Tuesday, September 30, 2008

Ironic Hipsters

And My Ever Rising Blood Pressure

Make no mistake: irony tyrannizes us. The reason why our pervasive cultural irony is at once so powerful and so unsatisfying is that an ironist is impossible to pin down. All U.S. irony is based on an implicit "I don’t really mean what I’m saying." So what does irony as a cultural norm mean to say? That it’s impossible to mean what you say? That maybe it’s too bad it’s impossible, but wake up and smell the coffee already? Most likely, I think, today’s irony ends up saying: "How totally banal of you to ask what I really mean."

- David Foster Wallace
"E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction"

I work at a library, a customer service industry, in which I'm peppered with hundreds of questions, ranging from the mundane ("Where's the bathroom?") to the complex ("Do you have videos with public performance rights on peer pressure for at-risk minority children of alternative sexuality grades K to 12?") on a weekly basis. Because of the volume and diversity of the questions, which come from people representing a widely divergent range of education and socio-economic background, a librarian has to develop a frame of reference for the questions in order to comprehend what is being asked; often a question isn't even a question until you help the patron articulate just exactly what he or she wants. It's kind of like Jeopardy!; my ability to do my job - and help you, the public - depends on the ability to have queries put in the form of a question (hopefully one with an answerable frame of reference). In other words, I get best results, and waste the least time, when patrons tell me exactly what they want and don't beat around the bush. The Straight Talk Express, library reference style.

That's why I was so peeved on a recent Manic Monday when a young guy who looked like your basic twentysomething Indie Rocker approached me and said, "I'm looking for really pretentious art films."

I know all about art films, but there was a subjective value system buried in the question. I mean, one's man's sirloin is another man's Hamburger Helper as far as what's considered arty and what's considered crap. A naked picture of Jenna Jameson is considered porn while a museum painting of a naked Venus is considered art, in other words. And pretentious? Did he mean, bad films, boring films, laugh-out-loud exercises in artiness?

So I asked him, "You mean bad films?"

"No," Young Guy replied, "Why would you say that?"

"Because," I said, "You said pretentious, which is typically a negative term."

"No it's not," he scoffed.

"It's not?" I countered, suddenly lost. (I had a momentary chill, the kind you get when you think you've gotten something terribly wrong all your life, like when my grandmother corrected my pronunciation of the word poignant, which I had mispronounced as "poik-nant" for 28 years thanks to Curly Howard of the Three Stooges.) "You consider pretentious a positive, complimentary term?"

"Yeah," he said with confidence and without blinking twice.

I was amazed.
pretentious
Adjective
1. making (unjustified) claims to special merit or importance: many critics thought her work and ideas pretentious and empty
2. vulgarly showy; ostentatious: a family restaurant with no pretentious furnishing (www.thefreedictionary.com)

"So, if you were in a bar chatting up a girl and she said she found you pretentious, you would take it as a compliment?" I asked, incredulous.

"Yeah," he replied, "Of course."

"Oh, OK..."

In other words, he was playing a game of wordplay, of hipper-than-thou irony. Not a librarian's best friend. We're here to answer questions, not to fall captive to verbal B.S. That's the domain of politicians...and ironic hipsters. Shades of gray in a black-and-white world.

Luckily, my co-worker, who knew the guy slightly from his soccer league, intervened and, being a Twentysomething himself, understood the kid's wavelength enough to decode "pretentious art films". Apparently, the hipster kid wanted to put on a film series based around this narrowly-defined self-understood genre, and my co-worker pulled some titles for him.

This whole interaction made me think of that Onion article "Aging Gen-Xer Doesn't Find Bad Movies Funny Anymore."

Later, I thanked my co-worker and said, "Strange guy, huh?"

My co-worker replied, "Yeah, I didn't understand at first he was being ironic, but once I could understand that he really meant good films in his ironic way, I could help him."

Of course, the kid could have just asked for what he wanted directly.

But I guess that wouldn't have been cool. Some people talk to be overheard and not to be actually listened to.

I call them assholes. Which is a still negative term in almost all circles (barring porn films). But direct and to the point.

