Mik Awake

Shocking and Disgusting Content

2012-01-26T13:33:00.003-05:00

Destroyed.

Description

2012-01-23T11:51:00.004-05:00

Sorry, dear imaginary readers, for not having blogged in a year. That's a joke, because actually it's only been a few months, but it's gone from 2011 to 2012, and anyway a few months in blog time is almost like a full year in human time.

I'd like to inaugurate the year by using this space to describe the room around me. "Now, Mik," I can hear your imaginary larynxes getting ready to vibrate with English words, "this seems self-indulgent and unnecessary. Why not just post a picture of your apartment and let me get on with my day? Pictures are quick to look at, quick to process, quick to forget. Reading a bunch of words takes time, time that I could be spending looking at other pictures of more newsworthy events, eck set err uh."

OK. You have a point. I won't do it. Except: There are three dirty bowls in my sink, two umbrellas hanging from my doorknob, and two orange paper flowers in a vase on my desk. The shirt I am wearing is one I slept in. It has black and blue stripes. The pants I am wearing I also slept in. They are gray and comfortable. A 2/3 full pint glass of water wobbles on the desk beside me when I type. I take a sip. Just kidding, I didn't take a sip just then.

This is blogging. This is important information on the Internet. If you publish anything on the Internet, it should be highly important, top priority, or very funny. It should be as brief as possible. It should communicate more than it actually says. It should tap into one of several "memes" that are "trending" at any given moment. It should push the conversation forward. It should not be about how you've had to take a dump for the last half-hour, maybe more. How you've been fighting that [sneeze] knuckling weight below your lower back, almost like it's rising up out of the chair you're sitting in, a wooden chair with a kind of suede or velvet-feeling cushion. The Internet demands innovation, not 19th century modes of "realistic" description.

I like how people, like art critic Hennessy Youngman, address the Internet as though it were a person, a friend. Or how Funky Dineva chooses to address her "friend" 'Nessa. I wish I had thought of creating an interlocutor, an audience, a person to address. Maybe myself. Mik? You there? A hollow clone, a listener clone, invented with no powers of actual speech, just listening? Who looked like me and listened as good as me? (I keep meaning to hit "." when I hit "?"?) I dream of a clone who would nod thoughtfully as I told him about how I was thinking the other day, Mik, about the kind of clothes people feel most comfortable doing work in. What kind of clothes do you wear, Mik, when I'm blogging? Some people write in the nude. Or in underwear. I write with my fly open, so that there's always the threat, Mik, that I'll expose myself.

Note: this is problematic when working, Mik, at the public library.

Writing, Blogging, & E-Motions on the InterNot

2011-10-21T16:02:00.011-04:00

If my blog is anything, it, like so many other parts of my life, is a story of a poor boy being caught between worlds. It has been a five-year attempt to bridge the gap between a person who fancies himself a serious writer and also a serious blogger. I've felt pressured at times by the demands put on me by each form. But in both personae, writer and blogger, I've felt duty-bound to be out in front of language, in the cavalry, as it were, of the way we write and talk nowadays. A writer should not only tell good stories, but should also consider what kinds of words he uses. The best words in the best order, the poet said. Writers have to know, as part of our job description, how words are being used: not just on the Internet, but also how they've been used pre-Internet, and how they're being used by real people in the offline world. In Modem-less America.

To be perfectly clear: people who rail against the Internet as keeping us from (ah!) the true and finer things in life, like nature and all that bullshit, are engaged in a fight that the Internet created, a fight that the Internet will always win. I'm not railing against the Internet, and I hope the following post doesn't get lumped into that category. I value the Internet. It is allowing me to share this post and allowing you to read it.

I begin this in a decidedly off-line locale. I'm at a desk in a studio at an artists’ residency outside Pine Plains, NY. In the lounge area of the residency, they have this amazing photography book called American Farmers. Each page has a huge, lush, wrinkle-wracked photograph of a grizzled old farmer, or a farmer with his family on his land, and each photo is accompanied by a page-long story written in farmer first-person. In one of the stories I read yesterday, a Louisiana farmer describing the damage done to his farm during Hurricane Rita said, “My house ended up five miles away from where it started.” I reread this line about 12 times: “five miles away from where it started.” How brilliant is that, I thought, how breezy and absurd and almost Shinto to imagine that a house can even have an end point separate from its start point, how brilliantly and blues-ily it turns a common saying on its head, how quickly you get a sense of the man behind the words. It was an amazing line, and it made me hungry to read the other stories in the book.

And then I got to thinking about why a line like this jumped out at me so much. Why it seemed so much like a restorative dose of iron for the anemic language centers in my brain. And then I got to thinking that maybe it had something to do with how much time I’ve been spending recently on the Internet (for work mostly) and the kind of nutrition the Internet affords a writer supposedly at the forefront of his language.

The very funny comedian Joe Mande, who I follow on Twitter, said in a recent interview that he didn’t know why anyone other than comedians and journalists were on Twitter, because it’s only good for getting information (news, cultural events, trends, TV shows) and writing funny things about that information. This was, of course, 50% a joke, because so much of Mande’s Twitter persona involves poking fun at celebrities and politicians.

But Mande's on to something. On the Internet, a big house with many rooms, I think the language that gets recycled the most and draws the most attention tends to veer between the two dipoles of information and sarcasm, news and cynicism—and more generally: yes and nah, :-) and :-(, RIP and LMFAO, and (on the subatomic level) 1s and 0s. You are either sharing information or you’re making fun of something, or you’re doing both at the same time, or you're not sure which one you're doing. After news of Gaddhafi’s death hit the Internet, Mande tweeted to his followers by retweeting something originally sent by Republican presidential hopeful Herman Cain who asked “What's next?” Mande, ignoring the Middle East, policy-wonking intent of Cain’s tweet, took the opportunity to mock Cain’s role as owner of a pizza franchise: “Please say pizza party!!”

Much as I love Mande and think he’s one of the most talented standup comedians I’ve seen in years, there’s something flat about this kind of humor, something stale and claustrophobic. Even when couched in the space of an essay like this, as I'm re-reading it now, it doesn’t pop with the same energy it had the first time I read it on my Twitter feed, in “real” time. I don’t think this is Mande’s fault, whose live standup is rife with narrative charm and moral curiosity and ingenious timing that some young fiction writers would kill for. I think the reason his humor is so flat on Twitter is Twitter’s fault.

For all the work people have done to make us believe that the Internet has supplanted real life as the main mode for connecting with human beings, I still don’t think that we believe in it 100%. We don’t believe that what happens on the Internet is real. I think we think it’s a quasi-real space. It’s not that what happens on the Internet doesn’t often have real life repercussions: e.g. break-up emails, instigating Tweets leading to actual violence, kiddie porn enthusiasts getting arrested, the fall of Rep. A. Wiener.

Let me qualify my statement: we believe the Internet is real when it benefits us to believe it’s real, or when there is sufficient photographic or video or verbal evidence to make us believe something is real.

Ostensibly, everything that happens on the Internet has an analogue in the real world, which is what gives it its powers of persuasion. For example, to go back to the farmer who lost his house in Hurricane Rita: a hurricane devastates the gulf coast. Then the news of the hurricane gets reported by all the major outlets in a dry, almost numerical style (CNN, AP, NYTimes, HuffPo, Fox). Casualties, deaths, wind speed, counties without power, bland statements of “fact” by “authority” figures. There are photographs of people caught in the act of crying. And videos of rubble and demolished neighborhoods. What people in other parts of the country experience of this major storm is not the rancid smell of a barn filled with dead cattle, not the bittersweet helplessness of a pragmatic, god-fearing man watching the farm he’s worked on his whole life float away: what we experience, what gets reinforced by every new update and story, is the very specific tone of pity and urgency that is the language of the news, multiplied and refracted by all the various ways it has of reaching us. In response to that news, we often find a corresponding tone, crafted through a very reductive and specific use of pitying and mournful language: WTFs and OMGs and “praying for the Gulf Coast tonight” and “thinking about all my fam in NOLA” and, for those who are more cliché-averse, the typical lack-of-commentary-standing-in-for-pitying-speechlessness: “Rita. Damn.”

So often I see writers, good writers!, opting for this latter form of emoting on the Internet, tweets or status updates that hope to convince us, because of the gaping negative space around them, that what the writer is experiencing is a type of emotion that is ineffably deep, that surpasses their ability to define it. It is an attempt at poetic understatement. It is meant to say a lot by saying a little. But really it's saying nothing.

Instead, what has been created, I think, is an epidemic of flat, tonally-homogenous writing. Bad writing, lazy writing, is the true stamp of the Internet Age, a reflection, I presume, of our lazy thinking. I see this kind of writing all the time on the Internet, written by people who are otherwise very good offline writers (see: Joe Mande). We are writers and one of our duties is to try to use language to reflect what’s going on in our heads, not to avoid language. Our job is to be out in front of language, to be diligent custodians of language, to weed out clichés and tropes and laziness, to recognize when certain modes of verbal expression have started to grow a fungus or decay, to know when to chuck them out and replace them with newer, better ways of saying things.

I think this is part of why the farmer’s line hit me with such force. It seemed totally foreign to the kind of language and sentiment you might read about a hurricane on the news, and it gave me an understanding of just how scrupulously curated and managed, how strangled and lifeless, much of the writing we find on the Internet is. Granted, the farmer’s line wasn’t 100% original. Granted, the line came as part of a longer narrative about the farmer’s life, and granted that narrative was part of a photographic book where (I admit) perhaps the shock of the line lay in the fact that I wasn’t expecting powerful turns of phrase. The point remains that the farmer’s response, his first-person experience of what would have been flattened into a pitiable, “tragic” news event by every major media and Internet outlet (and then snarked upon or mourned by online responders “my thoughts are with you”), his line was both elegiac and funny in the same breath. Part of why I had to read the line a dozen times was because it was not a tone my Internet-saturated brain immediately recognized as a viable response to this kind of tragedy. Where was the pity? Where was the overt, melodramatic sadness?

Nowhere. Instead, the farmer seems to be chuckling at his own misfortunes.

But it’s not a snarky chuckle. It’s not a chuckle that makes you laugh at him or at anyone. It’s a joke that we know is full of real loss and pain, but from the lips of a man who seems to have incorporated real loss and pain into the fabric of his existence—to the point that they are almost indistinguishable from other emotions, like humor. He’s saying, in a way, “Don’t feel sorry for me. I know what happened better than anyone. I know it’s an event that I’ll probably never live a day without thinking about. And to show you that I know this and that I don't care for your pity, I’m going to make you laugh and show you how it even messed with my ability to use language in the regular, boring way.”

And so his house ended up five miles away from where it started.

Deep events have a deep effect on language. We know that trauma can often cause a normally verbal person to fall mute or to start speaking gibberish or to use a forgotten first language. I believe this is part of the power of good writing or why good writing, surprising swerves of phrasing, upended cliches, often hit us with the force of real life. By means of imagination, writers can access this language at depths equal to or greater than others. That is a writer’s value, his charge, his power.

The events we “experience” on the Internet—and we can experience more catastrophes and traumas per minute than maybe any civilization before us could have dreamed—this onslaught of experience isn’t overwhelming us, as many believe. Quite the opposite. I think we’re not experiencing these events at all. And the proof is in our language: our Internet experiences are not having any noticeable effect (or any beneficial one) on the way we use words. It leads me to believe that when we’re “experiencing” life and the news and the world via the Internet, we’re not really experiencing anything but the Internet.

Our language isn't registering these catastrophes the way real people do. Our language is only experiencing the Internet. Simply put, our language is not keeping pace with our technology. There is a whole new realm of emotion, inferior to real emotion, that we might call E-Motion. It’s a 1s and 0s reduction, I think, of actual human feelings. An approximate mix of imagination and empathy which dwells in the quasi-real space, usually devoted to art and religion, that the Internet has now officially colonized.

This form of emoting (“Hurricane Rita. Steve Jobs. Gaddhafi. Damn…”) has already become a cliché, but it is a cliché specific to the Internet. It’s a cliché that only works if you understand the Internet as a place where words are used in a way that is emotionless and informative (CNN) or emotionless and cynical (Gawker). These E-Motions operate on a simple equation: an abundance of language (i.e. info) = a lack emotion; but a jarring lack of language (e.g. Apple’s spartan tribute page to Steve Jobs) = real emotion. The Internet has taught its writers the lesson that the less you use language, the more E-Motion your writing will have: “Steve Jobs. 1951-2011.”

Apple. Damn.

The Internet is an epic abstract work, our contemporary scripture, with no physical embodiment and no God-like single author, a text written and added to every moment by the Yahweh-like force of millions of humans around the world, the most persuasive and powerful and mythic narrative humanity has yet to create.

I don’t really think the Internet is our modern day bible, our New New Testament. What I have come to believe is that the Internet is the biggest novel ever written in response to the question: “What is reality?”

The Internet’s answer has, for the past couple decades, only grown louder and more strident and authoritarian: “I am reality.”

The Internet, if it were a novel, would be a demanding and entertaining one, not only because of its length, but because it is, like so many demanding and great works of literature, antagonistic to other forms of art. Were I to blurb the Internet like the gargantuan novel that it is, I might say that it is “a fiercely almost mind-alteringly self-referential novel, which uses language in a way that makes banal words like ‘poke’ and ‘like’ and ‘friend’ seem new and exciting. But the creators of this work often get too carried away with their own dull language and believe that their work is deeper and more real than it actually is, deeper and realer than life itself.”

Think back to the first time that you heard someone use “friend” and “like,” these Zuckerverbs, to describe Facebook-specific behavior. “That bartender tried to friend me.” I know it’s hard but think back to what you felt that first confusing moment you heard it, digested its ridiculousness. “Don’t you mean the guy behind the bar was being nice to you by chatting with you and buying you drinks? Why not just say that? And don’t you mean he befriended you? If so, that’s still a weird way of describing what happened to you last night.”

There was a subversive thrill to the deviously simple, almost retarded diction: friend (v.). The reason this was a new and exciting way of using language was that its simplicity alluded to a new-seeming way of making human connections on the Internet, a new experience. What we really meant was “The bartender I met in real life went on his computer at some point after we met and opened Facebook, a sophisticated Internet-based socializing software, and logged into his “profile,” which is a compilation of information and media about himself, and sent an automated request via the Internet to link his Facebook profile with my existing Facebook online website, and I found this automated request in my inbox early the next morning at which point I realized said bartender from previous night was trying to connect with me based on our real-life interactions.”

Why “friending” someone in this context makes sense and feels new and subversive is because the person using it has not only been following the novel we call the Internet, but also has an ongoing investment in the new trends and subplots generated by the Internet. A trend (and I think of Facebook as one of the Internet’s most persuasive subplots) is nothing but a compelling narrative writ large on a given society, a cultural subplot with a beginning-middle-end just like all narratives. The Internet, in this way, is a subplot machine. It survives and sustains itself by producing and keeping people eager for the next subplot, the next installment, the next trend, the next blog post. And nowhere is this more apparent than in regards to the Internet’s almost antagonistic relationship with good writing and powerful language.

The Internet is turning language into a “feature” of reality, branding words in a way that is meant to make us believe these are the most important and perhaps even the final way that these words will ever be used. Final—at least for now. Think of “bookmark” and “tab” and even the word “language” or all the delicious ambiguities implied in: “I went around the house with my laptop opening and closing windows.” The Internet would like you to believe you will never use “friend” to describe anything but this very specific process of linking one Facebook profile to another Facebook profile. The Internet will never champion alternate uses of this word to describe, say, a poet’s idea of death (“a beautiful friend/who remembers”). It’s the same way technology companies offer the most advanced features on a phone, and then next year an even more advanced version of that phone appears: but it still has the same name and might even be called, The Most Advanced Phone Ever, Version 4s.

All that the new number or letter at the end of the new phone means is: “to be continued.”

And it is this “to be cont.” feeling about the Internet which makes me dubious about its true value for writers. At the level of language, that’s partly why I’m not convinced the Internet is really changing "Life As We Know It" all that much. The English language hasn’t deeply changed; if anything, it’s been colonized by new types of vampires who want to make regular words like “friend” into much smaller, less meaningful words than they’ve ever been. Thanks to the Internet, language has been crammed and re-appropriated into a banal kind of speak, a circular closed-circuit English.

Yes, a tweet is a new form of micropublishing on an online platform called Twitter, but it’s also something that birds have been doing for millions of years, are still doing, and will do long after buzzards have had their way with the founders of Twitter. So when you stick a national flag and copyright symbol in the word “tweet” to refer to something done on Twitter, you’ve flattened the word so that it only means one new very specific thing and excludes all else. Of course, it’s ridiculous for me to argue that I can’t use the word “tweet” without it somehow alluding to Twitter, but if I did use it just to refer to, say, the sound I hear outside my window, anyone reading it on an iPad or a computer would have a moment where the true meaning of the word was momentarily eclipsed by the image of a stylized curvilinear blue bird and a mess of @ symbols and RTs.

Basically I think the Internet has been fighting a battle with reality that it can’t win. It is trying to convince everyone who believes in it that reality, or what we call “reality,” is actually just the boring places where there is no Internet. "Reality" is a place where tweeting is the sound a bird makes, a place where there are no bars listed on Foursquare, and no bars on your iPhone. A place where houses end up five miles from where they started.

But what the Internet and all the writers who have bought into its deeply persuasive fiction don’t seem to understand, or at least what they don’t express enough online, is that “reality” is not a boring place without a modem, reality includes the Internet. Reality gave birth to the Internet, and reality will exist long after the Internet. Reality is not only the boring places without a signal; it is the idea of a signal and the word signal itself; it is birds tweeting and comedians using Twitter; it is the cleaning crew who vacuum the floors of Mark Zuckerberg’s office, and it is the website Facebook.com; it is also a farm in the Gulf Coast where a man lost his farmhouse and spoke of it with a deep sense of humor and pathos and dignity that you rarely read online; it is this quiet, bird-bothered artists’ residency in the Hudson Valley where I should be working on finishing my novel, but have instead spent the morning and afternoon writing about why the Internet corrupts language and getting carried away with myself.

Carried away like that farmer’s house during Hurricane Rita, which ended up miles from where it started.

My Trip to Dia Beacon: A cARToon

2011-09-19T13:05:00.001-04:00

Workshopping the King Memorial Inscription

2011-09-12T11:34:00.003-04:00

Poet and memoirist Maya Angelou made headlines a couple weeks ago for her understandable disappointment at the inscription on the back of the new Martin Luther King, Jr., Memorial in DC, for which Angelou was one of the consultants. The inscription in question, located on the back of the recently unveiled statue, reads "I was a drum major for justice, peace and righteousness." The original lines of King's sermon, however, offer a much different pronouncement, rich with self-awareness and nuances of tone, rhythm, and meaning that the inscription loses: "If you want to say that I was a drum major, say that I was a drum major for justice. Say that I was a drum major for peace. I was a drum major for righteousness. And all of the other shallow things will not matter."

Leaving out the "if" in the inscription, Angelou contests, makes King look like an "arrogant twit" and "an egotist." "He was," she says, "anything but that." While Angelou is right about the gross butchering that the inscription makes of the original, a radical misreading of King's intended meaning, sounding more like the handiwork of a drugged sign language interpreter racing to make due, Angelou is, however, wrong about what's wrong with it. It's not the conditional clause that's the issue. The inscription's real problem, to use a parlance familiar to anyone who has ever taken a creative writing class, is point of view.

The POV problem interestingly enough is embedded in the lines of King’s sermon. In the original, delivered in Feb. 1968 to congregants of Atlanta's Ebenezer Baptist Church, Dr. King gives a bravura sermon on the larger theme of what he calls, not without a sense of humor and an acute sense of his audience, "The Drum Major Instinct." For the climax of the sermon, King chose the conceit of his own funeral, introducing it this way: "[E]very now and then I think about my own death and I think about my own funeral…And every now and then I ask myself, 'What is it that I would want said?'"

What follows thereafter is a list of things King would like said about him at this funeral, words he'd like to be remembered by, crescendoing with the lines about "peace" and "righteousness" which have been commandeered for the inscription. But in the lines directly preceding them, he begins the funeral scene referring to himself in the 3rd person: "I'd like somebody to mention [at my funeral] that Martin Luther King, Jr., tried to give his life serving others." It’s a death-defying tightrope walk between humility and hubris, but after one more similar line in which King toggles between first person ("I'd like for somebody to say...") and third ("that Martin Luther King, Jr. tried..."), he switches, inscrutably, to first person: "I want you to say that I tried..."

Why he switches to the first person while in the funeral scene is unclear, but one educated guess might be that in the moment, in the heat of oration, he trusted his prodigious rhetorical instincts, trusted that his audience understood the scene he had set up for them, that he didn’t need to keep his syntax parallel, that he didn’t have to be a slave to literalism, to the rules of syntax his very scene had set out. Perhaps there was something that struck King as a bit grandiose or too morbid about saying his full name, first middle last suffix, that way. Whatever the case, Dr. King, dropped the third person, and switched to a more immediate first.

In short, King was not saying that he would say these things about himself at his own funeral. That would be impossible. In his hypothetical funeral scene, he wanted us, his congregation, to say them. And the whole problem with the inscription is encapsulated in that first word, indeed the first letter: "I." Were we to take King’s fictional scene literally, we should be the eulogizers, not him. We are the ones who should write in stone: “He was a drum major for justice, peace and righteousness.” This might be the simple fix staring us in the face; it might only involve chiseling one letter and adding another.

While I agree with Angelou that the inscription grossly mischaracterizes King and his teachings, I disagree with her claim that he was "anything but" an egotist. It's not as simple as that. If anything, "The Drum Major Instinct" sermon was a moving and powerful admission of just how like us King really was, how susceptible he was to his worst instincts, to egotism and self-eulogizing, to his own drum majoring.

The most important thing to note is that, throughout the sermon, King doesn't exempt himself from the drum major instinct. "We all want to be important, to surpass others, to achieve distinction, to lead the parade." He was as prone to it as us: this was the real message, and his somewhat tongue-in-cheek self-eulogy, if it is anything, was a knowing embrace of that. His egotism lived alongside his humility. In the same breath that he asked his congregants not to mention his awards and accolades, he mentioned his own Nobel Prize. He tells his would-be eulogizers to say that he "tried to be right on the war question," leaving room for the notion that, yes, he could be wrong. Dr. King wants us, in other words, to remember him not for his achievements, but for his efforts.

Writing a script to be recited at your own funeral would have to rank very high on the list of acts of egotism. Why it doesn't come across as egotistical is a testament to King's skills as a rhetorician and his respect for the power of language. The sermon, like much of King's work, is by turns wise and self-deprecating, erudite and accessible, a nimble mingling of academic speak ("psychoanalysis") and lay references ("Cadillacs and Chryslers"), culminating, as so many of his greatest speeches, on a striking, visceral image driven home by means of a forceful, pounding parallel syntax.

Of course he knew that no one would recite these lines at his funeral, much less could he have imagined that they would be carved into a memorial in our nation's capital. Imagine someone taking the podium and saying: "Well, what can I say about Dr. King? I guess he tried to help people and tried to feed the hungry." We are not to take him so literally, and it is the literalism — the misunderstood literalism — which is at the heart of what's wrong with both the inscription and Angelou's well-meant, but still inaccurate complaint against it.

If only the committee had understood King's self-eulogy, a hypothetical, fictional vignette he used as a means of highlighting his message of effort over achievement, service over monuments, they might have understood why it is necessary to keep the third person point of view intact. If it were up to me, I'd have chosen another line from the Drum Major sermon for the memorial, one whose mix of hubris and humility still resonates with bitter irony against King's courageous, effortful life and his tragic end: "I'd like for somebody to say that day that Martin Luther King, Jr., tried to love somebody."

Five Years Later

2011-08-27T15:09:00.012-04:00

Five years after the most devastating attacks ever carried out on American soil, an even more significant world-historical event took place in a quiet studio apartment in Harlem: on September 11, 2006, I started this blog.

At the time, I felt as though it was my civic duty, my responsibility to respond to the heinous acts carried out against our people, my way of saying you won't keep us —

Why did I wait five years? That's a good question. Before I answer, take a moment to look at this highly adorable picture of my brother holding me up at gunpoint when we were wee children. Remember, I was a child once. We all were. So, wait, what were you asking again? You've forgotten? Oh, well, do you mind if I continue saying what I was saying. Cool.

It was my duty, as a 9/11 survivor, to post entries to a blog once a fortnight about my sleep patterns and getting stoned and Lil Wayne lyrics. I would not be defeated by the evildoers. But, if I want to, I will blog about being defeated. Though not by you, evildoers. You won't be the defeaters. Some other governmental entity or girlfriend or institutional racism will be the defeater, and I will prevail by blogging about them.

And so that is the humble reason why I decided to be a true hero and start a blog five years ago and, since then, I believe I have held true to my founding vision of: "tak[ing] a couple minutes out of a day to spit [the Internet] back up." Could Gandhi or King or Orwell have said that better? Maybe. Probably not, because they didn't have the Internet.

Next month, to commemorate the five year anniversary of September 11th, 2006 (a.k.a. the real September 11th), I'll be blogging once every two weeks or so, maybe less, about whatever it is I feel like.

Politics, Art, & the Actual World

2011-07-28T10:54:00.011-04:00

I'm not an angry person. I can't remember the last time I've lost my temper or flown into a blind rage at something that someone has done or said to me. I'm thankful for this. To be honest, I can't think of a moment in my life where flying into a blind rage would have been an effective measure. I've lost my cool plenty of times, been frustrated and moody in a more or less manageable way (e.g boss hatred), but I've never had a Desperate Housewives reality TV bleep-fest flinging of furniture and tapestries meltdown. Most of my friends, also, are of the calmer sort. We take walks, have dinner, drinks. We discuss.

The friend I was having dinner with last night, who happens to be one of the handful of people who remembers that I keep this blog (and who will likely comment on this post when I'm done with it), is an outspoken free marketeer: the poor are lazy, social programs keep them that way, and the bottom line is the only truth. That might sound like a gross reduction, but I'm almost certain he'd agree that I'm not misrepresenting him here.

Anyway, what he thinks about the world, or what I think he thinks about the world--and who is right or wrong--is not the point of this post, and frankly it's posts like that that are part of the problem with the way folks in my generation think and talk about politics. Whether you're a socialist or a libertarian, discussions along these lines all too often fall into lazy, cliched, worn-out ways of thinking. In fact, they feel less like rational, causal "thinking" than like a kind of incoherent worldview more akin to religious belief. This goes for both liberals and conservatives, and what might have started out as a discussion with a friend over dinner could end up an irate argument with an enemy.

