Autoscopy: I, Too, Decay

I, person that I am, like you, people that you are, was born a toothless baby. It’s been nearly 24 years since then; 24 years plus 39 weeks (born one week early) of development and growth. I’ve grown arms and legs and an assortment of organs, which developed pre-natally, deciduous teeth, which developed between the ages of 6 and 33 months (post-natal), then those gave way to permanent teeth, which developed between the ages of 6 and 12 years (also, post-natal). My wisdom teeth (aka third molars), the final dental development and perhaps capstone to general development of my mature self, came in (and were taken out) just a few years ago (2004-2005). Now, just weeks from my 24^th anniversary of post-natal living, I have suddenly become all too aware of my impending decline.^[1] Because I have awoken awareness to the fact: I, too, decay.

On March 9, 2009, during what in the profession is called a “closer look” scheduled two weeks following a routine checkup, I was informed by my dentist that I had a cavity on my left maxillary second molar (way in the back, top-left). Actually, he told me that I technically had two cavities back there. This was my first cavity (or technically first and second), and after 23 and 11/12 years of un-caried life, a source of personal pride, you can imagine it came as quite a surprise. ^[2] Because, simply put, I don’t get cavities, and yet, there I was on March 9, sitting in a plastic covered chair, bibbed, with a bright light shining into my face and a set of hands/instruments in my mouth, getting a tooth drilled and filled because it had begun to decay as a result of bacterial by-products.

It wasn’t just the discovery of imperfection, or more precisely the discovery of an imperfection that I was confident would not exist, but rather it was the sudden crumbling of the entire mythology I had already constructed around the premise of mine being a non-cavus disposition. When I was young enough to be considered young, but old enough for my nonpropensity towards tooth decay to prove apparent,^[3] I was told by my pediatric dentist^[4] that such nonpropensities could be the result of a low pH level in my mouth. He said that people with higher pH levels were especially prone to tooth decay, while people lower pH levels were especially not.^[5], ^[6] I liked this distinction, a simple binary: us Basics versus them Acids. I liked it so much that I folded it into my identity list. I, Josh. I, Jew. I, New Yorker. I, brown-haired. I, myopic. I, college educated. I, Basic. Right there, just like that. I talked about being a Basic to people, seeking camaraderie with others of my kind,^[7] and sympathized with those less fortunate to be on the side of the spectrum. I believed that one day I would find a woman just Acid enough that we—a pair of star cross’d lovers—would find the perfect pH balance with each and every kiss. And this would be the woman for me. I wasn’t looking for the rapid and violent oxidation chemically required for sparks to fly; I was looking for our chemical union to result in the perfect balance that only she and I could bring one another. Of course part of that mythology was that being with this dream girl and her counterbalancing acid-mouth would somehow sustain the health of my all-too-base–encountering gums, much the same as my base-mouth would sustain the health of her too-close-to-acid-for-comforted teeth, thereby perfecting the symbiotic Aristotelian ideal of Friendship (here, an ideal Friendship not only with benefits, but dependent upon them). The myth had burrowed deep into my psyche; I its hero, my Acid counterpoint my fate. In some form or another, this whole Base/Acid discussion has come up with pretty much any woman I’ve dated since before I was 16. This is not to say that I’ve screened any girlfriends or checked cavity counts or performed alkaline tests while they slept. If I determined any said girlfriend to be an Acid, it was great: I could make some sly joke about chemical balance, move in for a kiss, and then move back, look into her eyes and think about the great balanced future we could have together, dentally and otherwise. If I determined any said girlfriend to be a Base, well that was fine too, I guess, as it was like living on the edge, fighting heroically against Fate in some epic trial.^[8]

While my dental record had always been pretty clean, my father has had just about every dental problem you can imagine (and a bunch that you may have never heard of, or perhaps you’ve heard of them but have no correlating definitions), which, as long as I can remember, have been continually treated one procedure after another. If there is one association I have for “dental issues” in my free associating brain it would have to be “dad.” And I have to say I feel a bit the Luke Skywalker here to his Darth Vader (with all due respect to my dad, who I would not like to suggest in any way is an all-powerful enforcer of a cosmic empire bent on submission or destruction to all opposition parties therein). In The Empire Strikes Back, Luke loses his hand as the paternal link to DV is revealed and the very last part of the movie shows Luke’s hand being replaced by a machine-prosthetic hand, symbolic of the step Luke has taken toward following his father’s path (DV being a heartless cyborg of a man) to the Dark Side.^[9] What step have I taken? And in what direction? The maxillary second molar that had once been all me, all organic, all pure to its core, has been partially replaced by some composite resin (plastic!) that was wholly foreign and now fused to me. I, Skywalkeresque. I, part-artificial. At least when DV’s lightsaber cut into Skywalker’s wrist, it was a sterile event (some presumptions of the nature of lightsabers here made) as opposed to the bacterial decay that cut into my tooth. It was not my first step: at age 16, I started raiding his closets for his old clothes (innocent enough); at age 20, I was diagnosed with colitis after a pretty violent flare up (the same age my dad was diagnosed with colitis);^[10] at age 22, I started to work for him in order to learn the family business (the only one in my generation in my family to even begin going down that track). And now this? I believe there is an instinctual fear of turning into one’s parents, perhaps having to do with genetic diversification, or the necessity of evolution or progress as survival of the species, or some other scientific reason. This dental decay, and its subsequent composite false restoration, only stokes this fear, enflaming it (fear-of-becoming-your-dad-itis): I, son. I, apple fallen not far from the tree.

Perhaps part of the reason this whole cavity business has been so rattling is that I can’t help but feel like my I-Basic, I-no-tooth-decayed, identity has been stolen from me unjustly. None of the digital x-rays taken by my dentist showed any signs of tooth caries. My dentist, with his little tooth pick and magnifying eyeglasses didn’t see any tooth decay. As far as any of these things were concerned I was tooth-decayless. But at the very end of my routine exam,^[11] the dentist pulled a new tool, resembling something between a thermometer and electric screwdriver, which he explained was a new toy. The tool was able to compare tooth densities of teeth. As a control, he pushed the tool up against an unquestionably healthy tooth (of course at that point, I thought all my teeth were unquestionably healthy teeth). This measurement was then compared to some of the more slightly questionably healthy teeth. If the questionable tooth proved to have a softer density than the control tooth, my dentist suggested there may be something beyond what can be observed by the naked eye. Well, his tool found what it was looking for: a tooth with a density reading of 20 somethings less than my dense control tooth. It had only been 2 or 3 months since my dentist had gotten his new toy. Had I scheduled my appointment just 2 or 3 months earlier, none of this would’ve happened. Instead this rat of a machine dragged me out of bed at night to some HUAC-like trial accusing me of possessing, fostering some kind of blight, disease, decay on the morals of dental hygiene. The jury would be out for a week, but, when I came in for my follow up it was condemnation from the get-go. I was robbed by technology. But at the same time, it leaves me to wonder: if it’s true that this new tech-toy can detect dental decay far beyond the limitations of physical exams, isn’t it possible that this tooth was decaying for a long time already, that really I hadn’t been non-cavity-prone for months years even. Also: if my dentist really had a ball with this thermometer-screwdriver-like tool, what else would he find? He only took reading on 2 or 3 teeth. What else lies/lays in there, just beneath the veneer of this once Basic mouth?

The procedure of routing and filling a dental carie is simple enough. First comes the anesthetic: a swab of numbing gel, followed by a little taste of some locally injected thing, followed by the real dosage. Then the dentist, with the help of his water-squirting-tool-wielding assistant, uses his tooth drill to drill out the decayed parts of the tooth, like cutting out the bruised parts of an apple. Then the filling process: a blue gel used to prime the surface (read: the inside of the newly drilled holes), which my dentist described as akin to priming a canvas to ready it to best receive paint, then a first coating of the composite resin, which needs some time to dry, and then the rest of the composite filling, which needs even more time to dry. Lastly is the fitting stage: any excess resin that overflowed from the cavity will interfere with one’s bite, resulting in discomfort, and will need to be buffered down to fit.

It was only on the drilling section of the procedure that I really formed any real opinion on a procedural level (it was a negative opinion), but not because of the drilling per se. It was more of the by-product. Drilling a tooth is not just cutting out a chunk. The process is more akin to a high-powered sander—a tiny little sander that slowly (well the drill probably moves pretty quickly) sands away the affected areas. And despite the best efforts put forth by the water-squirting-tool-wielding assistant that stood over me and opposite my dentist and the little suction tube that rested in my mouth, hanging from my lip, I could feel the shavings, the dental dust, coming off the tooth, spraying all parts of the mouth like a heavy ossified mist. The dentist and water-squirting-tool-wielding assistant both wore surgical masks, or perhaps the masks used for asbestos abatement or exhuming decayed corpses, but I was breathing in my own diseased tooth, the idea of which, more so than the sensation, was distressing to say the least. I could smell it: the same scent I remember from childhood demonstrations of how to make a shofar, a Jewish ceremonial horn made from non-cattle animals belonging to the bovidae family (i.e. rams, goats, greater kudus, etc.) by boiling the horn (softening and cleaning it), removing the cartilage (hollowing it), and drilling a mouthpiece (completing the air circuit), the scent of drilled animals, dead bones,^[12] a childhood association. I, product of my experiences. I, animal. And so I imagined my tooth as a ceremonial horn, blown through the then-drilled holes made by my dentist with different drills, which sounded different tones, each pitched according to the varying drill sizes, which in a circuitous way only emphasized the shofar-tooth image. I, instrument.

