Converge perform "Glacial Pace" at Saint Vitus +1

from opinions rendered in Maryland v. King

Justice Kennedy penned the majority opinion in Maryland v. King, which ruled "... that DNA identification of arrestees is a reasonable search that can be considered part of a routine booking procedure ..." This means the cops can swab the inside of the cheek of someone who gets arrested, so long as that someone is being detained for a "serious offense". In giving the majority opinion, Kennedy goes on at length praising the role of DNA in identifying people. He points out that, had Timothy McVeigh been swabbed when he was stopped for not having a license plate hours after he bombed the federal building in Oklahoma City, then the cop could have known it was McVeigh. Or, had one of the 9-11 hijackers been swabbed when he was ticketed for speeding days before the atrocity, the cop would have identified him, too. Of course, nevermind that these identifications would not have prevented anything, and that neither terrorist was being arrested at the time. Kennedy's reasonings are impressively dense. And Justice Scalia calls him out for it.

In the dissent, Scalia writes, "The Court’s assertion that DNA is being taken, not to solve crimes, but to identify those in the State’s custody, taxes the credulity of the credulous." Then he goes on:

... while the Court is correct to note (ante, at 8–9) that there are instances in which we have permitted searches without individualized suspicion, “[i]n none of these cases. . . did we indicate approval of a [search] whose primary purpose was to detect evidence of ordinary criminal wrongdoing.” Indianapolis v. Edmond, 531 U. S. 32, 38 (2000).

Just how intrusive is the cotton swab? Maybe that's beside the point, as Scalia notes:

And could the police engage, without any suspicion of wrongdoing, in a “brief and . . . minimal” intrusion into the home of an arrestee—perhaps just peeking around the curtilage abit? See ante, at 26. Obviously not.

And what of the purpose of identifying people? Is identifying someone really so innocent? No, Scalia argues:

At points the Court does appear to use “identifying” in that peculiar sense—claiming, for example, that knowing “an arrestee’s past conduct is essential to an assessment of the danger he poses.” Ante, at 15. If identifying someone means finding out what unsolved crimes he has committed, then identification is indistinguishable from the ordinary law enforcement aims that have never been thought to justify a suspicionless search. Searching every lawfully stopped car, for example, might turn up information about unsolved crimes the driver had committed, but no one would say that such a search was aimed at “identifying” him ...

But what if the State really is just identifying people without intending to solve crimes for which no probable cause to search exists?

The truth, known to Maryland and increasingly to the reader: this search had nothing to do with establishing King’s identity.
...
DNA testing does not even begin until after arraignment and bail decisions are already made. The samples sit in storage for months, and take weeks to test. When they are tested, they are checked against the Unsolved Crimes Collection—rather than the Convict and Arrestee Collection, which could be used to identify them.The Act forbids the Court’s purpose (identification), but prescribes as its purpose what our suspicionless-search cases forbid (“official investigation into a crime”). Against all of that, it is safe to say that if the Court’s identification theory is not wrong, there is no such thing as error.

So, all that said, what does the majority's errant ruling promise for the future?

The Court disguises the vast (and scary) scope of its holding by promising a limitation it cannot deliver. The Court repeatedly says that DNA testing, and entry into a national DNA registry, will not befall thee and me, dear reader, but only those arrested for “serious offense[s].” Ante, at 28; see also ante, at 1, 9, 14, 17, 22, 23, 24 (repeatedly limiting the analysis to “serious offenses”). I cannot imagine what principle could possibly justify this limitation, and the Court does not attempt to suggest any. If one believes that DNA will “identify” someone arrested for assault, he must believe that it will “identify” someone arrested for a traffic offense. This Court does not base its judgments on senseless distinctions. At the end of the day, logic will out. When there comes before us the taking of DNA from an arrestee for a traffic violation, the Court will predictably (and quite rightly) say, “We can find no significant difference between this case and King.” Make no mistake about it: As an entirely predictable consequence of today’s decision, your DNA can be taken and entered into a national DNA database if you are ever arrested, rightly or wrongly, and for whatever reason.

about "Abnormal: Lectures at the College de France" by Michel Foucault

Abnormal is largely about the concept and perception of the abnormal person--the pervert or rapist or peeping Tom, for example--from the 19th century to present. In this lecture, Foucault begins by saying that, when an individual has power, he often becomes an object of ridicule (i.e., kings were often portrayed as fools by the peasants, at times). Foucault then explains how psychiatric opinions delivered in court conjure the character of a delinquent alongside the accused--a delinquent doppelganger to the author of the crime. So, it follows, the respected expert psychiatrist on the witness stand is also an oaf because he assesses and prescribes moral instruction as if he were a child, and he describes danger as if he himself was irrationally afraid.