Why this did not happen last night with my friend, I think, is because every moment in our upbeat, far-ranging discussion where I felt either of us falling into certain worn-out, knee-jerk responses (whether I thought they were based in truth or not) I immediately tried to approach the subject in a different way, a way that felt fresh, vital, or like something I had never quite heard. It's not an easy thing to do. It involves occasional pensive jags of silence. So, for example, when the subject of immigration came up last night, and my friend spoke of the leeching hordes of immigrants crashing the public systems in Europe, rather than reply with the cliched (though maybe partly factual) idea that their countries would be so fucked up and they wouldn't need to flee were it not for international trade and debt relief policies instated by, for example, the IMF/World Bank, I asked him what he thought about the Dutch and German and Chinese companies immigrating to Africa to start leeching corporations that suck the resources out of those countries. He thought about this for a while and qualified his argument by saying, with a regrettable shrug that kind of read like even he didn't fully believe what was about to come out of his mouth that, in essence, a European business immigrating to Africa was different because that was a strong country taking over a weaker country. In other words, my friend was saying that until countries like, say, Ethiopia, get their shit together, then a European company has every right to deplete that weaker country's resources. After an hour of wading through a tangle of euphemisms and unhelpful, tired free market dogma, we had finally gotten to the clear, specific, perfectly legitimate, though perhaps terrifying essence of my friend's worldview: every man for himself (unless overpowered), every country for itself (unless overpowered).

My guess is that this is not what my friend actually believes, but that the idea of the world--at least of a moment--became an abstraction to him. It became a debate, the nature of which had verged perhaps into territory he wasn't accustomed to thinking about and, actually, neither was I. Most of us don't make it a habit of surrounding ourselves with people we disagree with, people who don't share our political notions. We do this, I think, mainly to avoid messy, challenging, slightly uncomfortable conversations like the one I was having with my friend.

It is hard to avoid speaking euphemistically about the way we see the world, to not think in binaries of good and evil, lazy and hard-working, strong and weak, right and left, but to see it the way an artist sees it: concretely, specifically, idiosyncratically, interwoven in glorious complexity. It is hard work trying to see the world--especially the world of politics and economics--the way an artist would see it. Seeing the world in these kind of binaries (corporations bad/good, government bad/good), is lazy. Surrounding ourselves with like-minded people who confirm our understand of the world is lazy. And so whatever it was that my friend and I were trying to accomplish, I did feel on a certain level that we were trying to fight our own laziness. And so I tried to approach the conversation the way I would a piece of writing: whenever I felt my friend or myself falling into a tired, cliched pattern of thought, I revised the thought, tried a new approach.

The goal, as I see it, is to come away from such a discussion with a core set of values that you and your friend can both peacefully agree on, not only as a way to confirm the intrinsic, apolitical bond of friendship, but also so that you may both see where--starting with a shared core set of values about human responsibility, agency, and potential--your differences begin. This, I believe, is the point at which most discussions end, they blink right before the two parties are able to understand where their real disagreements begin. But a part of me feels like it's where a very interesting discussion could begin...

To use an analogy, it's like two people in two separate rooms who are trapped outside of a larger, airier room called AGREEMENT. There are a lot of doors into the room, but most of them are locked. You try one door; it doesn't work. In fact, all of them are locked. Rather than keep trying the same doors again and again. Hey, you say, what about this window? So you go to the window. You make it out the window and onto the fire escape, but it's too far to reach and open the window, so you give up on that and try taking the elevator to the roof and rappelling down. You reach the window, and you can see inside this glorious AGREEMENT room, so you take a big swing and crash shoulder first, bloody and bruised, but finally, at last, through the window.

But you're alone in the room. Your friend wasn't even trying to join you there. He's moved to another part of the building with an even more difficult to access room in between you. After a while, you either give up, or you realize...Hey, wait a minute. Why don't I just walk outside? We don't have to stay in this old stupid building. Let's walk clear of that place with the big rusting sign "LIBERAL-CONSERVATIVE POLITICAL AGREEMENT." Let's go somewhere without any fucking signs whatsoever. Let's just talk like two human beings who want some distance from the musty, dingy old ghettos of lazy thinking and dogma that our immediate political and religious forebears have handed down to us.

And even if my friend doesn't want to join me outside on the lawn for a tightrope dance about the world we live in, if my friend doesn't want to work hard to develop a new lexicon for speaking and thinking and tightrope-dancing about the country that we both inhabit and both love and both must share, if he wants to stay stuck in his same cramped room, either out of fear or laziness or the threat of seeming like he has "lost" the debate (though it was never a thing to be won or lost in the first place), if he wants to let the needle skip and skip over the rutted LP of his dogma, then I'll just stay out here waiting for him. And if sitting out here after all those attempts to join him in the AGREEMENT room looks like laziness or evasiveness, then call me the laziest most evasive motherfucker on the planet.

While I was sitting there with my friend, trying every now and then to catch glimpses of the soccer game on the screens over the bar, I couldn't help but think of the debt ceiling standoff in Congress. The eyes of the world are on America again, but this time there aren't any fundamentalist-commandeered airplanes crashing into buildings. It's just a bunch of paperwork. A bunch of words written by a bunch of people whose job it is, supposedly, to keep the best interests of our people--all our people--in mind.

For better or worse, I'm an American who believes in America, but I was raised by parents and surrounded by family who weren't American, who had been scattered from their beloved countries of origin, sometimes under duress, by great political upheavals. What I remember hearing from my parents and their peers about Ethiopian politics is the extent to which it had become an anarchic, power-crazed, your-tribe-vs.-my-tribe playground ruled by the biggest bullies and governed by the venal henchman and friends of those bullies. There was no feeling of shared national pride in, say, the traumatic war and partitioning of Eritrea. Instead, there was your Ethiopia, and my Ethiopia. Your tribe, and my tribe. From my perspective, as someone who saw Ethiopia as a proud, homogenous nation of black people who had never suffered under colonization, who all shared a beautiful, unique common language (Amharic), it was incomprehensible to me how petty internal tribal politics could get so bone-deep, so life-or-death, so me-vs-you, so reduced, so spiteful, so bitter, so mean-spirited among such a proud nation with such a rich history. One could argue that it was all the tribal nose-cutting for face-spiting that lead to Ethiopia's deterioration after the Revolution. It was such a rampant part of political life that it became a kind of joke or story that my parents used to tell, a cautionary tale, which goes: "God said to a poor Ethiopian that He would grant him any wish the poor man desired in life but whatever it was, God would grant it also to the man's neighbor two-fold. So the poor man thought it over, and finally replied, 'Poke one of my eyes out.'"

I'd always been told that this was a very Ethiopian sentiment, the sentiment of a people who'd somehow let politics get too bound up in their emotional lives, who'd lost perspective of what was important, who'd rather see their neighbors fail than see both of them gain something (even if your something was half the other guy's). But with the world still holding its breath over the debt ceiling standoff in Congress, the eye-poke theory of leadership seems to have become a sentiment of the fundamentalist right wing of America as well. So, when we talk about anger, or the kind of emotion that would compel a politician to throw a wrench into the gears of government, bring it to a halt, put the national economy in jeopardy, poke the eyes of many constituents, either this politician has a tribal power-hunger that reaches deep into his soul, or (probably the more logical theory) he has never experienced real hunger.

That might sound ridiculous at first, but I think, on a certain level, what we're seeing on Capitol Hill might be the result of a couple generations of politicians who do not understand war or political turmoil or actual hardship, who do not understand poverty and do not want to understand it, who do not want to understand that most of our world struggles for to feed itself, who do not know what it means to go hungry, who put emotions and power and careerist ambitions and the petty, conceptual concerns of upper-class American life over the basics: food, water, education, etc. They don't know that there's a difference between filling a basic need and filling their reelection coffers. Power has become their only real need, and perhaps they believe it staves off death with the same efficacy as food and water. They don't know there's a difference between going hungry and losing a debate. They don't know there's a difference between politics and real human life on this planet. They've perhaps never seen other forms of human life on this planet, except via the warped peephole of the news. They don't realize that we do not live in an abstract battle of wills; we live in a real world that we must share with our neighbors, and who cares if you make the deal with God that gives your neighbor twice the cattle as you. At least you won't go hungry tomorrow, and maybe with both eyes intact, your neighbor will be able to see when you're running low on milk.

This recognition that there is a real and complex world, full of people who go hungry and get sick and old and eventually die, and that this world will continue long after our tired, worn-out political debates and standoffs have collapsed, might be the most essential distinction between the artist and the political leader: the artist makes art as a form of self-aware commentary on the presence of an actual world beyond her own art, her art knows it is a sad, inadequate replica of the actual world, but she makes it anyway--both to sublimate and contain the experience of life. Shakespeare does not kill his uncle; his fictional creation, Hamlet, does.

But the political leader who creates policies and laws out of emotion, who plays on the anxieties and insecurities of his audience for personal gain--he becomes Idi Amin Dada, or he becomes Adolf the stifled painter. He succumbs to tribal jealousies, illogic, and fear. He asks God to poke his own eye out. His clear-eyed vision of a complex real world beyond his line of work is overlaid with a poorly drawn grayscale canvas of blacks and whites, Hutus and Tutsis, Ethiopians and Eritreans, liberals and conservatives. The space in the heart where the redemptive emotional urgency of art should dwell, for these fundamentalist leaders, has been replaced by the kind of worldview that seeks to fill the emotional, existential void left by the absence of art or religion, the kind that reaches down into where your sense of self begins, in other words the kind of politics that reaches too far down into the guts and plays in a deep, dangerous, interior theater that only Kafka or Picasso or early Eddie Murphy should play, the theater that premieres plays like "Loneliness," "Oblivion," "Sex," and "Death."

As an American and a student of American history and a kind of admirer of our highly rational, dispassionate, yet still tough-as-nails founding fathers--I thought America was immune to this spiritual, soul-deep political extremism--the kind that we see commandeering the corporate-backed leaders of the political far-right. I thought, as bad as the partisan politics got under Clinton and Bush, that I would never see such a thing play out under the Romanesque arches of Capitol Hill, a Kafkaesque standoff that I thought was--forgive me, dear Ethiopia and countries like you--confined to backwards, dystopian, third-world governments.

Sad to say, but if my resorting to this kind of slightly self-hating scare tactic--i.e. an African-American like me comparing a deadlocked American leadership system to a dystopian African government--if even this won't work to shake the deep-pocketed, fundamentalist right from its partisan stupor, perhaps nothing will.

Perhaps it's because they're hoping we'll think that the dystopia is happening on our Halfrican president's watch, perhaps they're hoping we'll not be paying close attention to who started the fire, hoping we'll overlook their stubbornness and draconian demands, hoping we won't read the fine print, hoping the specifics of the debt ceiling discussion will prove too labyrinthine and complex for all but the most wonky among us (and who listens to wonks anyway, right?), perhaps they're hoping, in other words, that we will be what they accuse the leeching poor black, brown and white people in our country of being: lazy. With 2012 just around the corner, they are betting on our laziness, and perhaps hedging a side-bet on our historically bad memories.

I'm not an angry person, but I do have anger. It's a kind of looser, more diffuse, perhaps more conceptual kind of anger, and I feel it when I think about peers of mine--sharp, energetic, self-aware people like the friend I had dinner with last night and whom I parted ways with with a loving fist-bump--who believe agreement means defeat, complexity means weakness, and might means right.

Maybe it's because I'm an artist that I believe there is an art to talking about the world and dealing with other human beings, whether via politics or business or love or friendship, for like art, these other areas also thrive on creativity, on finding new ways of dealing with old problems, of addressing the complex nature of human need.

But if the needle on the record keeps skipping, if we don't create art that addresses this needle-skippage, if our leaders don't understand the power of language and art in this age of radical transparency and reality curation, if we don't find ways of seeing our complex world in a new way that pays homage to all its glorious, wondrous, electric, ever-shifting complexity, if we keep singing the same tired old political-tribe war chants, we're all gonna lose our minds, and not really because we're angry--though that will be there too--but because have you ever been in a restaurant and tried to eat dinner with a friend and the CD starts skipping on the speakers overhead--and you almost can't do anything with yourself, can't take another bite, can't talk to each other as human beings and want to poke both of your own eyes out until they change the fucking disc, or just turn the noise off completely so we can hear ourselves think.

My Head Right

2011-07-06T16:16:00.006-04:00

The heat is starting to bare its teeth in the city. Even a centimeter of afro makes a difference, so earlier today I went to the Haitian barbershop off Flatbush, between the Bergen and Grand Army Plaza stops, to get my head right.

The shop has three ancient barber chairs, a stack of boring magazines, pictures of Obama and Aristide and Mandela and Dr. King and Ronaldo on the walls. There's a big window facing the street. When I walked in, there were two barbers there, the most I've ever seen.

The phone rang once while I was getting my hair cut, an actual wall-mounted land line with an actual cord that made an un-ironic bbrrrriiing.... bbrrrriiing....etc.

No one picked it up.

The barbers (and most of the customers) are all like early retirement age. There's a laid-back, retirement vibe about the place that borders on dourness. A short, bald man in jean shorts came in and took a seat in one of the plastic, three-slotted school chairs for customers. My eyeglasses were folded on the counter, so his face came to me as a light brown smear against the wall. Him and the other barber sitting in his barber chair barely uttered a word to each other, just stared out into the bright, hot street, watching the people pass on the sidewalk. No hurry to think of something to talk about.

That's when I got to wondering about the earthquake.

I wondered if maybe they'd lost people close to them. Or maybe they didn't lose anyone directly, but just carried the burden of the disaster around in their guts, in a kind of no-need-to-acknowledge-it-because-we're-all-thinking-about-it way. I wondered if, a couple years back, conversation in the barbershop was more lively, hopeful, buoyant, smattered with laughter.

But then I thought that I was being silly. What a narrow, lazy, American way of reading news headlines into the blurry faces of strangers, trying to peer into someone's heart using an old, rolled-up copy of the New York Times.

It's this kind of desire to see into people's minds and hearts--and the accompanying feelings of guilt and futility at ever being able to actually do this--that leads me inevitably, ineluctably towards writing fiction. Also, I thought of a nice line: "My hair fell right off the bone."

Sitting there, the electric clippers buzzing and bumping against my skull, I felt I was 3/4 of the way towards a mournful, crisp New Yorker-style "Talk of the Town," or, if the men would not agree to being interviewed (probably the case), at least I would be assured a slot in The Best American Short Stories 2012, Selected by Edwidge Danticat, who would invite me to Haiti with her and her family the next time they were going.

He carefully gathered the black apron off of me. Sweat was pooling in my armpits.

"Nineteen," he said. I raised my eyebrows: suspicion. He only charged me fifteen dollars last time. My barber had a long face with deep lines carved on either side of his mouth. Not a bad-looking older gentleman at all. He had visored my eyes with his hand right before spraying me with the alcohol. I had really appreciated that. So I reached for my wallet, hairline and temples still burning and emptied my wallet.

I snatched up my bag from one of the little plastic chairs where I'd left it. For some reason, I thanked the other barber and his friend, both still staring out the window. To the man who'd cut my hair I mumbled, "Have a good one." Each gave a quiet little nod, which might have been their way of saying, "How come we never see you at church?" or "Good luck with the heat!" or "Yes, it's true, life has felt strange since the earthquake," or "Nice haircut, young man," or "Please move, you're blocking our view."

Updates: Today Is Monday. I'm Better Than You.

2011-06-27T21:20:00.008-04:00

Suppose you were sitting in your boxers in an apartment trying to write something in an archaic internet format. Suppose you felt an itch at your ankle. Suppose you just did the dishes after a meal of fine dining at the Whatever's In the Fridge Brasserie. Suppose all of this. Now dispose of it in your brain heap. Because I'm better than you.

I am actually standing in boxer briefs at a high kitchen island in a renovated pre-war, post-antebellum, pre-prandial, duplex reverse suplex nestled in the gated commuter community of Prospect Morning Dawn Crescent Balsamic Twilight Heights Valley Crepuscular Hill, a gorgeous mixed-use residential, commercial, evangelical, umbilical community located in the heart of the most coolest dude city place every yah! I'm still better than you.

I saw Reggie Watts perform in Red Hook park on Friday. I'm better than you.

I'm halfway done with Infinite Jest. I'm better than you.

I'm not on Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, Foursquare, Chowhound. I blog. I'm the only person still seriously blogging in America. I'm the only person who only has a blog. It's all I can afford. It's a recession, people! It's the economy, stupid! It's the judicial branch, numbnuts! It's the military, Honore de Ballsack!

I'm better than you. My diction is better than yours, even if every piece of masking tape I've ever written into a work of fiction has been "ragged." That modifier is still better than you.

There is loud, kind-of-pleasant, brassy Spanish music playing somewhere on the street right now, making me feel like I'm in a musical about someone who has just moved to New York City. I am better than loud, pleasant boleros. I am better than music. I am better than you.

Like one guy I saw in the Grand Army Plaza library earlier today, I have an iPhone 4, an iPad 2, a Macintosh Book of Professional Grade, two iBalls, matching iBrows, an iFace, an iThink (iAm sold separately), and a yellow Sony Sports Discman with 30 second shock resistance. All of these electronics equipments ares betters thans yous.

TSS: 0

RAPE!!! (A Cartoon Regarding Political Matters)

2011-05-25T10:11:00.007-04:00

The IMF Chief stands for the IMF. The African Maid stands for Africa. The arrows stand for Neocolonialism in the form of multinational corporations. The frowning faces on both stand for the twilit desolation of the soul in the age of computers and blogs. The IMF Chief's possession of fingers, which are curled around the African Maid's arm, stands for advertising. The fact that the African Maid has "feet" and not the IMF Chief stands for global disparities in wealth wherein the poor must work on their feet all day. The triangle around the African Maid's body stands for the oppression of women by the patriarchal subject of geometry in all parts of the developed and developing world. The comparatively large size of the African Maid's head stands for the attraction that the deviant IMF Chief has towards big-headed women.

This is my first political cartoon.

My Novel Polemik: Composed of Sentences, Punctuation, and Shit: Get At Me

2011-05-20T16:19:00.002-04:00

I seen a lot of people posting these things on these blogs and in these magazines about the American novel, and I figured if a bunch of motherfuckers are doing something, there's gotta be some money in it. So, I'm gonna start with my first essay about the health of the novel and American literature, drum up some V.C. (that's venture capital for all you dumbasses), and keep writing essays about the novel until I'm fucking wealthy. I got a list of targets. I got beef with all of them, or you know partial beef. Beef Lettuce and Tomato:

First up: Jonathan Franzen. I see you homey. I heard what you said about that Status and that Contract, man. Back in '02. I know a bitch you used to fuck with. She said you go both ways. Said you like to have the Status and the Contract. What's up, man? Do you fuck with that faggot Gaddis or don't you? Can't have it both ways, my nigga.

Now, I'm not a novelist. I haven't even written one novel, let alone a whole bunch of novels to warrant motherfuckers calling me a novelist. So I know some of y'all is like, then what kind of authority do you have to be polemicking, my nigga.

But I would just say to you, my nigga, by way of analogy: How is Marv Albert, that short unathletic cross-dressing motherfucker, able to comment-hate on the NBA? How come he can do a better job than Charles Barkley or Bill Walton, who played the damn game until they couldn't walk straight? I think niggas like Franzen and Ben Marcus, they walking like Gnarls Barkley cause they been novelizing too much. They can't peep the game with any kind of objectivity, because at the end of the day, they just trying to style on niggaz. I'm not saying Marv Albert's "better" at basketball. Everyone knows he can't ball. Same way I can't write a novel, but you know the motherfucker just sees the game better, more objectively, no dog in the fight. Unless that motherfucker's got money on the Bulls or something. Which I've had my suspicions about. "Jordan." Why he says it like that: "Jordan." All italicized and shit. Anyway, that's my analogy. Get at me.

Now, back to this polemic: I want to talk about Ulysses. I read that shit. That bitch Molly is a freak. Bloom got a little dick. But Bloom = Joyce. Meaning he had to wait 700 some odd pages to tell y'all he had a little dick because he was embarrassed. Because personally I wouldn't want to read no 800 page novel by some dude with a little dick. Blazes Boylan. That's the nigga with the big dick that Molly likes. I want to read a novel about that player ass nigga, Blazes. Call it Blaze. About a dude with a big dick who just be fucking bitches with a rose in his mouth. Straight up. Give me a thousand pages of that. That's what I took away from Ulysses, that the book had to be that long and full of different shit because Bloom's dick was little. It's like how motherfuckers who aren't packing gotta drive big Hummers to compensate. James Joyce my nigga though.

So, now that I've handled Ulysses and I've proved that I can talk about that shit, I can prove my point about the novel, and you can believe that whatever I say next is gonna be from the heart, objective, and unbiased:

D. Wallace can eat a bag of big Blazes Boylan fat dicks! That mothefucker stole all my ideas. Including suicide. That was supposed to be my shit. I want my money, you lonely ass mothefucker.

Let's see I handled Joyce, Franzen, Wallace. Who's left?

Oh, how could I fucking forget...

Zoom in on me, America, zoom in...

N + 1. Y'all didn't think I was gonna go there. Y'all thought I wasn't gonna stoop to that level. Think again, you quadratic equation ass mothefuckers. Kunkel, you better watch your fucking mouth, man. Talking all reckless on the blogs, posting comments and shit with your cynical ass. You always dropping mad names, B. Unsolicited names, B. What's with all the fucking names? When are your well-crafted, defensive battle raps gonna end. This nigga think he a novelist. Nigga only wrote one novel, set the motherfucker in New York, and I wasn't even in it. Not one little cameo. What happened to the Contract Franzen was talking about? What happened to the Contract? And while we're at it: what does it equal? Yeah, motherfucker, I'm talking to you, what does N + fucking 1 equal? Why you got me doing math in a literary polemic? Get the fuck out of here. I'm through thrashing these little ass niggas.

Yo, America. Straight up. That's just my first polemic about your novels. My next one is gonna drop soon as I sign this Status Contract with my nigga Franzen. Get at me.

Next up:

Oh, Zaaaaaaaaaaaaadie. I see you, sweetheart.

High Post #158.359.ZA:-): Beheaded Necklace

2011-04-15T01:30:00.004-04:00

What up, dogs! What up, Internet? How's life? I misread this headline on HuffPo earlier today that said "Never Judge a Man By His Beaded Necklace." I read it as "Beheaded Necklace." What's a beheaded necklace? I imagined like a little shrunken head on a length of hemp or something. Some kind of hipsy-dipsy nostalgia piece of the 70s. Like the slap bracelet was for the 90s. Something you only know if you're of a certain age, you feel me?

But then I got to thinking: maybe a beheaded necklace is like the necklace off of a beheaded person. The victim of a beheading. But how could you verify that the wearer of that necklace was actually beheaded? You'd need like a photo at the time of the beheading. Do people still get executed by beheading in America? No. Absolutely not. Right? That should be a no-brainer. (No pun intended.) Of course no one gets beheaded anymore.

But now I'm wondering maaaaybe it still happens. Like in a state you're not sure of. Like Wyoming. Maybe there's a county or something where persons on death row can choose to be beheaded.

Wait, now I'm confused: are you actually able to choose your style of death if you're on death row? That sounds right, doesn't it? That's the humane American thing, right? At least you should get to choose how you die. Or is it standard in every state?

The chair, I feel, is a pretty inhumane form of execution, universally acknowledged nowadays. But I feel like I've heard a news story in the past few years that discussed some guy getting the chair in Florida. Which opens up this possibility: maybe there's a state that beheads people still. If you so wanted.

Come to think of it, I think I might actually choose beheading as the form of my own execution. Like, okay, if there were a multiple choice form they gave you:

How would you like to be executed next week?
A) Electric Chair
B) Gas Chamber
C) Lethal Injection
D) Beheading
E) Other_____________

I would probably think about circling beheading for a second. Because. Because. Wasn't there that French scientist during the Enlightenment or something who had himself voluntarily beheaded so that he could see how long the human brain retains consciousness before death? What. The. Fuck. How amazing is that? Who does that? Throws themselves under the train for the rest of humanity? Just to know some useless factoid about how many times one is able to blink? How do you even have that as a scientifically viable avenue of investigation? It sounds more like some shit you'd wonder when you're completely baked. "Like, dude! Haven't you ever wondered, like, how many times you can blink after your head gets chopped off? Only one way to find out."

I think that French scientist blinked for like forty seconds before he died.

Or maybe it was forty-five seconds. Something crazy like that.

Holding It

2011-04-14T18:28:00.005-04:00

As much as I love what I've learned over the past three years here at Syracuse's MFA fiction writing program, a part of me hates what I have become. It's impossible for me nowadays to watch a simple television show or commercial without deconstructing its narrative structure and silently commenting to myself on the soundness of the narrative logic, the slickness with which tension is introduced, the abruptness of the transitions, the tidiness of the endings.

What do I mean by all these fancy words. All I mean really is that stories are all around us, and whereas before, I kind of instinctively understood how they operated on my mind as a viewer or reader, I can now more clearly identify and discuss why a given narrative or joke or youtube gives me joy through the language of creative writing. I'll give you an example of how I think nowadays.

Me: I need to pee. This is a fact. I'm sitting here in the William Safire room of the library, which is empty except for me, and I need to pee.

Audience: Why don't you just pee?

Me: I don't want to leave my computer unattended here in this secluded reading room of the library.

Audience: Do you have really nice new stuff?

Me: No, look it's just a grimy four-year-old MacBook.

Audience: Oh, then are you just paranoid? Is that your "character"?

Me: Yes and no. There was a foreboding sign in the lobby which had never been there before: "DO NOT LEAVE ITEMS UNATTENDED!" Which made me think people must be getting their shit kidnapped left and right. Can you imagine kidnapping a laptop? Like: "We have your MacBook. Each day you don't pay our ransom, we will pluck a key from the keyboard."

Audience: Okay. That bit of information makes me understand your character in terms of specific time and place. The fact that there's a sign that was never there before is a major narrative occurrence which helps me understand the stakes of the story.

And so on and so on...

Now if I wanted to continue crafting this story as a piece of fiction, I would probably focus on that central narrative tension: a guy who needs to pee, sitting in an empty reading room, worried about news that there is a laptop kidnapper on the prowl. What will he do?

In real life, I'm about to pack up because this part of the library closes in two minutes. But in the story I'm starting to dream up now, maybe some shady looking dude walks into the empty reading room with our protagonist, who has to pee worse than ever. Of course, now there's a big narrative issue entering the audience's brain.

Audience: Why doesn't he just take the laptop with him into the bathroom?

Me: Well, he...Sorry, I'm really getting kicked out of this room now.

Audience: Oh, okay. Your story sucks. Bye.

TSS: 8

"Contradiction Is the Ruling Principle of the Universe"

2011-03-11T14:29:00.004-05:00

I think it frightens me that political discourse of this kind would not be possible in our day and age, that a dude as far right as William Buckley, who used his gifts of rhetoric to try to embarrass and belittle opponents, could have a somewhat civilized (though probably, in the end, unproductive) discussion with Huey Newton.