Related Links:
Pretentious - For the Sake of It (Gentle Giant CD compilation, 1977)

Monday, September 29, 2008

See This Immediately: MAN ON WIRE



In 1974, crazy Frenchman Phillippe Petit walked a high wire strung between WTC 1 and WTC 2. He didn't just walk it. He went back and forth eight times, laid down on the wire, knelt, and spent a total of forty-five minutes in the clouds.

I must live under a rock, because before Man on Wire was released, I had never heard of this stunt. This seems impossible, but true. The New Yorker did an incredible job with their hommage to Petit on the issue the week of 9/11.



Petit didn't just walk between the Two Towers, either. Prior to that impossible feat he also walked the Sydney Harbor Bridge and the two turrets of Notre Dame. (Later conquests include the Eiffel Tower and the Louisiana Superdome). And, of course, he didn't do these things alone. He had a colorful crew of losers and friends to literally help him string the wires. The documentary is heist-tale of sorts: the crew had to find a way to get to the top of the World Trade Center without being arrested, manage to string the wire and get Petit across it all before being apprehended by the police. After several hilarious and nerve-wracking gyrations, they succeed.

The footage of Petit practicing his highwire and the photographs of him exercising his passion are perhaps the most impressive, breathtaking aspect of this documentary. But it is the focus on the relationships of these people, and how this singular event changed their lives forever that becomes the most heartbreaking, most meaningful reason to see this film. All involved parties are interviewed and their piecemeal accounts combine to form the narrative of the events leading up to the highwire walk on August 7th, 1974. But interspersed there is video footage from the seventies, mostly in Petit's backyard in France, where he practiced his walk. The same people telling us this incredible story are immediately transformed into their younger selves in what feels completely seamless: as if the moment of Petit's ascension aged them by thirty years.

In what seems to be a very French philosophy, Man on Wire seems to tell us to live our lives to the fullest, pursuing our passions and unabashedly worshiping our obsessions until they become a reality. But in what I believe to be perhaps the most poignant message of the film is the solitude and the resounding silence that occurs after said mission is won. Petit achieved an incredible and impossible personal goal that day. When one is confronted with the success of a lifelong dream, that changes everything, well, what then?



I find the parallels between Man on Wire and the demise of the Trade Towers eerily profound. (And yet 9/11, for understandable reasons, is never discussed). The Two Towers, for so many New Yorkers, and Americans represent those unattainable goals, those impossible passions and obsessions. And even if they are built, they can crumble around us. But, for those brief moments they survive, the journey is worth it. And then we must confront the ghostly reminder of our past, and its formidable mist that gathers at our feet.


Sunday, September 28, 2008

When it Rains, Readers Pour

13th Annual Baltimore Book Festival
Friday September 26, 2008 - Sunday September 28, 2008
Mt Vernon Place, Baltimore - "The City That Reads"


Opening Ceremony, Baltimore Book Festival

What is it about the Baltimore Book Festival and torrential downpours? I went down on Sunday (the final - and only dry - day, after spending Saturday bailing out my flooded basement), of the 13th Annual Baltimore Book Festival and mused that question as I walked past the Walters Arts Gallery and saw one of the Walters museum guards outside on a smoke break.

"That's how you know it's the Book Fair," the guard said. "Every year they get the wettest weather - every year!"

Got that right, buddy. I think they even cancelled it one year due to a hurricane alert (2003?).

The sun finally came out Sunday, though festival goers wearing jeans like me still got soaked from the humidity. Anyway, before I even worked up a sweat, I ran into Baltimore Grassroots Media maven Mike Shea on his recumbent bike, down to film a Mark Twain impersonator for Baltimore City Public Access TV. Turns out he was interviewing Alan Reese, the guy I succeeded as Towerlight Features Editor at Towson State College in the '70s. Alan's always been involved with the local poetry and writing scene, and he looked pretty cool in his white suit. If he put on some pounds and grew a beard, he could pull double duty doing in-store appearances at KFC as Colonel Sanders with an outfit like that.


Reel Around the Fountain: Kids frolic in the Children's Book Tent

And Mike Shea? Well, the former Critical Mass-termind is never without his video camera, a spiffy Hi-Def Panasonic HDV30 that had me turning green with digital envy. I always considered Mike a social activist, but he decries the term. But I remember reading him getting busted for videotaping a Critical Mass rally back in 2004 ("Singled Out," City Paper, 5/12/2004). Must have been a hot-head cop (don't they have better things to do in Bodymore, Murderland?), because Mike's a pretty mellow fellow.