I’ve dreamt about tooth decay: dreams in which my teeth fall out en masse or crumble to dust at my touch, where said falling and/or crumbling is never painful (though usually at very least somewhat distressing) and sometimes turns out to be more of a side note than anything else. Apparently it’s not an especially rare dream amongst my fellow dreamers. Artemidorus, a soothsayer from the third century, reports on tooth dreams in his Interpretation of Dreams 1800 years ago. Artemidorus interprets tooth dreams to be about the family (the mouth being like a house) or possessions (who knows why). For people-tooth interpretations, upper teeth refer to important people in the family and lower teeth less important family members; right teeth refer to men and left teeth women; and incisor teeth refer to the young, canines middle-agers, and molars the old. For possession-tooth interpretations, incisors refer to household objects, canines objects of little value, and molars treasures. Artemidorus interprets people-tooth dreams to foretell the death of the family member to whom the tooth which is lost in the people-tooth dream corresponds, while he interprets possession-tooth dreams to foretell the loss of property to which lost tooth in dream corresponds. Many centuries (not to mention tooth dreams) later, Freud also writes about dreams of teeth falling out in his Interpretation of Dreams and categorizes such dreams as a “typical dream” along with dreams “of falling from a height,” “of flying,” and “of embarrassment at being naked or insufficiently clad.”^[13] Freud interprets the typical loss-of-teeth-dream to be about castration and/or guilt about masturbation. But I can’t say I buy the interpretations of either of these prominent dream readers: I can’t take Artemidorus’ argument too seriously because he understands dreams as divinations which is coming at dreams from a whole different level from the level from which I am coming; and I can’t take Freud’s analysis too seriously because Freud thinks everything is about castration/masturbation, so I can’t help but think he just took the easy way out here.

A more common interpretation I’ve heard (from peers and an assortment of dream-interpreting websites) contends that these dreams reflect anxiety about not having control;^[14] teeth will fall out in these dreams like Chiclets out of a 25-cent candy dispenser no matter what you do in the dream to stop said deluge of dentin. Of course, loss of teeth in the non-dream context pretty much represents the same thing in the larger scheme of things (which is why the dream interpretation resonates so soundly). That is, when your teeth are falling out (seemingly) by themselves (as opposed to falling out as direct result of blunt force trauma), we feel helpless and in the process of ruination. Dental decay is just that: decay. I decay. That’s what this means. I, one who does not care for decay.

I, one who does not care for decay? But I consider myself to be an (unrecognized) colleague in the small field of ruin studies. I, ruin enthusiast. I, who has done much research in books with titles like Fascination of Decay, Irresistible Decay: Ruins Reclaimed, Pleasure of Ruins, The Way of the Flesh. I, who has written extensively of the changing underpinnings of aestheticization of the ruin and decay over the past 300 years. I, ruin aesthete. So what happened?Well, maybe nothing. I have suggested that over centuries (particularly from the 18^th century onward) ruins have been aestheticized in a number of ways: emblematic, picturesque, monumental, nostalgic, nationalistic, etc. Each aesthetic category has its own historical, philosophical, and cultural basis. But the one category which I have always enjoyed the most was the sublime ruin. This category emerged in the 1750s or 1760s following Edmund Burke’s philosophical enquiry into the sublime, which laid out the definition of its modern usage.^[15] The sublime ruin provokes this terror (as this was the single most important aesthetic reaction when encountering the sublime) as one realizes the vastness of eternity as well as the inevitable decay of all material objects—including man—before it. All things decay, the ruin says, nothing lasts. And while this emotion may seem emotionally tiring (it is!), the sublime was sought by the Romantics of the period. The sublime was (for many, is) considered the height of aesthetic experiences. Romantics sought out ruins precisely for this emotional exchange with them, to feel dominated by them.

I, dominated. I, sublime seeker. The anxiety I feel as a result of this news of not only susceptibility but actual dental decay, the anxiety which shows my lack of control, the recognition of my impending decline (this existential angst) may be a true aesthetic encounter with the sublime. I am horrified by it. And yet perhaps I am drawn to it. It is exciting to me as I cower before its ramifications. Precisely. I can feel it.^[16]

The question itself crumbles. There is no I that was or I that will be, but only I that I am. In 24 years my identity has not changed, but grown, expanded, matured—a process that does not end post-peak, but is part of that process of decay as well. I, Josh. I, history. I, tooth decayed.

~Josh

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^[1] I see this as essentially different from feeling old, which is not a feeling I am currently feeling. In fact, I feel too young to think about feeling old. Oldness refers to age (temporal) and perhaps psychology (mental). I, however, am feeling imminent decline, which is completely physical and corporeal in nature.

^[2] My dental records, up until March 9, consisted of the following: (a) slight staining which was cleaned or cleaned as best said stains could be cleaned at periodic (read: semi-annual) checkups; (b) tender gums, due to somewhat delinquent care (see note 5, below); (c) slight over-bite and some spacing issues which were corrected by a few years of orthodontic care (read: 3 years of braces, which were cared for by a very sweet orthodontist who wore braces himself as if in a show of solidarity, and which were put on my teeth just after my bar-mitzvah and pretty much demarcated, if not defined, those awkward years boys aged 13 to 16 go through); and (d) after years of x-rays showing that my wisdom teeth were coming in straight, they decided to take a wrong turn and all four were removed during my summer vacation ’06 in a single sitting, which took no more than ten minutes (once the local anesthesia set in, the teeth just popped right out seemingly as easily as a Pez dispenser dispenses Pez) and together with the application and removal of braces were the only things that I would consider to be “dental procedures” at all comparable to the procedure of having this maxillary molar procedured. In case it wasn’t clear, I’ll just mention that while the whole wisdom teeth ordeal was upsetting, it was not upsetting in the same way this cavity is upsetting. No contest.

^[3] I should mention by reiteration that I never had a cavity in any of my so-called baby teeth either, despite my childhood distaste towards cavity prevention techniques (yes, I did lie to my baby sitters about whether I had brushed or not, but it proved innocent enough). My baby teeth fell out one by one perfectly intact, like James Bond villains killed by taking hundreds of bloodless and woundless machine gun shots to the chest, like sacrificial virgins left for the fairied gods.

^[4] I think.

^[5] This is not to say that my pediatric dentist told me that me and my low pH(at)-ed mouth were not susceptible to other problems. He said that people with low pH levels were especially prone to gum disease, which may be even more terrifying than tooth decay, but always seemed distant enough. By this (il)logic of distance from repercussion (i.e. gum disease always seemed like an older person’s issue), I felt pretty confident about my dental hygiene, if not prideful. Actually it has only been in the past year that I’ve gotten more serious (read: serious at all) about flossing to combat said propensity toward gum disease after my current (i.e. not pediatric) dentist said I had mild gingivitis (a gum disease). I’m more than happy to report the apparent successes of my flossing efforts in both thwarting the mild gum disease and gaining some approving nods from my dentist.

^[6] I should mention in full disclosure that I told my current dentist what my pediatric dentist told me and got a pretty sideward glance in return. It occurs to me now that the whole pH-level thing may have just been a tactical maneuver to keep a kid who thought he was dentally invincible interested in his own dental hygiene. Sort of like telling a kid who thinks he can fly about the amazingly strong suction force of commercial plane engine intake to keep him from jumping out the window. Tactically sound, I guess. It is also my current dentist’s glance that caused me to question whether it actually was my pediatric dentist who told me this (see note 4, above), even though I am pretty sure that I specifically do remember it being him who had done so. Still, despite my current dentist’s accusations, I refuse to let go of this general assertion of pH-based proclivities. It makes too much sense to me and unless someone can show me scientific proof otherwise, which my dentist has not done, I’m sticking with it. That being said, if you have such scientific proof and try to show it to me, I may run away or just close my eyes and start yelling, depending on my initial estimation of your speed versus my own speed and the physical, emotional, social, or other effects of my running.

^[7] I would warn them of their impending gum disease (see note 5, above) out of a sense of duty.

^[8] I’m going to have to be real careful here. I honestly can’t remember my current girlfriend’s cavity count at the moment. Although I do know we have had this conversation. I do want to clarify one thing: while the myth does have to do with finding an Acid for love, in no way am I particularly physically attracted to the sight of cavities in a woman’s mouth. I find them to be pretty gross to look at, as are most other things in other people’s mouths that lay beyond the most superficial veneer of a smile. The point being that I was more than happy to take a girlfriend’s word on her cavity count and infer from it her Basic/Acid identity. I needed no proof.

^[9] Of course in one of the Star Wars prequels (does it matter which one?) it’s revealed the first part of the not-yet-DV-DV to become mechanized in the not-yet-DV-DV’s descent into becoming the cyborg DV is losing a hand, as if to retroactively place even more resonance in young Luke’s amputatory transformation (a little forced).

^[10] I haven’t heard anywhere that colitis is a genetic disease. And yet, as if by some genetic, father-son, mental/spiritual, connection/intuition, I knew the moment my symptoms started to become evident (no need to go into the gross specifics) that it was colitis. Without a doubt. In fact, I called my dad on the phone and the first thing I asked him was how old he was when he was diagnosed with colitis. Of course he wanted to know why I was asking before he told me that he was around 20, but finally he did admit it. I don’t think he really believed me over the phone that I had colitis, but I knew I did. And when the doctors confirmed it a week later (it was a really long week for me), I definitely gave him a look.

