Relocating 

is
reinventing yourself,
discovering backroads,
new groceries,
a wardrobe change,
patching up leaks,
invigorating,
for a few days;

as the grocery stores and shortcuts
become the fresh cliché,
the clothes get worn in, and
you start shooting holes into
your new roof:

the rain and old ways come pouring through.

Little House in the Big Woods 

Perhaps it's a pitfall of big city living (or perhaps living of any sort) that our directed motivations are replaced by momentum, and our good intentions replaced by mere inertia: we get up, get out of bed, put one foot in front of the other, and the next thing we know, we're a well-fed sixty, asleep in our contentment and creaky in the knees, still wearing the same clothes and dreams and disappointments we wore when we were twenty.

So I'm taking some days away from the city, as many as it takes to recover a hope or an aspiration.

"Something was making him nibble at the edge of stale ideas as if his sturdy physical egoism no longer nourished his peremptory heart."

The Bohemians 

The Good Samaritan of Smith Street 

It was all just a big misunderstanding. It was a whole set of misunderstandings, in rapid succession.

I boarded a Brooklyn-bound F train in SoHo. It was a beautiful weekend afternoon, and the subway car was full of (more than usual) happy couples and their children. So many children. So many children, in fact, that my first impulse was to change to another car.

But the bell dinged, the door closed, and that settled it: I was staying with the kids. The kids and, at the far end of the train, a banjo player.

Goodie.

A little girl waved, and then spit up.

I waved back.

Her mother beamed at me, I suppose to thank me for helping to teach her daughter that the world is full of friendly people and not misanthropes. That old tale.

Squeals erupted from my left: a small gaggle of toddlers were falling and drooling on each other, dancing to the music of the banjo player, who was making his way toward my end of the train. The banjo player was plucking away, and the kids were having a literal hoot. They were having a literal hootenanny. So I did what any childless adult would do in this situation: I turned on my iPod. This situation is exactly why God invented the iPod: to keep your children and your banjo out of my world.

One square dancing toddler got tangled up in my headphone cable, yanking it from my ear; and as I reached down to untangle it, the train slammed on its brakes. The child flew through the air, toward one of the subway poles (and certain death, or at least pain and a lot of crying)—and through no fault of my own, I caught this child. I guess I saved its life. Its mother thanked me, and a few of the other mothers did, too.

I was just trying to untangle my headphones.

The child (who now owed its life to me) sat down beside me, but I wasn't having any of that—this tot looked a little soggy in the diaper. I stood up and—wouldn't you know it?—an old woman with a walker boarded the train, and thanked me for giving up my seat.

"No problem," I told her, since it had been an accident. A few of the mothers beamed at my generosity, at my act of kindness, and this time, some of the fathers beamed, too.

I was getting a bit of a reputation on this train.

That's when a man handed me five dollars.

"Huh?"

He pointed to the banjo player, then exited the train. I understood that this man had wanted to give $5 to the banjo player, but couldn't get through the wall of children without missing his stop—so he entrusted his $5 to me, the most reputable citizen on the F line. He wanted me to complete the transaction.

Of course I thought of keeping the $5. But the banjo player's shoes were in tatters, and he had actual duct tape on his instrument, and if I'd kept the $5, I'd have felt so guilty that I'd have spent $40 on whiskey, to salve my guilt—so, in the end, it was a losing investment. It was simpler just to give the $5 to the banjo player, and I did.

And he dropped it. It fell on the floor of the subway car, and the toddlers clambered for it, drawing everyone's attention to me, the donor, the Good Samaritan of Smith Street: everyone saw "my" $5 donation to this banjo player whose music I was trying to drown out with my iPod.

I could hardly bear all of the good will that I was engendering, so I got off the train one stop early. As I did, I ran into a man who asked, "Spare change?"

"As a matter of fact..." throwing him a couple of quarters and imagining the car full of beaming parents admiring me as the train pulled away.

The iPhone is Not Jesus 

Even Gandhi had to wait in line for the new iPhone. He queued up an hour after I did, just as the sun was heating up. "Do you mind if I stand up there?," he asked, pointing to a spot of shade in front of me. "Fuck you, old man. Wait your turn," I told him.

Bruce Willis, who was queued up two people ahead of me, nodded his approval, and chimed in, "That's right, Macaca. We've been here since 8am this morning. Wait your goddamn turn."

Mary Kate Olsen fidgeted with her hair and hid in the shade offered by her umbrella. "How many do you think they have in stock?," she asked no one in particular.

Steven Hawking answered: "I heard they're already out of the 16GB."

"What did he say?, asked Gandhi from the back of the line.

A hot dog vendor rolled his cart by. "Water, five dollars." Mary Kate bought one and popped a pill.

"What are you all waiting for?," someone called out from a passing car. Bruce Willis shouted back: "They've got a new book at the library." The driver looked disappointed: "Nobody famous?" He drove off.

Lily Allen, who had been one of the first to arrive, came out of the store and showed off her new iPhone. She'd gotten a white one. She made up a little iPhone dance, and we clapped for her.

"You want another forty?," Bruce Willis asked me, passing me a lukewarm bottle before I could answer. "Could I have one?," Gandhi asked. "Sorry," Bruce Willis answered. "That was my last one."

The hot dog vendor rolled by. "Water, ten dollars."

Steven Hawking pointed to the front of the line: "I think John Mayer just jumped the queue."¹

The heat was too much for Mary Kate: she had to be taken home. When the store manager came out to announce there were only two iPhones left, we decided that the honorable thing to do was settle it by knife fight. I made short work of Steven Hawking, and when Gandhi killed Bruce Willis, the two of us walked into the store together, bloody and triumphant. The iPhone was delivered to us, shrouded in blinding white light, by naked angels.

"This is some tight shit," Gandhi said, already installing the free Light Saber app. "Totally worth the wait." Then: "What's your number? You wanna grab a drink?"

1. Just like Steve Wozniak.

Repeal the Constitution! 

or, Unindependence Day

"With the right kind of eyes, you can almost see the high-water mark—the place where the wave broke and rolled back." - Hunter S. Thompson, on the peaking of the Left in 1968

Today, the Democratic-led Congress (and I use the term "led" very loosely) voted to allow the Bush Administration to continue its domestic wiretapping, despite the fact that this practice directly conflicts with the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution. As an added bonus, the bill grants immunity to the parties who originally broke the law to enact this wiretapping (because yes, wiretapping a U.S. citizen without a warrant is categorically illegal—at least until the President signs this bill into law).

When the President of the United States is sworn into office, they affirm a simple oath, one sentence long, without any bell-ringer words:

I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.

Before we add perjury to the list of Bush's crimes (for the obvious lie he told when he took that pledge), consider the wonders he has done to "execute" the office of President: since he took the position, the office has so little credibility that it really has been a kind of execution: the office of President as a defender of the Constitution is dead and gone.

The last line of defense protecting rule of law from Bush-style totalitarianism is Congress; but it would appear that our lame-duck President has "executed" them, too.

It's time to repeal the Constitution. It's obviously a useless piece of paper, anyway.

Drink Till You See God 

The Obituary 

Imagine his surprise when he saw the obituary, force itself as it were into his daily routine, in the middle of his second cup of coffee ("Light cream, two spoons of sugar") and between bites of cinnamon roll ("No nuts, please, they get caught in my digestion"). He had just padded down to the bottom of the driveway without his slippers ("Damn dog") trying to ignore the cold rain ("and worms") that got between his toes and the bottom two inches of his unhemmed pants ("Gotta do that").