Cops put the brakes on biker Mike Shea

There must be something about Mikes clustering together, because next I ran into Mike Hughes, erstwhile MPT and Baltimore Mag Webmaster who also writes fiction on the side. In fact, his short story "The Blackwater Lights" - included in the Legends of the Mountain State anthology - was recently lauded by Huntingtonnews.net as "one of the best stories in a collection that has no bad ones" and compared to the great horror writing of H.P. Lovecraft! (To read his fiction or other observations, check out his great blog at michaelmhughes.com/wordpress). Mike's definitely a social activist of the Literati Set. Apparently he had a reading at the CityLit Stage earlier that day, and was now cooling his jets talking to the hip-savvy McSweeney Books dudes, who looked like they were in Weezer.

Next I ran into a former Pratt Library co-worker, Donna Woods, who was manning the BookMooch booth. BookMooch (www.bookmooch.com) - whose motto is "Give books away. Get books you want" - is an international community for exchanging used books that operates under the premise that's it's better to give AND to receive. Every time you give someone a book, you earn a point and can get any book you want from anyone else at BookMooch. Once you've read a book, you can keep it forever or put it back into BookMooch for someone else, as you wish. I liked their banner (shown below); the Moochie critters are kind of creepy, like something out of a John Wayne Gacy-style clown painting.



And speaking of giving and receiving, when I wandered up to the Radical Books tent, I met the nice folks hawking $pread, the New York-based mag dedicated to worldwide sex industry workers (call girls, escorts, strippers, prostitutes, porn stars, et. al.). Naturally the sexual nature of the mag's headlines and photos attracted a number of horndogs, including some off-duty cop whose flair for the obvious ("I've found that a number of the prostitutes I've arrested had drug problems" - Really! Ya think?) astounded me. But they soon wandered away when they realized the mag wasn't at all prurient, and featured articles about sexual abuse, sex workers unions, hookers that murder their pimps, and such. Far from Red Hot, the mag's focus is more Red Emma's, with an appeal of "Sex Workers of the World Unite!"

I bought the issue with Tracy Quan on the cover, recalling that she wrote the text for a cool photo book I had seen at Daedalus Books & Music called Orientalia: Sex In Asia (2003). Quan, a former sex worker, has branched out into fiction, penning Diary of A Manhattan Call Girl: A Nancy Chan Novel (Three Rivers Press, 2003); though fictional, Quan's book (which originally ran as a column in Salon.com) is based on her real-life Sex and the City experiences. The same issue also had an article about menstruation fetish videos (we live in troubled times!!!) and an interesting interview with Caveh Zahedi about his autobiographical film I Am a Sex Addict, in which Rebecca Lord (one of my favorite adult film actresses) plays the director's wife.

Seeing $pread made me think of Teresa Dulce (pictured right), the Portland-based artist/activist who started stripping to pay off student loans and eventually founded Danzine - an Oregon sex workers organization and zine (1995-2005) - and later curated Portland's Sex by Sex Worker Film Festival (1998-2000)...I remember videotaping her in 1997 for an Atomic TV segment that never aired (trust me, there were a lot of them!), back when she did an in-store appearance at Baltimore's old Atomic Books (then on Charles and Chase streets). As former Atomic Books/TV impresario Scott Huffines recalled, that's when the bookstore used to have a display of James "Shocked & Amazed!" Taylor's sideshow oddities in the store, and Teresa did a "How To Put A Condom On" safe-sex demonstration in which she slipped the "love glove" over one of the horns on a three-horned goat head!

Later I spotted Joe Giordano, creator of the snazzy/snarky online mag GUTTER, wearing one of those Sinatra hipster hats that they sell at Target now (though Joe insists he got his fedora/trilby in New Orleans), the fashion craze that's replaced ironic trucker hats on the Ottobar and Joe Squared circuit...Just kidding Joe! Joe's a good guy and an ace photographer whose getting plenty of work and (well-deserved) kudos of late. I like it when he stops by the library, because he always finds the good books and CDs there before me - it's hard to keep up with his cool finds!