Buckley has his talons out even before Huey has said a word. Huey comes off as nerdy, a bit silly-sounding. His voice is disarmingly adenoidal. But underneath all that is a steely confidence you can sense just below the surface. Not to mention a huge and complex mind. What Huey says towards the end about contradiction gives me chills every time I hear it. Deep, deep shit.

This What My Novel Tastes Like #iwish

2011-03-09T02:30:00.002-05:00

DISTANT RELATIVES "Patience" from nabil elderkin on Vimeo.

Faulkner Fail

2011-02-21T20:54:00.003-05:00

"I'm a failed poet. Maybe every novelist wants to write poetry first, finds he can't, and then tries the short story, which is the most demanding form after poetry. And, failing at that, only then does he take up novel writing."

Preach. To failure!

P.S. You forgot to mention screenwriting, Bill.

"Still Had the Idea Though": Mindbarf on Power and Art

2011-02-19T13:19:00.008-05:00

Reacting to the news that rapper Rhymefest (best known as the co-writer of "Jesus Walks" / early Kanye supporter) is pulling a WB Yeats and running for political office after a life in art. Onstage at his benefit, an MC said that "politics is the 6th element of hip-hop" - the word made flesh - Obama as a hip-hop president the way Kennedy was rock-and-roll the way Bush was country. Leopold Senghor, the first president of a free Senegal, was also its poet laureate. What happens when poets rule the world? Plato's philosopher kings? Maya Angelou with a scepter. Elizabeth Bishop Desmond Tutu. Hitler wanted to be a painter. School picture with novelist Thomas Bernhard.

Thought: is part of Obama's problem as a President that he stopped writing poetry, fiction, memoir? Yeats kept writing - "Among School Children" came out of like a campaign stop. "A sixty year old smiling public man." I would love for Barry Obams to cancel some official WH reception because he's got a killer story he's been working on. Might be good for our country for him to do that. Creativity as a means to imagination. Creativity as a check against selfishness and linear thinking. Creating something, writing a story or a blog post or a poem that you don't care if no one reads. Writing with no ulterior motive, writing not to get published, writing not to get something out of it. Writing for the sake of saying some real shit, writing out of obsession, out of a need to make sense of one's own existence. The thin but important line between emailing this to a friend (Hey, what up, dude) and posting it here (Hey, maybe I'm on to something).

Sorry Brunt.

Perhaps a reason why Obama's talk about "innovation" as the savior of our economy feels a little empty at this point. The reason it falls flat maybe because it's not tied to Obama's moral vision. He hasn't made the connection explicit yet. The great heroic selflessness of the American people that Obama forever references as being powerfully linked to our national creativity. The selfless prolificacy of the artist: Miles Davis Box Set. Infinite Jest. Joyce Carol Oates. Lil B's 700-song mixtape. The thin but important line between selflessness and narcissism. The narcissistic creativity of Facebook: a lesser form of art. Titillation as the new false prophet. Why write poetry in this day and age? Facebook ain't a rubric for innovation: what the fuck did Zuckerberg innovate? False profits. Internet rich. James Joyce stopped writing poetry because Yeats existed. I stopped writing poetry because of Twitter. Is the internet antagonistic to literary forms: why everything feels flat online. Except for music. My novel is now an album. A mikstape. (Narcissist.) Facebook's evolution = a dude at a party in the Bronx talking over a break beat = keeps talking.

Power-conscious politicians and Hollywood producers forever misunderstanding creativity and innovation. The eternal struggle between power and art. Publisher and author. Businessman and inventor. "The man who invented them things just some sad ass at the basement of McDonald's." They see hip-hop or they see social networking, and they say, "Those guys in the Bronx and at Harvard: geniuses." While they knock the paintbrush out of their kid's hand and tell him to become a lawyer. You create art, you talk over a beat, you code a program, you work on a novel - in a room somewhere - alone - alone and broke - not to have history and the stock exchange validate you. Your well-timed obsession. Zuckerberg's example makes it hard for the followers of the Church of 21st Century Capitalism to justify bootstrapism and the logic of the market. Accidental billionaire. Who's an intentional billionaire? Who's an intentional genius? How do you create value? Simple: by changing the definition of the word to mean "whatever it is I'm doing." The accidental billionaire not so different than the toobroketodoanythingaires.

Ho Shovelers XXX

2011-02-17T14:05:00.006-05:00

INT. DAY. LIVING ROOM.

[A buff snow shoveler, played by legendary adult film actor Mik "The Broke Grad Student" Awake, enters the living room looking spent and carrying a snow shovel. There is a fetching young lady sitting in front of a fire.]

Mik: Phew. Well, miss. I'm done shoveling your driveway. That'll be 20 bucks.

Lady: Oh, rats! My husband keeps all the money, and he's at work now. Is there any other way I could repay you?

[Soft, jazzy porn music begins to play.]

Mik: I guess I could take a check.

[The lady leans against Mik as she peers out of the window behind him.]

Lady: Oooh, you made my driveway so clear. Now I can drive my car in and out and in and out...and iiiiiin....

Mik: Yeah, I guess that's the point of shoveling, right? So about that check...

Lady: You must be so hot and sweaty underneath all those layers. Maybe you should take your things off and sit by the fire.

Mik: That's awful emphatic of you, ma'am, but I have to go work on my creative writing thesis--

[Without another word, the lady begins to rip off the snow shoveler's clothes. It takes her 45 minutes: undoing boot straps and mittens and beanies and thermals and fleeces and parkas and scarves and shawls and underwear and under-underwear and three layers of sock and two layers of under-sock and uber-boots and quasi-galoshes. Until finally: Mik stands in her living room in nothing but his ratty boxers.]

Lady: Oh, your abs are so tight from all that shoveling. And your nipples are so hard. Do you always get this excited after shoveling driveways?

Mik: No, lady, they're hard because I'm fucking freezing. And frankly I don't know why you had me take off all my clothes in the first place. I just want my money. Can I borrow this afghan? Or can you turn the heat up in here or something?

[The lady, looking hurt, sashays over to the thermostat and cranks up the heat.]

Mik: Thank you. Now you can blow on my dong please.

TSS: 14 below

Boombox

2011-02-15T19:46:00.005-05:00

Das Racist's "luv it mayne," Miguel Cervantes's sadism/compassion for his characters, Vado, Alissa Nutting, Leopold Bloom watching the trams of Dublin and thinking about the birth-death cycle ("Cityful passing away, other cityful coming..."), Freddie Gibbs, Odd Future, John D'Agata, Terrence Hayes' poem "Shakur," not mentioning any of the new indie rock bands I'm into because it seems like as soon as I hear about them everyone has heard about them and has an opinion and one feel lames for even mentioning them, Big Sean, "Bwoy, stop!," Tyler the Creator's obsession with Justin Bieber, why is Blake Griffin always the number 1 fucking play of the day on NBA.com?, "Mr. Rager" as the only possible theme song for the inevitable Cohen Brothers' adaptation of Big Machine, he could brick a fucking lay-up and they'd make it the number 1 play of the day, ?uestlove talking about Dilla, Joshua Ferris probably gonna be that nigga for our generation, Wayne's genius use of "durn" in the line "and all I got in return was a durn country song," Hari Kondabalu vs. Hannibal Burress."

What's in your boombox?

TSS: 9

Reading the Witness

2011-02-11T18:39:00.007-05:00

A little talcum powder on my hands. Back to the cameras: Awake. Clap, clap. A little more powder, then--

Poof!

Arms spread under a wilting cloud of glorious boos.

That's me doing my literary LeBron, because I have a short story in the new issue of Witness Magazine, an amazing once-a-year journal published out of the Black Mountain Institute at UNLV.

I got the chance to meet the editors last week, and they were some of the smartest, nicest, warmest literary folk I've ever met. So proud to be in their orbit. (Didn't hurt that they got me drunk.)

You can download my story here. Just download it whenever. Whenever you can. No worries. No big deal. Close this window. Check your email. Check your face. Whatever. Zero worries whatsoever. See if I care.

Jerk.

TSS: 10

The Oscar State of the Nominations Union

2011-01-25T22:18:00.004-05:00

And a nomination for Best Foreign Film goes to...

Not the film I co-wrote!!!

Oh my god. What an honor. I'd like thank the Academy of the House of Representatives. I didn't prepare a speech. I'm so nervous. I'd like to thank God and Obama - for smoked salmon.

The state of this blog is strong! It will defeat you. Javier Bardem.

I need rest...

Byah!!!

TSS: 8

Hot Couplet of the Week (WEEK Week week): Lil' Weezer

2011-01-22T23:09:00.006-05:00

This week's HCW(WWw) comes from none other than Lil Wayne, from a new bit of beat devoury released on his website a couple weeks before New Year. I'm a bit late getting to it, but here it goes:

Paper chaser. Tell that paper, "Look, I'm right behind ya."
Bitch, real Gs move in silence like lasagna.

If Lil Wayne will go down in music history for something, by God, it should be for this kind of couplet. And to be really precise about what that something is, I'd posit that it's the way he has managed to find humor and power and weirdness out of a very simple, almost retarded literalism. These two lines are a perfect example of how he uses this over-literal wordplay to subvert lyrical expectations. The first line is a set up, and not a very good line in and of itself. It sets the bar low: a joke a four-year-old could understand. You can picture Wayne--maybe a kind of animated, Saturday morning cartoon version of him--with the sidewalk spinning under him and a dollar bill sweating in the foreground. He takes a common expression ("chasing paper") and succeeds in making the metaphor literal. It's a quick, vivid scene which he saves with that vivid bit of dialogue: "Look, I'm right behind ya."

Big whup, right?

But the real genius is in the 2nd line. Now that Wayne's lulled us somewhat into expecting another cartoonish image of some sort, we get the line "Real Gs move in silence like..." At this point, the listener's brain is already racing, unbeknownst to the listener himself maybe, to fill in the simile blank. He wonders, "Will the simile revolve around silence? Maybe real Gs move in silence like monks. Or like ninjas. Or like very quiet people..." The listener is not a rapper himself obviously, but you get the point: Wayne has set us up for a certain kind of literalism, the metaphor made real, the rapper sprinting after money. Which is why when we hear the actual object of that simile ("lasagna") it kind of takes the brain a couple seconds to process that Wayne is not trying to craft another scene like the one in the previous line. He's not trying to show us, in vivid detail, how G's silently move: he actually doesn't give a fuck about how the gangsters move. He's making a word joke: the letter "g" is silent in the word "lasagna." A joke that, again, delights in being overly literal but on the micro-level--not just with words, but with the letters within them. (See also, "I don't owe you [O U] like two vowels.") The beauty of these kinds of dirty similes, which Wayne's body of work is full of, is that for a split second as you're imagining some menacing gangster stalking down a dark alleyway, creeping stealthily, the dude suddenly turns into a casserole.

Fun with Litany: Themed Package

2011-01-22T00:05:00.004-05:00

To the left is a picture of a real room in a real hotel in our real America. Here is what comes with your night in this Phantasuite™:

Phantasuite, box of chocolates, bottle of champagne, two champagne glasses, whirlpool amenities, two pair of silk boxer shorts and hot breakfast.

This list reads like a story. I wonder if you have to give the boxers back at the end of your stay.

TSS: 10

Shy Ketchup

2011-01-04T17:29:00.007-05:00

A Brooklyn cafe. Dusk. Sitting alone at a table near the front is a fat, gabby Puerto-Rican boy, and sitting at an adjacent table, also by herself, is a toothless, stringy-haired old lady.

Fat, Gabby Puerto-Rican Boy: You come here every day?

Toothless, Stringy-Haired Lady: [Nods slowly, while chewing.]

FGPRB: Is it expensive?

The TSHL shrugs, still chewing, and motions to her fruit cup.

TSHL: $3.50.

FGPRB: [nodding] Not bad...not bad...

The waitress arrives with the FGPRB's cheeseburger and fries. Though he tries to shake the ketchup onto his patty, nothing seems to come out of the bottle.

FGPRB: The ketchup getting shy.

The TSHL mumbles something.

FGPRB: I said the ketchup getting shy.

TSHL: [still chewing] Use a knife.

Before long, the TSHL pays her bill and gets up to leave. When she tries to button the top of her coat, strange little whimpers eek out of her mouth. She is trailed by the pungent odor of cat piss, and as soon as the door closes behind her, a bus boy comes to wipe down the chairs she was sitting on. The boy watches this quietly, sadly, taking slow bites of his overly-ketchuped burger.

THE END.

TSS: 8

McPhee's True Story Scale

2010-12-29T14:03:00.014-05:00

From an interview with John MikPhee in the current issue of Le Paris Review:

INTERVIEWER: When did you first start to think about devoting yourself to writing?

MCPHEE: There weren’t any very early signs. My biggest preoccupation in childhood was sports, mostly sports you could play with a ball. My father was a doctor of sports medicine, and Princeton was his employer. As I was growing up, we lived very close to the campus, and in the afternoons I would go with him to the university sports practices—football, basketball, baseball. I hung around a lot of football players who were ten or fifteen years older than I was. After a while they made a Princeton shirt for me with orange and black stripes on it, just like the big guys had. I was number thirty-three.

INTERVIEWER: Who made the shirt for you?

MCPHEE: The same company that made the shirts for the varsity football team. It was presented to me when I was eight, and I wore it for a few seasons. When a football game started, I would run onto the field with the team. I was on the sidelines during these games. Away games too. When Princeton scored a touchdown, I went behind the goalpost and caught the extra point. One miserable November day I was down there on the sideline, wet, cold. And I looked up to the top of the stadium, and there was the press box. Shelter! I knew they had heaters in there with them, and these people were sitting there in complete comfort while we’re miserable down here on the field. They’re writing, they’re typing, and they’re warm. Then and there I decided to become a writer. Now that story, which I have often told, is about three to five percent apocryphal. The rest of it is absolutely true.

TSS: 95-97%

[Thank you, Chris Michel!]

Post-Facebooking Exhale

2010-12-16T18:36:00.003-05:00

Have you noticed that there's a way people have of exhaling very deeply and grumbling to themselves, at an unselfconscious volume, "Okay!" that lets you know, without having to look at their computer screens, that they've just emerged from a very deep Facebooking trench, and it's time to get back to work.

If I still had a Facebook page, this probably would have been my status update.

TSS: 10

Waiting for Brudah

2010-12-16T11:12:00.007-05:00

A wanly lit reading room. Long tables semi-filled with people on their laptops. MIK, a 29-year-old African-American man--adequately handsome with intelligent eyeglasses--removes his parka, drapes it over the back of a chair. A slightly older guy, a STRANGER, with chubby cheeks and a thin mustache, approaches.

STRANGER: Hey.

STRANGER reaches to shake MIK's hand. MIK is confused, but he shakes the man's hand anyway, smiling awkwardly.

MIK: Hi.

STRANGER: Are you from Nigeria?

STRANGER continues to shake MIK's hand.

MIK: No.

STRANGER: Oh. You look just like a brudah from my church.

MIK: Oh.

STRANGER: Yeah, I thought you were him.

STRANGER is still shaking MIK's hand.

MIK: Sorry...Heh heh.

STRANGER: I wish you were him.

STRANGER stops shaking MIK's hand. His smile slowly fades. He turns to leave, disappears into Brooklyn, Atlantic Avenue, Ocean Avenue, the Atlantic Ocean, God, Heaven, Praise Jesus, Hallelujah, Amen.

THE END.

TSS: 9.1 (until that last sentence)

Vitamin Doh

2010-11-28T12:43:00.010-05:00

This morning began like any other morning: I unscrewed the cap to my bottle of vitamin D and popped one on the old tongue.

But then, in my morning grog, I lifted the vitamin bottle to my lips and a stream of tablets careened off my mouth. The bottle had never left my hand, but somehow I must have been hoping that it would transform into a glass of water.

I was on my knees and hands picking vitamins off the floor and started looking around to make sure no one in the empty kitchen had seen me do this. Luckily, there was only the hanging ivy plant (pictured).

Suddenly, I realized that the hanging ivy plant had a very caustic, unfriendly sense of humor and was making fun of me. It shed a couple of brown, dried-out leaves, which I recognized as the hanging ivy plant equivalent of calling someone a jag off.

So I watered it.

With vitamin D.

And then it got strong enough to blog, jag offs.

XOXO,
Hanging Ivy Plant

TSS: 3

Hot Couplet of the WEEK (Week week...)

2010-11-27T19:59:00.026-05:00

In my tireless quest to find the gimmick that will make my blog a billionaire, I'm instituting a new feature which I'm calling the "Hot Couplet of the WEEK (Week week...)."

That's right, what blog you know has a built in ECHO (Echo echo...).

Besides being a shameless attempt to use hip-hop lyrics as a way of driving traffic to my site (the way I did a couple years ago with my infamous Weezy post), the HCW(Ww...) will also be a space for bite-size lyrical analysis of a pair of lines that I find worthy of closer attention. People tend to listen to music (and especially hip-hop) with their guards down. We're kind of programmed not to expect rich, layered, tonally interesting information to be conveyed mid-booty-shake.

But, as a person who has more or less devoted his life to words, I think talking about lyrics is part of the joy I take in music. I make no claims about being objective or scientific or academic about this. Looking into lyrics is not a science; it's an art. And I do this fully aware that no amount of analysis can ever duplicate a song's hotness. (That's what the song is for.) I think this is something people forget when they talk about a work of art. Analysis is never an attempt to duplicate the effect of the song. It's simply an attempt to translate, in the mundane 808-less medium of prose, the pleasure of a creative work of art and to share that pleasure. You can clap now.

[Thunderous Applause!!!]

The inaugural HCW(Ww...) comes from Big Sean, a young rapper signed to Kanye West's G.O.O.D. Music label. (This nugget of trivia is actually important to better understanding the charm of the line I've chosen.) Big Sean delivers the line in his verse on "See Me Now," the bonus track of Kanye's new album, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy (the most over-modified, under-comma-ed album title in recent memory).

I'll take a brief sentence to shill for Kanye and say that, yes, you should purchase this flawed masterpiece of an album, especially since you won't be able to find this week's hot couplet anywhere else on the Internet. (Trust me, I tried.) Take it away Big Sean:

"I know Kanye a jerk." How could you say that?/
He rode me and my mama 'round in his Maybach.

Aside from those bouncy, alliterative m's ("me," "my mama," "Maybach"), the beauty of this couplet is in the peculiar tone of Big Sean's delivery. I've been thinking about the advantages and disadvantages of the written word, as a form, and in some ways all writers must admit that musicians kind of have us beat on being able to add layers of meaning in a more efficient manner. Nothing really compares to the human voice. The slightly over-the-top offense that Big Sean takes at Kanye being called a jerk comes through in the way he delivers the phrase "How could you say that?" The phrase ends with a pause, then the pause is filled with an echo ("How could you say that?"), which has a way of undercutting the seriousness of Big Sean's outrage.

And that's when you get the joke: Big Sean is being a smart-ass. Rather than saying, "Kanye is a condescending douchebag who thought he could impress me by taking me and my mom on a ride around the block in his fancy car," Big Sean gets amazing lyrical mileage by playing the role of the self-serving, sycophantic underling who comes to the defense of his misunderstood boss. If they were characters on The Office, Sean would be the Dwight to Yeezy's Michael.

It's a brilliant little character sketch not only of Kanye as patronizing douche, but also of the subversive little shit who can see through all of his boss's I'm-a-misunderstood-victim posturing. There's something very Twain-ish about the line in that, even though we know Big Sean is poking fun at Kanye, we still can't say that he's calling Kanye a condescending jerk (but we also can't say that he isn't).

And yet the person who benefits the most from this brilliant bit of micro-satire isn't Big Sean; it's Kanye. You've got to ask yourself: how can a line like this exist on the same album where the headlining artist is asking people to "address me as your highness." Hip-hop albums are usually full of boasts like that (and Kanye's is wall-to-wall with braggadocio), but what rapper in the history of rap also has lines as subversive and self-deprecating as Big Sean's. Who willingly includes that kind of a line?

Not to say that self-deprecation is alien to hip-hop. Not at all. The best MCs--Biggie, Pac, Big Pun--were always poking fun at themselves. But they were the ones telling the jokes. They didn't invite younger, wittier rappers to hop on a track and decapitate them in brilliant couplets. What's even more confusing: Kanye didn't just invite some random young, witty rapper to make fun of him on his own album, he invited a player on his own team to do the lyrical equivalent of dunking on him then taking a dump on his chest.

What are we to make of this? Why is Kanye okay with letting Big Sean get away with this? Is it: (a) Kanye is a glutton for punishment; (b) Kanye views his own celebrity with an ironic, Warhol-like detachment; (c) Kanye is egomaniacal and a bit crazy and will appreciate any rapper who takes up the "Is Kanye a jerk or not?" discussion; or (d) Kanye left the line in for the same reason I've spent so much time writing about it: because it's brilliant.

Das Wrong

2010-11-21T23:35:00.010-05:00

I just read Sasha Frere-Jones' (what?) book report? bruised fan letter?--can't rightly call it a review, because SFJ doesn't actually grapple with any particular album or performance--well, his thing in the current New Yorker on Das Racist.

Let it be known: Das Racist is one of my favorite bands at the moment and probably the smartest, funniest hip-hop duo (really, a quasi-trio) to come on the scene since Outkast. That's no idle comparison either. There's something about the adenoidal, pesty kid brother, punch-lining of Himanshu Suri that compliments the meandering, 4AM free verse of Victor Vasquez in a way that gets any real hip-hop fans' pleasure neurons firing in a way they maybe haven't since they first heard "Two Dope Boyz in a Cadillac."

The group deserves the kind of closer attention, analysis, and respect SFJ gave Big Boi in his review of Sir Lucious Left Foot earlier this summer. I take issue not only with the way SFJ makes Das Racist out to be some kind of anarchic, humorless, counter-everything (even--gasp!--counter-SFJ) punks, but especially his inability to assess the group's value outside of the ultra-reductive binary of insider vs. outsider, punk vs. mainstream.

"In fact," Frere-Jones writes, in what I imagine must have been a drooling, palm-rubbing moment of syntactical revelation, "the band's best-known song, its 2008 debut, 'Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell,' is the kind of thing Das Racist might make fun of." Actually, no it's not, Sasha. If you mean to say that its ensuing popularity is something that Das Racist might make fun of: OK, we'll give you that. But to say that the song itself (an arch, absurdist, self-aware take on a very particular kind of American cultural monument, which, by the way, resists being discussed in the terms I've just used for it) would be the butt of a Das Racist joke if it hadn't been made by Das Racist is a tragic misreading at best, or a disingenuous dig at worst. SJF's criticism suggests that Das Racist hate for hate's sake, that they have no real aesthetic or moral concerns, that they, in essence, see the world in the same reductive insider/outsider, punk/mainstream paradigm that SJF himself seems to see things.

And it gets worse. Later in that same paragraph, SFJ writes of "Combination": "It is not hard to imagine a bunch of wobbly college kids yelling along." This is meant to imply that a scenario in which fans (i.e. college kids) are appreciating Das Racist's music would be totally contemptible to Das Racist. It is a glib, borderline nonsensical sentence that succeeds in insulting no one, except maybe anyone in college. Actually, Sash (can I call you that? Sash?), do you know why it's not hard to imagine a bunch of "wobbly" coeds yelling along to a Das Racist track? It's because they already do that. And that's part of Das Racist's point. It's not very hard to get the Taco Bell and Pizza Hut joke. That's kind of the beauty of it. We're all complicit and bearing witness to the absurdity, and, most irritating of all, we know that you get it too, Sasha.

I think, SJF's own hurt feelings are the weird minor chord playing throughout this piece, the chord which starts coming on louder and getting more pronounced as soon as we learn early on that he was once called out in an online article as "one of the white dudes [Vasquez] takes issue with," which, if you click through, you'll realize is a very reductive take on Vasquez's thoughtful, though very self-righteous essay.

In the end, SFJ comes across less like a music critic seeking to assess the value of his subject's material, or even like a music historian trying to place Das Racist in some sort of hip-hop lineage or context, to acknowledge their absurdly high hip-hop IQ, or even like a market-researcher trying to discover what new fan base the rise of Das Racist might herald the emergence of. Instead, this embarrassingly reductive, dismissive hit piece (which should not have been published on a personal blog, let alone beneath the monocled gaze of Eustace Tilley)--this instantly anachronistic take on one of the most exciting, innovative acts to come around in years--reads more like the petty vengeance of that very serious kid in class, the one who loves dishing out opinions and jokes about everyone else, but who shrivels up when he gets clowned one day by the funny, smart, stoner kids who don't take themselves so seriously. And that bratty serious kid hasn't forgotten that time the funny kids made fun of him. In fact, he's been waiting for that day when he could take a few hundred words out in his national magazine to put those "outsiders" in their place. And by the way: yuck, did you really call them that, Sasha? You know they met at Wesleyan, right? You know that their whole "outsider" stance is part of the joke, right? Tell me you know this, Sasha?

Hip-hop is alive; it's SFJ and reviewers like him I'm worried about. Can they really not understand the layered, idiosyncratic satire of a group like Das Racist, their seductive meld of highbrow and lowbrow, Dipset and Descartes, of backpack rap and Louis napsack? Or are they unwilling to admit, even if it might put their job security in question (which isn't the case for SFJ, who just got a new second gig working for Citizen Kane 2.0, aka Big Rupe, aka Mr. Murdoch) that these Das Racist motherfuckers are on to something?

I don't like getting on my blog-podium (blodium?) to criticize critics, but I fucks with Das Racist, and I feel a physical kind of revulsion at seeing lazy, ego-driven writers who aren't nearly as talented, funny, or relevant as their subjects taking up prime airwaves on the FM dials of the cultural conversation to push something eerily close to an agenda down are unwilling gullets.

To end this regrettably cranky post on an up-note though, let me close with one of my favorite riffs from Das Racist's latest mixtape, Sit Down, Man:

"I'm on the block like street meat/
Call me Dwight Shrute the way that I eat beets/
No beet farm, just pharm beats, smarmy/
A muthafucka try to harm me/
Huuunnh!"

True Story Scale: 10

100 Tweets of Solitude: Against Blogorrhea

2010-11-19T18:19:00.013-05:00

Let me update my status about this new Chipotle I'm eating at.

Let me upload a picture of this delicious burrito bowl to my flickr.

Let me tweet my bite-by-bite reactions to this burrito bowl.

Let me tumblr the feeling of my post-burrito bowl dump.

While I'm taking this dump, let me read the Prologue to Strange Pilgrims by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Let me find this: "Someone, I don't remember who, made the point with this comforting phrase: 'Good writers are appreciated more for what they tear up than for what they publish.'"

Emphasis mine. Hat tip: Michael Burkard.

Don't forget to flush.

Does Anyone Else Wake Up with Songs in Their Heads?

2010-10-27T08:43:00.003-04:00

The other day it was this one:

And today it was this one:

I love Kanye's narrative-work on this song. He doesn't do that enough.

Does this happen to you? Do you wake up with music immediately cycling through your Georgia Dome? Please leave a comment in the "Please Make Me Feel Less Crazy" section.