^[11] I have my teeth cleaned and examined semi-annually, which I realize is probably significantly more often than many other people of my demographic. I can only suggest that this is the result of a Jewish mother, whose own father was a dentist and was seemingly raised to have severe fears of tooth decay (nonetheless, my mom does have a few cavities), who schedules my dental exams whenever she has her own. Another result of having such mother was a distinct lack of sugary foods in my childhood diet: no sugared cereals, no candy, and only sugar-free gums. I once tried to explain to her that these sugared things won’t effect my dental health (I being a Basic and all), but I didn’t win the case. Maybe she didn’t understand. Or, maybe she was just trying to be fair: my brother, cavitied as he was, was definitely not Basic so maybe it was just a matter of being dietarilly hitched to his Acid ride.

^[12] Actually a shofar, by Jewish law, cannot be made out of bones (antlers), as they must be made of horns (which is pretty much all keratin).

^[13] It strikes me as peculiar that the typical dreams of falling and of flying are counterpositioned while typical dreams of being naked and of teeth falling out don’t have any similar oppositional typical dreams. It also strikes me that 3 out of 4 of these typical dreams are angst-inducing if not terrifying, while dreams of flying, I’m assuming, are usually pretty pleasant, if not exhilarating. I should mention that while I do have recurring dreams about teeth falling out, I do not recall dreaming any of these other typical dreams Freud lists (although I have tried quite expressly to have a dream of flying, concentrating on birds, superheroes, clouds, and such images while trying to fall asleep, and have on a number of occasions lamented my failure to have accomplished such goal of dreamt flight). I have had atypical dreams, which need not be discussed. Also, I should mention that I have another recurring dream of driving with an unresponsive brake pedal. By a simple survey of a few friends, I understand that this cut-brake dream is fairly typical, too. I imagine that Freud would have no objections to my inclusion of this dream in his classification of typical dreams and humbly suggest that he, too, would have classified it as such had he lived long enough to see modern vehicular brake systems invented. Actually, I imagine this would have been extremely interesting to Freud as he had a difficult time understanding the notion of a typical dream (a dream that many people have independently of one another) and it would have been fascinating to study the rise of a new typical dream that arose according to technological cultures of the time. Personally, I find these broken-brake-pedal dreams frightfully awful and dream a derivative of this dream at least as often as I dream derivatives of tooth-falling-out dreams. On rare occasions, I have had dreams that incorporate both tooth-crumbling and brakeless-driving (which usually involve brake failure and car crashes), which have proven damned near paralyzing upon my awakening.

^[14] Of course this is what I would think my car dreams are about as well, which of course suggests that I have a lot of angst about that sort of thing—enough angst to manifest itself in two completely different ways. Although they certainly do seem like different angst-sources: car angst suggests man’s loss of control with regard to technology (i.e. it’s is not me who controls the actual car braking in the car because really I have left that job to a complex system of technological tools on which I rely heavily), while the tooth angst suggests man’s loss of control with regard to nature (i.e. man does not control his body, ultimately, nor does man control all surroundings). So my sense of control seems to be burning from both ends of the candle.

^[15] Or at least one version of the modern usage. Immanuel Kant wrote his own philosophy of the sublime, which certainly built on Burke’s, but made some small but significant changes.

^[16] An interesting thought: as a true ruin-enthusiast, I may have already made a mistake. I was treated for my cavity. My tooth was restored. Restoration, however, is a true abomination to a ruinist (this debate first surfaced in the 19^th century when French restorationists and preservationists duked it out as to how to treat various ruin sites the world over). At very least I could have pursued the preservationist’s route of freezing my tooth in its current state of decay. But of course a devout ruinist would have called out to my dentist: Let it all crumble!

November 5, 2008

In just over one week, the election will be over. And I'm terrified.

No, not so much about whether my guy will win or not—although the possibilities of voter caging, false accusations of voter fraud, and all the other sorts of voter suppression tactics of the Right do make me anxious, the prospects of a McCain/Palin administration are the makings of a truly frightful haunted house this Halloween, not to mention that the fact that so many people in this country voted for George W. Bush twice just freaks me out. All that stuff is certainly scary, but that's not why I'm terrified.

I'm terrified of November 5. I'm terrified of living without this election. November 4 may be one hell of a final bender—ecstatic, climactic, or otherwise—but to suddenly kick this election cold turkey. I'm not sure if I can do it.

It’s hard to imagine what it will be like on November 5—what the world will be like—what I’ll be like—what you’ll be like. And that’s what is so terrifying. What will we talk about? What will we do? Will you still like me? We've been talking about this election for almost two years now. I was still in college when Barack Obama announced his candidacy. This election cycle has been one of few constants in my life. It has allowed me to keep anchor, while casting my first lines into the world beyond the campus, into the world at large.

It has allowed me to feel relevant. Sociability has been as easy as being informed. Any awkward silences can be filled easily with a “Did you hear about?” or “Can you believe that?” Just this week, a woman made the news by tapping into the undercurrent of racial fears when she made up a story about a black man assaulting and mutilating her in a fit of pro-Obama rage. Did you hear about that? Can you believe that? Let’s talk about that. Isn’t that interesting? Aren’t I interesting? This is too easy.

After November 4, we won’t even have any of those congressional races to talk about. No more Michele Bachman’s craziness. No more Nikki Tinker’s race-baiting her Jewish Democratic primary opponent. I’m already feeling emptier.

I suppose it's sort of a Saturday Night Live complex. The election catapulted SNL's 34th season into a realm of cultural significance it had long lost. It made SNL relevant again. Even producer Lorne Michaels has admitted that the whole Sarah Palin thing was a bit of a gift. But can it keep on giving? How does the show retain its refound audience once the election cycle is over? How does it keep from slipping back to that cultural backburner until the next election cycle (and that's hoping the next cycle will be as crazy as this one)? It’ll try to stay current, talk about other important things, current things, but it probably won’t work. After all, jokes about the economy are about as funny as—well—the economy.

To ease my terror, I suppose I would do well to remember that friendships are deeper than politics. And that they rely on more than just the current news cycle. On November 5, many of us will have to start looking for new hobbies, so to speak. Let us remember that while we put away this crutch of an election and stretch our legs once more, we still have our friends to lean on should we fall. We may not have as much current affairs stuff to talk about, but we have our memories of this election, the importance and nostalgia of which will probably last longer than the next president’s term(s). We’ve been through a lot together over the past two years and I know we move forward in whatever directions together. So perhaps, instead of fearing the end of this election, I should spend some of my time this week thinking of some new group activities. I’m open to suggestions.

~Josh

Soon finding a place in these lost verses

Friends,

The leaves have been turning slowly here in San Francisco. The edges of all the seasons are a little dull in California. Beautiful, here, but homogeneous. Well, last week, I traveled to the far and spare southwest coast of the city to celebrate the Jewish new year and to cast my sins into the Pacific Ocean. I stood in the icy water while small crabs burrowed in and out of the sand around my toes, some dudes wiped out on the waves in front of me and a few birds scattered across the wet shore, eyeing the old bread by my backpack in an erratic dance. I lingered there for a while thinking truly of nothing, something I'm usually not very good at. And then I splashed my way out of the tide's reach, back to the warm sand, feeling calmed and emptied.

I'm told that these days - autumn - are ripe with renewal, maturity, growth or, at least, pause. This blog has been sparse, but its slow pace has proven an asset. Each of the posts here has been an occasion, an event, and, because of their welcome surprise, I read my friends' words with added attention and joy.

Speaking for no one but myself here, the beginnings of New Flags emerged from the hope to create an artifact of our community, to merge disparate desires, experiences and ideas under our own banner of creative conviviality, flapping high and triumphantly in a strong breeze. And I think these are the same ambitions that have been the foundations of so many of the projects each of us has undertaken or collaborated on in the past few years. New Flags has surfaced as a modest venture, but its roots cling to deeper truths.


In this spirit of renewal and reflection, come celebrate one year of our sparse blogging at what used to be one of my favorite rock venues and then turned into one of my favorite bars.

New Flags- One Year Anniversary
Hi-Fi (Ave A btwn 10th and 11th)
Saturday, October 11 - 9PM.

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kindred local thoughts
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Asher

Autoscopy #3: Long Live Eulogies

We're approaching our first birthday here at NewFlags, and though not all our kin have made posts since our inception (seriously, dudes: it's been a year), it's cause for celebration. For the first time in a while, we'll all be in the same city this weekend, and when kin get together to have a joyous time, you get excited. You also get to thinking, and I'm not trying to be morbid: the flow of seconds into hours and months and years leads to a mortal inevitability that I'm not all that excited about. I have to work some things out....

So I was thinking that everyone should get to hear their own eulogy before they die, no? What if we added fifty-two days to our calendars – tacking one on at the end of every week – to host pseudo-memorials for the living? Close-ones would take the occasion to get closer, meeting at houses of worship – temple sanctuaries, living room shrines, IKEA showrooms – to belabor why one sacred head has owned their hearts for so many moons. It seems only fair to me. If memorials really are the celebrations they purport to be, what, then, would be so morbid about a memorial service for the standing and breathing? Death is not charming, and if that’s true, then there’s no reason we have to wait until then to finally get all vocal and sentimental about our peoples. There're things that you and I still do that over and over trigger the endorphin rushes in our friends’ skull-holes and keep them coming back for more. There’s the “I love you” toast at a party, and then there’s the expository speech with multiple paragraphs in front of 60 folks about “why I love you,” during which everyone gushes like an exploding piñata of compliments about your loyalty in times of crisis and your care and concern in times of despair. To quote a group of resident 21st Century geniuses: "Love is the province of the brave - ooh ooh ooh ooh ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh...."