Foucault then embarks on an overview of how power works in this discussion, referring to the phenomenon of how plague patients were partitioned off within society to be watched and studied (as opposed to lepers banished from society). But instead of plague victims, it is the abnormal who are watched and studied. The result of this partitioning and watching is the individualization of people--which is not to be confused with exclusion. All this is done for the preservation and productivity of society's healthy individuals, those whose potential is maximized.

Now, Foucault explains that, until the 16th and 17th century, a crime was conceived of as an offense against the sovereign, and punishment for the crime had to be bigger than the crime because it had to supersede the crime. But, later, crime in general was imagined as having a nature, a criminality, which leads to the question, What is the nature of a criminal? In a penal system that favors this question, the criminal's motive must be matched and nullified by the judicial system, and the medical community took it upon themselves to diagnose motives. Psychology supplies motives for motiveless crimes, and otherwise labels criminals as insane, thereby releasing the penal system from its obligation to punish.

A major development in criminology and psychology was the recognition and exploration of the concept of instinct. "Instinct" allowed for a power mechanism--the penal system with its need for knowledge--to engage with knowledge a mechanism--psychiatry and its need for power. The notion of human instinct helps make motiveless crimes intelligible; it also allows for the medical transformation of motiveless acts into pathological acts.

The notion of instinct came to dominate psychiatry, and allowed the field to expand its domain. Psychiatry soon became a form of family intervention; familial relations were pathologized such that antagonistic relations are deemed pathological. After 1850, a political dimension is introduced; much as history became a tool to politicize the past and present, psychiatry came to help distinguish riots from good revolutions by looking at the minds and motives of the leaders of movements. Madness opposed order, opposed family and personal relationships, and opposed stability; it was a characteristic of social immobility. Healthy behaviors and mentalities had to be conventional and voluntary; deviant behaviors and mentalities consisted of automatic and instinctual responses. All conduct was judged along a contimuum of voluntary vs. involuntary, all relative to the norm. Here, psychology grows beyond madness; psychology could now question all behavior, all people.

About the time that the state formalized support of marriage through policy incentives, homes started being built partitioned, with different rooms for each family member, separating families within a single home, separating kids from parents. This distribution of bodies helps dissuade the development of pathological, antagonistic, and/or incestuous relationships between family members. Foucault discusses the prototypes of the abnormal individual, the monster and the masturbator, and explains how the masturbator enabled psychology to become an authority on family, and link sexuality with illness in terms of masturbation or any other realization of the sexual impulse deemed immoral. Psychology's linking of sexuality with instinct opened a field that allows for masturbators and motiveless murderers to exist in the same conceptual space. Here, the sexual instinct is imagined as fragile, capable of becoming distorted and the cause of degeneracy.

Foucault discusses a rape case set in the 1860's that was referred to psychiatry for explanation. The controversial field outlined the offender's physical traits, and linked these to his deficiencies. He was described as having arrested development, rather than an exaggerated instinct or drive; likewise, his morality was arrested, according to the psychiatric experts.

In the early psychiatric conception of criminality, a patient's development goes wrong, and then the person becomes a criminal. But later psychiatry posits that the seeds of criminality are sown in the person's childhood. Psychiatry faced a dilemma when patients became depathologized because the practice no longer had the backing of medicine, and patients were no longer an suffering illness, per say. Psychiatry identified collections of eccentricities and behaviors and called them "conditions" or "syndromes". These collections of traits were previously considered predispositions, and a person could have a predisposition and still be normal (to the extent such a conception existed). But conditions and syndromes came to describe the abnormal, and any physical or mental illness can be associated with any condition or syndrome. Conditions refer to health but are not illness; they are non-health. Conditions are typically a case of arrested (moral) development or regression.