Just Curious Scale: 9

The Marathon Journey of "The Athlete"

2010-10-18T17:18:00.009-04:00

About six years ago, my cousin Ras sat across from me at a coffee shop in the East Village and told me he had an idea for a movie about Abebe Bikila. At first, I was skeptical. What I knew about Bikila's life at the time--which was very little--didn't seem like the stuff of cinematic gold. He was a marathon runner, who had won a gold medal running barefoot. He had brought pride to his country, and when Ras was pitching me the idea for the script, I could see a patriotic glimmer in his eye. It was interesting, historically and such, but where was the intrigue, the tension? Where was the story?

Over the next few months, as I somewhat grudgingly started to learn more about him, that story started to emerge. The quote that sold me on writing about Bikila was one he'd given during a radio interview before his ill-fated marathon loss in Mexico City in 1968. (During the race, he fractured his femur mid-run, but still kept limp-jogging for a couple miles.) His career on the wane, Bikila was asked by the Ethiopian radio host if his drinking ever got in the way of his running, to which he shot back, "You could dunk me in a barrel of mead and I'd still beat anyone."

Here was a real character, I knew. A trailblazing kind of genius whose life was as tragic as it was heroic. A humble man from the Ethiopian countryside with ego enough to sink your battleship. Next week will mark the 37th anniversary of his untimely death at the age of 41.

Ras and I worked on the screenplay for over a year--researching, outlining, drafting, revising, and, eventually, showing it to potential collaborators. It was the first lap in what would wind up being a very long-distance run to get the film made--a run which was as full of incident and drama as the life it sought to portray.

This is a long, boring introduction to the happy phone call I just received earlier today from my cousin Ras telling me that the six-year marathon he's been running with the filmmaking equivalent of bare feet has just rounded a significant milestone: last week, the film ("The Athlete") was chosen to represent Ethiopia for Best Foreign Film at the 83rd Academy Awards.

There's no unbraggy way of saying this: a film I helped write might be up for an Oscar, shorty.

Now before you go booking your tickets to the Kodak Theater, what this means is simply that "The Athlete" is one of 65 films currently being considered for a Best Foreign Film nomination. For a full list of the selected foreign films, go here. Even if the film doesn't make it to the final round of nominees (stiff competition this year!), which will be announced in January, it's the first film from Ethiopia to ever be considered for an Academy Award, which is pretty cool.

Fingers and feet crossed for January.

TSS: Aser

Hey hey why you wanna go and do that and do that? And by "that" I mean suicide.

2010-10-14T12:02:00.009-04:00

Hot on Twitter today (what's Twitter?) is news of rapper slash actor slash (new slash!) mediator T.I.'s heroic role in preventing a young man from committing suicide early yesterday. News still hasn't emerged about who the 24-year-old man was or what had pushed him out onto a ledge 22 stories above midtown Atlanta, but we do know that T.I. was apparently pulling out of his driveway in what one can only imagine is a sensibly-priced, pre-owned automobile with good gas mileage, when he heard the breaking news on local radio and drove in the direction of the building.

The gist of what T.I. told the young man seems to be, "Things are going to get better," which is nice and reassuring and all, but not necessarily something I might want to hear if I was toeing the line between here and the hereafter. One would think the young man went out on that ledge precisely because he'd thought it through and decided, "You know what, things are never going to get better." But sometimes you just need the King of the South to swoop up from Peachtree Street in his Hyundai which only has FM radio to tell you otherwise. Now I know I'm being a bit snippy, especially since all the details aren't out yet, but a part of me is not so much skeptical as maybe curious.

I'm curious not because the Mediator of the South has a court date coming up tomorrow (which I think is unfair as an accusation, both to T.I. and the suicidal young man); I'm curious because if I understand anything about celebrities--hip-hop stars maybe more than any others--is that they would kill their mothers to be up on the next new trend. Which brings me to another news item that hit the blogwaves earlier this year: reports came out that Lil Wayne, who is currently serving out the end of a sentence at Rikers Island, was counseling fellow inmates who were on suicide watch. He has also been blogging, which means when I go to jail I'm going to start rapping.

Breaking News: This just in, rapper Drake has been spotted on a yacht underneath the Brooklyn Bridge, where a young man is toeing the parapets and threatening to end his life. The young man, who recently lost his job and house in the worst recession in living memory and whose sick mother has no health care, listened hesitantly as Drake, who was wearing humpback-whale-skinned Reeboks and Balenciaga sunglasses (raised respectfully above his forehead for maximal eye contact) kept repeating "You the fucking best, you the fucking best" into an auto-tuned bullhorn. The young man decided Drake was being sincere - so he wiped the tears off his cheeks and jumped.

Even Breaking-er News: What a crazy news day! Rapper slash Nets-owner slash business...man, Jay-Z heroically came to the rescue of a pregnant woman who was brandishing a gun around a hospital, threatening to kill herself in front of the maternity doctors who refused to give her an abortion. "How many problems do you have?" said Jay-Z. In response, the woman lowered her gun and said, "I don't want to bring another life into this world where the gap between rich and poor is growing wider and wider every day." Jay-Z chuckled. "That's only one problem, lady. Look at me. I've got 99 problems. That's 98 more than you. Maybe I should kill myself." At which point Jay-Z stole the gun out of the young lady's grasp and turned it on himself. "Psyche, naw! I'm playing. I'm rich as fuck," Jay-Z said, handing the woman back her gun, which she used to shoot Jay-Z.

R.I.P. Jay-Z!!! You will live on in our heartz for evah!!! xoxo

TSS: 8

The Rides, the Wanting, Yes!

2010-09-13T18:13:00.006-04:00

I've been working part-time at a community non-profit here in Syracuse, and part of my part-time job involves reading surveys from kids who attended summer camp thanks to state funding.

Some of the surveys make you smile ("I did not like the monkeys"), or they make you sad ("Reading books sux"). And then some surveys sum up the tragedy of human existence in three short answers about a field trip to a water park:

Q. What did you like best about your field trip?
A. The rides.

Q. What did you like least?
A. Wanting.

Q. Would you like to attend this trip again?
A. Yes.

True Story Scale: 10.

Blogless August

2010-09-11T17:45:00.004-04:00

I'm sorry, blog. I've been busy. There was a wedding. I'm doing shit. Reading, writing, watching instantly. You know how it is. Get off my case, blog. August was hot.

"So why didn't you blog about it?" -- That's probably what you're thinking, blog. But that's dumb. That's a dumb thought, blog. Blogging isn't about just writing about shit that happens to you whenever it happens.

"Yes it is." -- That's probably your dumb response, blog. Is it not? You disgust me, blog. This is why I hate you sometimes. Because you compare me to other people and their blogs. So-and-so just updated his blog. So-and-so just added a new video to her blog. And then re-tweeted something about her blog about his tweet about their blog.

Fine! Go be someone else's blog then! See if I care!

See if I care...

No, I'm not crying, blog. I'm just. It's been hard, blog. August was hard. And of all people I expected you to understand that. When you didn't understand that just a second ago, it just...It hurt, blog. It really hurt.

It makes me question things. It makes me question us.

No, you're right. It takes hard work. I want this to work, blog. I don't want you to be an anachronistic HTML extension of me. I want us to be in singularity with one another. I want this to be going somewhere. I want us to be one.

So. Blog.

You're probably wondering why I'm getting to my knee. What I'm pulling out of my pocket. What I'm holding out to you across this romantic, candlelit expanse of one's and zero's.

Blog, will you make me the happiest man in the blogosphere, and, and...

Tell me how cool my new eyeglasses are!

Can I Talk? Can I Finish?

2010-07-28T10:24:00.005-04:00

I've been on a strange sleep cycle recently. I think the dead of summer, and full moons, and a weird work schedule are all to blame. And because of my strange sleep patterns, I've been having some strange--even for me--dreams.

This morning, for example, I woke up from a dream where I was talking to someone about something somewhere and, in the dream, I had the idea that referencing Dana Carvey's hilarious Ross Perot impressions on SNL was what the conversation required.

"Can I talk? Can I finish? CanItalkcanIfinish?"

My impression was a huge hit in the dream. It was right in that sacred nexus of pop-cultural-nostalgic references. The kind of reference that people remembered, but hadn't thought of really since first seeing it. Everyone was cracking up, and I was given my own television show where all I did was impressions of Dana Carvey's impressions. And I became very rich.

Since I'm awake and blogging about it now, let me just spin this top to make sure I'm really...

Oh, no.

Oh my god.

The top is still spinning!

True Story Scale: 8

An Open Letter to Mozilla Firefox

2010-07-23T19:42:00.010-04:00

Dear Firefox,

No offense, but you gotta chill with all these updates, man.

In the middle of downloading one, you tell me there's a newer version available. And then in the middle of downloading that one, you tell me there's an even NEWER version available. And in the middle of downloading that one, you tell me that "Throwdown with Bobby Flay" is on, and you know that's my shit!

I'm feeling disillusionized.

For real though, Firefox, is this the future? Have we arrived at the future already? Did we just exit off the now-way? Is the future going to be an unending upgrade loop? All day long adding useless new features to stuff we already have that works perfectly fine as it is? But never actually getting to use it?

Is this the upgrade conspiracy brewing in our culture? Do I smell dystopia on the horizon? Does it smell anything like Fruitopia? And where can one find Fruitopia anymore, Firefox? Upgrade me that?

Also, do you and Sonic still talk?

Sincerely,
MA

True Story: 10

Personal Greeting

2010-07-22T12:05:00.008-04:00

Hello. You have reached the voicemail system. Long time. We've noticed that you still have an impersonal computer lady voice as your away message. That's pretty lame. If you'd like to record a personal greeting, so that friends and family will think you actually care about their calls, press 2 now.

After the bloop, please record your personal greeting. Don't fuck up. Bloop!

"Hi, you've reached Mik Awake, I'm not available to take your call right now, so if you leave your name, number, and a detailed message after the beep, I'll be sure to get back to you. Thanks."

This is the voicemail system again. No offense, but that was not a very good personal greeting. Maybe you should have asked them to leave more information, like their blood type, or a favorite movie quote, or some Pringles and the solution to Fermat's Last Theorem. To listen to your personal greeting, which I'm telling you already, it sucks, please press 1. To just go ahead and re-record your personal greeting, which you should probably do, please wait for the bloop. Once again, bloop!

"Thank you for calling. Please leave a message."

Sigh. Voicemail again. Hi. Here I was thinking that I was a computer generated robot and you were the human sentient life form, similar to the type that created me. I was mistaken. Maybe you should have my job. "Thank you for calling. I am a robot. Please leave a message. I am a robot." Let's try this one more time. Bloop!

"Hi, I appreciate your call. Please leave a message after the beep, and I'll be sure to get back to you. But not if it's a mean message. Ha ha. Thanks..."

OMG! LOL! We are just cracking up over here in Voicemailistan over your personal greeting. It's just so hilarious! LOL! We want to publish it in our gazette, Voicemail Weekly, as the best, funniest, most personable personal greeting of all time! "Not if it's a mean message"! That's so funny because it's true, but only you have the guts to actually say it, because everyone knows you're a nice guy, and who would ever think about leaving a sweetheart like you a mean message. That makes me really want to leave you a nice message, man. Seriously. I'm cracking up so hard I forgot to leave a message...Now, stop fucking around! Bloop!

"You've reached the voicemail of Mik Awake. I'm not available to [deafening sound of motorcycle roaring down the street], so if you leave a message, I'll be sure to return it."

Bro. Voicemail. Wow. I don't know what's harder to believe: that they actually let you use cellphones onboard the deck of your aircraft carrier, or that you actually continued to record a message from inside a jet engine. Good job. You just immortalized some douche on a Harley who's going to destroy what's left of your grandmother's hearing when she calls to tell you how much she loves you. Love you too, Grandma! EXPLODE!!!! Show some respect. Re-record that shit. Bloop!

"Hi. Thanks for calling. I've been re-recording messages all morning in an attempt to strike the right note for people who take the time out of their day to call me. With email and text and missed calls acting as messages, leaving a voice message is a rare courtesy. I realize this, so I'm grateful to you for taking time out to record a message, and to show that I've been trying to put as much thought into the crafting of my own personal greeting--"

You have exceeded the time and boringness limit of the personal greeting function. If you'd like to write a novel, please hang up, buy a typewriter, call an agent, and leave the Voicemail system alone. If you would like to re-record your personal greeting, which you probably will, even though no one cares, please press 2 now, you vain, narcissitic--Bloop!

"The Bible says--"

Wow. Re-record. I don't even want to know where that one was going. Bloop!

"Beamer, Benz or Bentley, my inbox never empty--"

Come the fuck on. Re-record. Bloop!

"Thank you so much for calling--"

I'd like to thank the academy and my psychiatrist and Vishnu, because no one ever calls me anymore, because I'm the crazy man in the attic recording messages all day. Re-record, you dumb, friendless--

[Mik: Fed up, I press 6, to return to the main menu. Then I press 3.]

You have chosen to keep the computer greeting. Great way to spend an afternoon. Thank you so much for calling. Voicemail out.

True Story Scale: Press 5

The Poetry of World Cup Streaming Video Chat

2010-07-11T17:07:00.004-04:00

Among the perils and pleasures of trying to watch the World Cup Final via online streaming video is being distracted by the idiots who contribute to the real-time streaming chat which runs constantly alongside it. Fortunately, not unlike the players on the pitch today, the cave-dwelling internet lurkers were also in rare form. Here's a sampling of their ingenuity [bad words redacted and replaced with more event-specific language]:

"stick my canon in your grand [goalie]?"

"the US is fat ass."

"your rat client is waiting for a [slide tackle]."

"he [kicks] rats with plague on them."

"wow what a man."

"what a match."

"what a [referee]."

"Anon means anonymous. It's not a name."

True Story Scale: 9

P.S. Hooray for Spain. And hooray for Paul! What an [octopus].

Racism Is the Sincerest Form of Flattery

2010-07-09T13:02:00.006-04:00

Okay, let's do some hip-hop dancing, guys!!!

Let's start out with the running man! Lift those legs now. Just pretend like you're running from the cops!

Phew! Okay, that was exhausting. I wonder how those hip-hops do it. Now let's do this dance that I'm going to call the basketball! Because that's the only career option you have as a hip-hop.

Great, now let's do the crack dealer! Just slang them rocks out. Slang em, you filthy hip-hops.

Okay, now let's do the welfare queen! Just wait around in that line to get taxpayer money. Just wait around!

TSS: N/A

Wavy

2010-07-06T15:08:00.008-04:00

Why do we call it a heat wave? Waves are supposed to be refreshing, cleansing, cool, ride-able. Waves tumble over you when you're twelve years old, visiting relatives in California, the hollow hoot of the water collapsing around you, so cold your teeth chatter. Or they're supposed to be friendly, like saying hello to a friend, or they're supposed to be a bonding experience, like at a Syracuse Chiefs minor league game.

Can 100 degrees wish me a good day from across the street? Can 80 percent humidity get out of his seat and raise his arms and spill his Bud Light when the sea swell of humanity corners its way around the stadium. I. Think. Not.

If it's hot, it's not a wave. If it's a wave, it's not made of heat. So, let's rename it, jerks. It's a piledriver. Or a tackle. Or a grizzly bear. A big, wallowing mammal of mugginess, terrorizing the streets. And, now, this blog.

True Story Scale: 10

Sorry. I don't normally complain about the weather.

True Story Scale: 0

Thursday with Maury

2010-06-25T11:02:00.006-04:00

I went to the ballet for the first time in my life last night. Ballet crowds are weird. People yell "Bravo" after pieces that they like and sometimes they even yell (I wish I were joking) "Bravissimo" if they really like it. Thankfully, there wasn't too much of that last night.The only kind of strange part came at the end.

As luck would have it, last night happened to be the final performance of the head conductor, a dude named Maurice Kaplow. As a tribute, the orchestra did one piece in the middle of the program which was just music and no dance. I got a kick out of the way the whole symphony rose up from below and became level with the stage. (Or did the whole entire theater sink to the level of the pit? A conundrum.)

Anyway, the musical interlude was cool and sad because it was the conductor's last day. I think he even chose the music himself, and so he conducted the hell out of it. I kind of giggled and thought of Catcher in the Rye when the "kettle drummer" had his moment. (Holden: "Sally said I was a sacrilegious atheist. I probably am. The thing Jesus really would've liked would be the guy that plays the kettle drums in the orchestra.")

At the very end of the night, as I was making my way to the exit, the curtain rose, and standing in the middle of the stage by himself was everyone's favorite head conductor. The whole theater got to its feet and started going nuts. I was already standing and blocked from the aisle by a couple people who were yelling, "We love you, Maury!" "Bravo, Maury!" Apparently, head conductors are popular guys. I started clapping so that I wouldn't look like an asshole who was just trying to go home and watch World Cup highlights. (Which is exactly what I was, Brobinho.)

After Maury stood there bowing for a couple minutes, drenched in stage lights and applause, the dancers in the company started coming out of the wings with bouquets, and before you knew it, Maury had his arms full of roses. That was just the beginning though. Soon, each member of the orchestra came out with a single rose and dropped it on top of the huge floral snow-cone that used to be the head conductor. One after another. French horn, oboe, viola. Rose after rose after rose. You forget how many people are in an orchestra until each of them flings a rose in your eye.

I kind of felt sorry for the guy. Office goodbye parties are excruciating enough as it is. I remember some of mine. But imagine that in front of a thousand people who may or may not know you, watching you getting gang-raped on your last day of some random internship by this weird rose-dumping ritual. Everyone in the audience was cracking up and crying and cheering like mad.

When the director of the company came out with his rose, only the top of Maury's bald head was visible over his wild bear hug of flowers. The director placed his rose gently on the tippy-top of the pile, and then all of a sudden a deafening sound shut the entire theater up. When we opened our eyes, all of Maury's flowers were scattered over the stage and the farthest ones had hit a few people sitting in the very front rows.

There stood Maury, a few roses clinging to his dark tuxedo by their thorns. His face was red and his eyes watery. The theater was so quiet, you could hear a conductor's baton drop. And one did from Maury's sad, limp hand.

"I'm allergic, you idiots!" he screamed. "I've told you a thousand times, I'm allergic to roses!" Then Maury stormed off the stage, kicking roses off his pants and rubbing his eyes.

Someone in the woodwind section of the orchestra started playing a sad version of what couldn't have been anything but the Happy Birthday song. Turns out, it was also Maury's birthday. Confetti drizzled sadly, hesitantly from some unseen place overhead.

True Story Scale: 7

Bzzzzzzzz

2010-06-23T14:10:00.006-04:00

I'm waiting for the vuvuzela to make it into a rap lyric. Anybody got any ideas?

In the summer, I'm a beer-drinking fella'/

Six Point got me buzzing: vuvuzela.

Notice how I Draked that line and left out the "like" between "buzzing" and "vuvuzela."

True Story Scale: 1

Rap Dopeness Scale: 93 to Infinite

God Is in the Emails

2010-06-22T18:36:00.005-04:00

I've been overdoing it on the email checking tip today, but I'm still probably gonna check that shit again after I finish this sentence.

[Time lapse: 1 gmail-check long]

Mom just sent me an optical illusion email. It's the one where if you stare at the picture for a while, then stare at a wall, you can see a Jesus Face floating in midair. But this time when I did it, I didn't see a regular Jesus Face manufactured by my confused optical nerves, I saw the actual Jesus himself. Then I converted to Christianity.

Then I checked email again.

True Story Scale: 4

Some of the Hottest Girlfriends

2010-06-22T09:52:00.004-04:00

There was a dude begging in the train yesterday. He said, "I'm just a normal person who is having a hard time. I used to have an apartment and a job. I had some of the hottest girlfriends you can imagine."

True Story Scale: 2

The day before that, on the same train, there was a dude with a lizard on his forearm. He had tattoos and the lizard had chameleonairred itself to look like the tattoos. One of the tattoos said, "R.I.P. Tyrannosaurus Rex."

True Story Scale: 6

Fix These Roads

2010-06-21T19:24:00.006-04:00

Walking between trains this morning (I have this weird transfer at the Jay-Street-Borough Hall stop where I have to get out of the station), I saw a guy pulling a big grill. Yeah, kind of like that one. He also had a cage on one of the shelves of that grill, and, I think, an animal in that cage, which made me think for a second that he was taking the grill home to cook whatever was in the cage. He was having a hard time pulling the grill.

"Man," he said. "They gotta fix these roads."

True Story Scale: 1

Blog Experiment of the Day: Shorter Posts & the True Story Scale

2010-06-21T19:14:00.005-04:00

As my three irregular readers know, I'm an infrequent blogger. I do big posts, making big claims about more and better and longer upcoming posts. Then I crash. So, I'm switching it up for the next couple weeks and experimenting with shorter posts.

Also, with these new short posts, I'm also introducing a scale, which I'm calling the True Story Scale. At the end of each of these new short posts, I'll be placing a number from 1 (100% True Story) to 9 (Total Bull Shit).

My Warm Mug Turns Cold

2010-06-02T09:03:00.003-04:00

I’ve had several kinds of days in my life. I’ve gone a day without Google. I’ve even had a perfect day. But I’ve never quite had a day like the one I’m having today. At least not in many years. Today is the first day of Mik Quits Coffee. Sitting here in the library, typing this, I don’t feel tired so much as like a herd of wildebeests has taken a communal dump in my brain cavity and God is forcing me to think and speak and write and connect synapses through the grass-maggot filled sludge.

Even my analogies are sucking more than usual.

Anyway, I’m trying to give it up for a couple weeks at first, and then, who knows, maybe indefinitely. This isn’t a stunt. This isn’t one of those let-me-go-for-a-year-without-electricity-and-reading-the-OED-cover-to-cover-give-me-a-book-deal-please stunts. But, hey, I know what you’re thinking. You're thinking I am a stunt-puller. A gimmick bawd. First he gives up everyone’s favorite social networking portal, then he gives up his 2nd favorite beverage [Mik: Post to come about how this stupid diet also wants me to give up booze, which I will write as soon as BP top kills the grimed up pelicans in my frontal lobe. Fuck, another awful analogy.].

Trust me, I know what you’re thinking, not only because I’m pretty sure I’m going psychic without caffeine, but also because I’m thinking it too: Here I am, your goddamn stunt-puller. In a very nice deal, Publisher X purchases blogger Mik Awake's “The Guy Who Quit Coffee and Facebook in the Same Month.”

Nevermind that I’m actually trying to fight dermal issues that have been pestering me since college. Nevermind that I’ve been getting a lot more writing done without Facecrook. Mik just loves pulling stunts and blogging about it!? Doesn’t he?! Doesn’t he?!?!

Roll the blog before I start really wildebeesting up in this wildepost:

***

"Day with Coffee"

7:30AM – Hit the snooze button. Fall back into that light kind of sleep, you know, the kind with the weird dreams about dogs giving each other blowjobs in a Jacuzzi.

8AM – Hit the snooze button, but this time, instead of falling asleep, fast forward in your head a few minutes to your morning rituals. Brush teeth, okay, yeah skip that, what’s next. Shave, yeah, yeah, next, what’s next, I know there’s something I’m

8:02AM – And that’s when you remember coffee. And everything—the weird lady with the huge wrist watch who will seek you out in the library to sit next to you blaring awful Kool and the Gang music through her crap headphone—the big fat limping Italian guys who smell like fish and glare at you when you get off the subway—your credit card debt—all of it will seem a little bit not as terrible. Because there’s coffee. And this, this is what finally does the trick. That phantom smell of Gulf of Mexico-black Joe in one’s mug, beside a bagel slathered generously with creamed cheese. When you think about it, this is all that gets you out of bed in the morning. Starbuck’s, Stumptown, Jack’s, Nescafe, Ethiopian Harar, Jamaican Blue Mountain, Sanka. Whatever your weapon of choice, you know that whoever wrote that jingle for Folger’s about the best part of waking up, probably drank coffee everyday of his god-awful ad-job jingle-writing life.

8:30AM - Half-n-half with a little bit of sugar. Bagels are done. Fuck a bagel.

8:30AM-3PM – Every few minutes, wondering, as you look around the office, or (to be current) the unemployment line: “Do I need another coffee right now?”

3PM – After you catch yourself nodding into your keyboard (“Rich, Just got your ema;lij;….”), you rub your eyes and remember: you are due another cup. Even before you have it, warm through the cardboard/Styrofoam/Free Gaza thermos in your hands, your heart is already galloping in anticipation. It’s like the fucking F train over Red Hook. And when you finally lap that first bitter gulpful, your heart starts doing a sick freestyle in your chest to the beat of Mobb Deep’s “Shook Ones.”

Yo, I’m only 28, but my brew is old.

And when things get for real

my warm mug turns cold…

3:01PM – Night Time – …For every latte I drink, it’s 25 to Life.

***

"Day Without Coffee"

7:30AM – Hit the snooze button. Fall back into that light kind of sleep, you know, the kind with the weird dreams about playing squash without any equipment. Or pants. Or genitalia.

8:02AM – And that’s when you remember coffee….

8:02:01AM – …But also you remember that your new anabolic diet involves not drinking any...

8:03AM – Lifting legs with hands like a paraplegic discovering he can walk: It’s okay. Must go on. Must make it to bathroom. Must live life.

8:04AM – Fetal position on the living room floor around your french press: I have nothing to live for.

8:05AM – Brushing your mustache with toothpaste in the bathroom, whispering, through tears, to the mirror: I can get through this.

8:06AM until the End of Your Miserable Un-Caffeinated Day, back and forth like this, wondering what it felt like to be crisp and alert, as you once were in your youth. Which ended one endless day ago.

Enders

2010-05-21T09:55:00.010-04:00

This morning, I've been having a kind of phantom bookmark syndrome. My mouse has been wandering over the space between Gmail and NBA.com where that blue little "F" used to live, like someone visiting the house they grew up in and realizing that it's been demolished. And then remembering, "Oh, shit, I'm the one working this wrecking ball. Die, old house, die!"

Growing up, my brother and I used to have this thing that we could never leave the basketball court in our backyard without making one last, really sweet fade-away from the corner, and yelling, "Ender!!!" A similar thing happened as I was about to leave the blacktop rectangle of social media this week. I got some of the most intelligent, gravity-defying comments about my decision from folks. Shouts out to my good buddies Bryan "I heard what you said" Joiner and Matt "Sneak Attack" Jackson for the great back-and-forth, which was carried out in the comments of this blog and FB, respectively. Matt brought up a really great point, a great response to David Foster Wallace's inner-death idea, that this type of death happens (and will happen) regardless of whether it's Facebook or TV or whatever. That the problem is with the user, not the medium.

Also, that word "user" is interesting. Ever since social networking has been around, people have used the language of addiction to describe their Crackberry relationship to it. It's usually an ironic usage, of course, in that the only real active substances involved in the equation is narcissism, with a complimentary side dish of voyeurism. But I think Facebook is the king of social media pharmacologisms. Why should it surprise anyone that head honchos over at FB respond to privacy/abuse criticism in a way as pragmatic and gangster as Stringer Bell. "If you don't want to use the shit, don't use the shit." ("But I'll always be here if you need me.")

