I'm not given to make New Year's resolutions. But I do feel a major hole in my life, one that Live Journal used to occupy. I'm going to try, having let this field go fallow, to sow it anew.

Tags: blogging, everyday, holiday
Current Location: 85704

Tags: daughter, holiday, photography
Current Location: 85704

Tags: autobiography, photography, theory
Current Location: 85704

Tags: autobiography, holiday, theory
Current Location: 94704

Tags: daughter, holiday, home, music
Current Location: 85704

I've been doing a bad job of commemorating special occasions lately. Or maybe I'm doing a good job of not expending too much energy thinking about the past. Either way, I increasingly find my long-standing tendency not to look very far ahead complemented by a desire not to look very far behind.

But sometimes you just can't ignore the date. The Loma Prieta Quake in 1989 was a very big deal in my life, both because of what didn't happen to me that day and what did over the next two weeks.

Today I'll concentrate on the former. My friend Josh had suggested that we drive down to Jack London Square to watch Game 3 of the Bay Bridge series on the big-screen television there. This was a decade before mobile phones became a part of my world. Making plans was difficult and changing them even harder. I spent an awful lot of time standing at pay phones, typically in BART stations. Even so, things often went awry.

Josh was supposed to pick me up on Bancroft, in front of Eshleman Hall, around 4:30pm. Earlier that day, however, I'd committed to put flyers up for the organization Let's Elect the Chancellor. I believed in the cause, certainly. But I probably wouldn't have been so actively involved if Annalee and her partner David were not members of the organization. Although we'd broken up in June, while spending three week staying at my parents' house in Maryland, I was slow to find new housing. We still got along well enough as friends, so living together in her Berkeley apartment over the summer was't a total disaster.

It wasn't easy, though. She was starting to get involved with David, a friend of Josh's whom I'm had been hanging out with regularly for the past year. The situation was awkward. Because we were all pretty broke, though, and enjoyed each other's company, the three of us ended up spending a lot of time together engaged in an activity we collectively referred to as, "scraping the screen of life." Sometimes I had the impression that David wanted me around, whether because he wasn't sure he desired a relationship with Annalee or because he had sympathy for my plight, since I was obviously still in love with her.

Even after I moved out in August, I spent a lot of my time with Annalee. When David expressed interest in Physics professor Charlie Schwartz's cause -- he was always trying to get the Chancellor elected -- she eagerly joined him and I started tagging along. I'm sure she would rather have had me keep a wider berth, but I was thinking with my heart. Soon I found myself trying to prove how committed I was to the cause in order to impress David. It was an odd dynamic, to say the least.

At any rate, when we met in the middle of the day on October 17th to divide up the labor of promoting and organizing our next general meeting, I volunteered to put up flyers despite the fact that I had class that afternoon and was then supposed to meet up with Josh. So I decided to skip class. But instead of actually putting up the flyers, I sat around brooding about my unrequited love until I'd worked up a mental lather worthy of Werther.

By the time I collected myself, it was nearly 5pm. That, not coincidentally, was the time when Annalee's Early American Literature class let out. I'd known all along that she would probably be walking with a bunch of her classmates to hang out at Kip's. Rather oddly, David and I had taken to crashing this grad-school party together every week, soaking up the intellectual energy even as we wryly commented on our exclusion from the club. The only member of the class who made the two of us feel welcome, aside from Annalee, was the older guy in the Giants hat who seemed to revel in being a regular guy.

I decided, for reasons both selfish and stupid, to intercept Annalee during the post-class stroll across Sproul Plaza and ask for her help in putting up the flyers I had volunteered to distribute all by myself. Understandably, though, when I approached her amid the plane trees between Sproul and Bancroft, she was annoyed at me for intruding. I pressed the point for a minute, but then thought better of it and headed down the steps towards Lower Sproul.

I knew Josh would be waiting for me, yet opted to enter Eshleman so that I could at least claim to have done some of the flyering I'd promised to finish. If I'd had a mobile phone, I would have texted him to say I was running late. But because I had no way of contacting him, I just hoped that he wouldn't drive off.

That's why I was on the sixth floor of Eshleman, where all the left-wing groups were housed, when the earthquake struck. I was walking down the hall in the direction of the Bay. There was a non-structural sheet rock wall on my left and a much harder exterior wall on my right. At first the floor and windows started shaking as they had during the 5-something San Jos? quake I'd experienced that spring. But then the whole building pitched so violently to the left that I literally fell into that interior wall. Luckily, by the time the building headed back to the right I'd collected my wits sufficiently to brace my fall -- there is no other way to describe it -- into the exterior wall with my hand.