Foucault explains that a condition's causal background is the patient's heredity. In examining a patient's heredity, anything can cause anything. For example, Your uncle was a drunk? That explains your degeneracy today. Similarly--and this is the lecture's main point--a person's use of the sexual instinct for non-reproductive purposes, a person's having sex or masturbating for pleasure, is thought to point to a condition. This diagnosis is moralizing cloaked in medicine. Degeneracy grew increasingly medicalized. Furthermore, if conditions are a result of heredity, then the idea of finding a cure means nothing in psychiatry. So, this reveals that the field is not so much about the health of the patient, but rather about the protection of society from the effects of degeneracy. The heredity-based form of racism that sprang up at the end of the 19th century and reached its nadir with Nazism stems from psychiatry's social defense aspect.

This is a rich, winding lecture that recalls and elaborates on many of Foucault's major themes. Thoroughly enjoyable read.

how it's nothing, really

If this article--Mother Jones' Access Hollywood: How Jeffrey Katzenberg Became the Democrats' Kingmaker--is like the hundreds of other such articles before it, then Jeffrey Katzenberg is a name you'll maybe hear two or three more times and then never again. Not because he doesn't have some influence, but because he only has some influence.

Our Lady

With seven hollow vibrations, Our Lady of Sorrows' bell sank into the still-salty street and patched grass yards. I crossed into the big lot, passed the gym and Big Lots, then pulled the door. After grabbing a box each of sandwich and freezer bags--four dollars for both--and waiting the requisite two minutes in line, my turn. The young cashier, a girl no more than 17, here working at Family Dollar, rang me up, taking a five and exact change to cover the $4.36. Hands me my change, then speaks,

Thanks for putting the money in my hand. A lot of people just throw it on the counter.

That's how the big shots do.

She comes around and recollects a bunch of mops for sale by the door. Says,

Even though my hand be right here, she adds.

She returns to the register. The next has already lined up behind me.

Thank you.

Have a good night, I hear, pushing back into the big lot.

Concrete sinks beneath me. Cool air lends the hush.

about Baz Luhrmann's film, "The Great Gatsby"

Seated in the theater tipping back Baz Luhrmann's "The Great Gatsby", you're hyperaware that what you're seeing is a theatrical production: super-sized CGI-powered stage props and back drops. This isn't a period piece depicting the Jazz Age so much as it is an indulgence of the Jazz Age of our imaginations. And, in a way, this is perfect; this is an ode to Gatsby, a man who has built his own life with stage sets born of his imagination.

The Great Gatsby--the movie and the man--is a big show.

But the film pays a cost here because The Great Gatsby the novel is also a story--a story with moments of candid intimacy, bared feelings, and things revealed. So the problem is, when those genuine moments come, the film can't stop putting on a show.

This film can't be the book. Maybe it didn't have to. Too bad it tried.


Notes:

• Even with this flaw (and it's not the only big flaw), I enjoyed the film a great deal.

• Going in, I estimated Leonardo DiCaprio and Tobey Maguire should have switched roles; I traditionally think of DiCaprio as having an edge and Maguire as the more vulnerable and charming. But I was very wrong: DiCaprio is nearly flawless--everyone is.

the closing passage of "The Great Gatsby" by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors' eyes--a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby's house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an æsthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.

And as I sat there, brooding on the old unknown world, I thought of Gatsby's wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy's dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter--tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning----

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

RIP Jeff Hanneman (1964-2013)

Slayer guitarist Jeff Hanneman died last week. Helped invent thrash, wrote some of the best songs in that genre, and played swooping, crazy-barbed solos.

about "Dry" by Augusten Burroughs

The sleeve and press around Dry calls it a memoir, but the book reads more like fiction. Burroughs aptly boosts his addiction-oriented narrative with wit and crisp prose. Result, the pages turn quickly.

In first person, Burroughs opens the tale fessing up to the professional lapses that opened the door to rehab. But his stay there is given short treatment--too short, because much of the remaining three-fifths of the memoir dote on high-schoolish accounts of doomed and/or ambiguous relationships with other men. Nevertheless, Dry is a fun, fast read, thanks to Burrough's style and real-gay charm.

about selections from "Critical Essays on Michel Foucault"

This collection of essays opens with philosopher Gilles Deleuze rephrasing and re-articulating Foucault's concept of power. There is little new ground here, but the essay is a good opener. The first real bright spot in this collection is "Foucault's Oriental Subtext", in which Uta Liebman Schaub identifies Eastern influences in Foucault's work. Primarily she sees the obliteration of the self in the remedy to Western systems' ceaseless quest to isolate and peg the self, and to tie this knowable self to an identity, as described by Foucault.

