Stuff New Yorkers Say

Steve McQueen's Shame: A Review

I saw Shame today. I like Michael Fassbender in most the films he's done with one exception: Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds.

I generally tend to not judge accents as I'm a veritable soup of idiolects myself. However, Fassbender's accent in Inglourious Basterds is the stuff of headaches. But back to the Steve McQueen's Shame.

I like Fassbender's work a good deal. There's a certain gravitas he projects that few actors have the ability to carry. Born in Germany and raised in Ireland, he's a picture of cultural and linguistic diversity which is perhaps the reason why he appears to effortlessly play anything from a New Yorker to an aristocrat a-la-Jane-Eyre, or an X-Men-er.

The premise of Shame is the 'text' of shame and how it is engendered within a Judeo-Christian framework regardless of how far from prescribed religiosity it finds itself. I found the form of the film beautifully mimetic of a religious ritual. One good decision McQueen made is to go for Fassbender. It takes courage to take on certain roles and I most definitely don't see a Brad Pitt or a Clooney doing the same thing. Ok, maybe Colin Farrell or Jared Leto who by the way came to a mind a lot when viewing this film. Think, Requiem for a Dream, perhaps.

Most critics regard the film to be an examination of modern/urban sociality and how much the contemporary person wants to be tethered to others even though a good deal of current life seems to be about heightened individuality and insularity. McQueen's cinematic strength is not content, however. As a matter of fact, it rarely is. One thing he seems to do well, however, is explore the substance of form. The shots are clean, fast but not furious. McQueen's choices made me think of Doug Liman's portraiture styles. The camera rests on the characters just long enough till it gets moving again to the next point in the plot. Incidentally, this is how the film manages to deviate dullness. Aesthetically, this film is rich. Some of the city shots were also reminiscent of Nicolas Winding Refn's film Drive.

The past few years, at least since the actual boom of web 2.0, there seems to be little, if any, change in aesthetics. Incidentally, Vanity Fair's Kurt Andersen has a new article out on the question whether we as a culture are stagnating aesthetically. I thought of it while watching the film, actually. You can read it here.

I suppose it makes sense that form remains the one last frontier that's resisting change as all else around it has been changing mercilessly. Think technology. Hanging on to one thing seems to be the one crutch one needs to cope with the novelty and unpredictability of everything. Or is it? This seems to be the question that Brandon, the main character, tries to answer and eventually reject. Much in life seems to come easily to him. Much but not everything. He seems to bridle all else but basic urges about things he deems utterly trivial in broad daylight and when in the company of full lucidity.

Brandon seems to have it all on the surface. He's well employed, is generally well liked, at least on the surface, and seems to be governed by self-discipline. Only, he doesn't seem to do so as well as he appears.

He appears to want to connect to the world but the world seems to move simply too fast for him. His attachments are flimsy and most of the people he meets are forgettable. There seems to be a crisis of supply and demand when it comes to meaningful human connectivity. Brandon wants the opposite of what he has but the urban survival camp doesn't seem to be capable of providing it. He desperately wants the opposite of what he can get and every time he tries to leave his patterns of living, he falls right back into the known regardless of how much it is mired in dysfunction. Every night he goes after a new pursuit so that the next morning he can go back to all he knows.

Carey Mulligan plays his sister. I have only liked her in one film, An Education. All the other films that have ensued are nothing more than an imitation of her debut film. But then again, it would be hard to compliment a character who needs little support. Fassbender is no Pitt. He needs little support from other characters. A better script would have helped, no doubt.

Jessica Chastain is good in this. Very good. She's another example of an underrated performer often stuck in incoherent filmic choices, think the widely overrated The Help.

In sum, I enjoyed seeing Fassbender and I enjoyed the cinematography of Shame. What I didn't enjoy is McQueen's verbose effort to school the audience on addiction. His effort was, at best, sophomoric. His director of photography, however gets an A. Fassbender gets a solid A- but only because there's only that much he can do given the script.

In Shame, he is close to aces.

This film won't make you want to go back and brush up on your Descartes. Or perhaps Kant. It might just make you want to watch a bit of Kubrick and perhaps get a bit melancholy that he's been gone for a bit over a decade now.

Happiness and Excoriating

"I've got to tell you something and I know you'll excoriate me," says he as I drive through the rainy streets of the city thinking of ways to improve two things I'm currently struggling with. Driving, like working out, is a good way to clear my head. Another way is going down by the beach, sitting on my favorite bench that's usually unoccupied around 9pm and between 7am-8:30am.