Although I'd never been out on the high seas, I knew, instinctively, that this was what it must have felt like to traverse them in a large sailing vessel. And then I thought, "Buildings shouldn't act like boats; the whole thing is going to collapse." As it turns out, I was dead wrong. Architects want tall buildings to act like boats during an earthquake. Everything was happening according to plan. For a few seconds, though, I was trying to calculate whether it would be better or worse for me to be on the next-to-top floor in the event of Eshleman's destruction.

Once the shaking stopped, I exited via the stairway -- somehow, I remembered that elevators were a bad idea in case of emergency -- and found myself spilling out onto Lower Sproul, where a crowd was gazing westward, mouth agape, at the giant plate glass windows that fronted Zellerbach Hall. I asked someone what they were looking at. He turned to me stunned. "The windows were billowing like sails," he effused, "but they didn't break!"

Still jittery and not yet feeling wired with adrenaline as I would be a little later, I drifted into the Bear's Lair with a notion to watch the World Series. I'd completely forgotten about Josh at this point. Oddly, with the regulars sitting in their usual spots, the watering hole seemed surprisingly normal. I ordered a beer and sat down in front of the biggest television, still showing Candlestick Park. Then the soon-to-be-famous footage of the Bay Bridge and the Cypress Structure came on the screen, with Al Michaels doing voiceover, and I realized that there wasn't going to be a baseball game.

I wandered out of the Bear's Lair only to find Annalee and David, who had gone to meet her at Kip's, standing along Bancroft with my friend Leanne. We exchanged a few words, collectively achieving what I would later identify as "post-disaster rush". And then Josh walked up, chiding me for standing him up. He'd parked the car a block away, after waiting quite a while for me, deciding that he didn't want to go to Jack London Square by himself.

Only later did I realize that my tardiness might have saved us from harm. Not having a car, I didn't know the Bay Area's freeway system very well. But when I looked at a map of the damage two days later, I realized that Josh and I would most likely have been on the Cypress Structure at 5:04pm had I gone straight to meet him instead of waiting to intercept Annalee. To be honest, though, this didn't feel like a brush with death so much as a brush with excitement.

In the weeks following the quake I found myself flooded with boundless energy and a willingness to take risks that was definitely out of character. Indeed, I was still riding the wave of post-quake adrenaline when I met my future partner on October 30th. I'm sure it was an important factor in moving me to respond to her flirtation instead of pretending that I hadn't noticed. And I know that it played a role in leading me to ignore everything I'd been taught about safe sex. But that's a tale for another day. . .

Tags: autobiography, bay area, berkeley, holiday, poetry
Current Location: 85704
Muse: Forget You - Cee Lo Green - The Lady Killer

I've been scarce of late, I know, for a variety of reasons. But I'm still reading those of you who post here and am gearing up to share more myself. Part of the reason I've been parsimonious with my blogging is that my writing and editing time is taken up by the new publishing venture Souciant that I began with Joel Schalit, Jennifer Crakow and Rich Jensen this past spring.

Lately, I've been contributing pieces of my own every other week, though I hope to get back into a weekly groove soon. My piece for today reflects on the newly reissued film 1991: The Year Punk Broke, which documents a European tour by Sonic Youth -- one of my all-time favorite bands -- and Nirvana, right before the release of Nevermind, which is celebrating its twentieth-anniversary this week.



I'm fairly pleased with my work this time, which is saying something, considering how hard on myself I've been lately. Please go go check it out, if you have time, and also take the time, when you're able, to peruse Souciant's other offerings. I think we're building it into a really interesting place to visit.

Tags: clips, music
Current Location: 85704

Skylar was given the assignment, on short notice, to write a "list" poem for her Literature class. Because it's due tomorrow and she has already been working on her other homework for hours, I read her the opening lines of Christopher Smart's eighteenth-century tribute to his cat Jeoffry from Jubilate Agno, which Annalee Newitz and I used to enjoy reading aloud.