This I’ve believed for a long time. But why? Seems like a strange thing to have been thinking about since you were 13, but every so often I’m sitting on the Houston St. steps thinking about my eulogy. I wonder if it comes from a place of profound vanity, that really I just want to hear all about me: about my endless generosity, what with all the change I’ve given to the homeless over the years, and about my dedication to social justice that has seen me time and again confronting with an awkward pugnacity those who refer to “Africa” when really they just mean Kenya….

I think it’s more likely, though, that it stems from a deep, if not pathological, sentimentality, one that’s made me sometimes severely empathetic and once led me to write the lyrics to what I imagined would be a spare, unironic piano ballad that I’d use to close a musical set I would play at an intimate, wintry holiday-season show after a fat dinner in the low-light living room of one of my friends’ many cozy abodes. Here they come:

All my friends
I love them so much
They are almost all here
And that is so much more
Than I could ever ask for
I think I’ll just listen
To all of them breathing
Sometimes it gets so that is all I want to hear
Sometimes it gets so that is all I want to hear
So I’ll just listen


My crafty plan was to put the words in a song so I could tickle all my friends’ hearts without feeling all bashful and blushy about it. But that also defeats the purpose, no? It’d be something more if I had something to lose – like if there were strangers in the audience – because, (unfortunately) the way I see it is there aren’t rewards for the kind of niceness that’s in a eulogy. Or in a piano ballad. Or in a lot of things. There’s got to be some effort to match however much it takes to remain a good person in the face of utter shit. But then I start thinking about the people who don’t deserve a good word. What do you do with a dead body that never brought you any joy in the first place? I guess you just don’t go to their memorial. But also, what about people who aren’t necessarily “bad,” but who you aren’t exactly close to and you know won’t have many people at their memorial? You take pity and show up and look like a fool at how effusive you are?

Aarrrgh...this is where my theory starts to unravel….

Recently I tried to revise this whole idea. It’s simpler to say that everyone should get at least one glossy black-and-white photo taken of themselves in their lifetime. It memorializes in an instantaneous, wordless way, and its inherent aesthetic beauty lends itself to your image so severely that the implicit caption of almost any black-and-white photograph should read “Damn! Doesn't this person deserve to be looked at?!” (SEE BELOW) Seems simple enough. This came to me one morning after I saw a delicate photo of a man in a magazine that someone on the subway was reading. The man in the photo was looking down, contemplative, and his head was wrapped in a bandana. Who’s to say he didn’t live a good life? At least at that moment, he seemed to be doing no wrong. I had all this sympathy for him from this one photograph. Suddenly this seemed like the way to go...who needs eulogies?


Incidentally, when I got to work 20 minutes later, the same photo of the man was sitting on my co-worker’s desk staring out at me. I read the caption, realizing that it was David Foster Wallace. I went on to read the flattering article underneath, and I learned that this man was in fact dead. I’d never actually read Wallace before. I knew his Kenyon commencement speech, and I remembered a line that always stuck: “There happen to be whole large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine, and petty frustration.” I looked up again at the photo and wondered how someone who seemed so aware and in control of the banalities of day-to-day living could have reached a despair so deep.


Later, I did some trolling on the internet for more about Wallace and ended up reading some of his interviews. I kept reading a snippet of one long one in which he was trying to ascertain "why we're so desperate for an anesthetic against loneliness,” which to me read as “why haven’t we found an anesthetic yet?!” My impression of the man in the photograph was mutating into something far less romantic now. The delicacy and nuance of the greys in the photo suddenly started to look horribly foreboding.

When I subsequently watched an interview with Wallace on the Charlie Rose Show, his suddenly ruddy moving image disturbed me. On the one hand, he was alive, in the flesh. But on the other hand, and maybe this is hindsight speaking, he seemed terribly, terribly unhappy. He rarely looked at Charlie. What might’ve been a moment of reflection in the photo turned out to be a reality of posture, his back hunched and his gaze fixed on the nothing of the table and the emptiness of the black set. Each of his painstaking responses to Charlie’s probes carried with them a sense that Wallace was annoyed. Though Charlie is an aggravating interviewer, I got the sense that Wallace was more undone by how severely he believed in what he said. And every passing second brought with it another thought that was tragic enough on its own, but each held even more gravity when he realized, or at least believed, that no one else but himself might understand.

In that magazine photograph, at least, Wallace is frozen and unthinking, and it’s easier to try to remember him at a moment when he wasn’t straining under the weight of thought. When I think about it more, though, the photograph idea doesn’t totally work either because no one is actually connecting with Wallace: he has no idea how people around him feel about him, and why would he be flattered if one person he didn’t know came to his house for an hour one day to stand behind a camera and every once in a while ask him to move to the left a little and to “act natural?”

Moreover, what the hell could David Foster Wallace have wanted people to say at his funeral? If he got to hear his eulogy, would the adulations of his loved ones have kept him buoyant enough to live another day? Sadly, my guess is no. I can’t say what circumstances were compounding on Wallace, but I get the sense a gushing and early eulogy was not what he needed....

Eulogies as we know them are starting to sound futile to me. Why do we do it? They seem to have more to do with the people delivering them than they do with the dead. Are we just trying to absolve ourselves of any lingering guilt we feel toward the departed? Maybe our paeans to the lost are nothing more than good PR for our imperfect relationships. And now there’s no one around to prove us wrong...I don't want to believe we're so ego-oriented, but I wonder....

My experience of death has always been a solipsistic one, as in “whoa, this means I’m mortal,” and “I hope I do a good job consoling everyone.” Paradoxically, the lesson death has imparted me is that life goes on, and so my reaction to death has always involved me in some way. In that sense, when I say everyone should get to hear their eulogy before they die, I am speaking out of self-interest.

But it’s not out of vanity. I think it goes deeper than that. I think we’ve always wanted to feel that we’ve touched someone, someone who’d want to be in front of an audience, surmounting their phobia of public speaking, to make sure others understand the deep and far-reaching impact of your life, one so profound that it's managed to bring people together even when your physical faculties are kaput. So maybe my system of year-round eulogies for the living is imperfect, but couldn’t we devise something like it? Imagine what it feels like to know before you die that when you die, you didn't live an empty life. Imagine what it feels like to know that the life you are living is not in vain and has already meant something. Is it enough for you to keep going? I really hope so.

Love (a lot),

~ Ashraf

TV On the Radio - Province (Live at Amoeba Records).mp3

David Foster Wallace Interview w/Charlie Rose

Autoscopy #2: If Only for a Little While

Growing up, I sometimes fantasized about being really fat. But it wasn’t an escapist fantasy of wanting to be an astronaut or wanting to fly or wanting to ride ponies all day or wanting to be anywhere else but here. I was perfectly content being who I was and where I was, as long as that meant I could be really fat—if only for a little while.

Actually, as opposed to those escapist fantasies, I would consider this one—about being really fat—to be more of a practical fantasy.

I wanted to be fat because I was curious. And I wanted to be fat because I was bored. And I wanted to be fat because I was jealous of—well—fat kids. I saw them in class playing with themselves—and not in an autoerotic way. They could tug at their big cheeks. They could poke their double chins. They could jiggle their arms and thighs. And I thought that was completely unfair. If I was bored in class and pulled out some silly putty from my desk and began playing with it, squishing it between my fingers, the teacher would have taken it away. It would have been confiscated as contraband. But the teachers couldn’t take away their silly putty. I mean, after all, it was attached to them!

While I was at it, I also wanted to run a 100-meter dash really fat. Some people, I suppose, dream of having long thick hair for wind to blow through because they think the sensation would be liberating. I dreamt of running fat for similar reasons. I wanted to run as fast as I could and feel all that fat bounce with each stride. I wanted to feel that resistance and delayed response that must be like watching your hand move while really stoned. Rather than an equal and opposite reaction, I wanted every action to have a delayed and maybe even amplified reaction. I wanted every movement to have more weight.

I spent a fair amount of time thinking about this kind of stuff. And I thought I had it all pretty much figured out. I fully understood the health issues involved in being fat and I knew that really fat people couldn’t really run. That’s why I only wanted to be fat for an hour or maybe a day at most. And I didn’t want to get fat as much as be fat. I wanted to be instantly fat. Like Cinderella, but fat. A fairy could come visit me at night or even right there in the middle of class and wave its magic wand. And instead of a pumpkin turning into a sleek carriage, I could turn into something more like a pumpkin. By midnight I would turn back into the skinny kid again. I figured that by making it a wax-on wax-off deal, I would still be able to do all the things I normally do, just that I would be doing it with a whole lot of fat. I just wanted to try it out. A test drive, if you will.

It was around this time that I was preparing for my bar-mitzvah (which is when a fairy, on you thirteenth birthday, waves its magic wand and turns you for all Jewish intents and purposes into a man, albeit a young man). Part of that preparing was planning my bar-mitzvah party, a black tie affair at a hotel catering hall in midtown Manhattan. My parents handled most of the planning, like picking out the venue, the menu, and anything else that dealt with the adults invited to the party (family, family friends, etc.). But they let me do some of the planning when it came to entertaining the kids. There were something like sixty kids coming to the party; school policy was that you had to invite everyone in the grade.

I was given a catalogue of party game options. There were some standards like a basketball shootout, arcade games, and less active activities like sand art, and other souvenir-making things, but there were also larger activities, the main attractions if you will, of which I was allowed to choose one. It was important to me that I got something that none of the previous bar- or bat-mitzvah parties in the grade had (there were many previous bar- and bat-mitzvahs). And there it was in the brochure: sumo wrestling.