On the way out I had to stop at the American Visionary Arts Museum's booth, which is my perennial favorite. There I was dismayed to see that the already marked-down copy of Andy Warhol's Screen Tests I picked up at Daedalus Books & Music was even more marked down at AVAM! Oh well, live and learn. (By the way, reading about the screen tests is much better than actually viewing them, according to Video Americain's Scott Wallace Brown, who has a number of them in his collection; basically, the screen tests provide a Who's Who record of every notable '60s personality that stopped by The Factory)...Anyway, I told the AVAMsters that they have the best gift shop (officially known as Sideshow) in town and that I regularly recommend them to any out-of-towners who stop in the library and ask what landmarks they should see in Baltimore. By way of thanks, they gave me a Pirate book bag. You just can't beat that: trendy - and functional!

Friday, September 26, 2008

Katsumi Comes Calling


The comely Katsumi

When I expressed excitement on hearing that Katsumi (now called "Katsuni" after she was barred by a French judge in January 2007 from using "Katsumi" when a woman named Mary Katsumi sued her) - my favorite adult film star* - was coming to dance at Baltimore's Fantasies Nightclub in October, my co-worker Ross mentioned he had a tape of her on Howard Stern's On Demand TV show. It was a lame parody of James Lipton's Inside the Actor's Studio television show (already brilliantly spoofed by Will Ferrell on Saturday Night Live) called Inside the Porn Actor's Studio with Richard Christy.

Inside the Porn Actor's Studio w/Richard Christy


Hardcore Gone Limp: Katsumi on lame Howard Stern spoof

Host Christy had the soft-spoken part of the parody down pat, and the intermittent hand-clapping bit, but that was it. Pretty dumb one-trick pony idea, if you ask me, and the studio audience of wack pack mooks were even more lame - especially the nerd kid in the front row who was too chicken to drop trou in tit-for-tat exchange for Katsumi popping her toppings. But I enjoyed listening to Katsumi, the charming and intelligent 29-year-old Lyon, France-born porn star with the Japanese name (she got it from a Japanese manga character's name) who is actually half-Vietnamese (her Dad) and half-French (her Mom). Katsumi is also a polyglot who speaks several languages, including Latin (though, curiously, she didn't understand the word coitus when Christy used it). For the record, Katsumi told Christy her favorite word is gourmandise and her least favorite word is sperm ("Such an ugly word for something so beautiful"). When Christy asked her what she thought God would say to her when she reached the Pearly Gates, she responded, "You have too much pleasure to give; go back to Earth." A hearty applause followed.

Katsumi is huge in France, where she has her own TV show, and has always struck me as The Audrey Hepburn of Porn, able to ooze oodles of class even when her degenerette male porn partners are oozing other substances all over her beautiful body. As such, she deserves better. I for one would like to really know why someone so gorgeous chose this career path; the real James Lipton would find out.
* (Note: While Katsumi is my favorite active porn star; my all-time fave remains the now-retired Suzi Suzuki.)

Related Links:
Katsumi/Katsuni (Wikipedia)
Katsuni (MySpace)

Wednesday, September 24, 2008

Tuesday, September 23, 2008

Coffee Strains

Panera's Gets Nasty



I never thought I'd be a Starbucks person (I still think of them as pretentious fancy latte-sipping consumers of overpriced stimulant beverages and nothing makes me cringe more than when some high-maintenance yenta steps to the counter and insists on substituting organic soy milk for her ridiculously decadent latte concoction-du-jour), but with the demise of my neighborhood's Starbucks-wannabe, Caribou Coffee (which had a cool staff) and the ghettoization of Panera's (now frequented almost exclusively by tasteless college kids and semi-ambulatory seniors and staffed by surly high school grads and excessively inked ex-cons), I find myself getting my daily fix at Starbucks (where the sharp-and-savvy college-age staff is quick, courteous and professional). Always hot coffee, mind you, and always plain and sans-girly flavors and frills. Still over-priced, admittedly. But I got hooked - blame it on my brother and brother-in-law for giving me all those Christmas gift cards.