Skylar was inspired to attempt her own version, dedicated to her feline. I left her for a few minutes to use the bathroom -- we're hanging out at the Barnes & Noble Caf? in Foothills Mall -- and returned to find that she had already completed the assignment. I was glad, since I had feared that she would labor over the task as someone of her creative bent is inclined to do and was worried that she would run out of energy before her homework was completed. But when I saw what she'd come up with, my happiness magnified a hundred fold:

For I will consider my cat Punka
For her eyes burn brighter than all the tigers in the forests of the night.
For her robe of charcoal sweeps to her dainty toes.
For her tail is a plume.
For her eyebrows were singed away by the flame of Satan.
For she views food as a primitive curiosity beneath her contempt.
For she does not need solid fuel to feed her wild soul.
For she is smarter than my father.
For she counts the rows of helpless, neon mice and minces them with her claws.
For she is the predator.
For she regards her siblings as lower forms of life that God created for her prey.
For she leaps upon them from the night of the ceiling, sinking her teeth into their fur with a hiss.
For satisfying her bloodthirsty jaws, she squashes the black beetles from the cracks in the walls and eats the remains.
For she sleeps in the sink to block her servants from tentatively attempting to brush their teeth.
For she is irresistible when her motor rumbles.
For she is the love of the life of the universe and all its inhabitants.
For she is the bear.

This is a grand imitation of Smart's style. But the scary thing is that I read Skylar only a small portion of Smart's original and not the best parts -- and the ones that her lines evoke most strongly -- which come later on.

Tags: daughter, nostalgia, poetry
Current Location: 85741

Just now I was thinking about what I should do in the thirty minutes I have before I take my mom to another doctor's appointment and wandered into my office to look at the bookshelves there. I pulled my German paperback edition of the first volume of Capital down, since I mean to at least partially reread it soon. But it was clearly too intense for such a short window of opportunity.

While I was retrieving it, I glanced over at the adjoining bookshelf that holds much of my collection in twentieth-century leftist thought. I saw books by Rudolph Rocker, Antonio Gramsci and, my personal favorite, Walter Benjamin. While I'd rather read them, especially in English, than tackle the small print and yellowed paper of my German edition of Marx's masterpiece, it felt like a betrayal and, what is more, one consistent with a disturbing tendency in post-1960s theory circles, where primary sources are neglected in favor of books kinda-sorta about them.

So I held on to the Marx and made it out into the kitchen when my thoughts drifted to Lord of the Rings, which I began rereading as part of a contest with my twelve-year-old. Given how little time I have, I told myself, it would make more sense to make a little headway in The Two Towers and return to Marx under more favorable circumstances. But then that plan also flooded me with guilt, since I would clearly be taking the easy way out.

Stumped, I decided that I should at least try to think about J.R.R. Tolkien in relation to Marxism before sitting down to read them. That got me thinking that I should try to read fantasy literature that directly influenced Tolkien, maybe something by George Macdonald, so that I could compare an approach to counter-factual worlds produced in a Victorian context to the one that Tolkien took with the Great Depression and World War II as a backdrop.

From there I started pondering the modernity of Lord of the Rings, the fact that, even though it's a deeply melancholic story that celebrates what is lost with Max Weber's Entzauberung der Welt, the prose is decidedly modern in feel, particularly when juxtaposed with The Silmarillion, where Tolkien was striving for lexical and syntactical "antiquing" akin to the sort Edmund Spenser deployed in The Faerie Queen.

And then I remembered Walter Benjamin, who was deeply preoccupied with our relation to the recent past and, in particular, the ways in which modernity can make less then a century's remove seem vaster somehow than the twenty-five hundred years that separate us from the pinnacle of classical Greek culture. In Lord of the Rings, I realized, the distant past is more present for the elves than what happened relatively recently.

Focusing on Tolkien's elves then reminded me of the insight that the genius of his fantasy world lies in the way it treats time, the fact that each species has a different lifespan and a concomitant idiosyncrasy of perception. If elves, dwarves, humans and hobbits and humans all lived more or less the same number of years, almost everything that is interesting in his work would disappear. In other words, to put this realization into language appropriate for someone of Tolkien's generation, the strength of his storytelling is a function of the relativity he introduces into the experience of time.

That brought me back to Benjamin, whose interest in the recent past went hand in hand with a mission to liberate leftist thinking from linear chronology and the unimaginative teleology to which it has unfortunately led. And then I had a flash of inspiration: both Benjamin and Tolkien were born in 1892. Surely, their interest in time and the way they thought about it had a lot to do with the period in which they grew up, when so many technological advances were radically transforming the texture of everyday life.