The paper spread open on the mahogany table leaving nut-sized drops of water that might or might not ruin the wood after time. As always, he skipped straight to the end, to the announcements, to the life and death page ("The only real news"), which was the main reason ("the only reason") he subscribed to the rag.

"So. There it is. This is what it's like to be dead."

He wondered if it was no longer appropriate to finish his coffee ("but since no one's looking...").

In many ways he felt cheated—not at being dead ("It seems natural enough"), but rather at the system failure, that he hadn't been notified, that he'd had to read about it in the paper like everyone else, and ("My God!") that meant some people in this meddling town knew before he did ("Nosy").

Rather than let himself get bitter about it ("bad for my blood pressure"), he poured himself a third cup of coffee.

"Well, better go tell the kids", already sleeping through some of their favorite cartoons because the clouds and the rain kept the sun off their sleeping eyes.

(" At least they spelled my name right.")

Fire Drill 

or, These Are My Hands, Pt. 2

Why do these things always happen to me?

I'm in my kitchen and my hand is on fire.

All things considered, I could be much worse off. For instance, all my fingers are still attached to my flaming hand. Many victims of many kitchen accidents are not so lucky. So, on the plus side, at least I'm not trying to staunch a flow of blood while I pack my own severed fingers into the ice of my freezer, only to discover (sure enough) I forgot to refill the ice tray.

At least that's not happening.

I'm not choking, or poisoned, or having an allergic reaction that would require me to shoot adrenaline into my own heart. So there's that. No, the only real problem I have to contend with is the fact that my hand is on fire.

Seen with a little perspective, this isn't such a big deal.

Seen with a little perspective,1 you'd also see that it's not just my hand, but the small baking sheet that the hand is holding, too. It's a 13x9" baking sheet full of grease, and when I pulled it from the broiler, it was on fire; and since I pulled it from the fire with my hand, now my hand is on fire, too.

Since I pulled it from the fire using a heat-resistant oven mitt, technically only my oven mitt (and the baking sheet) are on fire, and not the hand itself. Not yet, anyway. It's a crucial distinction, but one that's hard to make with the eyes alone: visually, I look down the length of my arm, and sure enough, to all appearances, my hand is engulfed in flames.

Which is unusual, to say the least. (And that's a good thing.)2

It doesn't hurt, yet, but it is getting kind of hot. And since the tray in my hand is full of flaming liquid, I'm not immediately clear what sort of options I have at my disposal. So I hold it and watch it burn for a few moments, and think, and hope that in the meanwhile maybe it will burn itself out (though I know even while I'm thinking this that I won't actually be so lucky).

The flames burn, and I think: I wish I had marshmallows.

The flames burn, and I think: this proves it for sure, our smoke alarms really don't work. I should check the batteries.

The flames burn, and I think: I hope no one sees this. It's kind of embarrassing.

Somehow, with almost too much calm—almost psychotically-detached calm—I begin using my good hand (the one that's not on fire) to rearrange the appliances and clutter on the counter. Toaster goes here, check. Coffee grinder goes here, check. Non-flammable pot holder goes here, check.

Finally I clear enough space to put down the 13x9" fireball I've been holding, at which point I calmly remove my flaming glove, stamp out the fire, and then, to soothe my mild burn, reach into the freezer to grab a few ice cubes. But there aren't any ice cubes: I've left the ice tray empty again. Sure enough...

1. If you could see past the flames, which are about twelve inches high...

2. But not that unusual...

Time Lapse, pt. 3 

Waking from Sleep

You know that feeling, waking from a nap?—the sun has gone down, and you wake in a haze of confusion: you've been pulled from a dream, and it takes a few seconds longer than you expect even to be able to answer, "Am I awake, or still sleeping?"

Is this real?

Where am I?

Your lover is lying next to you. She is s also asleep, or half-asleep, and maybe she is dreaming, too, of warm summer days, trips on boats and airplanes, games played with friends or children or pets, childhood, picnics, dreams of napping. Happy times. Pulled suddenly from fantasies of happy times, we don't know immediately whether this time—now—is also a happy one; so, this first moment of waking is one of taking inventory; then judging:

What is now?

And how does it compare?

It's not accurate, the way we commonly describe this moment. We say we don't know where we are. But also, we don't know when. In this moment, we're confused: we think that the person beside us is the one we loved all those years ago, innocent, unadulterated; and only a few moments later, wake to remember that he or she is the one we love now, in that more complicated, careful way...

Time Lapse, pt. 2 

Negative Space

She pulls on her clothes, refreshes her lipstick, kisses me goodbye, and closes the door, and I notice it right away—the presence of this new feeling. It has been lingering all afternoon, this feeling, like an unwanted guest, but I chose not to acknowledge it, and that in itself is a new kind of duplicity, I suppose—this lie of omission: pretending to share an intimate afternoon, she and I, while also including this other, this third, this feeling, this feeling who sits there, watching us.

Maybe she feels it, too, the presence in the room with us.

Maybe she does.

But her version of the history is different than mine. Her version is steadier and more continuous than mine. In my version, we have had a very jarring year, she and I; and the result of it is that when I am with her, I reserve a part of myself. I bifurcate. Part of me is with her, and part of me is with myself. We stroll the streets, we wander in and out of shops, we lounge at restaurants, we loll in the park, we loll in bed, same as before—except now, part of me is not there. Part of me instead stands in reserve, out of body, stands guard, to protect me from the intrusion of another jarring year.

Maybe she feels it, too.

Maybe this is what happens between people.

Maybe this is an evolution of love.

The result of it is that a distance has opened between what I am feeling and what I am saying. The result is this new negative space, the vacuum of evacuated promise, and it occupies the room like an unwanted guest, intruding on the intimate afternoons.

In Extremis 

"Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show." - Charles Dickens, David Copperfield

Sometimes I wish that I had a terminal disease. I wish that I were sick and dying. I wish this because if I were sick and dying, people would like me more. They'd have to like me. They'd visit. They'd bring me flowers, and books to read, and prepared food, like potato salad, and I wouldn't be able to eat the food they brought, on account of my terminal illness; but I would say, "Thank you. It's the thought that counts." And I'd mean it, because the thought really is more valuable than the potato salad.

I wish that I were sick and dying because it would be the ultimate excuse for everything—for sleeping late, for going to bed early, for daydreaming, for doing so little with my time. I wish I had a terminal illness because it would forgive all my shortcomings, excuse all my failings. If I handled my illness with grace, then people would say, "He is so brave. He is so heroic," and if I handled it badly or selfishly, then people would understand: "Oh —he's in a lot of pain."

If I'm not dying, then what excuse do I have?

At the end, people would come to my bedside. They would say things about how I had affected their lives. They would forget any wrong I'd ever done them, and would remember me clearly as being someone better than I ever was. People don't speak ill of the dead:

Once I'm dead, I'm perfect.

Cat, Out of Bag, Releases Tongue  

"Do you know what people did in the old days when they had secrets they didn't want to share? They'd climb a mountain, find a tree, carve a hole in it, whisper the secret into the hole and cover it up with mud. That way, nobody else would ever learn the secret..." - Kar Wai Wong's 2046

I'm a terrible keeper of secrets. I take no pleasure in it: they worm away inside me; they keep me up at night; they keep me from writing.