By no means does deactivating my Facebook account mean that I'm dismissive of the site as a powerful force in contemporary life. Not that you care, but I have no less than two story ideas (one made-up, one not) that draw heavily (almost wrote "heavenly" just there; wishful thinking?) on Facebook language or the idea of Facebook, the way it infiltrates even the way you think about your day, which is a POWERFUL powerful notion (especially for those of us who trade in language, words, etc). For example, I know I'm not alone on this one: who among us HASN'T caught himself, from time to time, standing over the toilet and imagining the words "just laid a weird dump" doing a quick status fade-in beside your name on FB?

[...]

Please let me not be alone on this one.

Being Together in the Same Room: A Facebook Farewell

2010-05-18T11:53:00.006-04:00

I've decided to quit Facebook, powering down officially by Friday, not really in solidarity with anyone, though my decision has the texture of solidarity.

Big ups to Zuckerberg and Co. for starting something that's done a very good job of connecting people with long-lost family and friends (I see you, Ari Irvings!).

A lot of you already know about my aversion to some of the more personally embarrassing aspects of FB (i.e. my middle name is "Remove Tag"). And I've also not had a real facial picture of myself on my profile for a long time (see inset). But, while understandable, not wanting to publicize incriminating evidence about oneself online isn't a powerful enough reason to quit. After all, I do have a pretty incriminating blog here, about which a friend recently emailed saying, I guess you're not going back to the corporate world.

Fair enough.

The real reason I'm quitting is because I feel like the Facebook party has turned into a kind of trap. I see status apologies every week about hackings ("Sorry for the mass emails..."), and in their recent press releases, FB Corporate is understandably unrepentant, essentially looking over their poker hand and saying, "Go ahead. No one's twisting your arm to stay on Facebook." And they're right. Status update: "My arm is fine."

The real arm of mine that's being twisted nowadays isn't the lack-of-privacy arm, or even the someone-is-trying-to-pull-a-fast-one-on-me arm, although I don't know about you, but I hate the idea of folks trying to make a buck off me without my knowing it. The real arm-twisting deals with something harder to explain, something that was conjured up recently while I was reading David Lipsky's engrossing new book of interviews with David Foster Wallace. The interviews took place in '96, and, in this quote below, the late, great Wallace is talking about the emptiness of TV (not FB), but I think he gets into some very powerful, prophetic terrain which applies to the social networking site:

"I think one of the reasons I feel empty after watching a lot of TV, and one of the things that makes TV seductive, is that it gives the illusion of relationships with people. It's a way to have people in the room talking and being entertaining, but it doesn't require anything of me. I mean, I can see them, they can't see me. And, and, they're there for me, and I can, I can receive from the TV, I can receive entertainment and stimulation. Without having to give anything back but the most tangential kind of attention. And that is very seductive.

"The problem is it's also very empty. Because one of the differences about having a REAL person there is that number one, I've gotta do some WORK. Like, he pays attention to me, I gotta pay attention to him. You know: I watch him, he watches me. The stress level goes up. But there's also, there's something nourishing about it, because I think like as creatures, we've all got to figure out how to be together in the same room.

"And so TV is like candy in that it's more pleasurable and easier than the real food. But it also doesn't have any of the nourishment of real food...

"...as the Internet grows, and as our ability to be linked up, like--I mean, you and I coulda done this through E-MAIL [Mik: or Facebook!], and I never woulda had to meet you, and that woulda been easier for me. Right? Like, at a certain point, we're gonna have to build some machinery, inside our GUTS, to help us deal with this. Because the technology is just gonna get better and better and better and better. And it's gonna get easier and easier, and more and more convenient, and more and more pleasurable, to be alone with images on a screen, given to us by people who do not love us but want our money. Which is all right. In low doses, right? But if that's the basic main staple of your diet, you're gonna die. In a meaningful way, you're going to die."

Update: This blog post just cost me a $35 parking ticket. Two minutes late on the goddam meter. Argh! Fuck you, Facebook! And you, too, unreasonable NYPD traffic cop lady.

Library Defeats Coffee Shop

2010-05-11T10:42:00.005-04:00

This morning, due to an annoying and far-too-complicated-to-explain issue with street parking, I've been forced to relinquish hopes of hunkering down on the 2nd floor of my beloved Brooklyn Public Library and, instead, man the window seat at a cafe not far from where I'm staying. Probably most people would PREFER to work at a coffee shop. The clientele is undoubtedly less schizophrenic than the aluminum foil clad wonders at the BPL (and the art on the bathroom walls here is decidedly more intentional).

And though many complain about the types of narcissistic faux-writer types who work in coffee shops--"you should totally write that down"--I don't really have a problem with the people. In fact, I actually prefer to work around light chatter, clacking, signs of sentient life. There's something reassuring about it, no doubt thanks to my Mom, who never liked it when I closed the doors of my bedroom, even when I was reading or doing homework. Also, what I've noticed after a couple days around town is that there's not much difference nowadays between the types of workers in either place (laptops, wistful window-gazing, journals, LSAT books); if anything, the people who work in the library seem more serious about actually getting work done, mooring themselves--sans oatmeal chocolate chip cookie--to a taxpayer-funded table and the dream of a GRE score in the 99th percentile.

The thing I hate about coffee shops--and why I've chosen to do something less serious than work on my novel [Blog: "I thought we was friends, baby."]-- is music. As someone very sensitive and interested in how musical selection effects group dynamics (i.e. my drunk name is Notorious I.P.O.D.H.O.G.), I can't think of a worse place or time to pump Ice Cube's "Gangsters Make the World Go 'Round" than at 10AM over muffins and Earl Grey.

Who wakes up and goes, "Ah, I think I'd like a nice coffee, a bagel, maybe a couple sections of the morning paper. Oh, and some Immortal Technique played at concert volume." Well, probably only one person, Immortal Technique.

I'm totally blowing this joint....as soon as they get through this new Raekwon album. (Hot shit!!!)

Would the Shaqtus Be Protected Under Arizona Immigration Law?

2010-04-26T17:03:00.011-04:00

Last month, I had the pleasure of Spring Break-ing in the state that is now the focus of a raging national debate on immigration reform. I speak, of course, of Arizona.

Ah, Arizona! Home of the saguaro cactus, not to be confused with the Shaqtus and the diamondbacks, which I soon discovered on my first and last hike, wasn't just a cool sounding name for a baseball team. Also, strangely, home of people who don't believe in daylight savings.

What else can I add to my book report? ~~Let's see, Arizona is also the home state of John McCain, which he lost--kind of embarrassingly--in the presidential election to President Obama~~. And even though we're hearing a lot of griping nowadays about illegal browns, it should be noted that Arizona was, first and always, a place where a whole lot of original browns called home--and long before there were any other colors on the spectrum. (Shouts out to the Tohono O'odham.)

On my trip, I was mostly in Tucson, where people are, along with most of the Southern part of the state, as appalled by this racist, authoritarian bit of legislation as we in Liberalelitistan. What's more, not only are average citizens in Tucson upset by the laws, but by the sound of it, so are the people who would be in charge of enforcing it, too.

From my icicle-laden perch, far above this desert fray, these immigration measures, which will no doubt employ rampant racial profiling in an attempt to "identify, prosecute and deport illegal immigrants" (NYTimes), seem like another sad ploy by the far right to pick a fight with the current administration. I can't make sense of it any other way. The right continues to pass this kind of instigating legislation as a way of framing a flawed, slightly deranged debate. It's weird in this day of political correctness how much the folks on the far right are banking on the power of suggestion, like the Arizona state senator who got skewered by Anderson Cooper (yeah, I know) about the legitimacy of Obama's birth certificate, an on-air interview which quickly devolved into a "How do we know any facts ever about anything?" conversation. Very productive.

But to implement a law like this, which the Republicans had to have known they wouldn't get away with, strikes me as the most aggressive attempt at framing a debate along these lines: "See, we passed this very respectable immigration law that has nothing to do with the national agenda [Mik: "Bullshit!"], and look at how fiercely this immigrant loving, fascist administration comes to bring their foot down on our little state rights. (Hint: it's probably because he's an immigrant himself.)"

Aside from the actual terms of the law, to me the most troubling aspect of the bill seems to be the way it seeks to attack aspects of Obama's background and character. As soon as Obama says the obligatory, "No Way" to the immigration law, it somehow means something more (more what?) than if it had come from the non-Kenyan mouths of President Clinton or Carter. In other words, the terms which the Arizona Republicans who backed this law want to set for the debate are not based on reason or even strategic common sense (won't they alienate Latino voters in the state?). The only level it seems to make sense on is the scarier level, the level where the racially paranoid imp in all of us spins baroque conspiracy theories, the level where xenophobic militias are stockpiling weapons, the level where you hit the Door Close Door Close DOOR CLOSE button in the elevator and try to forget what you saw.

And that is troubling.

I hope it's not that. I hope it's just another sad case of the Republicans wanting to see Democrats fail more than they want the country to succeed, and doing so by any means necessary. Be they illogical, or racially divisive, or otherwise. But I'll end this monumental piece of blog with an analogy, because, well, fuck off, I like analogies:

Imagine, if you will, two dudes playing chess. But the house they're in is on fire. And, instead of chairs, they realize they're sitting on fire extinguishers. The dude who happens to be winning is like, "Shit," and grabs his fire extinguisher to start addressing the fire. Meanwhile the dude who's losing, makes an illegal move behind the other dude's back, and is like, "Aha! Check!" Just as a flaming beam crashes through the board.

Global Umbrella Powers

2010-04-08T17:05:00.003-04:00

I have discovered something remarkable, Internet, which you probably won't find interesting, Internet, because, where you're from, it never rains, or suns, or does anything. But where I'm from we have weather, loads of it. Sleet, snow, you name it. Around this time of year, we usually have what is known as rain mixed in with heat and humidity. So, to prevent that, we've invented these things, umbrellas.

But this is my discovery, Internet. Every day that I bring my umbrella with me, cramming it uncomfortably in the open back pocket of my man purse, so that the handle digs into the small of my man back, reminding me "Hey, buddy, umbrella here," this is what the weather says: "No, sir, I refuse to rain." Yes, you heard it right. I carry my umbrella around, and it never rains. I know what you're thinking. "No, Mik, you don't understand. It only feels that way. I'm sure there have been countless times when it's rained on a day you've--"

No, it is thee whom does not understand!

For some people, maybe your point would be well taken. But for me, the rules are different. This power is an actual magical power. I control the weather with my umbrella.

If I want it to rain tomorrow, all I have to do is leave my umbrella at home. My umbrella is like the Groundhog. If I want it to be sunny and 80 degrees, just say the word and I'll keep bearing the global burden in my Jack Spade.

But you want to know my even more powerful magical power: finding a way to whine about good weather.

Racist Snagglepuss Goes Cloud-Watching

2010-04-01T20:24:00.003-04:00

Oh, look at that one. It looks like a whale, a cucumber, an Asian being better at math even.

High Post 7: 1988 B.C.

2010-03-11T02:06:00.009-05:00

Hi, first off, I want to say that I'm really high right now. Guess what the search term was that I plugged into Google Images just a second ago to find this picture? I wrote "nice pictures." Cause that's all anybody wants to see anyway. Just nice pictures. All the time. At the top of blogs. Three, I guess, pink, kind of reddish, smiling circular-faced things with weird spikes in their totally black eyes and don't seem human and oh my god what have I let into this blog. Ruuuuuuuuuuuun!!!!

It's been a minute since I blogged. I realize this. And actually "it's been a minute," a phrase used in the previous sentence, is actually a euphemism for a long amount of time. A long amount of time is a euphemism for gambling. Gambling is a serious disorder that can effect society. Society is full of douchebags. Douche bags are an actual sanitary product. Sanitary products are things that clean up other insanitary products, such as waste. This is a student paper. I. have. a. robot. voice. The world is composed of insanitary human beings. These beings dress and walk and talk like the rest of us. We all probably know them. Call them neighbor and bus and laughter. But these beings are actually...Insanitaries.

Okay, enough of this. This blog post is going nowhere. You're lost. Just pull over! Pull over and let me out of the blog. I just want to go home. Unlock these fucking doors and let me out of this blog...help. Help! HELP SOMEBODY HELP ME I'M TRAPPED IN MY OWN BLOG!!! I'M FUCKING TRAPPED IN MY I'm just kidding I'm not really trapped. I'm just writing this shit out. Into an Apple laptop computer. Off the top of the lap with it, you know. Off the top of the Duomo (Italy!) on my high school trip now this is a story all about how my goodness I'm high.

This is how my students write. They write like all students, who are in terms of such as them. Nevertheless, do all students write? Students, writing, and terms all function nevertheless. And this is the rub. Students who are also functions nevertheless write. To write was established in 1988 B.C.

ME: Yo, wouldn't it be like crazy if 1988 A.D. was actually the same things that happened in 1988 B.C.? But like only all the dudes turned into girls, and all the girls turned into dudes?

ME AGAIN: But then wait. How would you know who used to be a dude in B.C. and who used to be a chick? I'm not fucking no present chick who used to have a dick. Or vice versa.

ME: No, man. That's not what I'm talking about. Just SHUT THE FUCK UP AND LET ME FINISH!!!!

ME AGAIN: Bite my nose off why don't you.

ME: I'm talking about...I'm talking about...You just got me so worked up just then just a second ago. What the fuck was I talking about?

ME AGAIN: 1988 B.C. was actually--

ME: Oh yeah right shutthefuckup so yeah what I was saying was that you wouldn't be no present dude if you were a girl, and you wouldn't be no present girl if you been a dude.

ME AGAIN: So, how would you know if you were really a dude or not?

ME: If you were a dude in 1988A.D., like us two are dudes right now, trapped in this blog, you would be a non-dude aka woman in 1988 B.C. So you would know. So you, for example, were a girl in 1988B.C.

ME AGAIN: Oh, yeah. What about you?

ME: I was a dude both times. (Pussy.)

This concludes our episode of "Mik Awake: Unusually Tired." As always thank you for reading. I think I'm just going to compose my blog posts like mail letters from now on. Like wouldn't it be funny if someone didn't understand the concept of a blog. And just wrote like actual letters into the blog. Because he thought he was mailing them. The dude would have to be old and a woman in 1988B.C. Or what if you treated it like a news cast every post?

Thanks again for tuning in. Good night, and sleep tight, and don't let those bedbugs bite, and watch out for polio, and that malaria is kind of going around so really tuck yourself in there, because I've seen the damage some of them bedbugs can do to human flesh, as well as herpes which is also really bad and can be transmitted by untight sleeping, or, as the medical profession calls it, loose slumber.

(Watch out for cancer.)

"Yes! Yes! Fuck you, too!"

2010-01-26T00:21:00.007-05:00

As kids, one of the first R-rated movies my mom let my brother and I watch was “Coming to America.” I think she was okay with it because it was a story close to her own heart: a couple of Africans trying to find happiness in America.

(Dad didn’t really care what we watched, so long as it didn’t make us gay, like when my brother and I were watching “The Birdcage” after dinner one night and he yelled, “I don't wanna watch this fag show!”)

For many years after watching “Coming to America,” we would refer to the f-bomb as The Eddie Murphy Word. As in Mom going (right after the movie ended), "Don’t ever use The Eddie Murphy Word, or you’ll get a spanking." Or my brother saying, "Ooooh, I’m telling. You just said The Eddie Murphy Word." Or me replying, "Don’t you dare tell on me, you lousy motherTheEddieMurphyWorder!"

At home on the set of our depressing ABC sitcom, “Having Come to America,” there was no room for The Eddie Murphy Word. But elsewhere, at school for example, in our trailers, it was Eddie Murphy Word this and Eddie Murphy Word that.

I think by naming it after someone famous, my mom wanted us to understand that only certain people had the power to say certain words. And that we shouldn’t think that power was our birthright. As though the magic of the word would be lost in our non-Eddie Murphy mouths.

Eddie Murphy will probably never know the power we had given him, never know that somewhere in the suburbs of America a family had named the best curse word after him. In many ways, it’s better than some star on a sidewalk, or handprints in hardening cement.

Of course now The Eddie Murphy Word is a relic, not only of our family and a time when we were afraid of dropping the f-bomb around each other. It’s also a relic of its namesake, who stopped doing R movies a few years after “Coming to America” and stopped saying the word he had invented and started making an animated ass of himself.

This turned out to be the real curse, because not even a year after Eddie Murphy stopped saying his word in the movies, they caught him in a car Eddie Murphy Word-ing a transvestite hooker. Which just goes to show you can take Eddie Murphy out of his word, but you can’t take The Eddie Murphy Word out of Eddie Murphy.

Occasionally someone in our family--usually not Mom--will use the Eddie Murphy Word, though I guess it’s not the Eddie Murphy Word anymore...or if it is, we don’t call it the Eddie Murphy Word anymore.

We just say fuck.

High Post 6: Go Hard, Yuppie

2009-12-19T21:02:00.002-05:00

I'm on some next level yuppie shit. What do you know about it? What do you know about pushing your kid around in a vintage wooden wagon that barely rolls? What do you know about electric toothbrushes? What do you know about being a vegetarian for a while and then, after a few years, going hard on the bacon? What do you know about nodding earnestly to all your still vegetarian friends?

What do you know about being sensitive about being a sell-out? I fucking love being a sell out. If I loved selling out any more, I'd have to get a new passport to a country populated only by sell out motherfuckers who require that their material needs be met in the most bland, un-ostentatious ways possible. I don't even know what it's like to have a hard-line political stance, and I don't want to fucking know either. All the tattoos I got during my dissolute post-college years: fucking lasered those bitches. I got a new tattoo around each patch of scar tissue saying "My Parents Were Fucking Right!"

Also, I fucking enjoyed getting rid of all my guitars. Now I even trash shit in my house that isn't an instrument but which I might at some point be tempted to make music on: Tube of white out? That shit sounds interesting when you flick it: TRASH! Venetian blinds? Pretty much a xylophone: TRASH!

You bet I love firing up the espresso machine I bought on Amazon after carefully reading a bunch of reviews and comparing specs. Those reviews were fucking right. That mircofoam is fucking worth it. And at approximately 7:30AM, when I shrug into my pea coat and messenger bag and leave my really comfortable apartment and average-hot spouse and step out into my formerly-Michael-Jackson-"Bad" neighborhood, and pick up a fucking muffin or bagel (depending on my mood), and snap up a copy of the new motherfucking issue of the New Yorker, which I don't even read all the way through but just like having: can any of you motherfuckers stop me?

And what do you know about having an iPod playlist called "Getting Psyched For Weekly Marketing Meeting"? What do you know about the Indigo Girls? What do you know about Coldplay? What do you know about calibrating your cultural tastes to the critical responses of major magazines? What do you know about using the phrase "quasi-experimental"? Yeah, that's what I thought. You obviously don't know shit about any of this.

This is all just to say: you can’t find a motherfucker more yuppie than me. Every day, I go to a new restaurant in the $$ - $$$ range that the Times recommends, even if I’m not hungry. In fact, name someone who shows up quicker to the new $$-$$$ restaurant on his block and introduces himself to the owners. Name someone who raves about it better than me for a few months. Name someone who is more impatient to talk shit about that same restaurant after a few months. Name someone who prohibits his kids from playing outside of their vintage wagons better than me. Name someone more tolerant of differences than me. Name someone who smiles harder at interracial babies than me. Go ahead and name someone. Give up? Yeah, that's what I thought, because no motherfucker out there is more yuppie than me.

And knock, knock: I fucking love Whole Foods. I spend fucking hours there. I age in that bitch. Everything that's ever gone past my mouth is organic. All the cows I eat fucking love grass, and all my chickens don't even know what the fuck a cage looks like. And you know the only thing I love more than Whole Foods? Expressing my shame about loving Whole Foods! I fucking love that shame.

And, yeah, you’re still evited to my next dinner party. And, yeah, there's gonna be crunchy little slices of baguette, because I fucking love slathering pesto on that shit. Yeah, I'm gonna drink a sensible amount of Pinot Noir and then secretly grit my teeth when my spouse rubs my back in annoying little circles. I fucking love being annoyed by that shit.

I’m just asking that, when that shit happens, you have no doubts about who the yuppiest motherfucker in the room will be.

It’ll be me, motherfucker. Me.

Q & A Discuss A Rap Lyric

2009-12-08T20:48:00.003-05:00

Q. What is the most misunderstood line from Jay-Z's "Empire State of Mind" ft. Alicia Keys?

A. "If [Jesus/Jeezy?/Cheeses?/P.G. Wodhouse?] is paying LeBron, I'm paying Dwayne Wade."

Q. Would you mind going through the various ways that you've understood this lyric?

A. Funny that you ask that, Cheeses, because I am a lyric understanding machine! I've understood this lyric in several different ways. To whit:

Jay-Z is so rich that he can make deals analogous to our lord and savior.
Jay-Z and Young Jeezy are members of a fantasy basketball league.
Young Jeezy is paying LeBron James to appear on stage, whereas I, Jay-Z, am paying Dwayne Wade for perhaps similar reasons.
Jay-Z is a Muslim like Dwayne Wade and the NBA.
Beyonce was a virgin when she married Jay-Z.
Destiny's Child is LeBron James' favorite R&B group.
Miami is a place where Young Jeezy converted to Christianity with Jay-Z after playing a basketball video game together and drinking sodas.
Young Jeezy and I, Jay-Z, have this hilarious inside joke about paying Dwayne Wade. Don't worry about it.

Q. How does one go about gathering the TRUE understanding of that line?

A. Like this.

Q. Eureka! That lyric went from very cool and strange and blasphemous, to very boring and not quite a good rap, and now it is back to, you know, kinda cool.

A. My question to you is who is paying Muggsy Bogues?

Q. Hey, wait a second! You can't ask a question! That's my job!

Q. Not anymore. See how I did that?

A. Wait! What the fuck?! Stop asking questions!!! Wait, why am I an "A" now?!! Give me my "Q" back!!!

Q. Why don't you stop making statements?

A. This is completely fucked up!!!

Q. Or is it, Cheeses? Or is it?

A. [commits suicide; leaves cryptic, ungrammatical note: "I am paying Manute Bol?"]

Early Resolutions

2009-12-03T18:08:00.003-05:00

Start calling customer service at my bank with snippy technical questions: "Okay, then how do I fucking download sufficient funds?"

Start reading race into things more, you bigot.

Stop standing over the toilet after huge dumps, updating Facebook: "Phew. Was getting worried for a second there."

Start living by this credo: "The hour is the twenty dollar bill of time."

Stop informing people that their backpacks are fully unzipped when they are not wearing backpacks.

Stop confusing everything that is not a push-up with sit-ups.

Start attending nudist beaches to practice mentally dressing women.

Stop drinking sit-ups.

Lester and the Janitor

2009-11-10T14:16:00.007-05:00

My friend Diana enlisted me in this neat traveling journal project called Pen Tales 20. Twenty notebooks were sent to twenty different people. Each person writes a 2-page story in the journal, then passes it on to another person to add another 2 pages.

You're supposed to keep the journal for only five days (fail) and write in longhand (digital printout fail). The one guideline I actually managed to follow was engagement with the previous entry, which was Diana's, which was a strange story about a girl's escape from an insane asylum. In the last couple lines, the girl happens upon the cottage of the asylum's janitor and opens the door, where she beholds "a sight of wonder."

I took over post dot dot dot and wrote this:

With the low, unfamiliar alarm filling the streets of town with word of my escape, the janitor couldn’t hear his own door opening. Wind slammed it shut behind me. It shook the walls of the cottage, and the janitor’s eyes widened at the sight of me. I could sense his terror filling the space between us. The room was dense with smoke and the sweet, charred smell of something burning. Suddenly, I felt a giant shadow move over me. I looked up. I fainted.

When I came to, a weak gray light was streaming in through the crescent aperture in the top of the room and staring down at me from the rafters with two eyes glistening darkly like chocolate was the biggest bird I have ever seen.

It was black as midnight, the feathers on its head rustled against the underside of the roof. It had to be twenty feet. Its claws were as fat and wrinkled as the trunks of a stand of birches. I covered my mouth with both hands and stifled a scream.

The janitor had repositioned himself in front of the fireplace. He was seated in a rocking chair before the fire, turning the crank on his strange instrument. It had a ring of long metal rods, which fanned out from the crankshaft. It was like a Gatling gun, expect at the end of every little rod was a fluffy white cube, like a marshmallow. I sat up quietly and when I tried to slide off the cot, my legs wouldn’t move. They were fastened to the frame by chicken wire.

The bird quacked as it tried to extend its wings in the narrow space above. It sounded like a St. Bernard.

I began to cry. The janitor stopped cranking his instrument.

“Please,” I whispered. “Please, let me go.”

“I can’t do that,” he said, in a pleasant drawl.

In all the years I’d been at the asylum, I’d never heard him speak. I’d seen him every day, watched him through the bars of my room as he dirtied the linoleum floor with a greasy, knotted mop.

“What is that thing?” I said. Its horrible beak, the size of a small boat, gleamed silver in the dimness. One of its smaller feathers had fallen to the floor and landed with a thud beside the room’s only table, like the oar of some hell ship.

“That’s Lester,” said the janitor, standing and rolling his contraption away from the fire on its casters. His eyes, half-lit by the orange flames, glanced back and forth between the bird and me. There was a tiny spot of soot on the tip of his nose.

Lester woofed again, and in the ensuing silence, I realized that the alarm was no longer sounding outside. It was almost dark. The janitor lit an oil lantern. It was almost embarrassing how quickly they’d given up looking for me.

The janitor began to pluck the tiny balls of fluff from the ends of his contraption. They were bent and charred black now. He tossed one into my lap. It landed on my white gown, streaking it with soot.

Sniffing it, I realized it actually was a marshmallow.

I bit through the crunchy, burnt exterior, into the hot, gooey insides. A million tiny pale strands fell over my fingertips. The sugary smell was dizzying. I thought I was going to faint again. It had been years since I’d had a marshmallow, but I knew that I had never tasted a marshmallow like this, roasted with such care and for so long. “It’s heavenly,” I said, my cheeks full of goo. The janitor smiled sadly. He plucked the other marshmallows from the ends of his contraption, perhaps four dozen in all, and formed them expertly in his thick, dirty hands into a roasted marshmallow the size of a volleyball.

“Feast!” the janitor shouted as he heaved the mass up towards the ceiling, where it rose, seeming to pause in front of Lester’s beak for a split second, just long enough for the giant beak to separate and pluck it out of the air with weary skill. The hollow knock of Lester’s beak as it snapped over the marshmallow goo echoed through the cottage. The janitor kept looking from Lester to me, me to Lester, his eyes wild with delight. There were shelves all around us full of unopened bags of jumbo marshmallows.

