May 19, 2007
how infinite in faculties
Jesus, Christopher Hitchens depresses me. Unlike a lot of people, I didn't immediately write him off after he backed the Iraq invasion. Partly this was because he's smarter than I am and might have been right (he wasn't), and partly it was because much of his appeal is his perverse willingness to assume a seemingly indefensible position and proceed to decimate all comers one by one, Bruce-Lee-style. When practiced by a master, this is entertaining regardless of the rightness of the position taken, and Hitchens is a master. He probably would have been smart and contrarian even if he had been born American, but a stint in the Oxford Debating Society seems to sharpen the knives in a way that even the best American law schools never accomplish. And his decision to live in Washington instead of London means that he has even fewer worthy opponents, enhancing his stature by comparison with the shouting heads all around him.
And I wonder if that's part of the problem. The well-documented haze of cigarette smoke and scotch fumes in which Hitchens functions seems to be catching up with him, but because he's still the smartest guy in the room even when dead drunk, it's not taking the professional toll on him that it would on lesser persons. The effect is not seen in his arguments but rather in his appearance and attitude, as these grim appearances on the Bill Maher and Sean Hannity shows demonstrate. (If you want to know why I don't even mention Colmes, watch that clip till the end. What a pud.)
I don't mind Hitchens being rude, and I don't mind him calling out the fascist tendencies of Bill Maher's (and, by extension, Jon Stewart's) audiences. But flipping the groundlings off (twice!) is something the old Hitchens never would have sunk to, and even though in both cases he makes his points, he looks like Death on roller skates.
Saddest of all, though, is the utter joylessness that drips from these clips. He used to make it look like so much fun that you were tempted to join his side even if you didn't agree with him, but nobody’s following this dead-eyed, sallow scold into the breach. The fact that his old friend Andrew Sullivan seems to view his Hannity appearance as a triumph is a good example of how even the biggest brain is no match at all for old-fashioned denial.
May 17, 2007
barritt's bermuda ginger beer
. . . is too frickin' sweet. (( Not in the Andy Crouch sense of *this is wonderful,* but in the literal sense of *this is made with too much corn syrup.*))
living in the past
I just downloaded a bunch of Jethro Tull, mostly stuff I already have on vinyl, and am forced to once again acknowledge the depravity of my teenage tastes. Not only did I like prog rock, the worst genre of all time, I liked the worst of it: Yes and Emerson Lake & Palmer. I wasn't nearly as hot for Jethro Tull, who stand up quite well, mostly because Ian Anderson was a pretty snappy popmonger when he wanted to be. (Out of curiosity, I downloaded an ELP track labeled “Jethro Tull tribute,” which was nothing more than a labored and predictably wretched instrumental slog through “Living in the Past.” My god they suck.)
I thought I could never be a real piano player, which in retrospect was more a reflection of my own issues than any external reality, but the overheated arpeggiating of Keith Emerson and Rick Wakeman didn't help. I thought you had to play like that to be a real musician, and that anything less was cheating.
Punk rock was obviously for those kids who were natural punks, full of spittle and rage just waiting to be transmuted into two-minute songs. But less obviously, it was for kids like me, who had been sold a bill of goods about what it took to be a musician. It took a while for me to catch on (and my love of '50s rock and roll and '60s soul helped a lot too), but I finally got the memo that anybody, and I mean anybody, can legitimately play rock music. If punk just means loud and fast, I never played it much. But if punk means teaching yourself how to make music with limited ability but plenty of chutzpah, I'm definitely a punk rock piano player.
May 11, 2007
it's a wonderful town
I no longer get overwhelmed by pangs of desire and loss when I come to New York, but I'll never be immune to its pull, either. My brother just moved back to Austin because it had gotten so hard to live here, and there was a piece in the Times today or yesterday about how impossible it is to find an apartment, so it's pretty easy to talk myself out of wanting to move here again . . . and yet: chatting up the woman in front of us in line at the Penn Station taxi stand, watching pedestrians framed against Central Park's glorious trees through the cab window, passing a very serious-looking and well-dressed Indian man in a business suit whose hair and goatee were dyed a bright gingery orange . . . I miss it.
May 9, 2007
i refute you thusly
Guy in a suit walking up Congress talking into a cellphone: “No no no no no.”
Guy sitting on bench facing the street: “YES YES YES YES YES!”
May 8, 2007
bandwidth and breath
There's a piece in today's NYT (sorry, registration required) about how meditation improves your ability to take in fast-moving stimuli. Well, duh. I know this already. If I would just practice yoga every day (and by yoga I mean meditation, asana, mantra, pranayama: the whole nine yards), my improv would open up and resonate like a spangly wet orange-and-indigo fuck-flower. So why don't you just . . . ?
Maybe it's an addict thing, but I am plunged into a black maw of hopelessness and shame by any question that begins with Why don't you just . . . ?
Because after all these years, I still don't know the answer.
May 6, 2007
"you mean like a date?"
I couldn't tell from her tone what she thought. She seemed like she was open to the idea but wanted to know for sure. I refused to commit, in part because I liked her and would have been happy to see her in a non-date-like situation, which is actually my first requirement for wanting to see someone in a date-like situation.
“Well, it could be like a date, but not necessarily.” A third party had gone to get a beer, but he was headed back our way across the patio. My window was closing.
“I like talking to you,” she said, leaning in confidentially. “But I'm not attracted to you.” In vino veritas.
Truly, here was my reaction: ouch and then okay and then thank you. Because even though it stung — how could it not? — it hurt less than it would have later. This is almost always true when you first meet someone, and yet for most people nothing is harder to say: “I'm not attracted to you.” The thing we have the least control over is the thing that feels the most like a personal insult.
But in most cases, “I'm not attracted to you” passes through the Three Gates of Speech without resistance:
Is it true?
Is it kind?
Is it necessary?
If everyone could be as honest as the woman by the pool, all the time, the world might be a different and better place.
But we'll never know.
May 5, 2007
the stars line up
After the first act tonight, I was really unhappy with how many mistakes I was making, so instead of breaking all my fingers with a ball-peen hammer I went out to the parking lot to smoke and recalibrate. I was starting to feel a little better when a wasp attacked me. I couldn't have been threatening it; I was standing motionless in the middle of a parking lot. I heard it thrumming next to my ear and remained calm until it became obvious that it wasn't going away and was really after me. I ran comically around the parking lot trying to evade it, a man in black fleeing an invisible assailant and trailing smoke from the burning cigarette he holds at arm's length. I soon gave up, hurriedly stubbed out my half-unsmoked cig, and slipped back inside, thinking maybe it's just not my night.