But I still would sometimes frequent Panera Bread when I was getting food. Until this past Saturday when I went to Panera's for a bagel and a coffee. I always love it when hey have those sliced bagel samples, and today they had chocolate chip and some raisin variety samples out. And tongs. I have never used the tongs. And I have rarely seen anyone else use them. So, I picked up a chocolate chip slice, put it in my mouth, grabbed a napkin to wipe off a chocolate chip smear on my finger, and grabbed another slice. Again, the piece I grabbed went straight into my mouth, without any subsequent contact. But as I approached the cashier, I was suddenly called out.

The cashier loudly announced, "Please use the tongs when eating our samples. When you use your hands...that's nasty!"

Realizing she meant me, I said, "Are you serious?" (This was after I stood in front of her for several seconds while she finished her conversation with her co-workers...but I digress.)

"Yes," she replied. "Don't you think that's nasty?" She wouldn't let it go.

"No, I don't think it's nasty. I washed my hands before I came in here and I grabbed a bread slice and I didn't lick my fingers or anything, I used a napkin, and I put the slice I grabbed into my mouth, without touching anything else. I mean, it's not like George Costanza on Seinfeld when he double-dipped the potato chip at his girlfriend's family wake," I insisted. "It's not like something else came into contact with my mouth."

By now I was miffed. I guess I made a big deal about it because in my day job, also a customer service field, I have to take an inordinate amount of shit every day - and this time, being the customer, I wasn't going to let a slight go unchallenged. Meanwhile, the whole mood of this commercial transaction was tainted and this became more than a simple food and cash exchange.

"Well I think that's nasty,' the cashier insisted.

Well, I think you're a nut case, I thought to myself. I shook my head and waited for her to hand me my sliced chocolate chip bagel (without using tongs!).

I paid her, she gave me my change and as I counted it, thought "Now that's "nasty" - dirty money touched by God knows who."

Needless to say I will never come to Panera's again. It's one thing to object to a patron's hygiene as a courtesy to other diners (as in the case of a legimate "double-dip" transaction), but very poor customer service to characterize something as "nasty." That's like remarking "Gross!" upon a customer suddenly sneezing or clearing their throat. Added colorful commentary, in other words.

Related Links:
Double-Dipping On Trial
Double-dipping? Seinfeld Was Right (USA Today)

Wednesday, September 17, 2008

Transported

THE TRANSPORTERS:
Retro Rockers Channel Groovy Garage & Brit Invasion Vibe




(Friday, September 12) - Though I had to get up early for work the next day, the Joe Squared lineup this night was too good to resist: the hot-rocking garage/surf/mod combo Garage Sale, their surf-instro soul-mates The Tritons, and the debut of a band called The Transporters - the latter featuring Jennifers' guitarist Joe Stone.


Joe Stone (left) and The Jennifers

I only got to stick around for the first two acts (sorry Skizz, Big Dave, Dave McD and John-I!) and while the co-ed Tritons (featuring poet Jenny Keith Ciattei on guitar and hubby Chris "Batworth" Ciattei - he of Plow, Little Gruntpack, Furniture Falling Down the Stairs, The Bobwhites, The Soul Gamblers, etc., etc. - on drums) were tremendous, I'm here to gush about the new kids in town, The Transporters.



The Transporters spun fun '60s singles jingles

The Transporters, nattily attired in sports coats-and-ties and living up to their "cool old sounds played in cool new ways" advance billing, played nothing but retro Garage nuggets and British Invasion cover songs - - and it was crowd-pleasingly delightful! We're talking Kinks ("Till the End of the Day," "I'm Not Like Everybody Else," and the fairly obscure "Gotta Get the First Plane Home" from Kinks Kontroversy and "Holiday In Waikiki" from Face To Face), The Who ("Run, Run, Run"), Les Fleurs des Lys ("Circles"), Yardbirds ("A Certain Girl," "Heartful of Soul," "Over, Under, Sideways, Down"), The Them ("I Can Only Give You Everything"), The Standells ("Good Guys Don't Always Wear White"), early Stones ("The Last Time," "19th Nervous Breakdown") and their ilk. They even threw in Love's psych remake of Bacharach-David's "Little Red Book"!