FInally, that realization made me think about how and why I am drawn to the work produced by intellectuals of their generation, those born sometime between the late 1880s and early 1900s. My father's parents were also born in the 1890s. And my paternal grandfather, like Tolkien and, in a different sense, Benjamin, was profoundly affected by World War I and its immediate aftermath. Could it be that my attraction to this period and the people who lived through it is bound up with an identification that, like genetic traits, skipped a generation?

Well, my time is up. Now I'm not going to read Marx, Tolkien or Benjamin until later in the day at the very earliest. But at least I got something written, which has been hard for me to do recently. It's a good exercise, reconstructing a train of thought in this manner, even if there's a danger that the mental associations that made it possible will be cauterized by the effort to capture them in words.

Tags: autobiography, family, fantasy, literature, theory
Current Location: 85704

Tags: autobiography, photography, theory
Current Location: 85704

Today was Skylar's first day of seventh grade. So far, everything has gone swimmingly. I've never seen her so relaxed at the beginning of a school year. Part of it is that she wants to show off her new look:

And part of it is that her desire to have a new look reflects the maturity she has begun to manifest lately.

Despite all the reservations Kim and I had -- parents had told us horror stories -- Skylar's first year of middle school went about as well as we could hope. She got started on the right foot and managed to thrive despite the inevitable friend and teacher issues that arose. As it turned out, the happy "It's alright; I'll be fine" look she gave us on her first day of sixth grade was an excellent omen:

Some parents have told me that I'll soon be deeply nostalgic for the innocence still written on that sixth-grade face. Maybe so. But I've had a great time with the soon-to-be-a-teenager I've been doing things with this summer. Yes, Skylar is different. But she's still the same old Bean at times. And when it's her new self that's coming to the fore, that person seems truly wonderful to me. Right now, though, I think I like it best when the two Skylars are perceptible at the same time, as a sort of palimpsest:

Still, I recognize that the new Skylar will be asserting herself more and more in the coming months. But I have no complaints.

Tags: daughter, holiday, photography
Current Location: 85704
Muse: Shadow Identity - Atari Teenage Riot - Is This Hyperreal?

It's always surprising how we -- or, to be more specific, I -- can see almost everything clearly except what's staring us right in the face. The sluggishness I've been feeling, that sense that I just don't have the energy to see projects through to completion, is almost certainly a direct result of the fact that I've been eating less healthily -- or at least at less healthy times -- and exercising in a more haphazard and sometimes half-assed manner.

I think one of my caffeine purges is in order. I haven't "detoxed" since before my mother's fall last February. And I need to start riding my bike every day and also jogging on a regular basis. My knee is as healed as it's ever going to be. All I need is the will to get out the door and get moving. Easier said than done, to be sure, but it does help to know that I've managed to shape up like that a few times in the past five years.

It's no surprise that how I feel physically bears on my ability to do intellectual work. Or that how I feel about my mental exertions conditions my relationship with my body. That's why I've resumed, after a long hiatus, writing by hand in my journal. And It's also why I'm making it a point to read theoretical texts for the first time in a long while. I still have what it takes to do good work with them. All I need is to get in a groove.

Tags: autobiography, everyday, health
Current Location: 85704

I realized a few minutes ago that I haven't posted here since July 4th, which is strange, because I'd gotten back into an LJ groove in June and have also had numerous "I should compose an entry" thoughts. Life has been emotionally tumultuous in the interim, but I should be used to that by now. Maybe the Monsoon, our glorious semi-wet summer, is to blame. I love it -- see my last entry, in which I excitedly presented the radar evidence of its arrival, as I have for several years running -- but it makes me feel lethargic during the day and hesitant to sit at the computer at night.

Whatever the reasons for my absence, I'm back. Yes, like a lot of you I have taken a tentative dip in the waters of Google+ since I last posted. And I plan to incorporate it into my social media existence in a more robust way going forward. But I like the idea of keeping this journal going, if less frequently than I did a few years back, both because I like the continuity and because Google+, like Facebook, is better suited to short posts and the posting of links to longer ones.

I don't want to get too mired in discussing my domestic situation right now, since I'm in a relatively good space, but I can say that my current feelings about it, both present and future, can mostly be grouped under the rubric labeled "Reconciled." I'm not happy about it, obviously. But I can't do much to change things for the better, at least in the short term, so walking around projecting anger or depression is only going to make me and those I'm in closest contact with feel worse.