I've known for a few weeks now that I was going to quit my job. It was a hard decision, partly because I like my job, partly because my job is brand new. That's right: I was in this exact same position a couple months ago, tied up in knots while keeping secret the fact that I was quitting another job. And then a few months before that, too. That makes this the third job I've quit in roughly six months.

That pace is going to be hard to maintain.

Nobody likes a quitter.

On the plus side, though it was a hard decision, it was also the right one: I think I've finally found a place where I can settle in. And now that my secret is out, I can look forward to getting a good night's sleep, and maybe doing a little writing...

Fathers' Day 

Two stories nearly side by side in the New York Daily News1, each one terrible in its own way, each one describing the unnecessary death of a child.2

The first story, "Dad crushed over death of little Kyle," tells the story of one Elliot Smith, suffering through the loss of his recently-murdered 3-year old son:

The boy's guardian, Nymeen Cheatham, 30, has admitted to beating Kyle with a hairbrush and her hands in the Bedford-Stuyvesant apartment she shared with her boyfriend, Lemar Martin, 25. Martin told cops he hit the boy repeatedly in the arm.

The article claims that Kyle's "drug addict mother was unable to take care of him," thus he wound up in the safekeeping of Cheatham, a woman who had no legal claim to the boy, and who had had her own four biological children removed from her custody, before moving to New York from Texas.

But the article brings us no closer to the true mystery of the story, the question that's between each of its lines. All it says on that subject: "It was unclear why Smith did not claim his younger son." A question that Smith is very likely asking himself tonight.

*      *      *

Seeking refuge from the awfulness, I turn the page3 and find "Bronx girl at play struck by cabbie"—this time, the story of M'Mah Bangoura, playing in an open fire hydrant. The spray of water apparently hid her from view: she was struck by a cab and killed.

The cabbie immediately called his girlfriend, to say he "thought he had hit a little girl." "He wasn't certain," the girlfriend told police. Then the cabbie drove the injured girl to the hospital, where she died.

The article said nothing of the girl's mother, but described the father, understandably, as "brokenhearted." "Every day, after school, she calls me," sobbed the dad, "and today I didn't get the call."

*      *      *

As holidays go, Father's Day is often taken to be a somewhat artificial and arbitrary one: it lacks pedigree (having been invented in the 20th century) and lacks uniformity (celebrated on different days in different countries). "In recent years, retailers have adapted to the holiday by promoting male-oriented gifts such as electronics, tools and greeting cards," says Wikipedia. And that's most of what there is to say about Father's Day.

Without fail, day after day, newspapers report on random, sudden acts of violence, and label them "tragic." They are "tragedies," the papers say—as if we, the chorus, bearing witness to the unfolding awfulness, stand something to learn from it all. I don't know what to learn from it all. But I do know that this year, Father's Day will be, to me, a little less artificial, a little less arbitrary.

1. New York City's paper of ill repute.

2. The adjective would seem to imply that there is such a thing as the "necessary" death of a child.

3. This being the Daily News, if I were really seeking refuge from the awfulness, I'd have put the paper down.

Sex in the City 

As if finding a loved one in this town weren't hard enough—today the Associated Press ran a story that claims, "One in four adults living in New York City has the virus that causes genital herpes."

The scariest part of this story (and there are many scary parts to this story) is imagining all of the New Yorkers who, fearing for their own sexual safety, start seeking partners in ... New Jersey? Which I'm sure is much safer...

Eww, all around.

Operation: Dystopia 

Life at the End of Oil

U.S. Special Forces in Afghanistan, sans combustion engines

A few years ago, at the beginning of the Iraq War, I posited that the sub rosa motivation for invading the Middle East was based on an undisclosed drastic shortfall in world oil reserves. Conventional wisdom says there are 100-200 years worth of oil left in the earth; suppose that number is closer to 10-20? If the end is actually nigh, then the neocons would want to keep this secret, and also stake claim to whatever oil is left.

But one doesn't need to believe in a neocon conspiracy theory to wonder if the end is nigh. As a simple result of increasing demand,1 oil prices continue rising to new highs, including this week's largest single jump ever; the G8 leaders are expressing "serious concerns" about the impact it will have on the world economy.

Given that the end of the oil economy is inevitable (sooner or later), still, economists have yet to present us a clear picture of what this "impact" will be: what will our lives be like, at the end of oil?

Instead, this portraiture has been left to the film makers and fiction writers (as perhaps it should?), who lately offer us more and more vivid depictions of dystopia—stories which are no longer relegated to the pulpy science fiction section, but rather have worked their way into the mainstream: Alfonso Cuarón's Children of Men shows us the last generation of humanity, in a not-too-distant future where people have lost the ability to procreate; Cormac McCarthy's The Road doesn't even bother to describe the nature of its particular apocalypse, focusing instead on the stricken brutality of getting by in this terrible but imaginable future.

Both tales depict the quick failure the values we've come to associate with "enlightenment" and even "humanity"; both show an ongoing conflict between an almost habitual will toward kindness to others, and a required escalation of self-serving (often violent) greed for self-preservation.

Between that future (the complete faltering of civilization) and this present (the age when we're first able to say, without exaggeration or even conjecture, that our current lifestyle is no longer tenable), what can we realistically expect and imagine?

Imagine a World Without Oil (more...)

In Search of Lost Time 

Voted Off the Island

Television viewers who still follow the fates of the survivors of Oceanic 815 were able to fill in some more missing puzzle pieces after this week's season finale of Lost, the episode which finally revealed the circumstances that allowed six (and only six) people to leave the island. We've known since the season's first episode that some people do manage to escape; we learned, over the course of the season, that many others do not.

And now we know why. For maybe the first time in the history of the series, the various threads and flashbacks seemed finally to come together in a single moment in time. (Lost has managed through so many seasons to dramatize the parable of the blind man and the elephant, each episode showing us only a piece of the story, and most episodes also managing to allude to another piece we hadn't previously known existed. But the series' use of flashbacks, and recently, flash-forwards, literally add a dimension to the proverbial elephant, by showing us pieces of the story as it changes across time.)

Fitting, then, that in an episode that features an overt mention of time travel (a Dharma Initiative bunny is jumped forward several milliseconds in "four-dimensional time"), many of the past narrative threads drew to a close, and all eyes turned to the future: having finally answered the dramatic question that has tied together an otherwise-twining series ("How will they get off the island?"), the writers offered another, unexpected one:

How will they get back?

De-Construction 

"Help! Help!" It's not a fine day at all. The sky is falling, and we're running to tell the king!" - Chicken Little

This morning in the Upper East Side of Manhattan, a crane fell—the second in three months—crashing through and demolishing an apartment building, killing two people and injuring and displacing others.

In the grand scheme of disasters (even recent ones), this one is relatively trivial—at least, as trivial as this sort of thing can ever be: a natural consequence of modern Icharian living. What makes the collapse of this crane remarkable is the sense of déjà vu, and the gradually-growing belief that this is the kind of thing that happens. When the similar incident happened in March, it seemed such an oddball fluke that it gave credence to the insurance industry phrase, "Act of God."1

People on the streets are now casting understandably-wary eyes to the sky, suddenly questioning a certain kind of safety that they've, till now, taken for granted:

"The sky is falling, the sky is falling..."