"What makes you think I'll excoriate you?" I say to him as I make a right turn.

"Because I know you. Plus, I know I'm in need of being excoriated." he adds. Usually, I would have interjected one of my usual one-liners known only to those who know my discursive routines. Instead, I say nothing. I'm in too involved a mood. My mind's busy. I say nothing and almost enjoy the silence for a bit.

"I might have something you'll excoriate me about, too", I finally say, "but let me hear yours first."

He proceeds to tell me the details and I ask him if he needs to hear from me the same thing I've told him a number of times in the past. He says he does. He feels like a review. "I feel like a good review," he says. Thus, we review.

I've thought a lot about happiness recently and how it relates to micro and macro sociality. Blame it on the rain, I suppose. It does have a tendency to lead to written fecundity. Writing pours out of me when it rains. Incidentally, I just finished a draft I'm submitting in two weeks. But back to the happiness thing.

Happiness cannot happen without self-examination. This is not some adage I had to think long and hard about. This is what the Western canon has taught me since early childhood. Start way South with Sophocles, move on a bit North to Plautus, pick up a bit of Dante in the neck of Florence, head North and West to Shakespeare, head back South and pick up some Goethe and, while you're at it, swing by France and have a sip of existentialism and what you'll end up gleaning is the following: Happiness cannot happen without self-examination. We cannot know the other, without knowing the self. Nobody can tell us what feels good to us, unless we experience it ourselves. I love the smell of pines. Absolutely, love it. It drives me insane with happiness. I discovered it when I was fourteen, right after learning how to dance with a tall boy with whose family we were vacationing and who was a horribly bad badminton partner. Happiness needs context in order to get registered. It needs a vehicle of narration. Without storytelling ability, it cannot be.

And it most certainly cannot happen without a clear grasp of history, one's own history. There's a better chance to face what's around the corner when you know and understand the corners you've left behind. And living because one can is no answer to existence. While existence might be nothing more than a string of coincidences, what our canon teaches us is that collectively we feel better about our individual and collective experience in life when we view it in connection to something larger than ourselves, like a bigger group of people, or a larger cluster of interests.

One of the first Shakespeare bits I memorized as a teen was a Hamlet soliloqui. I mostly saw Hamlet as a spoiled brat, not that different from other spoiled brats I knew growing up. And yet, I was in love with his eloquence. He was a brat who had a way with language. I've never been able to resist this kind, the kind that has a way with language. And my history will back this up.

"What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how
infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and
admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like
a god! the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals—and yet,
to me, what is this quintessence of dust?"

I always found it curious that while most people responded to the first verses, I was always keener on the "quintessence of dust" part. For some reason, I mostly use this phrase when break into German. I really don't know why. Translating Shakespeare into German is almost as sacreligeous as translating Goethe into English. My German counterparts often say, "Was ist denn mit der Quintessenz?!" Essence is fine enough a word, no? I wanted to say Quintessenz on Saturday. I didn't. I remember the context well. I was simply too tired to use it as using it would invite even more questions as to why my speech is often peppered with uncommon words.

The reason why I always respond to the "quintessence of dust" bit of the soliloqui is because it encapsulates the notion of life and human existence most fundamentally. And yet, it's poetic. It's association with nothingness is poetic. While our entire literary canon suggests than meaning resides in tropes, sometimes it feels better to embrace the simplicity of experience for what it is, a speck in time, a cluster of little somethings, some of which are good and others the stuff of anxiety, which inevitably make up one big trace.

The thing is, happiness is about shared experience. We need canon to live well. We can easily survive without a historical blueprint of existence. Animals do it. But to live and to want to live well, a script is needed, a well written one. One that says that happiness is our duty and that to go after it is somehow lofty a pursuit, noble even. We spend our lives going after goals, hard ones, to reach a level of happiness much of which seems to be rooted in status and accomplishment.

Without connectivity, we have no context, no history and few things taste better to one than being known, resisted, and eventually agreed with. Happiness is having someone who truly knows you and whom you truly know say to you that they've said or done something you'd excoriate them about. Bottom line, they know how you'll react and they know they'll feel better after sharing with you their short narrative. And while you've read their script over and over again you somehow feel good that they feel you know how to read them and, like a forgiving teacher, you'll excoriate them briefly but then you'll write little notes on the margins of their essay and they'll know how to get better and do right by you.