“I’ve never seen anything quite like him,” I said.

“You’re the first person’s ever seen him,” he said, wiping his hands on his overalls and popping the last marshmallow into his mouth. “Besides me.”

He gulped hard and stuffed his hands into the space between his flannel shirt and his overalls. He was looking at the wire around my ankles with remorse. “Sorry for tying you down,” he said, soon snipping me free with a pair of scissors. “We’re not used to guests.”

We sat at his table and he told me the whole, sad story of how he had come to be the owner of a creature such as Lester. His Ma had left him in a campground near the Mississippi border with nothing but a bag of marshmallows and a baby bird flapping blackly about a little birdcage. “She said she was just going down the road to find some graham crackers.” His chin crinkled with sadness. “That was the last time I seen her,” he said, sitting before his contraption and the fire once again. “I kept waiting for her to come back.” I reached for his shoulder, and when I touched him, he reared back as though stung.

“You’re still waiting for her, aren’t you?” I said.

“I reckon I am,” said the janitor.

The janitor wept silently, and the tears cut clean lines into the dirt and grit of his knuckles. Above us, Lester hopped from one rafter to another growing agitated. He barked a word that sounded human.

“Some more!” Lester cawed again.

The janitor said nothing, only wiped his eyes quickly and spun the contraption even faster into the fire. I kept glancing up at the door. I knew they were out there, laying in wait for me. I couldn’t stay. I had to think. Just then, a knock came at his door.

Here Is Me and Mr. Keret

2009-10-27T23:06:00.014-04:00

If I were an old Jewish lady, I would cut in front of me too, because Etgar Keret is the shit. And tonight, he became even more the shit. My sense of his the-shit-ness was already pretty high before tonight, but to sit in that lecture hall at the Jewish Center hearing him talk about his parents' unsentimental relationship to their memories of childhood during WWII and the Holocaust, which were filled with as much comedy, joy, and exaggeration as they were deep suffering and loss, hearing him talk of his inability to write directly about his parents' trauma, hearing him read his short story "Shoes," which I wouldn't mind modeling all my own bullshit immigrant stories on, about a boy who visits a Holocaust museum, then receives a pair of Adidas (Guten tag!) as a gift, Keret's the-shit-ness rose to astronomical levels in my mind.

Here is me waiting in line and failing at it and then retiring to the next room for coffee and dessert, a much-needed treat, because as amazing as Keret's talk was, I was still barely able to keep my eyes open, a result of the arduous Monday-to-Wednesday teaching-tutoring schedule I have this semester, during which I expend much energy I don't have trying to get freshmen to unfreshmen their writing, their minds, etc.

Here is me, one of the last people in the lobby of the Jewish Center, which I'm almost certain is not the official name of the place, on my seventh brownie and third cup of coffee and second tiny bottle of Poland Springs, garnering the fake smiles and silent ire of the people serving the food because I have made the bold decision to cut out the middleman (tongs) and pick up the brownies with my best two fingers. Here is me waiting with my friends for another old Jewish lady who has cut in line to finish verbally pinching Etgar Keret's cheeks.

Here is me, approaching finally--the lady actually pinched his cheeks! how funny! but he took it like a gentleman, didn't he!

Here is me stuttering for a bit, staring at him (was he glowing, or was I having an aneurysm, was he having an aneurysm because of his own radioactivity, are aneurysms contagious?), and here is me asking him if he remembers me from last year, when he came to Syracuse and we sat for an hour in the lobby of his hotel and I ran a tape recorder and asked him one groggy question after another for the literary journal, which he answered ungroggily, with wit and warmth and a life-affirming lack of bullshit. Here is me opening my mouth in front of a writer I wouldn't mind switching frontal lobes with, if only for a couple stories, just to see how it would feel.

Here is me making a self of my ass:

"Hi, Mr. Keret."

"Hi."

"Uh, did you see the interview?"

"Yeah, someone gave me some copies of it earlier."

"Oh, great! What did you think? You didn't hate it, did you?"

"I didn't get a chance to read it yet, I've been--"

"No, totally groovy. No worries. We're all busy. All good."

"So, you are one of the editors?"

Here is me, crestfallen, because a favorite writer has forgotten who I am.

"I, I interviewed you. Don't you remember--?"

"Yes, yes. I remember. You're an editor now, right?"

Here is me, the opposite of crestfallen, because a favorite writer knows something about me. I am totally an editor now! Who has told him? Let me hug that person! And let me hug Mr. Keret!

"Oh, yes! I am! I mean...I am."

"Good."

"Okay, I didn't mean to insult your memory abilities. I just wanted to make sure. So you do remember me, right?"

"I do...Do you have a book for me to sign?"

"Yes, in fact, I do, Mr. Keret. It's my own book. Which includes an interview I did with you in it. Do you remember it?"

"Yes, I said I do."

"It was at the Sheraton?"

"Yes."

"It was in the morning?"

"Got it."

"There was a voice recorder I had sitting on the table? Because it's cool if you forgot. I know famous writers are interviewed all the time. I'm sure other interviewers did a better job--"

"I said I remember you. I remember the interview. I'm looking forward to reading it."

"Great! Because I know it's been a whole year since I interviewed you in the lobby of the Syracuse Sheraton, when you were sitting there, in that fond chair of yesteryear, and I was sitting across from you asking you those questions of lore in an interview-type scenario? Ringing a bell?"

"Are you mocking me?"

"Oh my god, no! No, no, no, Mr. Keret. You're the shit! You're on my shit list! I mean, my The Shit list! Right up there with Walt Whitman and Bob Marley. Man, I wish I had interviewed those guys too. Wouldn't it have been cool to do a three-way with those guys? Ha ha! I didn't mean that in like a gay sex way. Ha ha. But like a round table gang bang of verbal cum shots on each other. Do you remember our interview, Mr. Keret? Did you enjoy it? Whitman was gay, by the way, did you know that?"

"I am very tired, young man."

"So you don't remember me?"

"Fine. No, I don't. I have no recollection of ever meeting you."

A moment later, as I walked away from his table of books distracted, embarrassed, Mr. Keret holding his forehead in his hands, having a real aneurysm, my friends ask me what happened. What did I say? What did he say back? Etc?

Shrug. "I don't think he remembers me."

Bummer, say my friends.

"Though he did allow me to pinch his cheeks!"

An Explanation of Current Events As Dictated to Me by My Racial Paranoia

2009-09-23T19:42:00.003-04:00

You should be on orange alert: it all started with Michael Jackson dying. And what was Michael Jackson? He was the Holy Grail of American racial torment, everyone’s savior and scapegoat, a black dude who was white most of his life and then died and became magically black again overnight thereby enraging decades of white people who realized that even a freakish hybrid black person could still be considered black by other blacks, and maybe even more black, than they had ever suspected.

Then Michael Jackson’s eulogy by Reverend Al Sharpton was broadcast on a radio in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where a police officer who had loved Michael Jackson because he thought black people hated him was getting ready to make his rounds. Brrrrng! There goes his phone. Hello, this is Racist Cop? Hi, yes, two black dudes are breaking into Skip Gates’s house and one of them is Skip Gates, can you arrest them all? Not a problem, ma’am, let me just finish this Hitler moustache I’m putting on a picture of Barack Obama who is trying to give me universal health care.

Then in the middle of Obama’s beer summit with the cop and Skip Gates, which he also invited Biden to so that the cop wouldn’t feel like he was being double-teamed in some kind of interracial gay porn scene waiting to happen, Congressman Joe Wilson was driving by Pennsylvania Avenue in a taxi and saw the beers and the dudes bro-ing it up and felt completely dissed. He was like, to himself, what the fuck Barack, when I texted you earlier today, you said you were working on health care tonight. You hadn’t said anything about beers.

Wilson was near tears and still far from home when he told the driver to let him off at the next corner. His driver let him off. Wilson slammed the door without paying him properly. His driver was Kanye West’s uncle.

Kanye West’s uncle, or was it his second cousin, I think it was his second cousin. Kanye is not really tight with his second cousin, but nevertheless he has a semi-direct line to him, so he called Kanye’s assistant later that week and she put him through to Kanye giving him the code word for annoying money-grubbing second cousin. Kanye’s second cousin was like, Dude can I borrow a couple dollars, you know I’ll hit you back, but I’m just a bit low on funds because I was driving this guy who kind of didn’t pay me properly the other day so now I’m in the hole some dough you know how that goes. And Kanye was suddenly curious about the dude who didn’t pay his second cousin, so he was like, I know you drive some big shots and political dudes in DC: who were you driving? He said it in italics like that. And Kanye’s second cousin was like, Congressman Joe Wilson, do you know him?

Of course, Kanye knew him. Kanye knew all about Congressman Joe Wilson. Kanye hung up the phone on his second cousin, forgetting to hook him up with tickets even though he had an extra pair. Kanye’s own racial paranoia was quickly turning to outrage and it was on boil the night of the VMAs because of the way Joe Wilson could just get away with yelling at Obama in Congress and could just slam the door without paying on his second cousin, his own family dawg!, which is why when he took the microphone from that country singer whose video really wasn’t as good as Beyonce’s, he was secretly yelling at Joe Wilson, which all of the various blogs, newspapers, and magazines were smart enough to see the completely logical connections between.

Orange alerts. No lie.

["No, You Lie" image courtesy of noyoulie@gmail.com]

WHITE GUILT/BLACK GUILT

2009-09-16T23:17:00.003-04:00

White Guilt: Sorry for going first.

Black Guilt: No worries. Sorry I didn’t take the initiative.

White Guilt: Hey, man. I just wanted to say…Man, I’m really sorry
about, well, everything. It just makes me sick to my stomach to think
about it.

Black Guilt: Totally not your fault. Actually, I’m the one who should
apologize. There’s so much disgusting reverse stuff going on nowadays.
I feel awful. I can’t believe you’ve felt this way for so long. How
come you never said anything?

White Guilt: No biggie. Really. Reverse racism is a total oxymoron. I
don't even understand it.

Black Guilt: I do, and I'm sorry for it. I’m sorry about your
firefighters getting passed over for a promotion in New Haven. So
terrible, dude.

White Guilt: Pssht! That’s nothing compared to the systemic racism
that continues to widen the income gap between our wealthy, amazing
families and your very sad, poor ones. Really sorry.

Black Guilt: Don’t fret. I’m sorry about that whole Sotomayor thing.
She had no right to generalize about you guys like that. I know tons
of really wise white dudes.

White Guilt: Thank you.

Black Guilt: Maybe not tons…Samuel Beckett. He was white, right?

White Guilt: More or less. I’m sorry he won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Black Guilt: I’m sorry Toni Morrison played the race card.

White Guilt: Sorry about that whole Skip Gates thing. That was awkward.

Black Guilt: Listen, I’m sorry for the way we assume that all white
cops are racist when they’re probably just doing their jobs.

White Guilt: I’m sorry for racial profiling.

Black Guilt: I’m sorry about Obama’s “stupidly” comment. And about
Obama in general. I can’t believe he’s been in office almost a year
now. It feels like it’s been forever since there’s been a white
president. Sorry about that.

White Guilt: No, I’m sorry we’ve been hogging it for the previous 219 years!

Black Guilt: Ha ha ha. No sweat. I’m sorry Tiger Woods owns your sport.

White Guilt: I’m sorry Eminem owned your musical form.

Black Guilt: Owned or leased?

White Guilt: Either way. Ha ha ha.

Black Guilt: I’m sorry the whole penis thing didn’t work out in your favor.

White Guilt: No worries. Old myths die hard.

Black Guilt: Right. Myths.

White Guilt: I’m sorry we think you’re lazy.

Black Guilt: I’m sorry our comedians do hilarious impressions of you.

White Guilt: I’m sorry in sixth grade you thought Jessica Mills didn’t
like you because you were black when it was because you kept wetting
yourself before talking to her.

Black Guilt: That’s okay. I’m sorry I got into Dartmouth and you got waitlisted.

White Guilt: Water under the bridge. I’m sorry you couldn’t vote until 1870.

Black Guilt: 1965.

White Guilt: Whatever.

Black Guilt:

White Guilt:

Black & White Guilt: Sorry.

Clean on the Outside

2009-08-07T16:55:00.008-04:00

I used to be a huge fan of BET's Comic View, especially when Cedric the Entertainer was hosting. Before he started going the Eddie Murphy route of kids' movies, cartoons, and weirdly perfect facial hair, Cedric was the pioneer of incorporating dance moves into his routines. It helped that Cedric was chubby and jolly and actually a really good dancer, and that he never smiled while doing it, which is part of what made his opening routines so hilarious.

Now a lot of comics seem to incorporate song and dance into their routines. Kat Williams' epileptic "Everyday I'm Hustlin" bit is less a Cedric-style song-and-dance number than it is a staged battle of wills between Williams and an unseen DJ who continues to queue up the song despite the comedian's protests: "Shit! Turn it off, sir. Don't play it again."

But there was no one quite like Cedric. What he lacked in hyperactivity, he made up for in smoothness and prowess. And every once in a while, I'll hear a song and think, "This would be perfect for Cedric."

This is such a song. Yeah, buddy.

The God Particle Is in the Details

2009-08-04T16:04:00.005-04:00

Perhaps you've heard about the 17-mile long super-collider buried under Switzerland. Apparently, if everything works out, we'll wake up the next day with the power of invisibility and time travel. I think that's correct.

Anyway, there was an article in the New York Times today about how they've been having problems of late, which is a buzz kill for me, who was looking forward to walking through the coronation of Napoleon Bonaparte unnoticed. And naked.

A friend of mine pointed out a particularly noteworthy sentence in the article, which is hilarious in the deadpan way that only objective print journalists can muster: "The energy shortfall could also limit the collider’s ability to test more exotic ideas, like the existence of extra dimensions beyond the three of space and one of time that characterize life."

This sentence has inspired me to write a play. It is called "Energy Shortfall."

Energy Shortfall

Switzerland. Deep below the earth's crust. No, deeper. The mantle. A Mechanic and a Physicist stand talking in a tunnel of the Large Hadron Collider.

Mechanic: So you've got an energy shortfall.

Physicist: Oh, an ENERGY SHORTFALL. You don't say?

Mechanic: Listen, I'll come back tomorrow and take another look at it.

Physicist: Oh, yeah. Just come back tomorrow. The energy shortfall isn't really a big deal. I mean, it COULD jeopardize our ability to know the truth about the universe. But you know other than that. No big deal. Go home. You're TIRED.

Mechanic: I said I'll fix it tomorrow!

Physicist (mocking): "I said I'll fix it tomorrow."

Mechanic: Super-collide this.

Mechanic punches Physicist.

Physicist: Fucking asshole! Fucking dumb fucking asshole fuck! Once this supercollider gets going I'm gonna fucking use it to zap you into the fucking Paleozoic era so you can get fucking torn apart by fucking Pterodactyls! You fuck--!

Mechanic punches Physicist again, knocking him against the super-collider, which miraculously begins to function. Zoom out. A black hole opens up over Switzerland. Europe, the world, the galaxy, blogs, are all engulfed into it.

Mik gasps as he awakens from a terrible day dream. His boss is standing behind him.

Boss: Ahem. Mik, did you finish creating those spreadsheets for the progress report?

Mik: No, sorry. I had, uh. I had an energy shortfall.

Boss: And why are you dressed like Napoleon Bonaparte?

Mik punches Boss.

THE END

(...Or is it?)

Fortunes

2009-08-03T19:09:00.005-04:00

There was a fortune cookie left over from dinner last night. I broke it in half and removed its lone intestine. "Your future is boundless as the lofty heavens," it said. There were smiley faces on it. They did not seem particularly friendly.

I am not a fan of the taste of fortune cookies, but feeling fortunate, I popped half of it into my mouth and proceeded to fumble the other half. It shattered on the floor, which somehow seemed to contradict the optimism of my fortune.

And like that: my friend Jesse was sitting in my kitchen. On this day a year ago, he died in a freak accident while he was out jogging. His future was not boundless. His future ended on the corner of Vanderbilt and Atlantic Avenue on a day exactly like this one. And yet who better to verify the truth of the fortune? Who better to ask about the loftiness of heaven than him?

"Jesse," I said to an empty chair. "Is it really that...lofty?"

"Eh," he shrugged. "I mean it's only heaven."

I picked the brittle, broken pieces off my kitchen floor. I tried to think of what else we could say to each other, a year deeper into my boundless future, and him into the one I continue to imagine for him.

For me really.

I looked over at him and began my boundless, lofty future this way: by taking dirty, broken pieces of fortune and eating every last crumb.

Sent via Yo Mama

2009-07-22T12:25:00.004-04:00

I’m probably not alone in being an enemy of Personal Digital Assistants. A few years back, I had one ‘o them thangs and quickly realized that I preferred to keep my Gmail-and-Facebook-checking addiction separate from my text-checking one. When the two forces met in my old BlackBerry, the results were, in the words of TLC, unpretty. My emails became more like texts. K thx bye. My texts became more like emails. I will see you in a little bit unless you want to meet later in which case that’s totally cool with me or if you don’t want to meet at all just send me a long ass text message like this one that takes up seven texts so I know, K thx bye.

But the single strangest and most annoying thing to me about these futuristic devices is the extent to which they shamelessly brag about who they are. I know everyone gets these emails now which you think are emails at first, only to get to the end of them and discover a final smug phrase introduced by two words: “Sent via…”

Sent via BlackBerry. Or: Sent via my iPhone.

Consider that: My iPhone. Not yours. Mine. Just in case you were confused, because sometimes you might think that you’ve sent yourself a fake email which you couldn’t wait a couple minutes until you got in front of a computer to sit down and respond to like a normal human being.

I often try to visualize the people sending me these messages, see them standing outside their buildings, cigarette in one hand, small computer in the other, winking as a pretty girl walks by. Now he’s holding up his PDA. “It’s a G-Phone,” he says. “In case you were wondering.”

Can you imagine if all of our messages carried with them some kind of vital information about the means by which they were sent? How annoying would that be? This post, for example, would be stamped with: “Sent via A Shitty PC With Something Called A KeyTronic Keyboard Which I’m Supposed to Be Doing Work on But Which I’m Using to Write Stupid Blog Entries That No One Will Read.”

Or if my text messages all ended with “Sent via Weird Pantech Phone Which T-Mobile Doesn’t Recognize as A Real Phone and Which My Cousin Gave Me Out of Charity.”

Or if all my flirty fun emails to girls ended with “Sent via a Laptop Which A Few Minutes Ago I Used to Download a Video of Two Hot Lesbian Nurses Breaking All Kinds of Hippocratic Oaths.”

This is not a world I want to live in.

Sent via Just Keeping It Real

One Man's Michael Jackson

2009-07-01T06:59:00.004-04:00

First, I guess I need to apologize to myself and anyone who reads this for letting the blog field go fallow for so long. I've been working pretty hard and more or less solely on this, ahem, you know, kinda, well, uh thing, and it hasn't left much time for blogification. And actually I probably wouldn't have posted this today if I hadn't been prompted by a friend's email. So I apologize for the vacation. I think I'll post a couple more times before the summer's out. Or maybe not. Fuck off.

For the past several years, whenever I've been at a party, and there's been an untended iPod hiccupping one, like, Portishead song after another, I am usually the one to commandeer it, drunkenly and without asking its owner or the party host, who are usually the same person.

And the first name I usually spin the wheel towards is Michael Jackson's.

He is the egalitarian party starter of the century; he is Jesus of the iPod-based dance party: a savior. Forever and ever. Amen. I've only been to one party where the detonation of "P.Y.T." didn't cause hysteria, and that's because the people at the party were all from Greece and probably forgot who Michael Jackson was, stuck as they were in whatever weird, trance bullshit they'd been listening to all night.

And actually that party really disturbed me for many days afterward, and I said to the friend who'd dragged me there something that I think is as true today as it was back in March: "One man's trash is another man's Michael Jackson."

Because he was already a fixture of every single birthday playlist I've ever had--and usually timed for the apex of the night--and because his musical career had more or less ended, for me at least, after that song, "Butterflies," the only thing MJ's death does for me is make him dead.

There was a period growing up when hip-hop was the only thing I listened to--TLC, Arrested Development, Outkast, Biggie, Jay-Z, etc. I had more or less forgotten about MJ. But then, somewhere in my early twenties, I probably heard some DJ at some club spin "Rock With You" during a set, and I remembered.

Movie Flashback: Boston in the early 80s, the smell of our apartment on Beacon Street, a time when my parents were young, happy, and their friends would force me to do my lame moonwalk at parties, and which I'd readily perform.

For me, it's always been about his music. And maybe a good bit of nostalgia. I'm sure the creepy stuff is still haunting some people, most of all those kids, if it actually happened (and maybe more so if it didn't). It is haunting. But we wouldn't even know about it if it weren't for his Truman Show-esque, perpetually spotlit life, lack of childhood, some foul shit Joe said and/or did to him, etc.

I'm not saying I think Mike is innocent because he created great music. He created great music, and he was a flawed person, who led (in the words of Obama) "a sad and tragic life." Two separate statements. But his person must be punished for the flaws. Not his music, which still seems, after all these years, bigger, more expansive and more important than the sad, doomed brother that produced it.

High Post 5: Smoke Green Like It Was St. Patrick's Day

2009-03-15T00:13:00.006-04:00

Yay, Ireland. Yay, yay, yay, Ireland. It is your day of celebration. You lift up your songs to the Creator of your country. And you say, yay, yay, yay.

I am very stoned right now, more stoned than I've been in a long time. I went to dinner with two friends, and then one of the two friends came with me to this party, where all the dudes were trashed because they'd been drinking since 7AM, and they were wearing green Mardi Gras beads and green tee shirts with green Afros and green dildos, and one of them was like, "Yo, dude. Dude. Dude. Dude. First of all, Yay, Ireland."

Then other dudes at the party in chorus went, "Yay, Ireland!"

"Second of all," he said. "We have guests, dude." Heads spun around slowly at me and my friend, revealing, for the first time, their half-shut-because-we've-been-drinking-since-7AM eyes.

Then the other dudes were like, "Well, let 'em hit the bowl!"

But of course they neglected to tell us that not only was there weed in the bowl, but that there was also hash, which is why, after taking the hit, I was coughing my goddamn lungs out.

I was walking home with my friend, who decided not to take a hit in the end (and I took his for him), and even though he was talking like a regular human being, he seemed, to my ears, to be speaking in this hypersonic dialect that only people in the future or on Koldova 9 (a new planet I just made up) could understand.

I kept quiet, for fear of revealing that I was not a fellow Koldova 9er. All I remembered was to use that familiar Koldovan 9 phrase as we parted ways in the middle of the street, which was, "Good night, dude."

It was shortly after this that I sat down in front of the computer and a cat miraculously leapt onto my shoulders out of thin air and started writing everything you've just read. Yes, that's him up there. Arrest him!

Aaaaarrrrresssst hiiiiiim!!!!!!!!!!

A Negro Speaks of Blizzards

2009-03-11T16:12:00.002-04:00

I've known blizzards:

I've known blizzards as cold as nads, colder than the
Sweet flow of cookie dough and vanilla in a DQ Blizzard (TM).

Cold and snowy. (Did I mention cold?)
I've known blizzards.

I have gone sleeveless in Atlanta
Last Christmas, on my front porch, when it was in the low fifties.
I have gotten away with going out to bars
In only a hoodie and jeans on temperate
January evenings in Little Five Points.

But now I live in Syracuse, New York. Why did I come here?
It is because someone who probably won't stay my girlfriend
Told me it would be "April all year round."
And that the biggest Dairy Queen in America was being built here.
Because she knows I love Blizzards(TM).
Those were the cruelest jokes.

So now I know blizzards.
My soul has grown cold like a blizzard.

I wish I did not know blizzards.

Fuck blizzards.

A Little Number

2009-03-09T20:12:00.010-04:00

Oh, shit!

Again!

My fiction fragment "The Mortgensens" is up over at Monkeybicycle.net, a great little journal and website. If you have a second between doing whatever unseemly things you do, please check it out. It'll be on their home page this week, and in the archives after that. Thanks!

MikSweeney's

2009-03-05T21:53:00.004-05:00

Oh, shit!

I have a piece up at McSweeney's Internet Tendency this week (under my government name), which is a huge deal for me. Not that I used my government name, but that I have something up at McSweeney's, which I've been reading since before I knew how to read. Anyway, check it out! Or if you don't get around to it this week, peep it in the archives here.

Lake Effects

2009-02-23T20:18:00.008-05:00

Worst day of the year. No sun, all snow. Inside you, you feel the blood thicken.

You step off the bus, start heading east on a little street connecting the main one to home. Usually your time for silent, ambling meditation. And Weezy in the headphones. But you don't love this street today. Pelted by unkind flakes, you let out a deep, long breath, longer and deeper than you knew you had in you.

You have the urge to kick something, so you do. A baby bunny of snow. It explodes around you. You feel better. But only for a second. You've drawn the attention of a woman getting out of her Volvo. How was her day, you wonder.

Her face says please don't rob me.

You miss the city something terrible on a day like this. When you come home and the house is dark and empty. Except for the cat and her eyes. You try to pet her and she bolts. Which makes sense somehow.

You're dreaming of a bar tended by a fat, bearded man who mumbles to himself. You divide your attention between your pint, the front door, a novel. You realize you're waiting for someone. But who? Ah, a friend. Remember that? Someone who understands. Who gets it. Who comes, in the style of poorly written endings, precisely when you can't stand yourself anymore.

Dear Editor...

2009-02-01T18:17:00.017-05:00

As part of my work with Salt Hill, Syracuse's nationally distributed literary magazine, I get to read a lot of short stories that get submitted from all of the craziest corners of our Union. (My long-time readers--Hi, Mom!--will recall that the slush pile has been one of the enduring obsessions here at Mik Awake: Unusually Tired.)

Of the, say, hundred or so submissions you get, maybe two you'll want to pass on to the editors, but most of the stories you'll read are just, you know...meh.

But for every ten meh stories (e.g. "On a warm spring day, Billy arrived at his grandmother's house..."), there is at least one story that is exceptionally terrible and/or the work of a legally insane human being. And contrary to popular belief and whatever T.I. may think, there is a very thick line between brilliance and insanity.

But somehow even the worst stories are inspiring in their own crazy way. Which leads me to this: I have written, as a kind of homage to some of these stories, a story of my own, inspired by some of the most persistent qualities one is wont to find in exceedingly awful writing.

Some things to look out for: some form of the word "alone" in the first paragraph, casual un-ironic racism (i.e. use of the word "Chinamen" to describe Asians), use of the word "luncheon," and moments of astounding illogic, as in "Mik Awake was born at the age of five."

Wrote a song about it. Like to hear it here it go.

This is probably the best story I've ever written.

***

Nik in Love: Based on True Events
By Mik Awake

Alone, Nik Asleep sat in a windowless room. His mother stood in a corner. The old hag was old and haggy and had teeth that were yellow. Light streamed in through the windows.