I remember hearing, a few years back, that when a plane crashes into someone's house, if that person survives, then the trauma of this experience can be so great that the phenomenon has its own name, a sub-category of post-traumatic stress disorder.2 This particular kind of trauma is nearly untreatable: once the sanctuary of one's home is invaded by soaring, flaming, crashing steel, then what comfort is left in the idea of "home"? If one must admit the possibility that the sky really is falling, then what sanctuary remains? Where can one hide from falling cranes and planes? When houses are no longer "safe as houses," then where is safe?

Where does one hide from an act of God?

1. If falling cranes are an act of God, then God clearly has some grudge against the Upper East Side.

2. I can find only scant evidence of this on the Internet, and it's possible I learned it from a source no more authoritative than Donnie Darko.

What I Like 

Soon enough, the robot is sure to figure out that, most often, what I like is to be left alone. I'm content to leave the social networking aside for now, and settle more simply for allowing the robot to read my mind...

Oy vey 

"Well, then, where do you buy your bagels?"

- Visiting Bostonite, noticing that New York has fewer Dunkin Donuts franchises

I Think We're Turning Japanese, I Really Think So 

"My art process is more about creating goods and selling them than about exhibitions." - Takashi Murakami

The Whitney Biennial at The Gap; Takashi Murakami in Your House

If you were planning to go to the Whitney Museum's Biennial exhibition of contemporary art, take solace in these two facts: you still have another week to get there, and if you miss it, you can always pick up Biennial-related paraphernalia at your local Gap. The clothing retailer commissioned thirteen artists1 to create limited edition, Whitney-branded t-shirts, which are surely not the finest work from this talented set of artists, but are easily the most affordable: you can buy one for about the same price you'd pay, well, for two tickets to the Whitney Museum.

A generation ago, pop artists offered commentary on our consumerism by making it the subject of their work; now the corporations seem to be commenting on the art, instead, by plastering it onto t-shirts, $20 coffee mugs and $40 wall calendars.

And while museums have spent the last decade knocking down the walls between their exhibition halls and their gift shops (even going so far as to open up museum store franchises in malls, sans museum), artists have started to meet the museums halfway, by moving the marketplace into the exhibitions. Takashi Murakami's current retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum features a fully-functional Louis Vuitton boutique, designed by the artist and included as part of the installation, to sell Louis Vuitton bags also designed by the artist, also part of the installation. Writes Dick Hebdige in the official exhibition catalog, "A credit card or cash is all it takes for anyone who wants to walk away with a Murakami."

For that matter, shopping might be the only way to participate in the work: Murakami's show is about the sale of souvenir schwag, and if you don't go home with a sticker book, mousepad, or skull-shaped throw pillow (at least ironically), then you're not actively taking part in the experience. Lucky for us, then, that the artist and the museum are happy to oblige.2

1. Ashley Bickerton, Chuck Close, Cai Guo-Qiang, Jeff Koons, Barbara Kruger, Hanna Liden, Glenn Ligon, Kerry James Marshall, Marilyn Minter, Kenny Scharf, Kiki Smith, Sarah Sze and Rirkrit Tiravanija.

2. Another interesting confluence between "high art" and bald commerce was orchestrated by Google this month, when they too commissioned a set of artists—including some from the set who made t-shirts for the Gap—to design "themes" for the iGoogle portal. Most interesting was Google's definition of "artist": they included, side by side, artists such as Koons with clothing designer Dolce&Gabbana, the soft rock band Coldplay, and cyclist-turned-brand name Lance Armstrong.

Kurt Cobain's Stomach 

If rock'n'roll is a menace to society, then maybe it's because we're all so ill-equipped to pick our own role models. We somehow spend our formative years idolizing long-haired, philandering men in ripped Spandex who have no greater skill than the ability to keep 4/4 time while drunk.1

How does this happen?

When Kurt Cobain died, they called him the spokesperson for my generation, without considering that this spokesperson was best known for lines like "Load up on guns " and "I have never failed to feel pain." I'm not sure that this is what one should seek in a spokesperson.2

What is the long-term lingering effect of a whole generation that admires and aspires to be a sickly, whiny, hyper-sensitive, drug-addled suicide?

I wonder this because lately I seem to have inherited Kurt Cobain's stomach—his famous stomach, the one which caused him so much hard-to-diagnose pain that he turned to heroin (or so the story goes)—and I'm proud of it as though it were a stigmata.

1. Which is not entirely unimpressive.

2. I took a makeup class once. (If you've ever wondered what exactly people do in acting school, this is one such thing.) After a few rudimentary lessons ("This is a pancake…"), we were each asked to clip a photo of a celebrity from a magazine, and then, using our makeup kit and whatever we could find in the nearby costume shop, make ourselves look like that celebrity. Become the celebrity. Be the celebrity. (If you've ever wondered what exactly people do in acting school, this is one such thing.) Most of the class walked in that day with photos of rock stars, and I had that famous Rolling Stone cover of Kurt Cobain.

Kurt Cobain Action Figure

Autoschadenfreude, pt. 2 

I saw something today that made me want to coin a new defnition of "autoschadenfreude," completely different from the original:

autoschadenfreude. Noun. The malicious satisfaction experienced by people who gather to watch and heckle, while someone attempts to parallel park their car.

Time Lapse 

"And if you can, at nineteen, count the people you love on one hand, you will not, at forty, have run out of fingers on the other. There are so few people given us to love and they all stick."
- Anne Enright, The Gathering

The trip put me in the mood of a birthday, or a New Year: something about transiting from one place to another offered me just enough pause, and distance, to reflect on what has been: there is the version of the story of our lives that we tell ourselves we're living, and then there is the version we're actually living; and sometimes it's not clear or obvious when those two diverge. Suddenly a year has passed and we're altogether someone different than we thought we were. There are lines on our face we never knew were there, and that small hole in our heart, the one that's been leaking the slow trickle of joy, at some point during the year that hole got larger, and the leak turned into a flow, and now has maybe caused structural damage, which, owing to the slow passage of time, we have till now failed to notice. This pause, this one flicker of quiet amidst the inexorable crawl-forward of time, this snapshot of the status quo, motion-blurry but clear enough, certainly, to discern this: the status quo not working. Then the pause is over: time has stretched its legs and now marches onward, and our momentary glimpse at clarity is insufficient to change the momentum of anything.

Up Over the Manhattan Bridge Overpass 

I walk home from work. It's a trip that (according to Mapquest) is five and a half miles door-to-door, and it takes an hour—an hour which I'm afraid says less about my health than about the dearth of demands on my free time. But I enjoy it. It relaxes me, and gives me time to think.

My path meanders past the storefronts of Soho and onto the teeming streets of Chinatown, before arriving at the footpath for the Manhattan Bridge, which spans the East River to Brooklyn. The bridge is over a mile long: it takes maybe fifteen minutes to cross; and most days, the footpath is nearly empty.

Fifteen minutes of peace and privacy, watching the sun set over the Hudson. In the midst of the clamor of New York City, this one span is deceptively intimate.

Perhaps, then, I can be forgiven for what happened on my walk today: a man, not unlike myself, was walking in the opposite direction, and when we passed each other, right around the center of the span of the bridge, I looked him in the eye and I said, "Hello."

He scowled at me and brushed past, quickening his pace, and never looked back.

This is New York City, after all.

Where Every American Dream Goes to Die 

I'm not a very good driver. You should know that, first of all. This fact doesn't keep me off the road, but I do hit things: I bump into cabs, crash into streetlights, and every now and then, I'll sideswipe a pedestrian in a crosswalk. It's terrible.

It's terrible and it's kind of fun.