Part of being more at peace with the situation comes from the realization that it has to end. For the longest time, I was holding on to the belief that my patience would be rewarded in the end. Now, finally, I recognize both that all evidence points to the contrary and that I am growing impatient myself. Because of my professional crisis -- I need to figure out a new career and find work until I do -- and the fact that I'm caring for my mother and, indirectly, my father on a daily basis I don't have much room to maneuver. Eventually, though, I will make it through this time of trial and will have the liberty to plan for a future worth living.

It's very hard for me to think ahead in that way. My feelings are still so bound up with my failed marriage and the parental burdens that come with the territory to give free rein to my imagination. Still, I'm making the proverbial baby steps towards a goal. I know now that I'd be better off living in a state of detachment than to get caught up in another relationship with someone whose energy is directed primarily at self-preservation. I understand where that mentality comes from. I'm sympathetic. But coping with the neglect of my own emotional life that has been a byproduct of living that way has taken too much of a psychological toll for me to be able to repeat the pattern without destroying what's left of myself.

That I can articulate this realization without being overwhelmed with rancor or regret strikes me as a positive sign. I know that I'm still badly tangled in emotional ties that keep me from going where I need to go, both literally and metaphorically, but at least I'm looking at the mess with a little more detachment, the sort I will need to begin the process of freeing myself from it. Seeing as how I basically failed out of Cub Scouts for not being able to tie knots, maintaining my composure in this endeavor will be taxing. But at least I know that it has to happen and, moreover, what state of mind I need to be in for it to be possible.

Tags: autobiography, everyday, health, scenes from a
Current Location: 85704

Tags: everyday, holiday, hom, tucson, weather
Current Location: 85704

I don't want to bore you to death by saying more or less what I've already written about seeing the extended edition of Lord of the Rings on the big screen, but we just got back from the third and final installment and was it ever spectacular.

I choose that word carefully, recognizing that a little Guy Debord-style critique is in order here, no matter how much I love J.R.R. Tolkien or the film adaptations. As I tried to articulate in a short piece for Souciant last week, part of what has made this round of one-time-only screenings powerful is that repeat viewers aren't there just for the story, but to see themselves seeing the films "as they were meant to be seen."

While that's true of all theatrical audiences to an extent and especially of the ones who go to blockbuster movies, there's a significant difference between the first-run experience and attending films years after their initial release. In the latter case, the distinctive qualities of cinema as a medium come to the fore with special intensity even if, as was the case for Lord of the Rings, they are digitally projected.

Having made the point, though, I still felt my passions surge at the appropriate junctures and grew even more teary-eyed than when I first saw the trilogy at those moments of maximum emotional impact. Despite the emphasis on the spectacular dimension to the experience, in other words, the mechanisms of cinematic identification still did their magic on me.

Of course, it didn't hurt that we've been without air conditioning since Thursday -- that's also why I've been scarce here, despite my vow to post more regularly -- during the hottest seven-day stretch since we moved to Tucson eleven years ago. When I walked in the door a little while ago, I declaimed, "Welcome back to Mordor!", because even low-impact activities like composing this entry take everything that I have to give. Like Frodo, I'm having a hard time remembering what it feels like to be comfortable!

Tags: blogging, everyday, film, health, home
Current Location: 85704

I just watched the extended editions of Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers in the second installment of the one-off theatrical screenings of the trilogy. The Two Towers was my favorite of the books when I initially read them. I loved the battle scenes in particular. Because Peter Jackson's team decided to move some of its key plot points into their film of Return of the King -- I guess all that wandering around in Mordor that Frodo and Sam do seemed too bleak and monotonous for a big-budget epic -- the cinematic rendering of The Two Towers disappointed me a bit when I first saw it back in 2002. But I realized tonight, watching the footage that was excised from that initial release, that the extended edition is really very satisfying as cinema.

I love the way the three interlocking narratives -- set, respectively, at Helm's Deep, Isengard and Ithilien -- build to a tremendous climax. And the extra material, including comic relief and a considerably richer portrayal of Eowyn and her future husband Faramir, helps to space out the battle sequences, which are remarkably well done but a little like bone hitting bone in the shorter edition. Yes, the padding slightly undermines the impact of Sam's tremendous self-reflexive speech about the sort of tale in which he and Frodo are caught up, pushing it farther from the picture's end. But that's a price I'm willing to pay for the richer characterization.