My friend Dave Cawley calls this style "Freakbeat" but I hate this made-up term for vintage Sixties guitar rock (why does everything have to be a catchphrase? No sir, like China's stance on Taiwan, I refuse to official recognize it!) Let's just say the tune-age met the crowd-pleasing criteria of fuzzy guitars, snarly vocals and a stomping beat.

Anyway, when I got home it made me immmediately start digging out my old vinyl and start playing the originals again, including the Yardbirds' Roger the Engineer, as this 1966 LP featured my fave song "Over Under Sideways Down" - a song you never hear covered by anybody. (Roger The Engineer also featured the Jeff Beck guitar-boogie workout track called "The Nazz Are Blue" - a song that provided the name for Todd Rundgren's old band Nazz; of course Beck's tune took its name from the old Lord Buckley Jesus-of-Nazareth routine "The Nazz"). Later I started spinning my old Stones singles, Kinks komps and Nuggets. So thanks, Transporters - you transported me back to happy days of yore and helped reaquaint me with my record collection!

By the way, straight from Joe Stone, here's the official set list from Friday night's gig at Joe Squared...and Joe assures there's more where that came from!

Transporters Set List:

mercy mercy
a certain girl
till the end of the day
holiday in waikiki
last time
little red book
I'm not like everybody else
heart full of soul
I can only give you everything
sometimes good guys don't wear white
circles
first plane
over under sideways down
run run run
19th nervous breakdown

Commitment for Sale


Oh my goodness.

Olivia Judson, in this piece on the NYTimes' "The Wild Side" blog, discusses the discovery of the arginine vasopressin receptor 1a gene, which has recently been found to support and encourage the maintenance of committed relationships in humans and other mammals. While the gene is present in both sexes, it's more important to males, as it corresponds to other behaviors such as "aggressive posturing, scent marking of territories, courtship and sex."

Too much of the gene, however, can be a bad thing. In a recent Swedish study, men who had two copies of the gene, a variant known as RS3 334 "were less likely to be married, and more likely to report difficulties in their relationships, than other men. Their partners were also more likely to report relationship difficulties."

When introduced into lab rats (a species that Judson notes is NOT, by any means, a monogamous species), the male rat became interested in cuddling with a partner, and when a new female was introduced into his environment, he "prefer[ed] to consort with the old partner." The question here is: if we were to insert this gene into human males who have a proven aversion to commitment, would we achieve the same result?

Of course, as Judson mentions, this isn't exactly an ethical move. And I, for one, am not a huge fan of altering human behavior through gene therapy.

So, ladies: seeing a guy that won't commit? Time to throw in the towel.

Shit is biological.

Tuesday, September 16, 2008

David Foster Wallace



I have never read Infinite Jest, but the novel means a lot to a dear friend of mine, so I've been meaning to read it for some time. I'm sure many others will be motivated to do the same now that the man behind it is dead . . . for understandable reasons suicide creates a shroud of mystery around the artist's work which gives it another level of permanence.

I have, however, read several of David Foster Wallace's essays, and found them quite intelligent and entertaining. There's also a sense of pain and raw emotion present in his writing that my favorite book reviewer, Sam Anderson, pegged as almost a feeling of "self-help" in his memorial on New York Magazine. In it, he mentions Wallace's commencement address to the 2005 Kenyon graduates. Here are a few lines that really spoke to me:

"If you're automatically sure that you know what reality is, and you are operating on your default setting, then you, like me, probably won't consider possibilities that aren't annoying and miserable. But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-type hell situation not only as meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the starts: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.

Not that the mystical stuff is necessarily true. The only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're gonna try to see it."

Things can be bad. I, for one, know that I make them worse when I let my anxieties and insecurities get the best of me. I know what's quoted above seems flouncy and Buddhist, and perhaps it is, but I can't hear advice like this often enough. So much of my reality is often colored by my negative perception. If I could learn, as DFW suggests, to seek the positive, even in times of stress, I think the world would seem less fruitless and that people would seem more kind.

I only wish his own advice had been able to sway him from giving up. My thoughts are with his family and friends. His words survive.

Alas David Foster Wallace...