I've been doing it for hours.

The self-appointed public watchdogs who attack Grand Theft Auto IV as "gratuitously violent" are chasing their own tails, failing to understand the real appeal—and danger—of the game. It is true that the game's protagonist, Niko Bellic, arrives off the boat from Eastern Europe and finds himself in the midst of an impoverished, crime-ridden city. But during the few hours I played the game, I saved relatives and friends from violence, I spared the life of a man I had been ordered to kill, I helped put down organized crime, and, for the most part, I lived the life of an upstanding citizen: I bowled. I went on dates. I drove a cab (though badly, and sometimes accidentally crashed into things).1

The game—like most games, movies, TV shows, comic books, songs, and news shows—has violence. But the violence is not gratuitous, any more than it is symptomatic of a large societal (or subcultural) ill: antisocial and even violent people may find an outlet in videogames, but the fact that these people are sometimes drawn to games is not to say that they are drawn by them:2

A U.S. Secret Service study from May 2002 found that only 12 percent of those involved in school shootings were attracted to violent video games, while 24 percent read violent books and 27 percent were attracted to violent films. An Australian study from March 2007 found that only children already predisposed to violence were affected by violent games. (U.S. Secret Service and U.S. Department of Education.)3

The real menace of videogames is that they are the new opiate of the masses. They don't make us more violent; they make us more complacent. They make us inveterate consumers (game publishers quietly hiked the price of each title from $50 to $60); they cut into our productivity (see "Halo Flu"); and they make other entertainment seem lackluster in comparison (see "Iron Man vs. GTA", or this classic which blames videogames for declining national park attendance).4

The real and present danger of Grand Theft Auto is that I'd planned to go to the gym and a writing workshop today, and instead I'm cruising around Liberty City.

If the American Dream dictates that hard work will lead us to a better life, then perhaps Grand Theft Auto really is "where the American Dream goes to die"—because it supplants our desire for hard work, and even our desire for a better life. Why bother, when we can just play a game? "Keep calm," it tells us, "and carry on."

1. My one intentional, glaring deviance from the law came after a night of drinking with my lonely, troubled cousin, when I got behind the wheel to drive him home. The game warned me in no uncertain terms that it was unsafe for me to drive while intoxicated. As soon as I turned the ignition and started down the road, the police arrested me.

2. Drawn, in the Jessica Rabbit sense.

3. See also, The Effect of Violent Video Games on the Human Psyche, and Caution: Children at Play.

4. I often feel like I'm falling behind in my entertainment: for example, my ever-accruing To Do list tells me that I need to catch up on an episode of Battlestar Galactica, two episodes of Lost, seven different rentals from Netflix, thirteen podcasts, and the small pile of books I've started and not finished—not to mention, of course, Grand Theft Auto, which promises to consume no less than 60 hours of time.

Buy-a-Baby 

You've always been an achiever. You put your career first, and you worked hard to get where you are. You and your spouse have a lovely Brooklyn brownstone, an Audi Quattro you never drive, and a combined income that would be, in any other city, above average.

What now?

Just because you gave your healthy breeding years to the workplace doesn't mean you can't have your very own little Alina, Emily or Abigail. You can! After all, what would be the point of making all that money, if you couldn't use it to buy a baby on the Internet?

Browse our selection today and see if you qualify for Super Saver Shipping.

Unrecycling 

Like so many of my fellow Americans, I am deeply concerned about fossil fuel consumption and the resulting effects on the global climate—but not enough to do very much about it. (Said Michael Pollan in a recent article in the New York Times: "I don’t know about you, but for me the most upsetting moment in An Inconvenient Truth came ... during the closing credits, when we are asked to ... change our light bulbs.")

So I'll admit that I felt a touch of self-righteousness—certainly more self-righteousness than I deserved—when I schlepped all of those bags of carefully-sorted recyclables down to the curb last night. At one level, I suppose, I should have felt ashamed at my ability to generate so much trash; but on the other hand, I was so proud that I'd taken the trouble to designate it as reusable trash. (That is, I was proud of the fact that I remembered to put it in a separate bag and carry it downstairs on Wednesday instead of Sunday. Go me.)

I was confused, then, when I came home and found one of my bags of bundled newspaper leaning against my front door. "Hmmm." I stared at it for a full minute. "What does this signify...?"

No obvious answer came.

I carried it back upstairs and dropped it in my living room.

The trash collectors of New York City are as finicky as a chef picking over the morning's produce. Trash bags will be left on the curb because they contain a single (recyclable) Coke can or water bottle, or, more often, for reasons unknown. I gazed at my bag of newspaper, trying to imagine what offense it had committed—why it had been deemed unworthy. The other bags were collected without ceremony, but this one—this one otherwise-unremarkable bag was found somehow lacking. Why? What commentary was being made on my recycling ways?

Some mysteries will never be solved.

I dropped it in an opaque Hefty bag and took it downstairs again, this time depositing in the trash. There is a regular pickup on Sunday: they'll take my non-biodegradable bag to a landfill without further incident.

I want to do what's right, I really do. If only I knew how...

The Great Outdoors 

It's spring, and I'm surrounded by the most beautiful scenes of nature that one could imagine: just through the window, on the other side of a thin pane of glass, there are rolling hills all the way to the horizon, and above them, an almost boundless sky.

A shame, then, that the "window" is my computer screen, and that the image before me is a photo of a place far from here, a place I probably will never visit, a place that quite possibly doesn't exist at all—a virtual landscape so remodeled by digital retouching and enhancement that it is quite literally nowhere: Utopia.

As we spend more and more time in front of our computers, under slightly green, unnatural fluorescent lights, in windowless cubicles, we're offered correspondingly more and more lavish landscape photos for use as our "desktop wallpaper"1—maybe to help us remember what the outside looks like? Except the colors in the photos are so saturated, it's not actually what the outside does look like.2

Outside gets farther away, while Utopia gets closer.

1. All major operating systems—Windows XP and Vista, the Mac OS, and the most popular distributions of Linux, offer nature-inspired desktop "wallpaper" imagery.

2. "Maybe the machines didn't know what chicken tasted like, so that's why chicken tastes like everything."

Command Line Existential Crisis 

$ whatis whoami

Redisenfranchisement 

Redisenfranchisement. Noun. A word that sounds like it was invented by George W. Bush, and to some degree, it actually was.

Read more from The Urban Sherpa Dictionary ->

Hitler's Birthday 

I have the worst time remembering birthdays, but there are a couple I remember without fail: Mom, of course (March 26); Dad (February 5; it took me years to remember that one...); my sister (June 3, but she sends daily countdown emails at least a month in advance); Paul McCartney (June 18, though I've never even gotten him a card); and Ado lf Hitler, who was born April 20 -- five days after taxes are due, and usually the date that I'm actually mailing mine. And also, not coincidentally, the date of the Columbine school shootings, in 1999.

There isn't much to celebrate about Hitler's birthday. We celebrate Columbus's birthday, though he was a for-hire explorer who got lost on his way to India; he"discovered" a continent that the Vikings had colonized five hundred of years prior, and in any case the continent was inhabited for the 5,000 years leading up to that "discovery." And Columbus's discovery led, indirectly, to the near genocide of all its indigenous people. But Columbus 's birthday is celebrated nationwide ... while Hitler, whose genocide was much more direct, has a birthday remembered only (unintentionally) by me.