The essay "Foucault's Art of Seeing" by John Rajchman opens with Foucault's startling idea that seeing--vision--"structures thought in advance". The visual representation of thought, of how people have seen their world and then accordingly made sense of it, is tied to their age, their time. So seeing yields different concepts and ways of thinking about a given subject. For example, in the classical age, people grouped plants by their character. Now scientists group them primarily by their surface traits.

Foucault took an interest in how concepts of visualization become embedded in institutional practices, and how ethical and moral judgements of things and people changed with those concepts. It is hard to imagine now that people asked different questions in the past; we tend to think we've always been "logical", that being logical is part of our nature. But being "logical" used to be a moral exercise.

Finally, Rajchman explains how, for Foucault and his philosophical-critical descendents, thinking is a dangerous act. I found this section of Rajchman's essay confusing; is it dangerous because it's always situated and political? because it's tied to moral and ethical consequences? because we, merely by thinking of things, may unknowingly reinforce or change ways of conceiving? Whatever the answer, the aim on the other side of that danger, what Foucault pursued, is a world that is not yet visible.

In "Beyond Life and Death: On Foucault's Post-Auschwitz Ethic", James W. Bernauer addresses Foucault's critics who charge the intellectual giant with advocating an amoral aestheticism. Bernauer begins his defense by recognizing Foucault's resistance to the scientifically-minded life style that presupposes we are knowable and, therefore, decipherable (and, as a consequence, subject to be judged against norms). He seemed to champion humans as sexual, primarily, and so he probed how sexuality came to be thought of as a moral experience. The modern age and its States conceive of citizens as life to be kept alive; Foucault conceived of man as desire.

That power that conceives of us as human souls in a life or death struggle categorizes us, marks our individuality, attaches us to an identity, subjectifies us, and imposes its truth on us. The sciences--the currently dominant producers and venue of true knowledge--"direct both the cognitive enterprise and the technologies for human self-relation". Foucault examined how people "became anxious about this or that," and urges us not to look so hard at what we hope to achieve, but rather what struggles we face.

Again, Foucault's ultimate goal was freedom. He knew there was no escaping knowledge-power-self relations for good, but he also thought that no "configuration" (of thought and power?) should be thought unchangeable.

about "The One: The Life and Music of James Brown" by RJ Smith

Through the ups and downs, James Brown commanded an audience. RJ Smith depicts this singular artist's flight out of poverty on the heels of Little Richard, his celebrity-identity bridging the civil rights movement and beyond, and his persistent stumble through the late-stage hard times.

Brown was born, barely, into extreme poverty, and grew up motherless, at the mercy of a hardscrabble father. His affinity for music and singing and his seemingly innate start quality got him followers and fellow musicians from early on. During the first half of his career, James Brown busted ass, working musicians into the tightest band alive, and wielding that band as his own, personal instrument. Year-round, he left it all on the stage.

For different, complicated reasons, some black celebrities' identities are tied to the politics of America's larger black community. Brown's did, but he was wildly inconsistent, veering from black power advocate to Nixon-endorsing spokesman. Brown was mixed up and he was his own man--a complicated soul who gave himself to the public.

Inexplicably--almost--after Brown turned 50 years old, he found himself with money problems, then, after more than half a lifetime working hard and sober, Brown started using PCP. Trouble chased him the rest of his life. Brown died in 2006, still troubled, still a star.


Note: In an afterword, RJ Smith reveals the small gang of thieves most responsible for Brown's financial ruin.

one of many things about Camus' "The Stranger"

(aka "The Outsider" or "L’Étranger")

Albert Camus' The Stranger begins with the main character, Meursault, attending to his mother's funeral. He resumes his life the day after the funeral, but quite soon kills a man in cold blood, apparently, and stands trial. It is not so much his murderous act, but rather his earlier callousness and inexplicable behavior after his mother's death that are used as evidence to convict him.

It's boilerplate to say Camus' The Stranger depicts a brand of existentialism. But even so, Meursault is not readily understood, though, oddly enough, he's completely relatable. Maybe this is because he also personifies another philosophy--one we all have but hate to admit to, a way of life that does not always seem conventionally noble: Pragmatism. 

The novella first casts pragmatism as universal, a view everyone adopts at one time or another.* Then, pragmatism, in all its beauty and brutishness, is contrasted with and convicted by lofty, often unrealistic ideals like nobility and justice.