I'm always susceptible to the call of allegory, particularly when it comes from the domain of fantasy or science fiction. Even the first time I read the trilogy, I found myself making connections to modern history. Now, though, decades of literary training combine with my extreme emotional vulnerability to burden the trilogy with so many levels of allegorical significance that it's a wonder the narrative doesn't crumble to dust as a consequence.

Tonight, because Skylar was sitting between me and her mother, a kind of "personal allegory" came to the fore. Given how hopeless I've been feeling about my future, watching any film as part of a rare family night out would feel like an attempt to fight for what is good against fearsome odds. When that film is part of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, though, that effect is amplified a hundredfold. Maybe I should be ashamed to admit how much Sam's speech moved me this time around, but I'm still so aglow with renewed inspiration to press on, whatever the obstacles, that my capacity for embarrassment is temporarily diminished.

Tags: daughter, everyday, family, film
Current Location: 85704

One of the strangest things for me about starting up Souciant is that the site was designed for running ads. In all the years that I was involved with Bad Subjects: Political Education For Everyday Life, we never sold the publication itself -- "Hard. Good. Free" was one of our early slogans -- and never sold advertising for it either.

Ironically, although I was fond of critiquing those who aspired to ideological purity, I was rather fond of our refusal to let ourselves be commercialized. And so were other members of our Production Team. In fact, the decision to allow an anthology of our work to be published by NYU Press was pretty fraught, because several people objected to our work being up for sale in any capacity, even though we had demanded the right to keep every anthologized piece available online for free.

A lot has changed since them. Sources of funding, whether public or private, have dried up. The resources that Bad Subjects leaned on in order to distribute hard copies for free and maintain a presence on the Web are battled over by worthy ventures to a demoralizing degree. Simply put, the price of remaining above the commercial fray is too high even for some of the stoutest advocates of free publishing to pay.

Whether Souciant ever makes enough money to provide support for its staff and contributors remains to be seen. At the very least, it will probably take at least a year before we can even think about how to make progress towards that goal. But that doesn't meant we are trying to keep ourselves pure in the interim. Until we have a deal in place to incorporate a more sophisticated means of serving ads into the site, we are plodding forward with Google AdSense.

It's not generating much revenue for us yet. But we're at least making a little money that we can apply towards the fee we pay for being hosted. And the best part is that many of our click-throughs seem to be of an ironic stamp. Because of the way AdSense works, unintentional comedy is rampant. Sometimes, the accidental montages generated by the relationship between Souciant's content and the ads that pop up are so delicious that they seem like performance art:

If you have ever heard my Co-Editor-in-Chief Joel Schalit's audio collage outfit The Christal Methodists, you will understand how perfect it is to have his piece about their recent rebirth via YouTube running alongside an invitation to become a minister. My mother was always incredibly open minded about music. Hell, she often listened to the records my sister brought home and even became a big Smiths fan. But when I put The Christal Methodists on the stereo one New Year's Eve, she turned white with anger and demanded that I take their "blasphemous noises" off at once. Thinking of that moment when I first saw this particular iteration of Souciant's home page, I couldn't help but smile broadly.

Tags: bad subjects, marketing, new media, souciant
Current Location: 85704

I've written about how time-consuming it is for me to sort through my "archives" many times in the life of this journal. Whether I'm attempting to find room in my overstuffed office at home, rearranging boxes in the garage, or looking for something buried deep in my storage space, it's almost impossible for me not to get more emotionally involved in the process than I should. And, yes, that's why I should radically pare down my possessions, since there's always something bittersweet about handling them and especially so now, when even once-happy recollections can only be viewed through blue-colored glasses.

Since we just watched the extended edition of Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring on the big screen this past Tuesday, I can't help but think of the scene before Frodo & Co. enter the mines of Moria, when the voice of Saruman comes to Gandalf, reminding him that the dwarves who hollowed out the mountain were greedy and dug too deep. To be sure, the "Balrog" that I awoke in my latest excavations in our garage is outwardly far less fearsome than the one Gandalf must confront in Moria. Yet his whip is just as treacherous, threatening to pull me down into the abyss at any moment.

But since I have yet to muster the courage to turn my back on the past and, indeed, have repeatedly vowed to myself not to start tossing things out wholesale as my mother once did during her mid-life crisis in the late 1980s, I am faced with the far more delicate and laborious task of sorting through all the material I once set aside for posterity, deciding what still merits the designation of "keepsake" and what can now be dispensed with. To make this project even harder, I am also the one who has to make sure that similar decisions are made for Kim and Skylar's possessions in the process.

For all of the force with which Kim insists on keeping her past at a distance these days, she still has plenty of mementos boxed up in the garage and storage space. And Skylar is, if anything, worse than I am about deciding that something of hers can be given or thrown away. Sometimes this extra burden comes with benefits, as it did this afternoon when I was able to bring Kim some of the art she has had stored away since we moved to Tucson. Nevertheless, having to stay mentally strong, not dispensing with an item until I'm absolutely sure that neither I nor they will regret its loss later, is very tiring.

That's why I try to take a break periodically in order to focus on whatever positive outcomes have accompanied the process. Tonight, looking through a stack of small and medium-sized memorabilia, I decided that it was unreasonable to write about each special rediscovery individually -- I'm apparently going through one of my infrequent level-headed phases -- but came up with an alternative plan: to make one of my "scanner collages" featuring some of my favorites:

If you're curious about anything you see here, I'll be happy to try to explain what it is and/or why it matters to me. For starters, everything in the collage dates from the happiest decade of my life, beginning with my year as an exchange student in Germany and ending in 1996, the year when I finally figured out how to write the way I wanted to about culture and, not coincidentally, also the best year Kim and I had as a couple, from the adventures we had backpacking to our wedding and New Orleans honeymoon. In that brief window of time, after her destructive relation to alcohol had diminished and before the pressures of trying to have a child or becoming parents or moving away from the Bay Area had taken their toll on our affection for each other, we were well matched.

Tags: archive, autobiography, love, nostalgia
Current Location: 85704

This past Saturday, as I noted in an entry from a few days back, Kim and Skylar joined me in celebrating my father's eightieth birthday two days early, since they were headed back to San Diego for a mother-daughter vacation.



It was a beautiful moment, one that moved my father and me. As he confessed tonight, he has been taking advantage of his new Apple TV device to watch it over again, as well as the equally happy-making video of the celebration that Kim and Skylar put on for me in May.



I've watched both videos a number of times myself recently. They have a way of boosting my spirits when I'm down, as I was for much of the past week. Because Kim and Skylar were away, I had the house to myself. But I've never done very well with that kind of solitude, even under the best of circumstances, and found it especially hard to bear in light of the burdens I'm coping with right now.

It didn't help that I had mixed feelings about their trip, both because I wanted to go back to the beach myself -- who wouldn't, in light of the fires that have made this Arizona June even more unbearable than usual? -- and because the two of them had gotten into a heated conflict on our previous trip to San Diego a few weeks back about how they would spend their time together. But they had a great time, in the end, and I made up for my loneliness and hurt at being left out by spending lots of time with my parents.

Because my father's birthday falls roughly a week before Father's Day, he liked to conceive of his celebration as a multi-day affair, highlighted by eating his favorites dishes and taking pleasure in his favorite operas. Knowing what a hard year he has had and how little he got to enjoy his birthday last June, when he was alone with my mother in Maryland only weeks after her discharge from long-term care, I made it a point to tell him that I would both cook a meal for him and watch an opera with him.

He let me pick the opera, so I opted for a 1998 German-language production of the Kurt Weill-Bertolt Brecht collaboration Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny (Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny). It wasn't the best presentation from the standpoint of sound quality or staging, but compelling nonetheless, especially for someone who has a soft spot for Brecht's mordant depiction of modern society and loves Weill's fusion of jazz and "New Music" influences.

Plus, there was the added benefit that the German was well enunciated, letting us comment on the many places where the English subtitles differed sharply from the original book. My father's German is not as good as mine from an active standpoint, but having grown up in a household where his parents spoke the language all the time gives him advantages over me.

One interesting thing I realized, when I was looking up Brecht's date of birth for him, is that my paternal grandmother was born, like Brecht, exactly one hundred years before Skylar. She and my grandfather had my father when they were in their early 30s in New York, after emigrating at the end of 1922. And my father was 37 when I was born.

I imagine that it's pretty uncommon for such a long span between generations. It's pretty cool to think about how my father's parents were living In Harlem during the height of the Jazz Age. I've shown Skylar photos of them in their stylish clothes from that time but need to do so again when she studies that period in school. It seems likely that she'll be reading The Great Gatsby at some point, for example.