Familiarity gives me comfort because familiarity gives us all comfort. Humans like routine. It's
due to our enculturation. We have no say in the matter. It's like saying we like how water tastes after being deprived of it. Another synonym for familiarity is intimacy and intimacy is harder for some for it resides in the territory of vulnerability where impulse and unhoned instinct doesn't do very well and where damage can easily be dished out. Giving intimacy means getting known and there is no ouvre bigger and more significant than that. C.S. Lewis wrote that we "read to know we are not alone."

Those who say they can do without familiarity have never had the courage to acquire it, they're strangers to it. And one could never rely on someone who refuses familiarity because to refuse it means to refuse a shared history, connectivity. And while contentedness can happen free of context, happiness needs more, at the very least, it needs a semblance of importance. The feeling of sucking on frozen grapes makes some, including me, feel content. Wearing silk panty hose with a form-fitting black dress hand-made in Berlin in the early 90's while wearing high-heeled boots as I meet someone for dinner makes me feel good. I do it when I feel like my inner self needs excoriating so that it can get to feeling better.

The Futility of Suffering and Nietzsche

Right after I woke up this morning I started reading the new articles on Vanity Fair. I started reading a new piece on aesthetic stagnation first and after getting upbeat at its premise it only seems apropos that I move on to Hitchens.

While reading Hitchens' article entitled Trial of the Will, I got to thinking about things I'd either experienced in life before or read in previous publications. I illustrate. First I got to thinking about David whom I met in grad school. He turned on to Dosteyevsky and Nietzsche around the same time we met so naturally we clicked. I'd run into David at the oddest times. One night, when my grad school significant other and I were driving home from dinner, I saw David walking by himself on the sidewalk. "Slow down. I think that's David" I say. We do just that. I roll down the window and say, "David! It's late. And cold. I mean, not that it matters." I felt my person giving me an eye-rolling but, naturally, I didn't care. What David and Bri time meant was hours upon hours of Lit Crit talk. We would both dive into a literary discussion almost maniacally. We'd start with Bulgakov's Master and Margarita, move on to Dostoyevsky and Nietzsche and in true, 'light' fashion finish with a good chat about existentialism.

Ha. I think to myself, this morning, as my hair is wrapped up in a towel and I find some pleasure out of smelling the body lotion I've been keen on for years. I get on my email and do a keyword on David. I have to say 'hey,' I think to myself. I enter his name and a sea of David words come at me. I open one particular email. The first sentence that jumps out was when he was traveling one summer around Europe and he was telling me about me his peregrinage. He writes, "I suffer regularly which is good for a person, I reckon." Ah, David!

Suffering and learning. Suffering does little for learning. It makes sense that we'd create a whole narrative of learning around it. I mean, it's bound to serve some purpose, right? Actually, the more I think about this, and I've bee thinking about this since early adolescence, the more I'm convinced that it's nothing more than a shallow myth. This is why back in 2004 I readily agreed with Woody Alen and why I easily get on Hitchens' side on the topic today. Granted, I also have much literary and historical context to back this up. Think Nietzsche. People tend to romanticize him and more often than not forget that his twilight years were yet another example of how impervious to learning one is when in deep suffering. Nietzsche's last years were a scene straight out of the third circle of hell.

There's little catharsis in suffering. The only good feeling that it generates is when it reaches its very end. The thought of not having to experience it again produces relief. And relief feels good when tasted after hardship.

I'm amazed at how our brains work. During the time I was in the shower this morning, it managed to give me a nice little essay, equipped with a full bibliography, of my readings and experiences on one topic. I started with David, moved on to Nietzsche, and closed with Woody Allen's Spiegel magazine interview back in 2005. I read it closely then. I also taught it in my German Literature course that Spring. A bit from the article says, and I translate:

"There is nothing really redeeming about tragedy. Tragedy is tragic, and it's so painful that people try to twist it and say "it's terribly hard, but look we've achieved something, we've learned something." This is a weak attempt to find some kind of meaning in tragedy. But there is no meaning. There is no up-side. And suffering does not redeem anything; there is no positive message to learn from it."

What was Nietzsche's phrase again, Was mich nicht umbringt macht mich stärker i.e., "What doesn't kill me, makes me stronger"? And how strong exactly was Nietzsche during the last decade of his life? By all accounts he was an etalon of feebleness thanks to his intense physical and mental suffering.

