Highly Accurate Profile of an FML-Writer

Tehe. From FML:

Today, I went to a bookstore and asked the sales woman,"Where's the self-help section?" She said if she told me, it would defeat the purpose. FML

Veterans and Vonnegut

I know I'm a little late on this, but I'm sure many of you saw the story about the last British army veteran of World War I dying at age 111. About two years ago, at the time of a Veteran's Day story on the last living American veteran, I posted the following on my Facebook, and it seems important to repeat in light of this story:

"I will come to a time in my backwards trip when November eleventh, accidentally my birthday, was a sacred day called Armistice Day. When I was a boy…all the people of all the nations which had fought in the First World War were silent during the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of Armistice Day, which was the eleventh day of the eleventh month.

It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one another. I have talked to old men who were on battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence was the Voice of God. So we still have among us some men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind."

- Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions

Woodstock

The hero of “Inherent Vice” worries that “the Psychedelic Sixties, this little parenthesis of light, might close after all, and all be lost, taken back into darkness,” that “everything in this dream of prerevolution was in fact doomed to end,” with the “faithless, money-driven world” reasserting “its control over all the lives it felt entitled to touch, fondle and molest.”

-- Michiko Kakutani, "Books of the Times: Another Doorway to the Paranoid Pynchon Dimension"

You know what's gonna piss me off? Next week when the media tries to package, commodify, and sum up Woodstock (Three Days of Peace, Love, and Music that happened four decades ago) in a few cute articles and requests for reader reminiscences. In fact, I saw the first article today, and this potential monstrosity comes out later in the month.

Why is it going to piss me off? Because I think in some ways people like me, the flower children of flower children, believe in Woodstock even more than our parents did. For them it was a reality, and realities are notoriously rough surfaces: gritty, imperfect, and even potentially painful. But to us, Woodstock was smoothed-out by the distance of memory and finished with the veneer of fairy tales that, even in the 80s and 90s, we could believe in more fully than any non-child could in the moments of August 15-18, 1969 because we WERE children. To us, Woodstock was much more magical than Cinderella, and it also really happened. For me, it is literally a birth story, as my birthday is the 17th. So wow.

Perhaps, as I believed for so long, half a million people really attained the perfect state at that moment, a kind of Rebel Without a Cause zen garden, simultaneously passionate and peaceful, honest and ideal, defiant but winning with love, and transcendent and very, very earthly. But maybe a bunch took the brown acid before they knew what had hit them, and maybe my father -- and plenty like him -- left after two days, exhausted, hungry, dirty, and not regretful about it.

But I don't care, because somewhere inside me I still think of it as that first thing, and I don't want it to be packaged in easy words for everyone to read and think they understand, and I certainly don't want it to be sold. I realize that the truth is that I have already "bought" Woodstock: Scorsese's documentary, Thompson's writings and the movies of his books, CDs of Hendrix, t-shirts, posters, and even the Youngbloods in car commercials. Forrest Gump. The truth is that I wasn't there, and I can't really get it. And, if Woodstock did ever exist as I thought it did, it had left much before than this year's pat eulogies-cum-celebrations, and I should know better than to think that we could have made people who didn't "get Woodstock" understand if they just held off the marketing for the 50th anniversary. I should better than to think that their getting it even less somehow diminishes what I know. Paraphrase Donne as you please.

But at the end, I do care. I do care about that little parenthesis of light and about guarding it as heart-light, not against darkness, but against the pale, static glow of TV. That has reasserted its control, did long ago, and all I have to fight it -- and I am not winning, not winning at all, a child of my own sad, scared generation -- is the memory of that fairy tale. Go listen to "Let's Get Together." Go listen to Joni Mitchell or CSNY doing "Woodstock." Go read Thompson's wave speech. They're about two things. First, the fact that this was different because everyone felt it. "Come on people now." "We were half a million strong." "Our energy would simply prevail." So yes, I am diminished by others misunderstanding. And, second, that -- no matter how long the fashion or the music or the drugs endured -- we only felt it together for a very short time. "We are but a moments sunlight / Fading in the grass."

Try to love one another right now. And yes I will be sad, and pissed off -- and a little scared -- to see one more crack put in my memory this week.

How Mika is Saving Contemporary Culture

Go watch this. I tried to write this whole long post about how it's anti-ironic, but it just didn't work. Just watch it and enjoy how wonderfully it portrays someone who is earnest AND sexual, and how exciting it is to watch someone utterly without defenses.

Happy Birthday to the O-Man and All My Fellow Leos!

Some very cool people whose birthday is today (in order of birthdate): Percy Bysshe Shelley, Louis Armstrong (contrary to his frequent assertion that he, like George M. Cohan, was "Born on the Fourth of July," even though Cohan himself had been born on the 3rd), Helen Thomas, Richard Belzer, Billy Bob Thornton, and, of course, the 44th President of the United States, born this day in 1961 in Hawaii, Barack Hussein Obama. Granted every date has cool people, but I really just wanted to give a shoutout to the White House. Well and Louis kinda too. And... ok... it's an unusually good date, no?

It's also Alberto Gonzales's birthday. Boo! He besmirches the good name of this date.

I Think We're Gonna Need a Bigger Boat...

It's Shark Week again! That's right. The fish that turned the me from the amphibious ocean-going child that I was into Mr. Paranoid of the Ocean Guy. (Also do you like how I made the border of the video red? Nice touch, right?)

Do you realize how important Shark Week is? I just got an e-mail from poets.org telling me about POEMS FOR SHARK WEEK. How cool is that?

Also, a friend of mine, who runs Googly Eye Watch (a blog which you should all keep your eyes on, since I hear it's getting press and some nods in the informal street art world), used to do various animal sounds when she was little. "What sound does the doggy make?"

"Woof, woof," she would say. "And the horsey?"

"NEIGH!"

"And what about the shark?"

"Dundun-dundun-dundun-dundun!" How cute?

The Style Section Does It Again

You may not all be aware, but I have this ongoing thing in my life where I mock the NYTimes style section for being, oh... usually about a decade late on things. There was the article last year about how the White Russian was making a come-back as a widely-consumed drink due to the popularity of The Big Lebowski, a movie that came out in 1998. To be fair, the White Russian had become more popular in the previous two or so years. So maybe they weren't the full 10 years late, but a) they made it sound as if the trend had been sparked recently by something that had happened a decade before and b) the trend had in fact been sparked by the movie... when it came out... in 1998. It had just passed the tipping point or something more recently. (Total sidenote: in this particular still from The Big Lebowski, John Goodman as Walter Sobchak is saying, "Has the whole world gone crazy? Am I the only one around here who gives a shit about the rules?")
The there was the article this spring about how this new sport called ultimate frisbee was starting to become popular on small, liberal arts campuses. Face. Palm.

Anyway, here's today's example: "Alumni are using school ties to make career connections." I thought that was the whole point of an alumni network. I know this is at least a decade-old story, and I wouldn't be surprised if it was five-decades old or even more for some of the snootier, more alumni- and legacy-oriented schools. Ahem. Anyway...

Simply put: in reporting style-stories, the NYT is out of its element...