Here are examples of how pragmatism is depicted as a quite ordinary mode of life, as universal: In accepting his mother's death, Meursault says, "The funeral will bring it home to me, put an official seal on it, so to speak ... " (p. 2). When he arrives at the retirement home chapel, the caretaker is too busy to greet him right away; then, when he arrives, Meursault immediately asks to see mother's body, but the caretaker has already rested the lid on the coffin. When asked, Meursault declines to have the lid removed for viewing. Here, the "official seal" is already on, and he need not see the body for repeated closure. His not viewing the body is later deemed criminal. But, meanwhile, the warden denies the other retirement home residents access to much of the ceremony because death, he says, puts them "in a nervous state for two or three days. Which means, of course, extra work and worry for our staff" (p. 4). The whole sequence goes on like this, Meursault just going through motions and the staff joining him and cutting corners of their own. In this way pragmatism is first cast as universal--everyone seeks their own convenience much of the time.

When retold in the courtroom, it is Meursault's behavior, not everyone else's, that is reexamined--reexamined out of context. And behavior that was previously all too human is on second thought deemed inhumane.

* Pragmatism may be easily confused with, and, in a sense, interchangeable with selfishness.

Notes: 

• On the matter of mourning: Meursault doesn't give much sign of mourning for his mother. But the novel shows that mourning is usually centered on oneself rather than the deceased--you mourn your own loss, not the death of the other. For example, when an elderly woman cries at the wake, the caretaker explains, "She was devoted to your mother. She says your mother was her only friend in the world, and now she's all alone" (p. 12). This is the only person who cries throughout. Compare this scene to one later in the novella in which Meursault's neighbor loses his dog and suffers for it; on the suggestion that the pound might euthanize the mutt, the neighbor, Salamano, is quoted as saying, "'They won't really take him from me, will they, Monsieur Meursault? Surely they wouldn't do a thing like that. If they do, I don't know what will become of me'" (p. 50). Then, after Meursault and Salamano return to their respective rooms, we hear Meursault thinking, "Through the wall there came to me a little wheezing sound, and I guessed that he (Salamano) was weeping. For some reason, I don't know what, I began thinking of mother" (p. 50). And, on the astonishing final page, Meursault speaks again of this mourning, judging it so: "With death so near, Mother have felt like someone on the brink of freedom, ready to start life all over again. No one, no one in the world had any right to weep for her" (p. 154). 

• The murder is still a bit of a mystery, though not entirely. 

A favorite line:

On leaving another neighbor's apartment drunk on wine:

After closing the door behind me I lingered for some moments on the landing. The whole building was quiet as the grave, a dank, dark smell rising from the well hole of the stairs. I could hear nothing but the blood throbbing in my ears, and for a while I stood still, listening to it. Then the dog began to moan in old Salamano's room, and, through the sleep-bound house the little plaintive sound rose slowly, like a flower growing out of the silence and the darkness (p. 42).

about the film "The Master"

Who is the master? And who can live without serving a master?

In the 2012 film The Master, Freddie Quell—a character brought into curdled life by the singular Joaquin Phoenix—drifts and crashes from one moment to the next, his troubled life being one corrosive improvisation. Quell is a haunted World War II vet with no aim beyond staying intoxicated and self-destructing.

Philip Seymour Hoffman plays Lancaster Dodd, the leader of a philosophical movement known as "The Cause." His critics charge that Dodd improvises his philosophy from moment to moment, that he is a fraud. But his followers see an enlightened, intense visionary.

Quell is tortured, intense, rough, gaunt, uneducated, drawn to poisons and pain; Dodd is composed, graceful, educated, well-dressed, plump, and drawn to the spotlight. When the film debuted, critics wondered, What, if anything, does the film say? say about our talk of freedom and our readiness to serve a master? about the inevitable disappointment that comes with looking up to someone? about faith? belief?

Maybe Dodd serves more than one master: he serves his audience's expectations, his wife, his vanity and ego. He is intrigued by Phoenix, drawn by his intensity and desperation. Each man is fed and inspired by the interest and attention of the other; each man is the other's project, and each can take the other to the next improvised step, wherever it may lead.

The Master is fantastic, unorthodox, beautiful, grimy, and searing.