So, what's die Moral der Geschichte? The moral of the story would be, when attempting to grapple with hardship, stay away from Nietzsche and any viable association you might want to make between learning and suffering. Sometimes, stuff needs to be experienced and left alone, wrapped up and hidden in some drawer.

I close with Hitchens' own words on pain. His own experience of sickness and suffering is what fueled his new article on Vanity Fair. He concludes: "I am attracted to the German etymology of the word “stark,” and its relative used by Nietzsche, stärker, which means “stronger.” In Yiddish, to call someone a shtarker is to credit him with being a militant, a tough guy, a hard worker. So far, I have decided to take whatever my disease can throw at me, and to stay combative even while taking the measure of my inevitable decline. I repeat, this is no more than what a healthy person has to do in slower motion. It is our common fate. In either case, though, one can dispense with facile maxims that don’t live up to their apparent billing."

What I learned from reading Greek tragedies as a child was that the best thing to do with suffering is to evade. Pretty good reaction, if you ask the adult version of me. Pretty, pretty good.

When in Doubt, Think Dante

I think about Dante all the time.
All the time.
I especially think of Dante when in times of hardship.
Of course, it helps that since the age of nine I got in the habit of maniacally memorizing verse after verse and, oddly, have yet to forget a single stanza in the terza rima. Dante helps me organize my thoughts. His work helps me get centered and put things in perspective.

As a doctoral student in Germanics, I took a PhD course in Dante's Inferno. I was the only non-Italian PhD candidate in the course. The professor, one of the better known Dantisti in the States, asked me one day, "Brikena, come mai Dante?" i.e.: "Brikena, how come Dante?"

Stutteringly, I said: "Perche, eeee, insomma, perche mi parla...." i.e.: "Because uhm, well, because he talks to me."

Since early childhood, I've most likely spent thousands of hours reading Dante. Easily. Dante never feels like reading. It doesn't feel like work. It's like listening to music. It speaks to me. And unlike much else, it never disappoints. It always gives me something. It doesn't just take. It gives. Therein lies its unfading novelty and attraction. Novelty and attraction can only work well in the confines of giving. Deprive them of it and they'll vanish.

Dante understood that the human experience is marked by universality. He knew that while we might term certain emotions and feelings differently, our experience of the great basics, i.e., love, pain, anger, anxiety, difficulty are fundamentally the same whether one is professor Brunetto Latini who's condemned to inferno for eternity (see Canto XV) or Virgil, the guiding poet, who was unluckily born a few decades 'ahead of his time.'

Feeling good is 'dolce' and feeling badly is not. The dichotomy is clear to all. Dante refers to himself as two separate entities. On the one hand, there's the generally cerebral Dante, il poeta laureato, and on the other hand, there's Dante, l'uomo, the highly emotional man. The man, who faints at the sight of the great emotional pain of Paolo and Francesca in Canto V.

Dante embraces his emotional and cerebral sides fully. In my view, this is what makes me be as Dante-centric as I am. Dante fills a need. A need to self-soothe and inevitably self-ameliorate.

Why Dante, others, other than Prof. Di Tommaso have asked me. Why not Sophocles or Shakespeare? Or Goethe, even. For crying out loud, especially Goethe!

The answer is easy. I've long held that we don't get to choose art. Art chooses us. I believe this. As a matter of fact, I'll venture so much as to say that few things are solely choice-based. Very few. We think we choose but in most situations we are swayed to go one way over another.

Daily, I'm amazed at the multitude of applications that La Commedia lends itself to. And daily I'm tempted to apply it.

Dante spoke to me first on a cerebral level as someone with a doctorate of philosophy. He spoke to me equally strongly on a personal level. My whole life I've had difficulty with displays of emotions. I've always privileged my cerebral side. And unfairly so at times. But the older I get and the more I experience raw life, the more I allow myself to taste the opposite of ease, levity, and happiness, the more I'm drawn to Dante. It's hard, no, impossible, to ignore something that reaches you both on a cerebral and emotional level contemporaneously. Try it. You'll most likely fail.

What's been claiming most of my thoughts recently is the notion of the pursuit of happiness and it tenability. I've long wondered what it is that Dante must have experienced to write in Canto V that there's:
Nessun maggior dolore
Che ricordarsi del tempo felice
Nella miseria (lines 121-123)
There is no greater sorrow
Than to be mindful of the happy time
In misery.