Now, I don’t remember exactly how the sumo wrestling was described in that particular catalogue, but a comparable party planner, on their website, describes it as follows:

Probably the most widely known 'interactive' game around, sumo wrestling suits have long been a favorite for company meetings, grad parties and a host of other special events. With sumo wrestling suits, two contestants put on oversized vinyl suits and are instantly transformed into gigantic Sumo wrestlers, complete with wig and miwashi [sic] belt. The referee starts the match and the giant sumo wrestlers try to push, pull and 'blubber' their opponent to the floor. The hilarious appearance of the overweight sumo wrestlers might just bring the spectators to the floor, so watch out! This one is a real crowd pleaser!

Racist undertones aside, I was pretty excited by the prospect. Just look at those verbs: push, pull, blubber. That’s what I was looking for. And then when I was done, I could take off the fat suit and show off my skills in the limbo contest. It seemed perfect.

Of course the parental veto nixed my fat suit plans. Something about kids in suits and dresses putting on big hot vinyl outfits and then wrestling seemed less than ideal. There was also something about liabilities. We ended up settling on laser tag, which was not as cool as it sounds (it turned out be laser tag inside a six foot by six foot space enclosed by a black sheet, where you weren’t allowed to run around and basically just hid behind a plaster “crater” until your time was up).

Looking back on that however I know that no fat suit would’ve ever satisfied my true desires to be really fat. Fat suits are too stiff. They are too fake. They’re not designed right.

Moreover, as the party planners say, they are “crowd pleasers;” putting on a fat suit wouldn’t be for me, but for others. I had no interest in the “hilarious appearance” (again, as described by the party planners) of a skinny person made fat, or the easy jokes of fat-face comedies that have become norms in the comedy industry since The Nutty Professor won an Oscar for Best Makeup in 1997 (films like Austin Powers, Shallow Hal, the end of Dodgeball, Big Mama’s House, Medea’s Family Reunion, Jiminy Glick, Just Friends, Norbit, etc.). I wanted to be fat for purely selfish reasons and purely sensational benefit. Not for the amusement of others, but the purely physical amusement of myself.

Today, I’ve maxed out at just under 6’ tall and I’ve never broken through the glass wall of 140 lbs, regardless of my eating habits and exercise routines (or lack thereof). By all accounts, I could be described as somewhere between slim, thin, and skinny. And I always have been. I can’t say that my fantasizing of being fat has completely stopped, but it has certainly become increasingly infrequent, especially ever since I grew enough facial hair to play with and tug at whenever I find myself in those unbearably boring situations. Simple pleasures. Fantasizing about being fat today, is more a fantasy for nostalgia’s sake than anything else for me.

Recently, I’ve talked about my old fat fantasies with a number of friends that have always been skinny themselves. (I thought it best not to bring it up with some of my less skinny friends. Respectfully.) Anyway, I asked them if they ever had similar fantasies about being really fat when they were young. The answer was a pretty solid No. And everyone seemed shocked by the idea. Not to say that any of them are especially weight conscious. They just thought the whole idea of such a fantasy was strange. As if I was the only person who thought about those things.

Maybe. Although I have a hard time believing that I’m that original.

When I was fifteen years old, I went on a three-day trip to Pennsylvania with my camp. We went to Philadelphia, Amish country, and on the last day we went to Hershey Park. Besides all my friends that were on the trip, there was Becky. I knew that she liked me and that she thought I was cute. Her friends had told me so. Moreover, I knew that she knew that I knew she liked me and thought I was cute. Her friends had told me so. And I liked her too. We had gotten to the point where we would talk to one another in passing, which was really a big deal considering we had never spoken a word to one another the previous few years we had been in camp together. When it came time to get on the bus for the four-hour bus ride back to camp, she was standing right behind me on line. And when I kept walking down the bus aisle, she followed me. And when I finally sat down in a seat, she sat down next to me. I didn’t even have to ask her if she wanted to. The bus started to drive and we were together, sitting right next to each other.

We talked for a little while. I thought it was going really well. I thought that maybe this was the night; we’d kiss and start dating, making it possibly the best summer ever. After about an hour, she put her head on my shoulder either to go to sleep or to pretend to go to sleep. I’m not quite sure which, but it didn’t matter. It was very exciting. I thought about maybe even putting my hand on hers. But just then, the bus hit a small bump and we bounced in our seat. Her head hit me on the shoulder, right where she had been resting it. She sat up straight almost immediately. She said that I wasn’t very comfortable, that my shoulder was too bony for her to rest on. I wasn’t sure what to say. And I wasn’t sure what I could do about it. I mean, it was my shoulder after all. I had another one, but I didn’t think that it would be any better or any more comfortable. I guess I could’ve pulled out some of the Hershey’s chocolate I had bought and start to eat it—I could’ve stuffed my face with it right there even—but I knew it would not have helped. It probably would’ve just made me car sick. We sat there for a few minutes quietly until she got up and moved to a different seat. And that was the end of that. We never dated and she pretty much lost interest in me after that. After all, what’s the point of dating someone if you can’t lean on them once in a while. I still remember the rest of that bus ride being long and the scent of urine had begun to leak out of the bathroom. I remember that scent very vividly. I still associate it with failure.

It was the first of many similar accounts: I’ve been reminded repeatedly that I’m just not very comfortable. Sometimes it’s sitting on some other bus. Sometimes it’s sitting on a park bench. Sometimes it’s someone I’ve been dating and sometimes it’s someone I’m just getting to know. I never know what to say to it. And they usually don’t have anything to follow up with either. It’s because they’re disappointed. They wanted something, something from me, something of me, that I couldn’t give them. In that silence, I’m pretty sure I know exactly what they are thinking about.

So maybe I’m not all that original at all. Because maybe I’m not the only person who has fantasized about me being really fat. If only for a little while. Just long enough for you to rest your weary head.

~josh

Beach Ball Martyrs

Our appreciation of music is more than an aural experience. While music has become increasingly accessible through the technology of downloadable and portable mp3s, we, the listeners (or consumers) constantly desire the most basic form of the music-experience: live concerts. (Similarly, given the technology of mp3s, record labels and musicians see concerts as one of the few ways to make a buck on music.) If we just cared about the audio, we could just stay at home (or go out) and listen to those same notes, rhythms, and melodies at our leisure. But we want more out of our music, to be informed of and by our favorite songs in ways that only a live show can offer. That’s why we spend money or (when free) time on these oh-so-ephemeral events. It’s the context, stupid. There are those dimly-lit and smoke-filled jazz clubs, where your senses all fall into some dizzy haze or another. There are those arenas where you think the whole world is cosmically unified in singing its heart out with the screeching chorus about hope, redemption, or triumph. There are those basements, where energy is oozing from everywhere at once and the dancing is so intense that the only things sweating more than you are the walls. There are those dusk concerts outside where the music kisses the day goodnight, evoking mood and emotion of poets, painters, and prophets.

This past weekend, I went to another kind of concert, the day-long summertime concert that epitomizes the greatness and party-readiness of summer days. It was sunny (too sunny even) and it was hot (too hot even) and it was great (too great even, considering how tired I still am). These are the experiences that nostalgia is made of, the things that I can look back at as both unique and familiar, specific and general. Things that I’ll one day compile into a single memory of youth, summer, and awesome. And it’s only possible because these sorts of festivals are so consistent and therefore so strong in my mind. Really, if nothing else, you can be sure of seeing the following things at these shows: (1) at least five people from school you didn’t plan on meeting up with, but are happy to talk to (or at least say hello to), (2) a whole lot of women wearing American Apparel bathing suits, and (3) at least two beach balls of varying size.

Item (1) is always great, because even if you don’t really like the person you run into, you may very much like their friend who will be back in just one minute. Alternatively, these small bumping-intos seem to have the power to make the world go round.

Item (2) is sometimes great, depending if you are (a) a man who is attracted to women in American Apparel bathing suits, (b) a woman attracted to women in American Apparel bathing suits, (c) really love American Apparel and the scene that wears it, or (d) don’t deduct points for unoriginality. Regardless, it’s a harmless phenomenon.

Item (3) is usually not great at all. Or actually never great after about, say, five minutes. Sometimes these are beach balls with company logos on them passed out as advertising by the concert’s sponsors. Sometimes these beach balls are just plain beach balls brought from home by someone. I’m not sure which is more alarming. Regardless, they are always present at these types of shows and as far as I can tell they are never tolerated for long.

The course of the crowd’s relationship to beach balls is fairly standard: at first the crowd is happy to see beach balls surfing over the crowd—people even compete to get to hit the ball themselves, as if the entire crowd was participating in one large communal game in which everyone is a winner and recipient of good cheer awards; the crowd’s attention however soon shifts, either a band comes on stage or people just get bored, but most of the crowd generally loses interest in any beach ball that may or may not be coming their way; this, of course, leads to a beach ball hitting you or a loved one in the head, which may not hurt (although some of these beach balls are pretty big), but is generally annoying; reacting to this nuisance people begin to hit the ball harder, trying to get it further away from their section of the crowd; of course the receiving section of the crowd doesn’t want the ball either so they just hit it back equally hard; a passive-aggressive situation, leaning more on the aggressive side ensues and the entire crowd gives each other looks of annoyance and castigation until someone finally stabs the ball with something. The fact that they stab the beach ball as opposed to just letting the air out of course makes them complete garbage to be picked up by event staff at the end of the day.

Without leaning too heavily on the-world-is-a-beach-ball analogies (which by the way could have been reinforced by the invocation of globe beach balls, but wasn’t, due to my own restraint, sort of), there is an important social phenomena on display. Namely, that no one actually deals with the issue at hand (i.e. the beach ball). Instead, everyone is pushing their problem (read: the problem) on someone else, which only gets pushed on someone else, a chain reaction resulting in a whole lot of annoyed people.