I Hardly Knew Ye (and That's My Loss)


The world lost a bright light in David Foster Wallace

I read the New York Times obit (by photographer/filmmaker Bruce Weber) and appreciations yesterday about the apparent suicide of this apparent genius writer at age 46 and was fascinated. Not because he had suicidal tendencies - many authors and artists-in-general are clinically depressed (see William Styron, Hemingway, John Kennedy Toole, etc.). But when I read about how he was an avid tennis fan who was once a regionally-ranked junior tennis star, I was intrigued (being an avid tennis fan myself) - in the same way my only interest in seeing the documentary Metallica: Some Kind of Monster is to learn more about drummer Lars Ulrich's pre-musical career as a tennis player. So, working at a library, I decided to seek out his non-fiction works (since his most famous novel Infinite Jest runs over 1,000 pages and I have textbook AADD, I ruled out reading that book fast!)

One of the first things I found was his 2006 New York Times piece on Roger Federer, "Federer As Religious Experience." It was brilliant, the best appreciation of the Swiss master's skills I had ever read. In watching Federer play, Wallace saw the same kind of beauty Michelangelo realized in sculpting his David:
Beauty is not the goal of competitive sports, but high-level sports are a prime venue for the expression of human beauty. The relation is roughly that of courage to war.

The human beauty we’re talking about here is beauty of a particular type; it might be called kinetic beauty. Its power and appeal are universal. It has nothing to do with sex or cultural norms. What it seems to have to do with, really, is human beings’ reconciliation with the fact of having a body.

Of course, in men’s sports no one ever talks about beauty or grace or the body. Men may profess their “love” of sports, but that love must always be cast and enacted in the symbology of war: elimination vs. advance, hierarchy of rank and standing, obsessive statistics, technical analysis, tribal and/or nationalist fervor, uniforms, mass noise, banners, chest-thumping, face-painting, etc. For reasons that are not well understood, war’s codes are safer for most of us than love’s.

Further research led me to two of his non-fiction collections, Consider the Lobster, and Other Essays (2006) - which contained a piece about Tracy Austin and the "sports biography" - and A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments (1997), which had a superlative profile on Mike Joyce entitled "Tennis player Michael Joyce's professional artistry as a paradigm of certain stuff about choice, freedom, discipline, joy, grotesquerie, and human completeness."

Now I've read every book ever written about tennis and I am here to attest that David Foster Wallace was the best writer on the subject I've ever encountered. He "got it" as only a handful of writers ever came close to "getting it" (e.g., John Feinstein in Hard Courts or Eliot Berry in Topspin). Or, in his own words:
I submit that tennis is the most beautiful sport there is, and also the most demanding. It requires body control, hand-eye coordination, quickness, flat-out speed, endurance, and that strange mix of caution and abandon we call courage. It also requires smarts. Just one single shot in one exchange in one point of a high-level match is a nightmare of mechanical variables. Given a net that's three-feet high (at the center) and two players in (unrealistically) a fixed position, the efficacy of one single shot is determined by its angle, depth, pace, and spin. And each of these determinants is itself determined by still other variables - for example, a shot's depth is determined by the height at which the ball passes over the net combined with some integrated function of pace and spin, with the ball's height over the net itself determined by the player's body position, grip on the racquet, degree of backswing, angle of racquet face, and the 3-D coordinates through which the racquet face moves during that interval in which the ball is actually on the strings. The tree of variables and determinants branches out, on and on, and then on even farther when the opponent's own positions and predilections and the ballistic features of the ball he's sent to you are factored in. No CPU yet existent could compute the expansion of variables for even a single exchange - smoke would come out of the mainframe. The sort of thinking involved is the sort that can only be done by a living and highly conscious entity, and then only unconsciously, i.e., by combining talent with repetition to such an extent that the variables are combined and controlled without conscious thought. In other words, serious tennis is a kind of art.


The physics behind the art of tennis

And it was an art that Wallace rightly concluded was best appreciated live, as "television doesn't really allow us to appreciate what real top-level players can do - how hard they're actually hitting the ball, and with what control and tactical artistry." (God knows I can appreciate that observation. Just this past weekend I was playing tennis on some nearby public courts when former Dark Side bass player Dave Jarkowski strolled in with his 15-year-old son Eric Jarkowski, and asked if I wanted to hit with Eric. I did, or rather, I tried to. Eric was the Baltimore City boys tennis champion last year - as a Freshman (!) - at Poly High School, and receiving his blazing forehand strokes was like seeing an asteroid hurtling toward me at supersonic speeds. Blink and you missed it. It took a half-dozen tries before I could return one measly ball over the net to him!)