I have a friend born on Hitler's birthday. That's why I remember it. She'd complain about how terrible and ominous it is to share a birthday with one of the most reviled men in history, though she knew all the while that it made people more likely to remember her birthday. That was Hitler's gift to her: an unforgettable birthday. Though as an inspiration for a themed birthday party, or a cake decoration, or gifts, the Hitler connection is not very fruitful.

I have another friend who was born on September 11. I'd like these two people to meet, ideally in the context of a birthday party, and maybe they could buy for each other all of the inappropriate tasteless gag gifts that the rest of us are too afraid to buy: for the one, a lampshade, or model boxcars; for the other, that snow globe I've seen that predates 2001, with the two towers of the World Trade Center and, when you shake the globe, airplanes made of shiny foil circling the buildings.

Victoria's Other Secret 

Fortress of Solitude 

It was another routine day in Metropolis for Superman, the day he saved the single-engine jet from crashing into the city. The plane had lost power to its stabilizer and gone into a flat spin from which it surely never would have recovered, had Superman not flown in to save the day: the Man of Steel managed to grab the plane by its engine, arrest its spinning, and guide it to a safe landing in a nearby baseball field. The four passengers of the plane were grateful and in tears, while the LIttle Leaguers stopped their game to cheer.

Unfortunately, the force required to catch the plane in mid-air was also enough to dislodge the jet turbine, which broke loose from the body of the plane, and plummeted out of the sky and into an apartment building below. It tore through the building and killed two dozen people.

Superman, exceptional in so many ways, had never been the most thoughtful hero: decision-making while flying faster than a speeding bullet does not lend itself to introspection. Good and evil had always been for him, if simplistic, at least clear. When he received the news of the two dozen deaths—deaths which had been directly caused by his own well-intended efforts—he was devastated, and confused like he had never been before. For the first time in his life, Superman questioned his own ability to discern right from wrong—so he did what any reasonable thinking person would do in such a situation: he stopped rescuing people, and retreated to his Fortress of Solitude, there to wait and contemplate, until which time his path of action would become infallibly clear—which is to say, never.

Fridge Full of Condiments and No Food 

Current inventory of the refrigerator, as of April 16, 2008:

Extra Hot Dijon Mustard, Zhou Black Bean Chili Sauce, Tabasco Brand Pepper Sauce, Tabasco Brand Green Pepper Sauce, Tabasco Brand Chipotle Pepper Sauce, Salsa Picante de Chile Habanero, Harissa Paste, French's Classic Yellow Mustard, Sarabeth's Orange Apricot Marmalade, Sarabeth's Peach Apricot, Melinda's XXXXtra Reserve Habanero Pepper Sauce, Sarabeth's Pineapple Mango, Lemon Curb, Rice Wine Vinegar, Stonewall Kitchen Champagne Mustard, Thai Kitchen Roasted Red Chili Paste, Kikkoman Soy Sauce, Kikkoman Reduced Salt Soy Sauce, Annie's Natural Tuscany Italian Dressing, Annie's Fat Free Balsamic Vinaigrette, Oyster Sauce, Preserved Lemons, Gold's Horseradish, Rhubarb and Ginger Preserve, Sambal Oelek Chili Paste, Ma Po Spicy Bean Sauce, Pla Dug Chili Paste, Strawberry Preserves, Moroccan Green Olives, Maple Syrup, Hellman's Mayonnaise, Hellman's Light Mayonnaise, Heinz Tomato Ketchup, Heinz Reduced Sugar Tomato Ketchup, Chili Paste with Sweet Basil Leaves, Sambal Bajak, Lakeshore Wholegrain Mustard, Mae Ploy Green Curry Paste, Assorted Beer, one egg.

These Are My Hands 

There's a fire in my kitchen. This is a thing that happens sometimes. There are several pots on several burners and something somewhere has overflowed, and instead of simply making a mess, it has made a fire.

I might put out the fire with a towel, but I can't find one, and instead I try to dampen the flames with my bare hands, by pressing them against the hot metal burners. This is an ill-advised solution to the problem. In my own defense, I never decided to put out the fire with my hands. It just sort of happened.

Kind of like that unplanned phone call I just made. Sometimes it's like someone else grabs the steering wheel and drives into oncoming traffic. "I swear, officer—it wasn't me."

My hands have a mind of their own. My hands have Tourette's. My hands are always having an out-of-body experience, doing things I neither plan nor condone. One of these days, I'm sure, my hands will up and slap you. They'll sit down at a keyboard and plunk out a Tom Clancey novel. They'll goose someone on the subway. They'll drive the car off the road.

"I swear, officer—it wasn't me."

What scares me most is that I don't know whether or not that's true. It kind of was me. I don't know which is more me—the hands when I control them, or the hands when they control me. Which is more me—the one putting out the fires, or the one starting them?

This Old House 

"I have a great deal of company in my house; especially in the morning, when nobody calls." - Henry David Thoreau

A friend and I were recently talking about Walden, the book by Henry David Thoreau where he goes into the woods because he "wants to live deliberately"—the book that we were all required to read in high school, and didn't, but only skimmed it, which we've all been talking about periodically ever since. That book.

We talk about Walden not because it's such a great book (we wouldn't know...), but because we too want to go to the woods and live deliberately.

Every now and then, I throw up my hands and say, "I'm moving to a cabin in the woods."

This morning it dawned on me: I already live in a cabin in the woods.

Not literally, no. Literally, I live in an apartment in Brooklyn. But it's on a sleepy, tree-lined street, with an enormous garden for a back yard, and though there's no mountain-fresh air or scent of pine needles, there is peace and quiet here. Or would be , if I'd ever get around to listening.

(To say that I am a seeker is also to say I'm a malcontent, or that I am not a finder. )

So, when I say I want a cabin in the woods, I must mean something else. Maybe it really is all about the pine needles.

The Most Authentic Art in the World 

In 1940, four teenagers in the south of France fell into a cave and discovered its walls were covered with what might be the most authentic art ever made—paintings that pre-date any "art scene" by more than 15,000 years.1

Almost nothing is known of the pre-agrarian painters who covered the walls of the caves in Lascaux during the last ice age. They took time out of their short, brutish lives to climb deep inside a network of uninhabited limestone caves, and to paint human figures, glyphs, and animals on its walls. Whatever the purpose of the paintings, the work was not decorative: the caves would have been accessible to very few, and only visible through use of the earliest-known artificial lamps, found scattered throughout the site at Lascaux.

Why do people make art? That is the question that rings out through the Lascaux caves and echoes to this day. Why does anyone take the time out of their short, brutish life, to make something that might or might not ever see the light of day?

1. However "authentic" these cave paintings might have been, our modern-day experience of them is decidedly not so: to help preserve the original work, the French government commissioned replicas of the Lascaux paintings for the walls of another, nearby cave (called Lascaux II), and the original cave was closed to the public.

Chutes and Ladders 

PATIENT:      I just hope to God that death is the fucking end. I feel like I'm 80 years old. I'm tired of life and my mind wants to die.
DOCTOR:      That's a metaphor, not reality.
PATIENT:      It's a simile.
- Excerpt from Psychosis 4:48 by Sarah Kane

"Sometimes," he begins, "it's like I'm trying to build a ladder while I'm climbing on it. I have two long poles and a lot of short ones, for the rungs, and I have a hammer; and the first thing I have to do is hold these two poles upright, hold them parallel, and then join them together with the first rung. This is a very difficult job to accomplish by one's self—holding up the two poles, then situating the rung and hammering it into place. This is very hard. The poles keep slipping out of place. Assembling it takes strength, coordination and luck.