Note:
The Master was written, directed, and co-produced by Paul Thomas Anderson and stars Joaquin Phoenix, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Amy Adams.

about American Idol

This umpteenth season is very slowly announcing our newest idol--a woman: probably a woman named Kree.

The show American Idol puts contestants through a few rounds of singing talent and performance competitions. Then the finale crowns a winner--presumably, the best talent and performer who is an American idol. Whether you are watching from the show's judge's panel or from home, you judge the contestant, their talent, their look.

If a contestant sings well but looks unconventional, she can pass the first round. But then comes the problem: you have to be believable; the audience must think you are believable as a pop star, a pop idol. And that believability, no matter your personal preferences, depends on your preconceptions of what a pop star is.

The believability is an extension of the theater of the show--the anticipation, the suspense, the competition, the deployment of sincerity, pain, disadvantage (as advantage), hopes, and dreams and effort. As theater, the contestant has her part, and the momentum of the show's theatricality inevitably leads to a climax demanding the idol be selected.

The selected contestant, the winner, is an idol before she even wins. She is merely crowned by the finale. The judges often claim that this is "a singing competition". No, it certainly isn't that simple. And that the show employs a democratic element makes no difference at all.



Notes:
Nicki Minaj is probably a better judge than she's given credit for being. Unless she is given a lot of credit for this. I wouldn't really know.

about "Fear and Tembling" by Søren Kierkegaard

Kierkegaard believed his contemporaries took faith for granted. In Fear and Trembling, he tries to better understand faith by examining the Biblical story of God calling Abraham to sacrifice Isaac. This is a brief dialectic that problematizes and praises faith.

Abraham, a favorite of God, was an old man before he finally had a child. Through Isaac, his first born son, Abraham was to populate the nations. But God called on Abraham to sacrifice Isaac on Mount Moriah. Abraham prepared his belongings and took his son Isaac on a three-day journey there to do as God asked. Isaac asked why his father was not bringing a lamb to the sacrifice and Abraham answered that God would provide. Upon reaching Moriah, Abraham binds Isaac and draws the knife. At the last minute, Abraham is told by an angel not to follow through with the sacrifice. Ultimately a ram caught up in some nearby bushes serves as the sacrifice.

How could Abraham live with himself? How could he ever look at Isaac again, knowing he had been a moment away from killing him? Why would God ask this of his favorite, Abraham? It's a troubling story to say the least. But Kierkegaard unfolds it carefully, and convincingly makes the case that this is a paradoxical story of heroism, not depravity.

Spring

  -Edna St. Vincent Millay

To what purpose, April, do you return again?
Beauty is not enough.
You can no longer quiet me with the redness
Of little leaves opening stickily.
I know what I know.
The sun is hot on my neck as I observe
The spikes of the crocus.
The smell of the earth is good.
It is apparent that there is no death.
But what does that signify?
Not only under ground are the brains of men
Eaten by maggots.
Life in itself
Is nothing,
An empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted stairs.
It is not enough that yearly, down this hill,
April
Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.



Note:
First read this in eighth grade.

about how everyone is so nice

When you move somewhere new, you might find a lot of the people there are nice. This is because you are more likely to ask people for help and information and, naturally, they oblige best they can. Where you're from, you rarely had to ask people for help because you knew the area, the weather patterns and expectations, the laws and ordinances, and so on. So people there were just people you had to share the city with. Your new neighbors are people you try to get along with.

about 2012 films: I see black people

At the Oscars, Daniel Day-Lewis won Best Actor.

Both the films "Lincoln" and "Django Unchained" concern African American slavery in the US--an issue that in ways big and small plagues the US still. But "Lincoln" portrays and conveys black people differently--I think with a greater truth, the kind of truth only realized in art.

How so?

"Lincoln" doesn't have any main black characters. It has hardly any black people at all. Sure, it's about that President at a specific moment, and not about slaves. But what and who is Lincoln? Why do we honor him today? States' rights were at stake, but the civil war was fought over slavery, and that is Lincoln's legacy.

All during the film, black people are peripheral, somewhere on the edges, rarely seen, rarely on screen. And aside from gentle scenes of dialog at the beginning and end of the film, they are never confronted. Their captivity and freedom is debated with a little input from those most affected.

But though they are invisible, black Americans are everywhere in the themes and culture and gravity of the moments being enacted. They are the thing referred to but never spoken of; they are exchangeed but never valued. They are marginalized in the film, reflecting their existence in America, and the racially collective experience of their existence here for some time.