In the past, I’ve used these balls as inflatable beach chairs between acts. This past weekend, my friend earned extra points of respect and admiration for collecting beach balls at his feet, simply catching them and putting them down. In both situations, the idea was to take a pro-active and non-violent stance towards a care- and beach ball free concert. And yet, the people around us shot us both dirty looks. But we were doing it for everyone! We spared everyone all kinds of future pains! Here is the solution! You’re welcome!

But they wanted none of it. The beach ball and the ups and downs therewith are part of the experience. It’s part of that summertime nostalgia that we are already, at a young age, creating for our future reference. We may not want to deal with the beach ball at the moment, but we want it there in our memories to draw threads of continuity between familiarities. It’s a powerful image, suggestive of warmth, youth, softness—all good things. Too colorful to pass up on. The type of detail that makes memories seem all the more authentic, despite their soft focus.

Our suffering will be rewarded one day, not in our next life, but later in this one. We are all beach ball martyrs. Hallelujah.

~josh

Fiction: Scratch That

It seems like it’s always right as your favorite song is about to break open into the full chorus, during that little pre-chorus that really gets your mouth watering or ears tingling that the CD starts to skip. The anthemic lyrics never come. Instead, you’re stuck with that one word you really don’t care about. Maybe that word on repeat is the or dream. Maybe it’s even love. You just don’t care. Anyway, you take out the CD and look at its surface, hoping that you’ll just find a little piece of schmutz that you can wipe away. But no, it’s a scratch. Maybe you then remember you accidentally dropped the disc a week ago. Maybe you don’t know where the scratch came from at all. Honestly, I’ve had to buy London Calling three times already, and I just refuse to buy it again. Out of principle. Then again, that principle isn’t going to help in this situation, because at the moment you have a big scratch scarring the reflective surface of the CD you really want to listen to, and it isn’t going anywhere (the scratch or the song).

That’s sort of how it was with Felix Landers. Felix was a real nice kid, really sincere. And he got along with everyone. We all liked him a lot, but he was one of those kids that would be categorized as “scarred.” We all knew Felix’s story even though it wasn’t Felix who told us about it (we never brought it up with Felix either). It was an unfortunate fact about an unfortunate kid. I can’t even say how we first heard about it for sure, because no one really felt comfortable talking about it (I still don’t). It was just out there.

Without going into too much detail, I’ll just say that some very bad men did a very bad thing around a very young Felix. These bad men then proceeded to make sure (convince) Felix hadn’t seen that very bad thing, when in fact Felix had. It should go without saying that it’s not especially easy to convince someone that they didn’t see something that they had. And I don’t think I need to appeal to cultural references such as the Who’s Tommy to convince you that successfully convincing someone of something like that could be quite traumatic for a child. It would leave lasting psychological effects. And it did.

But like I said, we all really liked Felix. We just had to be careful around him with certain things. Felix didn’t like being asked certain types of questions. Actually, it’s not that it was a matter of liking or not liking, more like Felix couldn’t handle being asked certain types of questions.

One weekend, Larry Perkes met up with a bunch of us to play basketball in the park and either he was just a little too excited and careless or he didn’t realize Felix was around (Felix did have a way of shrinking to the back of large groups), when he said “I saw Terminator last night. It was awesome. Did you guys see it?” We all answered at once, each of us stating how we had seen it a week ago or hadn’t gotten around to it yet but planned on it. As the chorus died down, however, we heard Felix from the back:

I didn’t see it. I didn’t see it. I didn’t see it. I didn’t see it. I didn’t see it. I didn’t see it. I didn’t see it. I didn’t see it. I didn’t see it. I didn’t see it.

And he wasn’t stopping. He was stuck in this loop. It was something that happened when he was asked about seeing something. It was one of those things he couldn’t handle. Literally. We all knew why. And it was problematic for us because (a) nobody wants to see someone, especially a friend, go into that sort of state, (b) it reminded us all about Felix’s past, which was emotionally disturbing for us other kids, and (c) we didn’t really know if Felix had seen the movie, so those of who had not seen it yet (like me and Ray Rohr) didn’t know whether we should invite him or not when we did go.

*

For the time being, the only thing I can do about my London Calling problem is smack my CD player. This gets the laser inside to start reading the information after the scratched part. Even though I may miss a part of the chorus (maybe even the really good part), the alternative is to be stuck listening to that pre-chorus lead-in forever.

And it was the same with Felix. It was clear that he wasn’t going to snap out of it by himself. So in situations like this one, where Larry Perkes asked if Felix had seen Terminator, we had to give Felix a little nudge to get him going again, to break his cycle. Actually it was more of a punch. And it worked. Felix snapped out of it and we broke down into two teams of four like nothing happened. My team ended up winning that day though not by my own merit (I did try hard).

Still it was times like that that we all sort of silently reaffirmed our friendship commitment to be more careful around Felix. We had no problem playfully punching each other during sports and Felix never complained about us hitting him too hard or at all (I think he knew we were just trying to help, that is, if he knew we had hit him at all), but we always felt bad when we had to punch Felix like that. I mean, honestly, the kid had been through enough. Don’t you think?

~josh

Autoscopy #1: It's the Coffee Talking

I’ve never been much of a coffee drinker. Not that I have any particular problems with the drink, other than it sometimes giving me a mild case of sour stomach (or what I understand to be sour stomach) and diarrhea. And it’s not an issue with taste either, because I’ve always liked coffee flavored sucking candies and coffee ice cream. Sometimes I think that I may even like coffee more than those people that drink it regularly. I know plenty of people that discuss different roasts, the advantages of cone filters over flat filters, and the best places to grab a cup of coffee in just about every major city in the USA, but I’m always surprised by just how much sugar they dump into their cups. That’s right: I may be only a casual coffee drinker, if that, but I take it with no sugar and just a splash of milk.

The point is that coffee is just fine, but I’ve never depended on it to get me—or keep me—moving. In the morning, to wake up, I take a shower. Or I don’t. Either way I get up. And while it’s not the fear of becoming a caffeine junky that has kept me from a regular coffee routine, there are a number of things that I’m happy that I don’t have to deal with: (a) I can only assume that on Yom Kippur when all those Jews in synagogue are fasting and haven’t had their morning fix, the resulting trembling and shaking makes them a little nervous about their pending atonement; (b) when I’m in a bad mood, I can blame other people, rather than blaming myself for forgetting to set my alarm and running out of the house without time for a coffee; (c) I don’t feel compelled to talk about coffee all the time; (d) similarly, I don’t assume other people want to hear me talk about coffee all the time (but hopefully enough to read this essay).

Even in college, I didn’t really rely on coffee to get through those long nights in the library. And that usually made me the odd man out, considering everyone else was either on caffeine, taurine, adderall, or some combination thereof. When I would start to lose focus, I’d stretch my legs under the table to get my blood going. If that didn’t work I would take a walk to the water fountain. If that didn’t work I would go to the other water fountain, the one that was plugged in and dispensed cold water, cold water being all the more effective. And if that didn’t work, I would skip a couple pages and try again. After all, if David Hume had anything important to say in those fifty pages, he probably would have said it already.



While I would categorize my relationship to coffee as one of admiration at a distance, energy drinks like Red Bull, Amp, Rockstar, Sparks, Crunkjuice, etc. are a whole other story. I think they are scary. They not only have a whole lot of caffeine, but all kinds of other chemicals. While taurine, one of the active ingredients, may not actually be a synthetic version of bull testosterone as some rumors indicate, the notion is just a little too juicy to ignore completely. And the thought of needing a dose of testosterone just to be able to read my Foucault always seemed to say something strange about my masculinity: man up, don’t be a pussy, concentrate on those fucking power structures, bitch-ass.

Not to say that I haven’t ever had an energy drink. I have. In college I played on my school’s competitive ultimate Frisbee club team. Besides daily practice sessions, we would play in weekend-long tournaments throughout the northeast. For reasons that I never understood, even in the Spring when daylight hours were long, tournament organizers always insisted on starting these games at what seemed to be the crack of dawn, which meant we had to wake up before dawn to make the sometimes two-hour commute.

Tournament days were without exception exhausting, even when I didn’t get much game time. It was certainly exhausting when I did get a lot of game time and had to run around chasing a plastic disc and people for four games each lasting around an hour and a half. And if you made it to the tournament finals, you got to play in a fifth game (great).

So it shouldn’t be surprising that most players rely on energy drinks to give them just what the drinks advertise: energy. It also shouldn’t be surprising that at some point, the upperclassmen looked at me nearly passed out on the side line and took pity on me by passing me one of their cans. It wasn’t peer pressure or anything like that, and it’s not like in Major League Baseball where teammates make you take steroids for the good of the team. To me, this seemed like some sage advice from my captains. So, without much thought I opened the can and downed the thing.

It didn’t take very long to kick in. I’ve described the feeling as suddenly having this deep urge to dance, bumping and grinding with some female, while simultaneously punching some dude in the face, repeatedly. And that’s how they sent me onto the field. That was game mentality.

We were playing Brandeis University. They were an okay team, nothing particularly special. We had played them before and I even knew some of the kids on their team from summer camp.