"I have none of these things.

"It would be an simple job if I had a lot of space, if I could lay the poles on the ground, if I weren't so crowded, if I could put it all together without having to fight against gravity, against physics. It would be an simple job if I had a friend or two to lend a hand.

"But I have none of these things.

"Once the first rung is in place, the two long poles are much easier to handle. The second rung will be hard but not as hard. Each new rung will make the ladder stronger but also put the tools, the hammer and pegs, more and more out of reach. Building a ladder while standing on it isn't easy. But the second rung is sure to be easier to affix than the first; and the third easier than the second; and each one easier after that.

"I know I could climb out of this, if only I could figure out that first rung."

On the Head of a Pin 

Luc Besson's Angel-A

"In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little, yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work, and their selves, to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. But the bitter truth we critics must face is that, in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is probably more meaningful than our criticism designating it so." - Anton Ego, from Pixar Studio's Ratatouille1

In Luc Besson's 2005 film, Angel-A, an out-of-luck Parisian named André is ready to jump off a bridge into the Seine, when a beautiful woman (Angela) beats him to it. She takes the plunge, he rescues her from drowning, and the two team up to get their lives back in order.

Their path leads through gangsters, pimps, horse races and strip clubs (this is a Luc Besson film, after all), before winding up (less characteristically) at Notre Dame Cathedral, and nearly at the gates of Heaven itself. En route, the two of them share a few touching moments: Angela is (of course) sent down from Heaven to teach André that he is lovable, and when she has him look in the mirror to tell himself so, he can't do it: "It's difficult," he stammers, but persists, tears in his eyes, till he manages to spit it out: "Je t'aime," he tells his reflection quietly.

If a film is entertaining, and manages to inspire or interest us toward a few moment's reflection, then perhaps any further discussion of it is beside the point—as esoteric as a medieval philosopher questioning how many angels could fit on the point of a needle.

But Angel-A is just as filled with touchy moments as touching ones: at one point, Angela whores herself to every man in a club, in order to help settle one of André many debts. (Angel-A is Wings of Desire meets Risky Business.) Later, we hear an alternate version of this story, in which Angela did not actually have sex with the 99 men, but simply lured them to a bathroom, robbed them, and bludgeoned them unconscious. Whew, that's much better!

The movie is one-half a fairy tale: a sweet man, who was never shown love, learns to treat people with kindness and honesty, and thus turns his life around. But it's a half-articulated moral, because in the world of Angel-A, only select actions have consequences; everything else can be solved by the six-foot tall, blonde-haired deus ex machina in the short black dress.

By the end of the movie, Angela has helped André realize his true nature; and his thanks to her is to lure her away from her own true nature: as she spreads her wings to fly back to Heaven, he clings on to her and brings her crashing back down to Earth, to "save" her and return her to the only place she could ever be happy: at the side of a man.2

1. I might have thought differently of Angel-A if I hadn't seen it back to back with Ratatouille, and noticed that apart from the pimping and whoring on the one hand, and the cooking and eating on the other, the two stories are almost exactly the same.

2. Luc Besson's brand of well-regarded schlock—including The Professional and La Femme Nikita—has come with its own mostly-well-regarded brand of "feminism": in his films, the girls kick ass. But they also take all their orders from men, and in the end, it is always the men who succeed or fail to make them happy.

Pantone 700U 

is the color of my face flushed with fever.

Pantone 7499U 

is the color of my ashen face.

See also Pantone 381U, as true now as then.

Crossing Guard 

A few times during the day, the doors of P.S. 29 open up, and children gush out, yelping and laughing, loosed onto the streets of the city—and then the city is loosed onto them.1 Every day, on every corner, their guardian angels are there to protect them, and help them home: the crossing guards.

The crossing guards know the children by name. They talk to them, ask them about their day, ask about their homework, or their new boyfriends or girlfriends. The children joke with the crossing guards, laugh with them, seem to confide in them; and when the crossing guard says stop, the children stop; and when the crossing guard says go, the children go.

Today, at one crosswalk, a woman escorted a small pack of children across the street, and, arriving at the far curb, she took an extra moment to re-button a girl's coat, and to brush a bit of loose hair out of her face, before sending her on her way. And with that gesture, she reminded me what I love about New York, and about Brooklyn, and about people more generally.2

1. The children of New York—maybe every single one I've ever met, without exception—are so thoroughly smart, able and self-possessed that I now think of New York as the best (and possibly only) place to raise kids.

2. This week, I had the pleasure of meeting "Princess Genevieve," who was visiting, along with the rest of her family, from Ohio. Princess Genevieve wanted to ask me some questions about her website, which I thought was in pretty good shape already. While talking with her, I felt very briefly, very slightly, like a crossing guard.

The World According to Facebook 

Or, Christopher Is, pt. 2

Yesterday, my mother asked me about the well-being of my sister's husband's brother's wife's father. "Huh?" That's my brother-in-law's sister-in-law's father, or, to put it another way, my own father-in-law three times removed.

If it is true that we are all separated by no more than six degrees of separation (and it is true, according to MSN Messenger), then my relationship with this person employs no fewer than four of those degrees. I have met my brother-in-law's sister-in-law, once, and I might have been able to recall her name, if someone offered me a hint of the first couple letters. I've never met her father, didn't have any ideas as to his health, and asked my mother how in the world she knew of this person.

Her answer?: "Facebook."1

(Unlike 99.9% of the Facebook population, my mother was born in the 40s.)

*      *     *

Unlike 99.9% of people born in the 70s, I am a regular user of Facebook. I know what superhero I am ("Rogue"), which German philosopher ("Heidegger"), and whether or not I'm a "hottie" (duh). If you're nice to me, I might "brew your a spot of tea," and if you're not, I might give you "the people's elbow." I can defend myself against the attacks of your zombie and vampire armies. I update my status often. And in the midst of all of this din of useless information, I failed to notice that there was something wrong with the health of my sister's husband's brother's wife's father.

Like 99.9% of the Facebook population, I was completely absorbed with stupid games and, ultimately, with myself. If the point of this software is to bring people closer together, then in this random sample of one time, it did not work.

*      *     *

There is a new feature in Facebook, through which the website makes its own recommendations about whom we should befriend. Its logic is fairly straightforward triadic interaction: "the friend of my friend is my friend." If several of my friends have a friend in common, then the software concludes that I, too, might know this person.

In other words, it mines out that second degree of separation, and shows a list it calls "People You May Know."

Looking at the list, I do in fact see some familiar names, but to me it reads more like, "People I Would Know, If Only I'd Been More Outgoing and Socially Confident"—friends of friends who might or might not remember me, if I were to click on the link to their name.2 Facebook offers me an alternate reality, where I can imagine myself at the center of a wider, and ever-growing, circle of friends—or at least "friends." I can know more and more about these people, what they're doing, where they're going, what music or films they like, whether or not their marriage (to someone I've never met) is working out3—without ever encountering them in the real world, in the future or in the past.

As for my actual friends, I'm not sure that Facebook draws us closer. Occasionally we'll get together (online) for a game of Scrabble, or I'll "throw [virtual] toilet paper" at them. But no more than that. And some days I wonder if that's the limit of what we have in common—if that is all our friendship ever was—and I worry that perhaps Facebook has become, instead of a collection of friends, more like a resting place for failed friendships, people with whom throwing toilet paper is enough.