Cerebrally, I've always known this. I've lectured on it plenty. Emotionally, I'm convinced that the only way to get happiness, to truly capture it albeit fleetingly, is to see it in conjunction with pain and memory. Happiness cannot exist in the confines of complacency. It couldn't. It needs the oxygen of immediacy. It can't be without. Happiness can only be when ridden with the anxiety of potential loss.

Being, at times, happy is the hardest task to accomplish. Some are aided by their respective genetic makeup to have a somewhat easier/harder time with happiness. Generally, however, happiness takes much conscious work. If left to chance, the end result will undoubtedly be difficult. The gift of introspection, some call it. This ability that some have to look inward to find answers to the human condition. Introspection is not a gift. Introspection is work, a lot of arduous work. Introspection cannot be given one. It needs to be acquired. One individual at a time.

Steve Jobs' Biography by Walter Isaacson: A Review

Isaacson's authorized biography of Steve Jobs is a good read. No doubt. How could one go wrong with a subject such as Jobs? All the years I've been reading about Steve Jobs, I used to get a kick out of people complaining about his controlling ways, his voracious appetite for work, and his unrelenting quest for excellence. Well, I wouldn't expect new devices like the iPod and the iPad to come to life by a slow, lassez-faire type with no sense of urgency.

Isaacson's biography is not peppered with too many 'genius' references. I'm glad it's not. It's another strong aspect of the book. Isaacson portrays a person who is aware of societal hierarchies and knows that to get any kinds of access, one needs to be in the right place at the right time. The anecdote of young Jobs forcing his parents to sell their house so that they could move to a place they couldn't quite afford just so that he could attend a better school was most compelling. Those who observe that Jobs did things his way and had disregard for established hierarchy seem to be wrong here. Young Jobs understood that everyone needs a good beginning, even one who has the ability to bring us the iPod.

Another griping snippet in the book was Jobs' refusal to have any sort of relationship with his biological father. Birth anxieties seem to have accompanied him his whole life. Isaacson seems to infer that much of drive was informed by the fact that he was given up for adoption. Jobs' personal relationships were well captured in the book. Two other people stand out in this section as well, his sister and his illegitimate daughter. Through it all, Jobs looks like any average person out there. He was accompanied by ontological insecurities and found work a good place to be and maybe hide in.

Those who refer to Jobs as a genius seem to do so decontextually. What is a genius anyway? What standards are we employing here? Are we talking 'Leonardo' genius or 'Einstein' genius? Apropos, since I mention the latter here, what made Einstein interesting from a popular culture point of view is the fact that he was, for some intents and purposes, quite average. He didn't excel scholastically, didn't have big professional ambitions when in the work force, ah, and, most importantly, had a troubled relationship with mathematics. It took many a person to help and inform him.

And just like Isaacson's biography shows, it took a lot to help and inform Steve Jobs. But while Jobs was extremely hard on those who crossed him, he would be harder on those he liked and, as a result, held to a standard they couldn't always keep. What people like Jobs have is tenacity. Skill comes in many forms. There might just be as many ways of being good at something as there are moments in time. What allows one to produce a great product, in the case of Jobs, is his ability to understand that function could never truly shine outside the realm of form. Aesthetics is never inconsequential. This is a sentence I find myself uttering often. Form is not the stuff of levity. Form has heaviness, the heaviness of importance. It's one nugget I am certain of and one I also saw elaborated in this text.

I recommend that you read it. It won't necessarily inspire but then again, should it? Fundamentally, we are all the same whether we're creating things that millions will want to have or not.

Poetry and the iPhone 4s

I have a knack for poetry.
And poets.
Especially, poets.
I have much respect for people who have an innate ability to produce poetry. Maybe that's why I privilege my poet friends to the degree that I do. I am aware of their skill and I pay homage to it. I was never good at writing it. However, I vouched to get decent at interpreting it.

Today I met a poet.

We met while talking about the iPhone 4s and how it compares to other super phones in the market. The conversation started most business-like. I've been in the technology business for a year now and there has been a shift in my quotidian jargon. I've replaced words like la terza rima, literary tropes, synecdoche, and gender theory with words like multicore, downloading speeds, data, and Android. The latter choice is faster, very 'now', technical and, at times, not very poetry-informed. It's denuded of tropes. It's clean, clinical, and free of literary entanglements.