Notes:
* The only other film I saw is "Flight".


(Also, the President now is black.)

about "Knockmestiff" by Donald Ray Pollock

Now abandoned according to Wikipedia, Knockemstiff is the name of the small Ohio town where Donald Ray Pollock grew up. As he did with his subsequent book, The Devil All the Time, Pollock uses the area as the setting for a string of stories depicting a special kind of depravity considered unique to Appalachian parts steeped in extreme poverty. But whereas religion was a common theme in The Devil All the Time, here, drugs fuel and, alternately, dull much of the pain. Another difference is that The Devil All the Time is a more traditional novel, while Knockmestiff is a collection of shorts with very loose connections but no collective arc.

Pollock's favorite word is "rotten", and this repeated word choice attests to his laser focus on depravity. While this focus has to date permeated and made visceral his clear, true-to-life prose, I wonder now if he can tell a story outside a thoroughly rotted town. As a reader, Knockmestiff isn't necessarily the kind of place you want to come visit again and again. And again.


Note:

• In his dedication at the end of the Knockmestiff, Pollock apologizes for running down the town so thoroughly, and stresses that people there are generous and not monsters.

Make sure you hear the national anthem.

“When you're good at something, you'll tell everyone. When you're great at something, they'll tell you.”
    ―Walter Payton

(coming from behind in the Super Bowl)

Michael Jordan might be a jerk and competitive to a fault, but the man knows greatness, and he knows how time distorts the collective memory of greatness. Here is a wonderful excerpt from a new ESPN "Outside the Lines" profile of professional basketball's greatest ever at age 50:

Over the next seven hours, all of it spent watching one basketball game after another, he's (Jordan) again pulled inward, on a Tilt-a-Whirl of emotion, mostly shades of anger, from active screaming to a slow, silent burn. He transforms from a businessman returning from the office -- Honey, I'm home! -- to a man on fire. The first sparks come from a "SportsCenter" debate, one of those impossible, vaguely ridiculous arguments that can, of course, never be won: Who's a better quarterback, Joe Montana or Tom Brady?

"I can't wait to hear this conversation," he says.

He stretches his legs out on the ottoman, wearing sweats and socks, and as one of the guys on television argues for Brady, Jordan laughs.

"They're gonna say Brady because they don't remember Montana," he says. "Isn't that amazing?"

Aging means losing things, and not just eyesight and flexibility. It means watching the accomplishments of your youth be diminished, maybe in your own eyes through perspective, maybe in the eyes of others through cultural amnesia. Most people live anonymous lives, and when they grow old and die, any record of their existence is blown away. They're forgotten, some more slowly than others, but eventually it happens to virtually everyone. Yet for the few people in each generation who reach the very pinnacle of fame and achievement, a mirage flickers: immortality. They come to believe in it. Even after Jordan is gone, he knows people will remember him. Here lies the greatest basketball player of all time. That's his epitaph. When he walked off the court for the last time, he must have believed that nothing could ever diminish what he'd done. That knowledge would be his shield against aging.

There's a fable about returning Roman generals who rode in victory parades through the streets of the capital; a slave stood behind them, whispering in their ears, "All glory is fleeting." Nobody does that for professional athletes. Jordan couldn't have known that the closest he'd get to immortality was during that final walk off the court, the one symbolically preserved in the print in his office. All that can happen in the days and years that follow is for the shining monument he built to be chipped away, eroded. Maybe he realizes that now. Maybe he doesn't. But when he sees Joe Montana joined on the mountaintop by the next generation, he has to realize that someday his picture will be on a screen next to LeBron James as people argue about who was better.

The debaters announce the results of an Internet poll, and 925,000 people voted. There was a tie: 50 percent said Montana and 50 percent said Brady. It doesn't matter that Montana never lost a Super Bowl or that, unlike Brady, he never faded on the biggest stage. Questions of legacy, of greatness, are weighted in favor of youth. Time itself is on Brady's side, for now.

Jordan shakes his head.

"That doesn't make any sense," he says.

That's good writing, and a compelling anecdote, considering it's about a guy sitting, watching TV. And what it says is so Goddamn true.


Notes:

Speaking of basketball and greatness, as the annual stupid NBA All-Star game approaches, let's remember the only rendition of the national anthem that ever mattered: Marvin Gaye at the 1983 game: