's stuff":

"Let’s blow their little minds. A mind is not blown, in spite of whatever Hollywood seems to teach, merely by action sequences, things exploding, thrilling planetscapes, wild bursts of speed. Those are good things. But a mind is blown when something you always feared but knew to be impossible turns out to be true; when the world turns out to be far vaster, far more marvelous or malevolent than you ever dreamed; when you get proof that everything is connected to everything else, that everything you know is wrong, that you are both the center of the universe and a tiny speck sailing off its nethermost edge."

Lovely. Man, do I want to write like Mike.

A-Sitting on a Sofa Playing Games of Chance

I'm dealing with the consequences of mixing sour mash and mini hamburgers in the wee hours, thankful for the low lights of Coptix, listening to Astral Weeks -- and reading about it too:

Maybe it boiled down to how much you actually want to subject yourself to. If you accept for even a moment the idea that each human life is as precious and delicate as a snowflake and then you look at a wino in a doorway, you've got to hurt until you feel like a sponge for all those other assholes' problems, until you feel like an asshole yourself, so you draw all the appropriate lines. You stop feeling. But you know that then you begin to die. So you tussle with yourself. How much of this horror can I actually allow myself to think about? Perhaps the numbest mannekin is wiser than somebody who only allows their sensitivity to drive them to destroy everything they touch - but then again, to tilt Madame George's hat a hair, just to recognize that that person exists, just to touch his cheek and then probably expire because the realization that you must share the world with him is ultimately unbearable is to only go the first mile. The realization of living is just about that low and that exalted and that unbearable and that sought-after. Please come back and leave me alone. But when we're along together we can talk all we want about the universality of this abyss: it doesn't make any difference, the highest only meets the lowest for some lying succor, UNICEF to relatives, so you scratch and spit and curse in violent resignation at the strict fact that there is absolutely nothing you can do but finally reject anyone in greater pain than you. At such a moment, another breath is treason. that's why you leave your liberal causes, leave suffering humanity to die in worse squalor than they knew before you happened along. You got their hopes up. Which makes you viler than the most scrofulous carrion. Viler than the ignorant boys who would take Madame George for a couple of cigarettes. Because you have committed the crime of knowledge, and thereby not only walked past or over someone you knew to be suffering, but also violated their privacy, the last possession of the dispossessed.