At times though, my literary scholar self comes out most unexpectedly and, voila, a poet is befriended.

The following conversation took place today between me and the poet:

The poet: "So, what do you make of the Samsung Galaxy S II dominating Europe right now?"
I: "It's good. It speaks well for the Samsung brand but Apple is still king. It's tough to ignore the 'cool' factor of the brand. Especially now. The iPhone 4S is going strong."
He:"The Galaxy S II is a superphone, though."
I: "No doubt. The S II is a superphone, it has a double core, 14.4+ downloading speed, 4.2; screen, 8MP camera. At the same time the iPhone is a super phone to all those who have it and have experience with it."

I continue and this is where the connection takes place.

"You know, the new 4s is poetry."
He:"What do you mean by that?"
I:"It's a beautiful balance of form and content. It has capabilities that I doubt most users will ever come close to making use of and, not insignificantly, it's aesthetically pleasing. It's like a good poem."
He: "Hmm. Funny you say that. I do that. I perform my poetry."
Instead of resuming the conversation like any other 'normal' person, I channel my literary scholar self and say, "structured or free verse?"
He: "Allen Ginsberg. All the way, Ginsberg."
I: "He seemed to need so much affection, a shame not to make him happy."
He: "Death & Fame." Hmm. Really?"

He looks happy to have outed someone. Someone like him. Someone of his ilk.

...
At this point we know we're not about to go back and talk about Wired articles on super phones or Steve Jobs' passing, the Apple brand, or superphones.

He: "So, who's yours? Favorite, I mean."
I: "Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita...."
He: "Dante."

Needless to say, we will speak again. Meeting poets with a knack for technology doesn't happen often. Most of my poet friends are not technofiles. Or infected by neophilia, for that matter.

My new friend says he reads his own poetry at a cafe nearby.

In a businesslike fashion, I open up my iPhone, tap on the calendar app, ask for the name of the cafe, click on the GPS and calculate the distance from work. Beautiful. It's only 2.4 miles South.

18304

This is the number of messages I have in my Gmail account. Of course, I delete. I do. Daily. But I've always led a highly verbal life. As a result, I get to get an email form Google Help Desk letting me know that my "web mail quota has exceeded the set quota which is 3GB. [I am] currently running on 3.9 GB." Forgive me Google for I have exceeded the quota. I've dared go past the permitted parameters. What now? Will I be marginalized to the outskirts of the emailing world? Is there such a thing as an email Inferno or something? Which circle will I end up in? The email did get me to thinking about my writing habits and my usually verbal life, however. For years I've been giving/receiving a whole lot of words. And words add up. 3.9 GB is a lot of words. I take a few minutes to look at some folders. Some are too passe. Especially at 2:15 AM they feel passe. I delete a few folders. And still, not a dent. I need to get a good course of action. I need to put my words on a high-protein, low-carb diet. I wake up on account of a bad dream. I open up my email to get my mind off of the disturbing images of the dream. Why was that scary behemoth of a dog chasing me like that?! I mean, I even fed it and everything. I gave it my Starbucks muffin. What gives, dog? But, I better stop talking about the dream and get back to the google chastisement. I have to face the bottomless well that is my highly verbal life and start editing much like I edit my closets. It's easy for me to edit clothing. I only own a very few items of clothing that are older than one year. The reasons are simple. I'm hard on what I wear. In no time I'll manage to ruin the sturdiest and best-made sartorial contributions any closet would love to have. Why is it to hard with words, though? In my academic career, most of my lectures and writing were about concise speech and how difficult it is to master it. As a matter of fact, for all the courses and syllabi I've developed so far, I have an assignment I called: "capture." Often, especially in literary theory courses, I'd accompany it with another one I called "James Joyce auf Deutsch." i.e., "James Joyce in German," i.e., writing a-la-James-Joyce. So, for the latter, the students would be encouraged to just keep on writing and let the words flow as naturally and freely as they could, one association at a time. And in a matter of days, the next assignment would be a one-page 'capture' intended to make them think carefully about every content word chosen. Many of the comments I would put on most papers would say, "How could you say more with less? - Economy of speech: employ it more often." It's time I heed my own advice. I've always been in love with economy of speech. Some people tend to love difficult things. And I've always loved a good speech economy. The kind that's managed right. Once in a blue moon I encounter it and, when I do, I delight in it like a diabetic at a gelateria who's been allowed to go nuts on ice cream for one blessed day. And, here I am. Looking at the number 18304. Wondering how I could have accumulated a Tower of Babel in such a short time, with much deleting and all. I start to delete a few. But then my eyes get heavy. Surely, this can be done later. I put the computer aside, turn to the left side, close my eyes, and hope I don't get tormented by the awful nightmare that woke me up in the first place and sent me to my email.