“My dear son,” said the mother, using nice words but saying them un-nicely. “I don’t approve of your new girlfriend. And so that is why you are in this room: for grounding.”

The son felt angry. The anger boiled in him like water in a pot on a stove being made ready for use with tea or a French press for coffee which people would sip while sitting around a table and talking about current events, like Barack Obama.

Suddenly, he knew why his mother didn’t like his new girlfriend. It was because she was a different race. “Your racism is killing me,” Nik began to cry.

Instantly, his mother felt guilty, but hid her guilt from her son. “You are still grounded, young man.” She slammed the door loudly and stormed off down the hallway towards her room which she entered with a sigh. His mother, later on, would go to a luncheon and get into a car accident because she was so upset.

Otherwise, it was an everyday average day in their house. The father was absent somewhere being an alcoholic. Nik threw a chair in anger whenever he thought about his alcoholic father. "Chair!" went the chair.

The cats played in the foyer with the dogs and rabbits.

The cats were named Snuggles, Muffie, and Bridget. The dogs were named Brandon, Chuck, and Captain Fluffers. The rabbits had only two of their race on hand for the playing in the foyer, and there names were Teeny and Tiny. It was hard for Nik to tell the two rabbits apart. Was he racist against rabbits, he wondered. Maybe he had more in common with his mother than he thought.

He walked to his mother’s room to apologize. Several weeks had passed since the grounding. Did I mention he was off grounding when he was playing with all of the animals in the foyer but still hadn’t forgiven his mother? He could hold a grudge, that one.

Nik had told his mother that he had stopped dating his girlfriend of another race, a Chinawoman, named Kntadk^9. But this was not the truth. And Nik's mother found out by following Nik to school the next day and spying on him. She shook her fist at her son's interraciality.

“I hate you, Mom,” Nik cried with Kntadk^9’s China tongue jammed down his throat.

In the end, it was all he could say.

THE END
Or: FIN (For the foreign and Chinese markets)

Perfect for Gojam

2009-01-28T13:54:00.006-05:00

On my last trip to Ethiopia, I got my grandparents [Mik: That's them on the left] a hand-crank flashlight. In a country like Ethiopia, where batteries can be pricey, and blackouts happen too often, I had figured a gadget like this might be useful. All they needed to power it was their hands.

It took me a while to explain to Grandpa how it worked. When he finally wrapped his head around it (“No batteries, huh?”), he said, “This is something we need. This is something we really need…Especially in Gojam.” [Mik: Grandpa reps his home state hard.]

Grandma, praying nearby on her beads, rolled her eyes and swatted the word Gojam from the air.

Grandpa wanted to know if they sold bigger versions of these flashlights. I told him I wasn’t sure, but that I would check next time. “How much did it cost?” It wasn’t that expensive, I told him, not wanting to corrupt the gift somehow by saying its dollar amount.

“How many can you get me with $100?”

“Oh, a lot, probably,” I said.

“Okay, I’ll give you the money. I want as many of them as you can get. And did you say they have the big ones?”

I told him I would check.

“This is really something we need. It would be perfect, perfect for Gojam.”

In the middle of all this, Grandma had quietly gotten to her feet. She reached to grab the flashlight out of Grandpa’s hands. She made her familiar growling noise of disapproval. It was the same noise she made when I would refuse a second serving of food. “Aaaaah,” she said.

“He gave this flashlight to me,” she said. “It’s not going anywhere.” And she disappeared into her room. As a show of protest, Grandpa sat down and started reading the newspaper.

Grandma is a maniacal keeper of things. From arcane bric-a-brac like high school wallet photos and the old, left behind dolls of her grandchildren, to items intended for everyday use: electrical transformers, batteries, and (now) hand-crank flashlights.

She stows it all away in the big, locking cupboard in her room.

A couple weeks after the flashlight fiasco, when a radio in the living room began to lose its signal, she emerged from her room with a shiny new-looking stereo that no one had ever seen before. We might have thought she bought it recently, except the stereo had a tape deck. And they stopped making stereos like that a decade ago.

In other words, Grandma had saved the stereo, a gift on one of my aunt’s first trips back shortly after everything (Communism, the Wall, the hard Mengistu Years) fell.

Weirdly, I felt sad for this stereo. To be waiting all those years in my Grandma’s closet, missing out on all the new songs, sitting silently while broadcasts of the war, the government massacre of student protesters, and the growing similarity of the new regime to the old one whizzed by overhead. Unreceived. All the while psyching itself up for its first use, like an athlete before a big game. (“I’m gonna play the shit out of these cassettes! I’m gonna pick up radio signals like nobody’s business!”)

Only to discover that your time has passed.

Dokes: Birth of a Thing

2008-12-22T23:33:00.006-05:00

Humor gets so much attention. The ability to make someone laugh is prized so highly in our culture these days. (Can you imagine how much more ass P.G. Wodehouse would get if he were alive today and, say, living in Williamsburg as opposed to someone like James Joyce? Wouldn’t even be close. J.J. would be blindly onanizing himself every night.)

Take the idea of a joke, for example. A joke is a unit of comedy as old as language. Since we had the ability to say words, we’ve been doing our best to arrange them in ways to make ourselves laugh. I don’t know if any of what I’ve said in this paragraph is true or not, but it sounds authoritative, so I’m leaving it.

But what about sadness? Sadness always gets picked last at the emotional pickup game of life. Just go with this for a second please. Why don’t we have something similar to a joke, a pithy few lines that, rather than make us laugh, might have the ability to make us deeply sad.

Call them “dokes.”

Obviously, like the good cooking show host that I am, I have already prepared the dish. Here are two dokes:

A guy walks into a crowded bar and has a beer by himself. He thanks the bartender then blows his own brains out. Later, police find a suicide note in his room at the nearby motel. “My biggest fear has always been dying alone,” it says. “Bad enough to have lived my whole life that way.”

A doctor walks into an office where two people, a husband and wife are waiting with worried faces. “Your daughter has six months to live,” he says. Later that night, in the quiet pediatric oncology ward, they tuck her in together and kiss the top of her smooth head.

What's wrong with us, Chris Onstad?

Meaningful Eyes

2008-11-22T20:36:00.004-05:00

Like all places on a Friday night, the one you choose is crowded. You can’t avoid it in a city like this. You are at the bar getting another round you can’t afford; you tip the bartender a dollar for both drinks. You make your way back to the booth with your elbows out in front so you don’t spill anything.

She watches you with a worried smile. You place her drink down and slide in across from her, also smiling. She thanks you and insists, as she has for the last four rounds, on buying the next. You shrug at the suggestion, because you are a man, and one of your duties is buying drinks.

Soon, you’re back on the conversation you started earlier. About dating. After she tells you about her last boyfriend, she looks at you meaningfully and says, “I can’t ever be with someone who thinks it’s okay to lie to women.”

You hold her gaze and say, “I can’t believe there are guys out there who still do that.”

Her eyes continue to hold some kind of meaning, and water maybe, and they grow more meaningful and strange by the second. You know better than to look away—at the bar, at the perspiration on your glass, into the lamp over your heads.

Even when she bends forward to sip, you exert great mental force to keep your eyes on her, because while her lips are parting over the straw—pop—there are those meaningful eyes on you again.

You ask her, sensing something important passing between you, if she would like to step outside for a smoke.

You unfold two cocktail napkins and drape them over your drinks, like little ghosts protecting the booth and walk out into a warm night. Lights, voices, and horns throb through the streets, familiar as blood through veins.

“I have a confession,” you say, taking her hand.

Your eyes are meaningful, and just before kissing her for the first time, you say, “I don’t smoke.”

United Statuses of America

2008-11-06T00:26:00.002-05:00

Someone understands her grandmother a little bit better. Another person is elated that Palin and McCain have a black president. Another is Waving the flag. (I know. Can you believe it?
Never thought that day would come.)

RIP cynicism, says another, and still another is the happiest sick person on the planet. Another one wonders if the haters could just take a moment to appreciate how far we've come.

esta super alegre, vamos gente, seamos el cambio que queremos ver.

IF ANYONE SEES ANY EXTRA NYTIMES BUY ME THREE.

Someone says quit your whining.....you sound like a democrat! Another was looking for the change obama promised this morning and looked under my pillow, outside the door, nada. Luckily found some in my bag...Thanx OBAMA. (haha, too funny. I found some change too....in my swagger!)

OBÁMANOS!!!!!!!

One walked down the street with a smile daydreaming about one of her future children becoming president of the united states. Another told Jaia this morning that she could be president and she said, "I want to be Spongebob!"

She admits she's taking a little pleasure in your misery. She is worried for America, while he can not imagine a better place or time to be a homosapien.

One is asking all u celebratin' Americans to save me a drink; one is relieved; one is excited that next time she goes abroad she can admit to being American; one says happy tears over politics is a rare and beautiful thing.

Someone is ready for the weekend already.

Emails I Never Sent to Girls I Liked

2008-10-26T01:10:00.011-04:00

I'm ready to blog again.

It's been a rough weekend for me. The weather has been terrible in Syracuse. I've been feeling frazzled, unproductive, and, yes, quite sad: Jesse would have turned 27 today. Time marches on, even though everyone who knew and loved him is still waiting to wake up from our collective bad dream.

To ward off the blues, I've been checking emails and Facebook and my phone on a minute-by-minute basis. And I realize that, for the first time since moving here, I am feeling very lonely.

This loneliness crippled my writing output this weekend. This loneliness has me wandering the halls of my house, dribbling my basketball in front of the cat, and sifting through old journal entries.

And yet this loneliness produced a rare discovery tonight: a whole digital cache of lost emails. What kind of lost emails, I ask myself rhetorically to facilitate the following response: insane and creepy emails to girls I liked at one point or another, emails that (alas!) I never ended up sending, emails that might have been lost forever.

Why, I ask myself again as a lead-in to the following sentence, didn't I send these emails to the girls? The reasons should be apparent; for example, in one unsent draft to a high school sweetheart, which I don't include here because this is a family blog, I begin by stating: "Hey, L--I was just thinking about you and decided I'd email you instead of just masturbating to your yearbook photograph as usual..."

I'm bored, lonely, rather depressed, without shame, and I have internet access. So here are some of the choicest deleted messages I have never sent to girls I like.

***

Dear A--

How are you? It was great seeing you earlier today. In fact, I continue to see you. Yes, that's me across the street with the camera. I've rented an apartment with a perfect view of your bedroom and am videotaping you, even now as you're reading this email. Nice faded green pajamas...

Psyche! Hahahaha. Gotcha, didn't I?

Seriously though, A--, those pajamas have seen better days. Call me.

All the best,
M

***

Hey, S--

Just wanted to let you know I had a really great time kicking it with you outside of work. One question though: why do you remind me of my mother so much?

BTW, I mean that as a compliment. A sexual compliment.

Curious,
M

***

N--,

Sigh. Here goes nothing. It's late on a Wednesday evening, and I'm sitting here trying to find the right words to express what's in my heart. I know we've only known each other for a few days on Facebook. But I'm so glad I friended you after seeing a picture of you in my cousin's album and seeing how hot you were and how cool and fun to be around.

These past few days have been the most fulfilling days of my life. You're everything I've ever been looking for in a woman. You're single. You like "Grey's Anatomy." And, by way of sexual compliment, your boobs seem bigger than average and like they won't get saggy and gross with aging.

I guess this is just a long way of saying that I want to take our three-day Facebook friendship to the next level. Please make me the happiest man in the world, and...

Send me a few naked pictures of yourself.

Peace,
M

***

Hey you--

I didn't mean to make things awkward earlier today by asking you to dinner. I just thought I sensed something different. We've been such good friends for so long, and I value your friendship so much. I don't want to ruin that. But I'd be lying if I said I didn't think about what it might be like to be something more than friends. This is a shitty way of saying it--over email and all--but I just am kind of shy about things like this. I thought about calling you, but that would have been worse in some ways. Maybe it would be best if we got together at that cafe we went to last week and just talked like two friends who care for each other and respect each other's feelings. Gosh, I know it's corny to say all this. I just get nervous around you sometimes. And it's been happening a lot lately, and I can't help but feel like maybe you feel the same way too. I don't know much, but I do know that I want to keep you in my life. I hope I haven't said too much...

Yours always,
M

P.S. I have attached a picture of my own genitalia to this email. I wonder if it's bigger or smaller than you expected. Let me know.

***

Hello H--

Great meeting you earlier today at the Saunders reading. Just wanted to open the lines of communication.

I love you,
M

***

Hi again, H--

OMG, I am sooooooooo embarrassed by my last email. I totally didn't mean to write "I love you" in the salutation. I wish you could see how red my face is now. I hope you're not too weirded out to write me back.

Sex is natural,
M

***

H!

Jesus! I don't know what's wrong with me today. I tell you "I love you" in the very first email I've ever sent you, and then to make matters worse I say something cryptic and sleazy like "Sex is natural" in my next email. I really have no excuses. I hope you forgive me, but if you don't, I can understand that too. I was just experimenting with salutations, for my own twisted pleasure, and didn't mean to hit send before deleting them both. Once, I can understand maybe you'd think was an honest mistake. But twice: I know. Completely unacceptable. I probably have no chance at all of hearing from you, even though I so enjoyed talking to you about Gravity's Rainbow after the reading today. If you can find it in your heart to forgive the sign off of my previous two emails, I'll make it up to you by buying you dinner next weekend. Cool?

Qhh%#Vn/*? qlekrQ1!!23orjfn

[Oops, accidentally hit some keys while I was masturbating about you.]

Later,
M

JT3 Arts Fundraiser

2008-09-11T22:41:00.002-04:00

The newly established Jesse Thompkins Foundation for Young People in the Arts will be holding its first fundraiser at Maggie Brown Restaurant on September 20, 2008. For more information about the event, see the above flyer. For information about the Foundation and Jesse's life and work, please take a second to visit the preliminary website for the Foundation.

Forever Young Brothers

2008-09-09T02:36:00.011-04:00

On the set of "Young Brother Gets Coffee."
(l. to r.) Zack Hagan, Jesse, Andrew Ellis, Me, Manuel Santini, and (on ground) Jack Schurman.

As anyone knows who frequents this blog or has a working mouse and can check the previous post, over a month has gone by since my last entry. Though I admit that I’m not the most consistent blogger in the world, never in the two years of this blog's existence have I allowed so much time to go by without a post.

There is a reason.

[...]

I never thought I’d ever use the past tense to talk about my friend Jesse Thompkins, III. Not just because he was one of the healthiest, most athletically gifted people I knew, and not because he was one of those annoying people who didn’t need to exercise to be ripped, and not because he had superhuman—literally, superhuman—foot speed. But it’s for some other reason that, for a month now, I've been unable to understand. He was just the last person—and I mean the last human being on the face of the earth--who I thought, expected, or could conceive of as being the correct answer to the following question: “Which best friend of yours will be hit by an out of control S.U.V. on August 3, 2008, while standing at a street corner, and minding his business, in the middle of a jog, on a pleasant Sunday afternoon, in the same Brooklyn neighborhood you both called home for the past two years?”

But maybe that’s just another way of saying that I wish he was not the answer to this question. But I still can’t—and almost won’t—believe that he is.

Jesse Thompkins? There's no way.

We were college friends, who became life friends, who became neighbors, drinking buddies, The Wire: Season 4 marathon viewers, and collaborators on a few of his short films. And, up until now, I’ve found it nearly impossible to write anything here.

This is partly because, of the five people I count as actual readers of this blog, Jesse was probably two of them. Here’s a good example: I do this thing on my blog sometimes where I write some stuff after I’ve smoked some weed. I’m very creative, so I call them “High Posts.” There have been a few of them, and they are mostly unreadable.

My last such post is dated June 4, 2008. I remember I was walking home late from work that night and ran into a friend in the neighborhood. He was chilling on his front stoop with another guy when he pulled out a joint and, before you knew it, there I was: high.

I walked home in that pleasant daze that only comes with having smoked a blunt on a deliciously warm summer night in Brooklyn after a long day of work. I don’t know if that feeling only comes because it was a summer night in Brooklyn, but it being a summer night in Brooklyn surely didn’t hurt. I arrived home, plopped down in front of the computer, and blogged my high brains out…

Not an hour later, barely enough time to polish off a bag of UTZ Sour Cream and Onion Potato chips, there was an email in my Inbox from Jesse with the subject line “You.”

The body of the email read, simply: “blazed, son?”

Who knows what Jesse was doing checking my blog at midnight on a Wednesday. I was probably going to wake up the next morning only to forget having written it. But there he was, not only checking it, but emailing me, in what is probably the closest approximation of real-time that one might ever experience while high and on the internet. Naturally, I called him back right after I got the email, and he let me repeat the story of how I had run into so-and-so, smoked, wrote some shit, and posted it. And we laughed.

[…]

A few weeks ago, on August 17th, a crisp, beautiful Sunday afternoon, I found myself motoring away from a small island in the center of Lake George. This, for the past three years, has been the sight of an annual summer tradition called Camp Lo.

From the beginning, before I even knew where Lake George was or before I’d ever really hung out with any of Jesse’s high school buddies, who were the ones hosting the trip, Jesse had been an ardent, pro bono evangelizer for the Camp.

And it was because of his enthusiasm that I decided to take my chances and try it out. Needless to say, the first year, and the year after that, were two of the most enjoyable, quotable, and memorable weekends of my life, and no one looked forward to summer and to Camp Lo every year more anxiously than Jesse did. He made clothing, grooming, and career decisions with Camp Lo in mind, and strictly as a disinterested party—you can’t help but have that kind of enthusiasm rub off on you.

I was looking forward to Camp Lo more than I ever had this year. There were going to be more people than ever (over 50), and this year’s trip was also to be a kind of goodbye for Jesse and I. He was going to leave for LA at the end of the month to sell his screenplay, and to be closer to his girlfriend, who lived there but was coming camping (another victim of his proselytizing), and I was going to start a three-year writing program at Syracuse. For a couple days, we would eat grilled meat, go tubing, toss the football, drink a lot of beer, and sit around the campfire laughing about something or other.

I had even imagined the moment on the pier when I would step into the motor boat waving goodbye to Jesse and his girlfriend as the campsite, the island, our summers in Brooklyn living a couple blocks from each other—writers, neighbors, and friends—slowly receded into the distance. I wouldn’t have a reason to get choked up, because he was about to go to Hollywood and make it big with a beautiful girl at his side. I was the one who was disappearing into the cold, dark, uncharted wilderness of upstate New York for a few years to write some shit that people will probably never read.

Instead, it was August 17th, 2008 (the real August 17th). It would be the last day of my life that I was younger than Jesse. He was fifteen days my senior, a fellow Scorpio. And everyday after August 17th, 2008, I would always be older. I would live to see one more day that he hadn’t. I would be 27, and he would still be 26. I would celebrate my 30th birthday, and he would still be 26. I would be 40, 50, 60, and he would still be 26. Like the character we created some lost Brooklyn night, he would still be Young Brother.

It wasn’t until very recently that I was able to wrestle down this sense of guilt and the recurrent questions of Why Jesse? And why not me?

Our paths had been almost identical. We both grew up in the South and moved to the big city. We both went to Columbia. We both loved movies and had an embarrassingly vast knowledge of 90s hip-hop. And for a little over a year, spanning two of the most memorable summers I will probably ever see as long as I live, we lived a few blocks from each other in one of the most vibrant neighborhoods of the most vibrant place this world has ever known: Fort Greene, Brooklyn; Brooklyn, New York.

[...]

And it is unspeakably strange now to be the Young Brother who must continue: the one who is both lucky enough to stay up late into the evening writing this, but also the one who is saddled with what will be a lifelong weight of memory, loss, and empty thoughts of what might have been.

I have always had the bad habit of looking at the present through the eyes of an older version of myself. And in these daydreams, Jesse has always been there. I imagined us, two old dudes at a bar in Fort Greene. Jesse the distinguished auteur, his cell phone ringing ceaselessly with calls from production studios wanting him to direct their next superhero thriller. (Lord knows, he would have gone Hollywood in a heartbeat.) And me, the writer-friend. These are the pleasant thoughts, the happy daydreams that, embarrassing as they are, keep you going when you’re in the position we were in. And maybe, at that bar of the future, we are doing a toast to those years as young writers in Brooklyn when nobody knew our names, when we loaned each other 20 bucks periodically for laundry and went to rooftop parties where the kegs ran out in under an hour.

Then maybe we shake hands at this bar of the future. He goes his way, back to the wife and kids. And I go mine.

But now I see that that pleasant, sustaining daydream of mutual success, of kinship through art, struggle, and life, that brotherhood lasting into our old years, was always a dream. I am alone at the bar. Maybe I turn to one of the young kids, some other self-styled 20 year old artist, and I say, the way Jesse always had: “What’s happening, captain?” And maybe this young brother gives me a pitying little head nod.

Thinking about that phrase (“What’s happening, captain?”), I’m suddenly remembering the various times I ran into Jesse on the street. It wasn’t uncustomary for us to run into each other, living as we did only a few blocks apart. But when we did, I was always happy, surprised, and wore the shock on my face. I would throw up my hands as if to say: Jesse! What are you doing here?!

And Jesse, who would spot me at the same time, would stare at me like a stranger. And for a split second, I wouldn’t be sure if he’d recognized me. And then, real slow and deliberate-like, with a little fake-serious pout, he would nod his head. As though he had seen me coming or somehow knew he’d run into me.

I remember one such time, I saw him coming out of the dollar store on Myrtle with something big and boxy and cumbersome in a plastic bag.

Jesse! What a coincidence! I thought, smiling. He gave me the slow nod. What’s in the bag, I wanted to know. And very quickly, he dropped the fake-serious “pleased to meet you” act, and started to gush about what was inside.

He took it out just a little bit to show me what couldn’t be anything other than one of those miniature basketball hoops you hang over your bedroom door. I was confused and a bit disappointed. What was he doing spending money, a dollar even, on something as stupid as a miniature basketball hoop?

“Do you know how fun a miniature basketball hoop is?” Jesse asked me.

“Whatever,” I said with a wave of my hand. (I was always waving off his ideas.)

All the while, I was thinking, What are you doing buying stupid kids’ toys when you should be busy working on your opus, your life’s work, your script?! He probably had a feeling that that was part of the reason behind my disappointment at his new purchase.

Not long after that, I was over at Jesse’s house. Who knows what we were doing or talking about? Maybe we were getting ready to go to a party in the neighborhood. Maybe we were discussing the next possible “Young Brother” short. Whatever it was, I noticed a miniature basketball hoop hanging over a doorway in his apartment. Then I noticed the little bright orange ball. [Mik: I literally just realized that I'm holding the ball in the picture up there.] Which is when some nerve or synapse long-buried in my brain, some instinct ingrained in my male nature, fired and said: Must. Play. With. Ball.

Before I knew it I was going nuts on the miniature hoop. Doing crazy spin dunks and no look shots. Wow, I remember thinking. Who would have ever thought that a miniature basketball hoop could be so much…

I looked over at Jesse. He was watching me, nodding with a sly smile and raised eyebrows: “See,” he said. “I told you.”

And to understand the way he said “I told you” is to understand a huge part of Jesse. He didn’t say it in an I-told-you-so way. He said it like a kid who was happy to reveal to another kid (this kid) a great secret of life: that one doesn’t always need to take oneself so seriously all the time, that it is good to have fun.

And being Jesse’s friend, if it was anything, was great fun. He was one of the only people I know who wrote his own jokes. Most of them weren’t very good jokes, which Jesse was aware of (and which made them somehow even funnier). He would make this face right after he dropped a new punch-line. It was a face both embarrassed and proud, like he’d farted and didn’t care if you smelled it. It was a Jesse face.

[…]

This period in my life was full of chapters and chapters of history we accumulated, walking, talking, boozing, partying, laughing, and working together. And thinking about it now, nestled as I am in this strange new town around these strange new people, my time with Jesse takes on a taint of unreality, of folklore, of myth. We couldn’t have been that happy. We couldn’t have drank that much. We couldn’t have cared about our art that strongly. Broke and often unemployed and eating more pizza than we cared to admit, we couldn’t have had that much fun….

But, my dear 3 other readers, it’s all true. We were that happy. It really was that great.

[...]

And, to you, Jesse: I’m not sure if you they get wireless up where you are now, but I hope you keep checking in on me from time to time. I want you and everyone who reads this to know that I am grateful our paths crossed in this life.

Nowadays, in this strange post-Jesse world, in which it feels like anything can happen, in which everyday seems somehow more sacred, surprising, and real than the one that came before it, I look down at my forearm and remember, now and forever, what a wise young brother taught me about life and about art and about friendship.

And I give great thanks.

Based on Jesse's own "JT3" rubber stamp.

Ethiopia, Part Two: Broke, Bag-less, and Blocked

2008-07-22T10:14:00.006-04:00

Because this is going to be a pretty whiny post, I figure I’ll start off by saying that I’ve honestly been having a good time in Ethiopia these past several days. I’ve caught up with the grandfolks, kicked it with the cousins, and thrown back some whiskey with the uncles. I even managed to make a side-trip this past weekend to the ancient walled city of Harar in east Ethiopia. (Picture left.)

But the other day, I heard a successful Ethiopian businessman, who used to work in China, say that, “Ethiopia now reminds me of China 20 years ago.” A prediction like that should be as much cause for excitement, as it is for alarm. Indeed, for every two steps towards easing the suffering of this extremely poor, disorganized, and mismanaged country, there seems to be at least one step in the opposite direction—barriers that make things less hospitable for a new generation of progressive, energetic, and talented Ethiopians. As an example—a very petty, microscopic one that does not claim to be either progressive, energetic, or talented—I posit three things that happened to me this past week as examples of what I’m talking about.

Ahnd:

One Ethiopian Birr is worth a little more than 1 US dime, which makes me feel like a rich man here and not like the broke thousandaire I am in New York. You acquire, rather quickly, a skewed sense of value. Two rounds of drinks and a round of hookah at a posh sheesha bar in town set us back about 400 Birr. When you convert that into dollars, roughly 40 bones, it doesn’t sound that bad at all. But when you think that 400 Birr is the weekly salary of most entry level, college-educated office workers in Addis, you’ll start to realize that something is pretty off.

And that’s just consumer goods, like booze, food, and such, which have all sky-rocketed in the past year—and especially in the past six months. Oil prices are catapulting here just like in the States, and it’s having an effect on all sectors of life. Prices continue to soar, while salaries stagnate. My cousin, who has a law degree from the premier institution for higher education in Ethiopia (i.e. Addis Ababa University), pulls down 3,000 Birr every month, equal to about 300 American dollars. A full tank of gas here—you have to drive everywhere—costs about 500 Birr and lasts about 10 days. My cousin, if she didn’t carpool with my aunt every morning to work, would be spending almost half of her income on gas. That’s ridiculous, and probably hard for folks whining about $70 fill-ups in Atlanta to fathom.