Within the first few possessions, I jumped over a Brandeis player to knock down a deep pass. On my way up I had made a little contact with the Brandeis player, just enough for him to know I was there. When he called a foul, I started yelling at him:
—You should be ashamed of that call. Really ashamed.
The Brandeis player, short, pimpled, and wearing athletic goggles, tried to explain how I fouled him. I replied very simply:
—That was some pussy shit!
When he told me to calm down, I didn’t:
—Go fuck yourself!
He asked me not to curse. The conversation ended with me saying the following:
—At least I’m better looking than you!
That’s sort of the way the remainder of the game went. When I caught a goal, I took a little extra time to stand over the Brandeis player guarding me. When I guarded someone, I would whisper to them that they had no chance. I tried to stare down their entire sideline. I barked. I stuck my chest out. And I laughed at them. When they dropped a disc. When they threw a bad pass. When their cleats didn’t hold in the mud. When they spoke or looked at me. I just started laughing.

A few hours after the game, after I could once again feel the exhaustion in my body and all the muscles I had pulled over the course of the day finally made themselves known to me, I thought back on what had happened during the game. That was weird, I thought. While everything that happened during the game seemed appropriate at the time, I couldn’t help but think about how out of character it actually was for me. Normally, I’m much more the kind of guy that rolls my eyes or (silently) sneers at the guy talking, talking not whispering, on his cell phone in the library. The guy who would rather stew in my seat and wait it out, rather than confront the inconsiderate guy. But the outright aggression I showed in that game: that wasn’t me. That’s not how I see myself, and that’s not who I want to be or ever wanted to be for that matter. I remember the kids like that. I couldn’t stand them.

So who was it?


Red bulls may not be laced with testosterone, but it certainly made me act in this hyper-masculine way. But what does that say about my actual masculinity? I suppose no more than the fact that I’m writing this on a beach in San Francisco no less than 15 yards from many naked men. And no less than the fact that when that girl in the bikini walked past me, the best I could do was muster a sort-of smile.

Maybe if I were raised on caffeine, I’d be a totally different person. If I were a routine coffee drinker, I would have more interest in working out. Maybe there’s a whole would-be me out there in an alternate universe, with a cup of coffee in one hand and some one-night fling in the other. Maybe I would have played varsity basketball. If only I grew up with a little more caffeine in my system, slipped into my diet a little more steadily, I would have had a more pronounced jaw line.


For my 7th grade science fair project, I did one of those experiments your teacher recommends to you from a book. My partner and I took a bunch of mealworms and split them up into four groups. Keeping one as our control, we gave the other groups increasing amounts of “no doze” pills in their food. The group that received the most caffeine literally bounced off of the walls of their container. Not jumping. Bouncing. They were all dead within a day or so.

Come to think of it, I guess I should take that experiment as reassuring. Those mealworms didn’t become anymore masculine. They were just in a mosh pit for no reason. I should really rethink the whole thing. Maybe it has nothing to do with masculinity. How could caffeine do that anyway? Maybe over caffeination doesn’t make me “hyper-masculine” it just makes me a “hyper-asshole.”

~josh

The Undead: Your Favorite Records Live

For so many musical acts, there's usually THE record, that one album where vision and execution lie together as the comfiest of bedfellows. To us listeners, these are the records that just make so much sense to us they are just a given. This specified kind of worship can sometimes be so extreme as to obscure artists' other achievements in their careers, where later works just doesn't seem as impressive as their masterful predecessor (like Nas after Illmatic), or in hindsight, earlier work is seen merely as a mis-step along the way to a perfect album (My Bloody Valentine?).

I'm sure there're artists who'd agree that their careers have either built up to one album, or that their creative juices were never more focused and potent than on their breakout record, but very often, it's us fans who are making the judgments. In most cases, it's only because of that one album that anyone might remain a fan (would anyone really be listening to any late Dylan if he wasn't DYLAN?). Really, there's nothing that compares to that first time, the momentous occasion when you actually "get it," when a melody or a voice opens the psychic floodgates to your central love organs. Years later, you wish you could relive that sacred moment when you and the music symbiosed to form a single, perfectly symmetrical SOUL.

Thank God for record labels.

Roused and ready, the labels are here for us, always poised to feed our need for reimmersion in the ecstasies of our younger years, pumping tons of cash into reformatting, remastering, repackaging, and reissuing our favorite records. Throughout the 70s, cassettes ran slightly behind records as the preferred music format for consumers. In the 80s, their popularity grew with the advent of portable cassette players. Starting in the late 80s, with the advent of CD's, labels encouraged music listeners to repurchase their music libraries with smaller, "higher quality" compact discs. And throughout the last two decades, labels have been releasing special edition reissues of classic albums.

Time and again, we consumers oblige in kind (witness a third reissue of Love's Forever Changes), and we shell out the duckets, hoping somehow to come at the record with virgin ears and have our minds blown again like they were however many years ago by our favorite artists. Or else we're looking to be the uber-completist. Often, in addition to reissuing (and often remastering) records, these repackaged albums come stocked with bonus tracks, if not bonus discs, of b-sides, alternate takes, and never-before-released songs. There's usually some extended liner notes, penned by a doting music journalist or by an artist fessing up to how much they've stolen from said band's sound. On so many of these re-releases, there's the prestigious "Original Recording Reissued and Remastered" sticker pasted on, which I guess means the recording deserved to be reissued and remastered – either because it was so poorly recorded the first time around, or because the material is so damn good, the technological limitations of the era precluded the album from being listened to in its most lucid, digitally-enhanced incarnation. Never mind the possibility that maybe we loved these great records for exactly what they were – the warm-as-womb, wah-wah-ed squalls of distortion punctuating the first track on Dinosaur Jr.'s You're Living All Over Me; the mysterious, funny, (and disturbing?) "You Fuckin' Die" interlude on the Pixies' Surfer Rosa (deleted off some re-pressings) – these are parts of a whole that gestalt their way into our souls and make us weak in the fecking knees. Maybe we want them there for eternity (even if we sometimes skip over them).


But businesses have the distinct power of creating demand, and the truth is this is a business. Selling us our youths over and over again is nothing new. The Woodstock generation has made much of its tie-dye-stained bills by relentlessly reliving the experience of the 60s, charging $150 a ticket for reunion shows and selling original posters for who-knows-how-much. Everyone's got to make a buck, so I'm not knocking our parents' ventures, especially if this is how they're paying for us to have a comfortable living. And besides, this nostalgia-fest has its perks, not just for the record labels, but in a less monetary sense, for the artists themselves. This expansive, full-disclosure business model allows creators to involve interested fans in their creative process, if they're brave enough to put some of their sketches and flubs on display.

Take, for example, The Stooges' The Complete Fun House Sessions – a box set that culls together every single piece of audio material recorded during the sessions that led to the great paean to sleaze that is Fun House. Fans get the chance to hear Iggy fuck up his words, laugh at the tight-as-all-get-up band go through a ton of false starts, and soak up a little recording studio atmosphere as band, producer, and engineers discuss the merits and blemishes of each take. You get to feel like a part of the band in a way you might not have when all you had was the finished record in all its glory and intrigue. It's an illuminating advantage to the excess it takes to be a completist.

You still have to think, though, that however thorough and enlightening the box set may be, it's an investment, one that pits music fans against their wallets, having to decide whether to purchase something they're already familiar with vs. something new that's potentially amazing/horrible (unless of course you're going the download-everything-for-free route, in which case: NEVERMIND).


But hark! There is hope!

A healthy and generous antidote to this muddled, mostly commercial practice can be found on the most glorious of homo sapiens' innovations – the internet. And perhaps the most healthy and generous proponent of this internet-based, direct "artist-to-audience" model is a most innovative homo sapiens named Bradford Cox (of Deerhunter/Atlas Sound notoriety).* On his sprawling blog, Cox walks us through the evolution of his songs, with demo mp3's, moment-by-moment accounts of his thought process (both technical and emotional) while recording, and even proofs of some of the album art that he and his bandmates went over before putting out their records. In the history of recorded music, this is the kind of complete access that is restricted to a holy few. Of course, Cox has complete control over what is put up on his blog, and so we're not privy to EVERYTHING that's going on in the studio, but it is still significant to discuss that not only is this a direct, money-less enterprise - it is also IMMEDIATE. Now, the mystery of an album's creation doesn't have to wait a decade until its reissue to be uncovered. For those especially devoted to watching the life of a song, the process can be reversed, where we can now hear the demos BEFORE THE COMPLETE VERSION. And there's something to be said for "democratizing" the creative process, even if I'm partial to the notion that boundaries and mystery belong in art.

Still, you've got to appreciate Cox's generosity (and prolific work habits!). And to his credit, he doesn't reveal ALL the demos of ALL his tracks, but he certainly shares enough of himself to make you wonder what exactly constitutes "private" to him. His good-natured posts are generally reciprocated in the comments sections, which makes the dynamic all the more interesting. Now, we not only have a deluge of information coming from the artist about the art during its creation, but we also have the artist getting almost immediate feedback from its listeners. Cox even welcomes assignments from his listeners, for example asking fans to request songs to cover and offer their impressions of the results. I haven't yet seen him heed any of these requests, but I don't hold it against him…I'm sure he's busy….


Even in this age of two-way communication between artist and listener, where the potential to engage with new art as it evolves is at its peak, it seems we're still suckers for the old days. In recent years there's been a spike in the number of artists performing their classic albums live, in their sequential entirety, often at the behest of the UK festival group Don't Look Back. The list of albums being performed is ever-growing, but to name just a few milestones being rehashed –

Spiderland – Slint
Daydream Nation – Sonic Youth
Only Built for Cuban Linx – Raekwon
If You're Feeling Sinister – Belle and Sebastian
Millions Now Living Will Never Die - Tortoise
Liquid Swords - GZA/Genius
Vs. - Mission of Burma
It Takes A Nation of Millions To Hold Us Back - Public Enemy
Perfect From Now On - Built to Spill
Meat Puppets II - Meat Puppets

It's endearing, on the one hand, for so many of us so-called "adults" to have our souls still stirred by these organized noises that were put together when the other Bush was in the height of his reign of idiocracy. It's also a testament to the artists themselves, their ability to have crafted full-length recordings that are with every passing year accruing "timeless" status. These are albums that have touched us, amazed us, and influenced legions who came after.