The Cars' New Brilliant Album: A Review

I've been on a bit of a break from music.
...

Shocking, I know.

However, one truth of mine is that I can easily let go of stuff that doesn't keep me interested. I tend to look at this trait as a big positive. Others might disagree. If something is not qualitative, I'll give it some attention out of fundamental politeness and general respect for the genre. However, my academic quarter is just that: a brief interval of artistic etiquette.
But maybe other things have been at play in my recent nonchalant attitude vis-a-vis music. Be that as it may, after five weeks of no active music listening, (sacre bleu, I know!), I'm back.

After feeling no inspiration while scrolling down the thousands and thousands of track titles in my library, I thought I'd gain some distance between my muse, music, and my quotidianity. Instead, in my long drives and writing intervals, I'd listen to Marc Maron's brilliant podcast, WTF with Marc Maron. And, since I have long been a lover of stand-up comedy since seeing live acts back East, listening to Marc Maron interview comics has been most gripping and informative.

But, I'm not one to be without music for long. While my love of novelty might be too strong to resist, my long-term commitment to music is indisputable. And in the end, it always wins. I always pick it.

Enter The Cars.

Their new album, Move Like This, is the stuff of true skill. It's brilliant, very now, oozing experience-forged skill, and just very sexy. Hot. Very hot! In a time in music where prefab tracks and auto-tune seem to call the shots and true talent is obfuscated by way of cheaply manufactured aesthetics, coming across actual quality feels so refreshing. I had been parched and tonight I feel sated. Tracks like "Hits Me," "It's Only" and "Keep On Knocking" have a kind of masterful pace that make one wonder how such melodic perfection could be produced. So good. Great guitar, incomparable synthesizer, unparalleled vocals and just general 'cool' are what The Cars' new album is all about.

Every track is infused with a sense of history and contemporaneity which I've always thought hard to pull off. You listen to a track like "Take Another Look" and you know that feeling both melancholy and levity is a genuine possibility in the realm of good music. When a band tries to tip the hat to times past, it runs the risk of sounding dated. When it tries to be as 'now' as it can, it runs the risk of being slapped with accusations of affectation. However, The Cars do it just right. The listener is transported to times past while being firmly aware of what it means to be contemporary.

You don't make good art by accident. You make good art by study and constant practice. It took the Cards a couple of decades to put forth a new album but, holy crap, they've produced a hell of an album. So, sorry Marc Maron, I'll have to retire your podcast for a bit. Well, I've listened to every episode by now anyway and I'll re-visit your stuff in a little while. I'll be courting The Cars now. And I invite you all to do the same. You will love this.

Sitting between Two Redheaded People

I received some major news a few weeks ago. You know how it feels when everything around you unexpectedly goes in slow motion and you're almost capable of doing a play-by-play analysis of what's getting shown to you? Yeah, kind of, sort of like that.

Afterwards, I go to my car, sit, and put my hands around the steering wheel as if I’m driving somewhere. Only, the key is not in ignition and I have no music or a podcast episode from WTF with Marc Maron coming out of the iPod. Fifteen minutes into it - even though I'm told it's fifteen minutes. It felt more like 15 seconds to me - I hear, “uhm, so, are we going somewhere or should we see if we can get pizza delivered in the parking lot?”

Funny. I know.

For some odd reason, my mind took me to my first semester as a freshman in college. I haven't really thought about that time since going through it. As a general rule, I tend to experience, file, and move on to the next thing. Anyway. I had a brutal schedule then. One that I had hand-picked myself. Naturally. The thing is, I have a knack for picking difficult scenarios and subsequently sticking with them and bringing them to fruition. It's a chronic condition, I guess. Some people spend their lives averting challenges, others welcome them with an unexplained and unrequired bravado. Color me the latter. Whoopty doo!

So, when most students would take between 12 to 15 credits, I would alternate between 18 to 22 credits. Most unnecessarily, by the way. I just wanted to see if I could push myself to a new limit and if I could still hold on to my full-ride scholarship while castigating myself with an impossible schedule. I know. Let it go. It’s my thing.