I also have read just about every book written on the adult film industry (needless to say, I have divergent interests), so I was doubly pleased to read the opening essay, "Big Red Son," about the Annual AVN (Adult Video News) Awards at the 1998 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, which was described as "the Apocalypse [taking] the form of a cocktail party.". It was a spot-on piece of reporting, Hunter S. Thompson with gravitas. Here's a sample:
The adult industry is vulgar...The industry's not only vulgar, it's predictably vulgar. All the cliches are true. The typical porn producer really is the ugly little man with a bad toupee and a pinkie-ring the size size of a Rolaids. The typical porn director really is a guy who uses the word class as a noun to mean refinement. The typical porn starlet really is the lady in Lycra eveningwear with tattoos all down her arms who's both smoking and chewing gum while telling journalists how grateful she is to Wadcutter Productions Ltd. for footing her breast-enlargement bill. And meaning it. The whole AVN Awards weekend comprises what Mr. Dick Filth calls an Irony-Free Zone.


Irony-free vulgarity at the AVN Awards

Reading all the obits, I realize (all too late) that I must read his books which, thanks to an prodigious-to-the-point-of-exhaustive work ethic, are plentiful. As Sam Anderson wrote in New York magazine:
"He was the great enemy of word limits, proportion, and journalistic restraint. He aimed, in every single project, for the grand totalizing exhaustive gesture — whether it was a 1,000-page novel seeking to catalogue an entire culture (Infinite Jest) or a 100-page "experiential postcard" recounting a week on a cruise ship ("A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again"). For Wallace, a thought could never actually, in good conscience, realistically, be finished — there was always one more reversal, one more qualifying clause, and an honest writer had to follow them out. Hence the famously never-ending sentences that spun off, even more famously, into never-ending footnotes. The black hole of his self-consciousness drew everything into it, even and especially self-consciousness itself. But that compulsion to be exhaustive was, apparently, exhausting."

It's ironic (and David Foster Wallace apparently hated Irony!) that it took a death to make me take notice of the man once considered by his peers to be America's greatest living author. Sign of the times?

Related Links:
Wikipedia
New York Times Obit (Bruce Weber)
"Exuberant Riffs On a Land Run Amok" (Michiko Kakutani)
"The Genius of David Foster Wallace and the Ugly Monster of Depression" (Baltimore Sun)
New York Magazine Obit (Sam Anderson)

Marisa Miller Is A Naughty Schoolgirl. Sort Of.


Marisa

I’ve never heard of Malibu Magazine, but somehow they managed to getMarisa Miller in a pair of knee high socks - which is what I’ve been doing for the last 3 years in my Marisa Miller school girl fantasy. Unfortunately Marisa isn’t wearing a plaid skirt but hey, beggars can’t be choosers. So thanks Malibu Magazine for making my fantasy a reality. Sort of.

Marisa Marisa Marisa

Marisa Marisa

Marisa

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Jessica Alba, Smile! Your Breasts Are Growing


Jessica

I don’t know why Jessica Alba looks so crabby all the time, she’s a big star, she just had a lovely baby, and now her breasts just keep getting bigger and bigger. What more could anyone ask for? Maybe she’s upset about stretching out all her favorite sweaters, but I bet her husband has a HUGE smile.

Jessica Jessica Jessica

Jessica Jessica Jessica

Jessica Jessica Jessica

Jessica Jessica Jessica

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Brooke Hogan Bikini Pictures


Brooke

I can’t believe I’m saying this but Brooke Hogan actually looks a little less manly in these bikini pictures, at least from the neck down. Here she is playing around in the surf with her boyfriend. I didn’t know she had a boyfriend, I’m not one to judge but I guess some guys like dudes with big tits.

Brooke Brooke Brooke

Brooke Brooke Brooke

Brooke Brooke Brooke

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