1. I didn't even know my mom was on Facebook. She never "friended" me.

2. My friend Carolyn pointed out that this same list might also be "People You Hate, and Have Consciously Decided Not to Befriend in Facebook"—in which case, this new "feature" is a bit of an annoyance. She added too that I've never asked to be her Facebook friend, and that I've never mentioned her on my blog.

3. The single most remarkable moment of Facebook pathos I have yet to see—even more pathetic than my mother not "friending" me—was the moment when someone I know changed their relationship status from "Married" to "Separated", and announcement of the change was published out to the Facebook world. Compare with a lover's fight recently overheard: "You can break up with me," she said, "but I'm not changing my Facebook status!"

Sounds of Silence 

Gus Van Sant's Paranoid Park

Cinema is inherently voyeuristic: we, the viewers, are always on the outside, peering at something to which we should not be privy, while on the inside, the characters who occupy the world we watch seem unaware of our presence.

In the case of most Hollywood blockbusters, it is easy to forget that we are voyeurs, because our window offers us a view of the impossible—places we could never possibly be: inside a jet fighter, or amidst a zombie army, or bumbling through a romance with a witty supermodel, or in a galaxy far far away.

Gus Van Sant's recent spate of vérité-style films offer instead a glimpse into places we might have been, if only we were so unlucky: lost in the desert without food or water (Gerry), hiding under a table in the library of Columbine High School (Elephant), or living out the final week in the under-furnished mansion of a reluctant rock'n'roll hero, before his suicide (Last Days).1

Add to this list one more place we don't want to revisit any time soon: the mind of a teenager—in particular, the dreamy, lyrical, emotionally-detached mind of a skateboarding teenager named Alex, growing up in a broken home in Portland, struggling with belonging, and involved in an unfortunate and grisly incident one night at Paranoid Park. The film recounts the events before and after that incident, but it jumbles the order, skews the point of view, slows things down, speeds things up, repeats a scene several times but reveals something new each time. "I'm writing this a little out of order," says Alex of his own pencil-scribbled narration. "Sorry. I didn't do so well in creative writing."

Van Sant, an American auteur who is best known for his (excellent but entirely conventional) Good Will Hunting, has since been diligently reminding us that the medium of film is one of sound and image and time, more than one of plot or character or dialogue. The most memorable moments of his recent films are the ones in which nothing is said and not very much seems to happen: the crunch of feet on the desert gravel; an ad hoc song plucked out on an acoustic guitar, performed for no one; the silent grainy home-movie footage of one skater after another, jumping off a ramp and reaching—Icarus-like—for the sky. These scenes may seem wistful, or indulgent, or narcissistic2; but then, the most memorable moments of our own lives are probably the same.

1. Van Sant calls these three his "Death Trilogy," and indeed, they are beautiful, elegiac, fictional snuff films.

2. Marshall McLuhan suggests that Narcissus would never have become so enamored of his own reflection if he had understood it for what it was ("Narcissus as Narcosis"). Instead, perhaps he was enraptured at the discovery of one so similar to himself, and could not avert his eyes. The same might be said for Van Sant's long, longing gazes upon his subjects.

Cloudscape 

"The certitude that everything has been written negates us or turns us into phantoms." - from "The Library of Babel," by Jorge Luis Borges

I'm sitting in that chair in the corner of my bedroom, and my hand is bleeding. The morning is quiet. The sun shines in through the window and casts the shadow of the pane onto my bed, and I can hear distant traffic, and feel a breeze coming in.

I'm watching the blood run down my hand onto my wrist, onto my arm, a bright red rivulet, so bright, shockingly bright, candy apple red, and I think, "This is so shockingly bright. This is the color of vivid, the color of vitality, and seeing this color, it is a memorable experience. What is happening now is special. It is unique."

The same thing happened yesterday.

I cut my hand two days ago, or maybe it was the day before that, and since then, every morning, when I get out of the shower, I sit in the chair in the corner of my room and I notice again that my hand is bleeding. I see the angle of the sun through the window, I hear far-away cars, feel the gentle breeze, and think that what is happening right now is unique, never having happened before or ever again, though it happened yesterday, and (one might conclude) it will happen tomorrow.

I watch the trickle of blood wind across my wrist and down my arm without fear or concern but only deja vu, as if I am stuck in a single point of time, while the world around me has continued to move and change, almost imperceptibly, like the passing of a cloud.

Right now—is it today or yesterday? And if this has all happened before, why should that make this moment any less unique? If time is truly infinite, then won't this all happen again—not just my bleeding in this chair, but the repetition of the bleeding, and the musing on it? And again and again. If the dimensions of the universe are as boundless as mathematics, then is there not someone else, somewhere else, doing this same thing, even now? And writing about it? Hasn't it all been written before? Even by me.

The bleeding stops, on its own, for now, and I go on about my day.

Do No Evil 

"There are moments—increasingly rare in risk-abhorrent modern campaigns—when politicians are called upon to bare their fundamental beliefs. In the best of these moments, the speaker does not just salve the current political wound, but also illuminates larger, troubling issues that the nation is wrestling with." — New York Times editorial on Barack Obama's "More Perfect Union" speech of March 18, 2008

I had many reactions to Barack Obama's speech yesterday in Pennsylvania, but first among them was one that caught me completely by surprise:

Hillary Clinton should step down, and concede the race for the Democratic presidential nomination.1

This opinion is different than the one I expressed here, or here, or even here. It is an opinion that's shifted gradually, over this last Machiavellian month, and then suddenly, when Obama stood up in Philadelphia and delivered his much-discussed "More Perfect Union" speech.

Consider that during the same news cycle, the press was combing through Clinton's "First Lady" papers, sniffing for evidence of scandals real or imagined; her own campaign continued its deceptive shell games in Michigan and Florida and Pennsylvania, arguing that though Obama now has the weight of the popular vote and the balance of delegates, in November, only she, Clinton, could pull the states that "matter." Elsewhere in politics, President Bush again declared "victory" in Iraq (beginning to beg the question not what the word "victory" means, but rather if words, in politics, mean anything); and newly-sworn-in New York governor David Paterson volunteered his chronicle of extramarital affairs, literally as if to give himself an air of credibility, because we all know by now, any politician who wants to be taken seriously must cheat on their spouse.

All of which is to say that if we, the electorate, are exhausted by the charade that is contemporary big media politics, and jaded, and detached, and disenfranchised, then of course we were caught off guard when Barack Obama took the podium and spoke to us honestly. In the midst of his own (possibly actual, serious) scandal—his association with "racist" pastor Jeremiah Wright—Obama avoided easy platitudes, sound bytes, and disavowals, and instead spoke to us "as though we were adults."

Both Obama and Clinton have promised us that they are candidates of "change." In Clinton's hands, this word is an honest and well-intended one, describing her intentions to improve our nation's economy, health care, and reputation abroad. Obama, too, wants these things, but it is becoming clearer that his idea of "change" is more fundamental:

He wants, first of all, to repair our dysfunctional, dumbed-down democracy (a system which has alienated nearly every citizen I know, and a system in which Clinton is as deeply implicated as anyone). This is not "change you can xerox;" until recently, I did not even believe it was change that was possible. But I am beginning to believe.

1. Upon further consideration, what I really mean by this is that she should rise to Obama's level of rhetoric, or she should bow out—preferably the former.

Don't Ask, Don't Tell