To illustrate my point, here’s my schedule as a first semester freshman.
English Writing: 8:00AM-8:50AM (apropos, I am categorically not a morning person.)
Basketball: 9:00AM-9:50AM
Religion: 10:00AM-10:50AM
Biology: 11:00AM-11:50AM
And, after a six-hour break:
Math: 6PM.

Chances are, if I would go at it again, I’d most likely pick some hard scenario like this again. And since I didn't do all that shabbily the first time around, I'd dare make it even more challenging. I wish I were joking. At times, I wished I was one of those people who were happy being a 12-credit type of person. I could never pull that off, however. A certain gene pool and predisposition coupled with certain acquired behaviors proves to be incurable more often than not. Bottom line, some people take the easy or easier way out while others like detours or harder trails. It doesn’t mean that one camp is better and/or smarter than the other. It’s just diversity. I used to think, foolishly proudly, that the harder way was somehow more respectable. Turns out that's not true at all. Being happy with ease and a general lack of ambition is something I wish I could do. I bet life would be a total breeze. I doubt I'd lose track of time, holding on to my steering wheel while the ignition key is still on my lap if I were into 'easy.' Alas, I'm not.

But back to the schedule. I know I'll make the point eventually. The hardest thing about it (i.e., the schedule) was going from Basketball to Religion. I played basketball like I was a 6.2’ dude. And I’m a foot shorter than that. I played so hard all I wanted to do afterwards was take a long shower and do the unthinkable: take a nap. Instead, I’d gather my stuff and try to clean up as I ran even harder from the gym to the Humanities building where the Religion course took place. I was always panic-stricken when going to Religion. Ok, the real reason had to do with the seating chart, yes there was a seating chart for that class. The professor thought he could remember our faces better if we sat in the same place every day. Oh, there were close to 100 students in that auditorium, by the way. Insane man, I know.

In Religion, I was sitting in the middle of one of the back rows. That's the seat you get for being one of the last ones to walk in as you pull a Carl Lewis from gym class. I was smack dab in the middle. I tend to remember few details from people and events if I’m not too struck by either aesthetics and/or intelligence. Nothing much struck me in that class other than the fact that there were two redheads in there, a boy and a girl, and for some reason they were sitting respectively to my left and right. Yup, I was sitting between two bona fide redheads, a boy and a girl. I couldn’t get over the fact how enthralling I found their hair and their galaxy of freckles. They could have been related. They weren’t.

What occupied my mind then was the fear that I would continue to perspire as the professor taught about the historical context behind Leviticus. I couldn’t wait to go home and shower. Hard. Few things make me freak out. Not showering twice a day is one of them. I know. It’s my thing. Let it go. In Religion, I somehow felt some version of piety as I “suffered” in my tight but cushy seat while pursuing my education in the private university where people were more polite than those in Pleasantville and perfect strangers would say “hello” and “how are you?” to you. Ad nauseam.

For some odd reason, after my news, I felt exactly how I felt when sitting in Religion as I freaked out at the prospect of more sweat coming out of me as I had played with a kind of vigor I generally reserve for the airport as I'm always running to my gates trying to make my connections. I recognized the feeling immediately. I scratched my head metaphorically and literally. I wondered why I had to scratch my head and made a quick mental note re: changing shampoos. Then, metaphorically, I scratched my head again and wondered why, of all the thoughts my brain would have strung together, it decided to pick one that took me back to my freshman year.

In sum, I often wonder why I have such loyal tolerance for quotidianity and all its menial routines and overall uninterestingness. And every time I wonder about its strong presence, I am reminded of the function it plays. It's a bringer of stability and overall sanity. I like control. Control, for odd reasons, gets a bad rap. However, control is nothing to sneer at. It comes too naturally to some and very challengingly to others. While I have a naturally hyper nature which at times makes concentration difficult, thanks to learned control and discipline, much can get accomplished.

It's hard to get stuff done well when you are pulled in so many directions all of which beg for your attention. So, amid the frustration of nature, desire for focus needs to kick in. And it does. It says, I want to do a task at a time and I want to do them well. So, controlling one's nature is indispensable when it comes to accomplishment and productivity.
It turns out, it's also indispensable when it comes to dealing with a kind of novelty that puts well-tested quotidianity on its head and tells it to go spin.

And there you are, metaphorically sitting between two redheaded people, hoping your sweat won't get noticed.