The other revelation watching the opera, which my father and I watched in three installments, ending tonight, is that it played a huge role in shaping my politics as a teenager. Back when my sense of the world's complexity was still fairly inchoate, I watched the Metropolitan Opera's telecast of their 1980s production starring Teresa Stratas and was completely transfixed, both because Stratas -- who grew up in a rough neighborhood right near where Lincoln Center would later be built -- was amazing and because the savagely ironic edge to the proceedings resonated with my adolescent turmoil. This wobbly, low-res video is taken from a tape of that telecast:



Doors fans will recognize that song, which is repeated throughout the opera, as one of the few that the band covered. It's funny to read the YouTube comments by people who thought that the Doors had written the song, though I suppose it matches Jim Morrison's image well enough to make that conclusion plausible. But I heard the song in the opera before I came across the Doors version, since my education in popular music was always several years behind what I learned about classical music from my parents.

Shortly before I left for a year in Germany as an exchange student in 1986, right after I'd graduated from high school, I watched a theatrical production of what I think must have been a Brecht play with my father. At any rate, I remember getting sucked into it because it reminded me of the opera. Around that time, I also read a New York Times article that discussed the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, whom I had never heard of up until that point, at considerable length.

And that's why, when I went into my first German bookstore a few days after beginning my language class in Hamburg, I skipped the instructional materials and purchased a slim paperback of what turned out to be rather obscure Rilke poems and a hardcover collection of similarly marginal German plays, the first of which was Brecht's version of Turandot, which I had gotten to know from Puccini's last opera.

As my fellow American exchange students were goofing around in our language classes, I was laboriously attempting to translate Rilke and Brecht even though I knew almost no German. It probably wasn't the most efficient way of learning a language, but it did wonders for my literary training, sending me down the path that would lead me to being a German major in college.

Tags: autobiography, everyday, family, music
Current Location: 85704

Thanks for the comments on my preceding entry, about my new venture Souciant. I look forward to getting those of you have expressed interest involved and hope that others who read me here will let me know if they would like to try writing for us.

As promised, I am trying very hard not to hide my light under the proverbial bushel. So I'm directing you to my latest piece for Souciant, in which I made an effort to articulate the underlying principles that motivated me to start the publication. It's a review of the debut album by Brooklyn's much-lauded -- excessively so, I'll warrant -- duo Cults. Or, rather, as my subject header suggests, it's a review of my struggle to write a review.

That degree of self-reflexivity, a specialty of mine, can be awfully tedious. I know, after all, since I have to live with myself. In this case, however, it was justified, because I needed to explain my frustration with the dominant mode of cultural criticism -- if you can even call it that -- that prevails in the age of Twitter and Facebook:

As I explained to a friend shortly after beginning my first draft, it’s not hard to regard the album as an example of what’s wrong with alternative music under the sign of Pitchfork. Cults’ all-too-rapid rise from making a few tracks available for free online to being the latest “it” musicians in the international music press hurts artists who have been working hard for years to get their music out. And the fact that Cults aren’t even on an indie label, having signed to Columbia’s latest attempt to rival Merge, Sub Pop and Matador, just reinforces the impression that they are taking shortcuts without having paid their dues.

The more I thought about it, though, the more I realized that dissing Cults in a review would make me guilty of the same offense. After all, the whole point of naming this publication Souciant was to take a stand against the recklessness that prevails on the internet. I know as well as the next underpaid, overeducated intellectual trying to scrape out a living online that insouciance is the shortest path to success.

It’s a lot simpler to write reviews when you don’t let yourself think too hard about what you’re reviewing, when you can focus all your energy on coming up with memorable turns of phrases or button-pushing conclusions. But I’m even more tired of that sort of faux cultural analysis than I am of Brooklyn. I want to read the work of critics who take their time, who force themselves to test their initial reactions to a book, film or record, who aren’t afraid to admit that they are confused. In short, I want to read the work of critics who care too much about the state of contemporary culture to settle for the easy way out. And that’s also the work I want to write.

In the end, though I had good reasons for being negatively disposed towards the album, I had to admit that it was winning me over.

The rest of the piece concerns my own idiosyncratic response to Cults, which reminded me somehow of both David Lynch films and the music of Born To Run-era Bruce Springsteen. In explaining what I heard, I go out of my way to emphasize that there's nothing to indicate that my perception is the correct one. Rather, the album seems to function like a musical Rohschach test: we hear in it what we need to hear in it. Of course, there's an extent to which all all music -- all culture, really -- works that way. But in the case of Cults, that quality seems to be foregrounded to an unusual degree.

Tags: autobiography, clips, music, new media, souciant
Current Location: 85704