Speaking of cars, the most ludicrous thing I’ve heard since I’ve been here is the government’s newly imposed automobile tax, which states that all citizens (except of course those with close ties to the ruling party or some kind of investment scheme) hoping to import a car to Ethiopia must pay a tax that is the equivalent of 200% of the value of the car. So, for example, if I wanted to bring a new Porsche Cayenne (market value: $90,000) to Ethiopia, I would have to pay the government $180,000, not including shipping costs. For any young person interested in moving to Ethiopia, working for a couple of years, and living in relative comfort while doing so, the financial strain would probably be too much to handle.

Worst of all, however, isn’t the price of food or gas or even construction cement: it’s real estate. Prices have hit New York levels in Addis Ababa. A crummy 3BR house in a decent part of town would set you back about 2-3 million Birr, or roughly $250,000. You could, if you were so inclined, buy a 1BR condo in Miami for that price—though, to be fair, I’m not sure about the quality of the injera on South Beach.

Huwlet:

I landed at Addis Ababa Airport on Friday, July 11, to the unfortunate news that my checked bags had not landed with me. After filling out a lost luggage form with one of the baggage attendants who works for the-airlines-which-shall-remain-nameless, I walked out of the terminal and into the gray-green air. The fresh tang of diesel fuel, burning wood, and eucalyptus trees damp with rain assaulted me with the force of memory. Were these the same taxi drivers that were here hawking rides three, five, thirteen years ago?

I went home that morning rather indifferent about my lost luggage and fairly certain that my bags would return safely within a day or two on the next airlines-which-shall-remain-nameless flight from Paris.

It wasn’t until just yesterday, some twelve days after I departed Hartsfield airport for Ethiopia, that I finally received my luggage from the airlines-which-shall-remain-nameless. Over the course of the past week, I’ve made no less than five trips to the airport. Everyday, I was given a different story about where my bags were and when they’d arrive. Invariably, they were on their way to Addis and would be here tomorrow morning. Eleven tomorrow mornings later, they finally showed up. By this point, I’d been denied daily compensation for my clothing and sanitation expenses (usually a given) and had suffered even more by way of emotional strain. I had to borrow clothes from my male cousins, all of whom happen to be giants, while enduring the constant jokes of my female cousins, who had taken to calling me “Stinky.”

Late last week, I wrote an irate email to the airlines-which-shall-remain-nameless and am told they called back, full of apologies. They wanted to know the names of the employees that I dealt with at Addis Ababa Airport. Later today, when I call them, I will give them no such names, not only because I don’t know the names of the people I dealt with over the past week (it was always a different person), but also because this isn’t about a few rotten apples, as Rummie might have said. This is about a systemic communication and customer relations failure that’s bigger than any one employee.

It’s also about that daily compensation. Papa needs a new pair of chama! (No, seriously: see previous post.)

Sohst:

Here’s something you might not have realized. I didn’t post the last entry to my blog. Even this one you’re reading. Not me either. That honor has fallen, for reasons I will tell you in a second, upon the nimble fingers of a good friend.

The story goes like this. While sitting in an internet café a couple days after my arrival, and starting to reek a bit in my unwashed pair of slacks (thanks again, airlines-which-shall-remain-nameless), I decided to pay myself a visit at Mik Awake: Unusually Tired. My internet connection was strong. I had my Gmail open on another window. But for some reason, I couldn’t access my blog—or any other blog—on the blogspot.com network.

My cousin was checking his email beside me, and I leaned over the divider to ask him if there was a problem with blogspot on his internet. It turns out there is a problem. A big problem.

Blogger.com is a blacklisted site in Ethiopia, only accessible by going through certain URL-scrambling sites like proxify.com and gpass1.com, both of which, however, have now fallen under the banned sites rubric here. So, basically, my blog and all the other blogs running on Blogger.com are blocked in Ethiopia. Which is sad, but which is what you get when the communications infrastructure a country relies on for phone calls, emails, general openness, efficiency, and the free exchange of ideas is controlled by the government. (Yes, Ethiopia is one of the few remaining places on earth whose Internet, mobile, and phone lines are controlled—and closely monitored—by the State.)

All of this anachronistic, quasi-fascist control is weird coming from a government that is as avidly pro-capitalist as Ethiopia is now. For a kind of answer, one must look… East.

It’s interesting to see the way Ethiopia has become, like so many other African countries, a battleground between Euro-American business interests and Chinese interests. It should come as no surprise perhaps that every time Prime Minister Meles gets censured by the “International Community” (read, the U.S. and E.U.) for human rights abuses or election tampering, he makes a trip to Beijing.

“Oh, you want to talk about rights?” I can almost hear him saying. “Let’s see what the homeys back in China are talking about… Oh, they don’t seem to care about my rights abuses. And on top of that, they’re charging me less to do what you do. Fuck you, America! And fuck your phony ideals!”

One does wonder if Ethiopia’s recent reliance on China does make a certain kind of sense. After all, what has Western moralizing, which always seems to be accompanied by blatantly contradictory actions (ahem, Rwanda), ever done for Africa? Why not side with a country that makes no bones about morality and hooks you up with shit?

It is depressing to note how, after so many years, Ethiopia’s answer to solving national ills is to take on the ideals, weapons, goods, and flaws of the biggest bully of the moment. And the bad boy on the Ethiopian block isn’t Uncle Sam anymore. It’s the big, red dragon.

P.S. Block this, Ethio-telecom douchebags.

Ethiopia, Part One: Chaplin, Ferenjis, Satan, etc...

2008-07-15T09:15:00.002-04:00

It's Day 4 of my trip here in Addis Ababa. My luggage is still in Paris, so right now I'm relying on any old hand-me-down's I can find in the closets of my relatives. At present, I'm wearing a baggy pair of khakis and an oversized (read, XL) Nautica shirt that is mostly yellow and resembles a shirt I might have worn in middle school.

In 1994.

But the funny thing is, seeing as how it takes a while for new styles to catch on here, I bet I look pretty good to most Ethiopians on the street (though there's no way in hell I'm going out dressed like this). Really, the only thing that people seem to be having a problem with this time around is the only article of clothing that actually belongs to me: my shoes. That's them over there on the left.

My cousin, who went to an all-girls Catholic school, said that they resembled the shoes the nuns used to wear. My father has called them Charlie Chaplin shoes.

Alas, unlike the tramp of yore, I will not be eating this pair any time soon, as I not only have a special fondness for them (maybe because of the ribbing they've taken), but mostly because my luggage is somewhere in Paris and, for the time being, these are my only pair of shoes.

Outmoded fashion sensibilities aside, Ethiopia is full of changes big and small. I've been noticing a much larger number of Europeans, Asians, West Africans, and Indians than I ever have on any of my previous trips. They're on the streets, in the restaurants, in the bars, shops, internet cafes, and office buildings.

Adding to this new and refreshing cosmopolitan feel is the great strides in infrastructure that seem to be taking place all over Addis Ababa. The construction cranes are ubiquitous, the roads are surprisingly pothole-less, and the parts of town that used to be the most poverty-stricken are surging with a vibrant, less destitute, more entrepreneurial middle class.

This I've gleaned, in the somewhat patronizing style of Evelyn Waugh, from riding in the passenger seat of cars. So I might be way off.

But whereas America seems like a nation in decline, Ethiopia--or at least Addis Ababa--seems like a place on the upswing. There are problems, no doubt. But not nearly of the magnitude I witnessed five years ago during my last real visit here.

Clouding my vision might also be the fact that my family is what one might consider upper class. We have maids, cooks, guards, and gardeners, who toil tirelessly throughout the day, who eat only after we--the spoiled spawn of America--have stuffed ourselves with injera and wot. This inequity, faced daily and in intimate quarters, mixes with guilt, shame, and pity and settles in my stomach like a kind of indigestion.

Last night, my aunt told us a story that troubled me deeply. We were all sitting in my grandmother's sparsely furnished living room. Some cheaply produced Amharic music videos were playing on ETV (Ethiopian Television) in the background as my aunt recalled the time when one of her helper girls, a thickly built, hard working girl from the country, complained to her one day about stomach pains. My aunt took her to the hospital, where they asked her to give a stool sample. For the next few hours, occasionally coming back out into the waiting room to give the appearance of normalcy to my aunt, this girl locked herself in the clinic bathroom. The doctors couldn't find anything wrong with her, although on the way back to the house, my aunt noticed that her underpants had been soaked through with blood. It was her period, she said, and so my aunt bought the girl a new pair.

Several hours later, there was a knock at the front gate of their house. It was the police. They had questions for my aunt and her helper girl. Had they just been to this clinic? I pictured my aunt nodding with a confused look on her face. Had my aunt's helper girl used the bathroom? Yes, but what does that have to do with anything. Did my aunt know anything about the baby they found in the toilet?

One can only imagine the look on my aunt's face as she began to realize what had happened. Her helper girl, who was hefty perhaps, but still, had been 9 months pregnant when she arrived at the clinic earlier that day, and hiding her condition from even those who lived closest with her, had gone into labor that day and given birth to a baby in the bathroom. Had even cut its umbilical cord with her bare hands, had drowned it in the still water of the toilet, and had even tried to flush it away. The trips she took to the waiting room to assure my aunt that she was okay were taken between contractions.

The girl was put away for 6 months, punishment enough perhaps for a young woman who claimed to be a virgin: she actually said she recalled waking up one night many months before and seeing a man standing next to her bed; she said she thought he was a ghost or the devil. She would have probably said anything to keep her job in my aunt's house.

I love my aunt, as I love all my family. But to live in the same house with a woman who is 9 months pregnant and to be ignorant of her condition (or to avoid talk about pregnancy in the beginning) should give you some idea of the amount of psychological apartheid that still exists between Ethiopia's rich and poor. Of course, when my aunt was telling the story the other night, it was also funny. Upsetting, pathetic, but funny. That the girl said she didn't even remember having sex. That no one had noticed the bulge in her stomach. That my aunt could have been an accomplice to infanticide.

Oh. Good times.

En Route

2008-07-10T09:47:00.004-04:00

For the next few weeks, Mik Awake: Unusually Tired will be going international. Starting…now.

So, not to brag or anything, because I know how much we like to exoticize the French and their lifestyle, and their cuisine, but I’m sitting here in a place called Le Conti in the St. Germain section (borough?) of Paris. If you're ever here again, their WiFi password is Romeo.

This whole city should have a "No Homo" logo projected onto it from outer space.

I’m eating a smoked salmon sandwich on hard bread. It is above average. I am drinking a 1664, which I didn’t realize was a French beer until an hour ago, and the streets in front of me (sigh) are narrow of width but probably wide with history. Folks seem to have an unhealthy love of motor scooters here. They also have this cool bike rental thing where you can pick up a bike from various parts of the city by putting money in a machine and dropping it off somewhere else. Genius. Although the distrustful New York side of me coupled with the bored suburban high schooler part of me wonders what would happen if you just never returned it. I guess the French trust each other more than we do. Or you have to have some kind of online account. Sorry. I didn’t think that I’d be thinking about this bike rental program so much.

Anyway, I haven’t addressed the elephant in Le Room. What the fuck am I doing in Paris on a Thursday afternoon? Answer: I’m killing a few hours before my flight to Addis Ababa, my final port of entry. (The subject of a post to come very soon.) I decided to venture out from Charles de Gualle, where my things are hopefully safely chilling in a locker manned by an Asian dude who seems to hate his job. (Dear Asian Dude, please don’t steal my grandmother’s cans of powdered Ensure.)

It’s funny, but I don’t know shit about Paris. I have this sinking feeling that I’m eating lunch right now in the kind of place that I’d never eat at in New York. Am I at the equivalent of some Upper East Side bistro? Am I at a Chelsea brasserie where they serve humorless food for humorless Parisian yuppies? One never knows unless one has lived in a place for long enough…or has cool Parisian friends who know the deal. I basically just saw the smartly advertised “WiFi” sign and hopped on a beige wicker chair of my own.

My flight to Paris from Atlanta was a bit delayed, which I never usually have a problem with, except this time, I happened to be sitting next to a dude was the spitting image of W. H. Auden, except with mechanic hands, a gruff smoker’s cough, and a worn-in NASCAR hat. As a matter of fact, I think it actually was Auden.

After Auden took his seat next to me, he pulled out an Arby’s chicken salad sandwich, apparently distrusting Delta’s promise of dinner, and just then an effeminate male flight attendant was approaching him with a duty free bag. I could see through the translucent plastic that inside was a carton of Marlboro Reds.

“Mr. Auden,” said the flight attendant.

“Yeah,” said Auden.

“Do you have your receipt for this duty free item you purchased?”

“What?” said Auden. For a second, I couldn’t tell if he was upset, annoyed, or hard of hearing. He reached for the bag. “No, I don’t have my receipt.”

The flight attendant pulled the bag back. “Then, I’m sorry I can’t give this to you without a receipt.”

Auden, though I couldn't see his leathery, wrinkle-wracked face, must have had chunks of chicken salad flying out of his mouth as he says, furiously, “Well how did you know that it was for me!”

The flight attendant turns on his heels and leaves in a huff, apparently to go talk it over with someone from the duty free department. That’s when Auden, out of nowhere, yells, “HEY!” Really loud and raspy, and as if to punctuate this, he drops half of his sandwich on the floor of the aisle. “Oh, that’s great,” he says as the flight attendant and most of the other people in the cabin begin to realize that our formerly sane, comfortable flight has been infiltrated by a deranged British poet.

This was only the beginning. After he finally got his cigarettes, and the flight attendant cattily returned his “Thanks” with a drawn out “Mmmmm-hmmmm….,” then came the grumbling to no one in particular about the long amount of time we were spending taxiing in the runway, waiting to take-off.

I’d be lying if I said his periodic comments (“Let us off the plane!”) didn’t rile me. Finally, we took off, and Auden settled down and (of course) finished both halves of his sandwich, even the fallen one.

A couple fitful hours of sleep and a few hours of reading later and voila! Here I am in this French café with wireless and a few Algerian dudes who are impressed by the speed of my typing. I’m about to put them on to Maino. Bye haters, and hello Addis.

More Soon...

"You Look Really Stupid M. Awake"

2008-06-24T10:01:00.002-04:00

My favorite spam subject line of the day.

High Post 4

2008-06-04T22:50:00.005-04:00

So, once again, we here at Mik Awake: Unusually Tired are all high again. Gun smoke, gun smoke. Biggie Smalls for mayor, the rap slayer, the hooker lay-er, the muthafucka say your prayers. Woooo! Hot shit, hot shit! That picture on the left is what happened when I did a search on "High Post 4." If you don't know about this series on this blog, muthafucka, you better ask somebody, baby BABY. Why am I channeling my inner Christopher Wallace right now...?

Anyway, by "we all are high" I mean only me. Mik. See, that's me over there on your right, pretending to sleep. I write the stuff that goes on this blog, because that's what blogs are about. They're about writing in a journal that you know people are going to read. See that picture there. I took that picture with the built-in camera on my Macbook. I wasn't high when I took it, nor asleep. I was bored and decided to beef up my "About Me" section on the site with some slick shit. But now every time I look at that "About Me" section, I contemplate deleting the shitty bio (notice the egregious lack of print publications!) and taking the picture down. I don't know why. I guess in light of all this over-sharing Emily Gould New York Times Magazine bullshit, which, by the way, has managed to piss off every single literary yuppie hipster media person in New York City.

What was I saying? I forget, and I'm too lazy right now to go back and find the stream of thought that started this post in the first place. I guess I was talking about blogs. Blogs are cool. I have a blog.

This is me writing in my blog.

...

Oh, shit! That gives me a good idea for a blog. How about if you wrote a blog and you called it "The Most Meta- Blog Ever"? And all of the posts were just you, the blogger, blogging about blogging. Like you just kept writing "Here I am, clacking away at my blog. The fan is running. It is Wednesday night at 11pm. I am blogging." You could describe the shit around your desk when you're blogging. In my case, we have a modern-looking black desk lamp, a dry cleaning ticket, a bill from a bar that overcharged me $8 on my debit card. Which reminds me, I need to follow up on that. On the other side of my desk is a set of joke teeth, a stapler, some Liquid Paper, and this brochure from a French lady who, a few months ago, invited me to attend one of her "Naturopathic Methods" sessions for my dry skin. I keep telling myself I'll go one day. But who knows? Maybe.

...

What was I saying?

Oh, yeah. The blog about blogging. Yeah, someone definitely needs to run with that idea...Catch, Internet! I've just thrown you a goldmine. Muhahahaha!

I don't know why I just laughed like that. It's probably because I'm really stoned right now. On a wet Wednesday night. No Homo.

...

I've been saying that a lot lately. "No Homo," I mean. I'm fascinated by the whole "No Homo" thing in hip-hop. Everyone's gut reaction is to think that it's just your everyday average hip-hop homophobia, but I think the exact opposite. Think about the circumstances during which you're supposed to say "No Homo." You're only supposed to say it if you have a gay thought. It's like the murderer who says "I didn't kill him" before anyone has charged him with a crime. It's like a kid yelling "Not it!" right after he's been tagged. Think about how awkward it would be to bump into a friend on the street and be like, "Hey, man. Long time no see. Do you want to grab a drink? (Beat) No homo." If you said that, your friend would think you were gay.

But in all honesty, what heterosexual man doesn't have the occasional gay thought? Right, fellas. Am I right? Fellas?

...

Hmm, I wonder if I'll wake up tomorrow morning and delete this. No Homo.

Phew, that was close. I was almost gay for a second. Good thing I said "No homo."

Seriously though: no homo.

Lil' Wayne: Top 10 Lines

2008-05-29T13:56:00.003-04:00

No homo, but I am an avowed Lil' Wayne dick-rider. So much so that I dead-seriously think someone should get to work on compiling a book-length edition of "The Poetry of Wayne Carter." Then, someone should follow that book with an accompanying critical study.

For the time being, you'll have to settle for what follows below: a list of the most ingenious lines of Weezy F. Baby according to me. Oh, and please, whatever you do, just don't forget to say the "Baby." It makes him really angry if you don't...Yeedig!

10. "Quick Draw McGraw. I went to art school." The first thing you should know about Lil' Wayne is that, like most rappers, he is a pathalogical liar. But unlike most other rappers, he doesn't do it for self-aggrandizement. He's willing to say anything about himself so long as it makes for a hot line. In that sense, he is a pure rapper in the Eminem or Red Man mold: everything is subjugated to the hotness of the line. Especially reality. Whereas other rappers who take themselves more seriously might have qualms about portraying themselves as art school graduates, Wayne does not. But the genius of Wayne is that you'd think that a tactic like lying pathalogically and not taking oneself seriously would help darken the line separating Wayne Carter the person from Lil' Wayne the rapper. But because he lies so often and so lucidly, and because he knows you're expecting him to lie, and because he seems to be Miles-Davis-post-"Bitch's Brew" crazy, it's nearly impossible to differentiate the person from the rapper these days.

9. "If hip-hop is dead, then I am the embalming fluid." After you get over the initial hotness of this line, which comes from his newish single "A Millie," you'll realize that this line makes absolutely no sense. Okay, let's see. If Wayne is embalming fluid, which is what is used to keep corpses from decomposing, then his role in hip-hop is to make something dead seem like it's still alive. Is it an admission of defeat? Beating a dead horse? There are better ways of saying one is a great rapper, so I'm led to believe that either this is a very profound bit of social criticism (and self-criticism), or it's Wayne's way of saying that people who say "hip-hop is dead" are just using words, so I'll use another word to describe myself: "embalming fluid."

8. "I am magnificent like Marcus. You might wanna fall back like August. Or late September whatever you call it." I'm excerpting this line from a freestyle that made its viral way around the interwebs a while back, when Lil' Wayne completely owned the beat from Jay-Z's "Show Me What You Got." I chose this line because it's a great example of the way he's never afraid of going off on tangents. Coming up with the "fall back like August" line might have been enough for 90% of people who call themselves rappers. But what makes Wayne very special, and more than just a rapper, is that he chases the August tangent into the next line, beating you to the punch of correcting him ("late September whatever you call it"), all while keeping it on beat and rhyming. He zigs when you think he's going to zag, and then he just does some other shit. Call him the Greatest Zogger Alive.

7. "Y'all boys too weak, like fourteen days." This line comes at the end of a sequence on Bun B's "Damn, I'm Cold," in which Wayne employs his own version of the familiar "counting rap" method. What's great about this one is that, like most of Wayne's best lines, it's not exactly double-sided. One side of the line makes an aural-verbal sense (too weak sounds like two weeks, which equals 14 days), but the other side, which is comparing "the boys" to "fourteen days" is complete nonsense. This is what makes Wayne special; he actually strives for that kind of absurdity. (Another example: "Handled the game so long, my thumb's bruised." WTF?) The only way this line could have been improved might have been by an ad-libbed "Fortnight muthafuckas!" in the background.

6. "Lampin in the Hamptons like 'What the fuck is a hammock?' The chef up in the kitchen like 'What the fuck is a sammich?'" This brief digression occurs in the middle of a freestyle over the "Knuck If You Buck" beat. It's part of one of those epic Wayne rants that strings together subjects as disparate as a female drug mule who speaks "Spanglish," a blizzard, dealing drugs in Iraq, and a mother who chides her son to hide his jewelry--and somehow it all makes perfect sense. What I love about this particular line, and a lot of the hottest Wayne lines, is his sly use of dialogue. It's also hilarious that he feigns ignorance about hammocks, which you can almost picture him laying in awkwardly, hollering from the yard at his annoyed, uncomprehending chef.

5. The Wayne Cackle. It's not a "line" of quotable music, per se, but the ominous comic book laugh that has become a Wayne trademark actually has a functional purpose. Let's say you're listening to one of his freestyles, trying desperately to catch every pop culture reference (Who is Magnificent Marcus?) he throws out. If you hear Wayne's cackle, and you don't understand why he's cackling, that means you missed something. It's like a footnote for which there's no actual note. But if you try several times and can't make sense of the pre-cackle line, it could also mean that he's just laughing because, unrelated to the song, he's thought of something funny. You never quite know with Wayne.

4. "The hurricane come and took my Louisiana home. And all I got in return was a durn country song." The genius of this line is subtle, but it all hinges on the word "durn." Wayne bends it not only to create the interior rhyme with "return," but also to make the word it's standing in for ("darn") sound more Southern and folksy, like a country song. A lesser, not-as-inventive rapper might have replaced "durn" with "stupid" or "fucking" or "damn." This is what your college literature teacher meant by fusing sound and sense, form and content.

3. "Safe sex is great sex. Better use a latex, 'cause you don't want that late text, that 'I think I'm late' text." This line makes me almost forgive him for subliminally marketing his own condom brand, whose advertising campaign has some eeriee, homoerotic undertones. (Lollicop!) What's not to appreciate about this line: the compressed cautionary narrative of fucking and late-night text getting, the interior rhyme at the beginning, the forked usage of "late," the ingenious coinage of "'I-think-I'm-late' text," and all of it wrapped in a conscious safe-sex message. Besides being a dope lyricist, Wayne knows how to deliver a great line, which is why you have to hear the song to understand how perfect the hectic interior rhymes of the first line slowly unfurl and slow down, like a condescending Sex Ed. teacher, on the "I think I'm late text" line. This is the closest Wayne will ever get to preaching, which is to say not close at all.

2. "How you want it? Show me my opponent [Chewing sound]. Shoeemyponent." This line from Wayne's dizzying final verse on "Stuntin' Like My Daddy" is the kind of line that no other human being but Wayne Carter can dream up. It will take some explaining for those unfamiliar with it. Basically, after he says the first "Show me my opponent," you hear some weird crunching sounds. It's only later, once Wayne repeats the line, rapping as though his mouth is full, that you realize what he's done: Wayne has just eaten his opponent. I barely know how to explain how brilliant that is. Wayne is one of the first rappers who has made noises an integral part of his rapping arsenal. See also: "She back it up like [truck backing up sound]."

1. "I'm headless. No mind. I can say 'Don't rhyme,' and it's gone rhyme." He's right. It does rhyme. And the message in this line is that not only does he do his best work when he's out of his mind, but that he's almost unable to control how good he is when he's in such a state. In lines like this, Wayne reminds me of that place the novelist Thomas Hardy wrote about where the writer's unconscious mind takes over. It's lines like this that make you wonder if he looks back over the page sometimes and wonders, "Shit. How did I come up with that?"

Did I miss any? Let me know in the comments.

Happy Belated Mother's Day!

2008-05-13T16:13:00.011-04:00

So, I’ve been all about the NBA Playoffs this year, and in case you missed it, here was the best part of last night's Boston Celtics v. Cleveland Cavaliers game. I watched the play happen live, and I couldn’t really understand all the layers of what was going on until much later.

After this hard, wrap-up foul by Paul Pierce, Lebron James, rather than basking in the deafening boo’s of the hometown crowd and walking around with a “Damn-I-was-gonna-do-a-sick-dunk!” scowl as often happens on plays like this, instead comes out of the melee looking uncharacteristically flustered and then gives Pierce a puzzling, gentle dap on the chest.

At the time, I figured this was a sportsman show of solidarity between two compassionate athletes, recognizing, in spite of the bloodthirsty, stupid jeers of the fans, that it’s just a game.

But I had a weird feeling that there was more to the story than that. (It was similar to the way I felt in those perplexed seconds between Zinedine Zidane’s red card and the first replay of his headbutt to Marco Materazzi’s solar plexus.)

A few minutes later, during TNT’s halftime show with Charles Barkley and Magic Johnson, all the talking heads were laughing when a shot of Lebron’s mom, sitting harmlessly on the sideline, flashed across the screen. Then, they showed the clip again, and you realized what had happened.

Lebron James's mom, sitting right behind the basket, had elbowed her way into the fight and was screaming at Paul Pierce and Kevin Garnett, presumably for fouling her baby too hard. When Lebron realizes what's going on, he turns to his mom and yells what, after careful lip reading, can only be, "Sit yo' ass down!"

More than anything, I love how shocked KG and Paul Pierce are at this: not that Lebron's mom got in the fray in the first place (KG seemed like he recognized her and was diffusing the situation at first), but what really seemed to make things awkward was when Lebron snapped at her.

It's obvious KG and Pierce had no idea how to react, and Lebron seems really embarrassed too. Maybe it was because his mom brought it back to high school with a couple dudes who are worth more than a lot of developing countries. But I secretly think he was most flustered by how harshly his "Sit yo' ass down" came out. When he said it, he looked the way any 23-year-old would look if his mom showed up at his office and told his coworkers to stop giving her baby a hard time.

When Lebron goes over to give Pierce that sportsman-like tap on the chest, it looks, on a second viewing, like Paul is thinking to himself: "Damn, I can't believe he just cursed out his mom like that."

This is like every kid's worst nightmare, except televised on TNT and number 1 on youtube today.

Update: Lebron James is grounded for the next two games.

More Recent Update: Lebron James’s mom was seen leaving her local Mercedes dealership with a new convertible.

Even More Recent Update: Lebron is un-grounded.