But on the other hand, is it really all that necessary? I guess those of us who were too young to see these songs performed live finally have the chance to, and those of us who were actually there can do it all over again. But the obvious tragedy is that it just isn't the same. Does a live show need to adhere to the rigid confines of an album's sequencing anyway? Having these artists be paid to go up there and play their songs exactly the way they were on record feels a bit like asking Dave Chappelle to do his Rick James line – it's pretty awesome, but there's so much more we could be enjoying together.

And even though the act of revisiting these albums could be seen as a celebration of the work of an artist and the bond forged between us and them, it can also be seen as strangely selfish. In a weird way, we're demanding that the artists celebrate these records on our terms. I'm assuming, too, that these artists don't really want to spend time talking about what they did decades ago, especially when many of them are still making new music. But then I consider that some of these artists wouldn't be making new music now if, at some point in the last ten years, people didn't continue clamoring for them and attending their reunion shows....

In the end, I want the artists I love to make a living, and in all honesty, I really do love when an album is played in its entirety, so I can't be all upset. It's just that there are times I wonder if I can be okay with not having the world exactly as I want it to be. Will I ever get that same fuzzy feeling again I had when I was fourteen listening to the second Meat Puppets record? Will I ever accept that my later years will never compare to the ones previous? Will I ever, ever grow up?


~ Ashraf

Nas - It Ain't Hard To Tell.mp3

* I could talk about Radiohead here, but really who hasn't already?

Interview #2: Max Goldberg

I've never been one to associate the idea of a cultural "critic" with the phenomenon of "laughter," but when I talked to San Francisco Bay Guardian film and music critic Max Goldberg a few months ago, I got a whole lot of the latter, a comforting balance to the overwhelming weight of his intelligence. For the past four years, Goldberg has worked his way up to writing thorough and thoroughly erudite features on some of the most enriching films and musical acts that have made their way through the City By the Bay. In addition to working at the Guardian, he wrote an extensive piece for the gallery opening of his close friends (and NewFlags comrades) Dave Wilson and Frank Lyon aka Ribbons, while also maintaining a part time position at event listing site Flavorpill.

Furthermore, Max’s band Stop Plate Tectonics blew the collective mind of all the NewFlags contributors back when we were in college together. In February, Max took a couple of hours out of his culturally fecund schedule to talk about the (dis)comforts of being a “Critic” with a capital C, the politics of being a tastemaker vs. a provoacteur, and how the hell you write about the art of friends who are so close, you call them brothers.

Thanks to Dave Wilson for taking the photo above, and many thanks again to Max for dropping some knowledge on us. Do check out Max’s excellent blog Text of Light (on the blogroll!), which compiles all his Guardian pieces along with other, equally learned musings on the world around him.

~ Ashraf
………………………………………………………………………………………………

NewFlags: So are you making a living writing?

Max Goldberg: More or less…”a living" is so relative, but it definitely feels good to have everything I'm doing somehow related to "the bigger picture." In addition to working at the San Francisco Bay Guardian, I write for Flavorpill in San Francisco, which is an event listing site. I do something every day for that job, which isn't the most substantive – I troll the internet for events to list and write little blurbs about them. And then I freelance write a little bit scattershot – it always seems to go in waves. I’ll have a few assignments in a week and then I’ll be really working a lot, and then there’ll be another week where it’s more about just coming up with ideas and seeing what’s coming up on the calendar to be pitching to the people at the Guardian.

NF: I guess you can’t really let your mind wander too much because you have to be writing about something that’s playing relatively soon, right?

MG: Totally. I obviously feel fortunate to be in San Francisco just because there’s a good selection of things that are happening. And I feel like the culture is generally at a level where there’s always something interesting to be interacting with. Although, the idea of doing it in New York or in LA is a crazy notion to me because it’s such an overload. But it definitely is a very broad challenge to be coming up with projects and ideas that I might wanna think about and write about and carry out on my own that don’t necessarily have to do with “the films opening in March” or “the bands playing this week.”

NF: When did you start writing in an expository sense on films and music? I know you studied film in college, but were you writing or thinking about writing about art before then?

MG: Not with any grand design, certainly, and not consciously. I feel like it was a pretty natural transition for me, but I also feel like a bunch of little things just sort of happened and I ended up going with it. I ended up being a film major in school and ended up really digging that, but that wasn’t at all what I was expecting to do when I went there. And I guess my job at the Guardian feels the same way to me. I can easily imagine that that just wouldn’t have happened and I don’t know how long it would have taken me to get around to doing this.

NF: Were you at least especially thorough in reading about music and movies?

MG: Yeah, they’ve always been an interest of mine. As far as reading about movies and music and “paying attention” to criticism – that’s something that really only started to happen for me after graduating from college. It was a sort of education after my education, because at school I did feel a kind of awakening, but at the same time, it was just reading what was handed to you. The Film department had a certain bent, and you’re very much watching and thinking and reading exactly what they give to you. And so I think that when I started to write in the fall of 2004, pretty much right after graduating in May, I just had a hunger to see what criticism was all about and read who the people are who do this really well. That first year for me was totally exciting, I was always thinking to myself “Whoa, this person is so big and I’m so persuaded by their view of things.”

NF: Are you finding that writing is deepening your enjoyment, or appreciation of the art? Or is it just another way to take it all in?

MG: Well, writing about film and music feel very different for me in the sense that the music stuff just feels like a natural growth – it’s a very local thing for me. I’m usually thinking and writing about the music that’s in front of me, or that my friends are really enthusiastic about. And I just write in a very expressive way about music and about taste.

Film criticism feels a bit more serious to me, I guess that’s more where I feel the “deepening” or the “broadening,” but I don’t know exactly how to put it into words. If I were to look back on the last few years, it’s a combination of first learning how to write by doing it, how to be writing in this format which is pretty narrow – I’m usually writing between 600 and 1500 words – and learning what you can do with that, and what the goals are with writing about films and the different ways you can write about and react to them.

The other part of it is constantly feeling like I’m just catching up – there’s all these directors and movements about which I might know a few things, but I’ve only been able to see one or two of their films. So much of this job is still about “Before I start shooting my mouth off about Jacques Rivette, I better actually try to see a few of his movies.” When you’re reading one of those great critics in Film Comment or something else, you realize these people are 55 years old and they’ve spent 30 years watching films really diligently. And you tell yourself that you have a lot of work to do to be able to develop that voice.

NF: Are there some specific writers you can think of you feel like you’re learning from?

MG: Yeah! At the Guardian, I feel so fortunate to have landed there and to have a relationship with Johnny Right Huston – he’s the Arts Editor and the Film Editor. With him, I feel like my taste has been shaped so much by where he’s steered me. It is getting increasingly rare for independent papers to have an actual staff, even if it’s really small – which it is at the Guardian – and to have these people steering the content. The other main paper in San Francisco is the SF Weekly, and it gets some of the syndicated reviews from the Village Voice, which then run everywhere else. So it’s just nice to feel this local vibe.

There are definitely a lot of different critics I respond to, critics who I’ve tried to go back to – I especially respond to Manny Farber, and to Andrew Sarris. Among working critics, especially in Film Comment, whenever Kent Jones or Amy Taubin write something, I feel like I’m always so easily wooed by what they have to say. And there are critics who I read whose erudition boggles my mind, if I’m reading Jonathan Rosenbaum or the really great Australian critic Adrian Martin, I feel like they’re doing a totally different thing than I am. I feel like I’m the hack saxophone player watching John Coltrane play. And, then there are other critics who I think are great for different reasons, like J Hoberman for the Voice or Manohla Dargis for the New York Times. Their stuff is more hopeful to me because I can more easily imagine myself writing what they're writing – I think part of it is that they’re writing for a more general audience than some of the more esoteric writers.

NF: I’ve always been curious about the experience of watching foreign films – to a certain extent, they feel like a critic’s domain and I’m curious if you see a sort of disconnect between the people doing very specific writing – like at Film Comment, where they’re maybe not catering to a specific audience, but they’re almost guiding it – as oppose to the New York Times, which can really appeal to a more general audience.

MG: There’s a couple of different parts to that. I think that both certainly have their place in terms of writing for the more general audience and writing for the coterie. And I think that part of my time doing this is sort of – and this is very much an ongoing process – is finding out what I’m good at or what it is I should be applying myself toward, and where my energies are best directed to. Not only is it ongoing, but I feel that thinking about it in that way is a very new thing to me because it’s taken a long time for me to even start thinking of myself as a critic, even though that’s what I’ve been doing. It’s such a tenuous lifestyle, it’s just taken a long time for me to be comfortable with what I do and the fact that I’ve been doing it for a while and I’ll continue doing it for a while and I can now think about how I want to be as a critic. So that’s definitely one thing.

And it’s interesting what you say about foreign films because I think there is implicitly in any film critic, and in a lot of more serious music criticism, there is this element of didacticism in a critic’s voice, or I guess in a more positive way, an instructive type of voice that is taking on this role. It’s like “Okay, here’s this thing, which is great, but because of various realities of distribution and capitalism, it’s not going to get pushed, so here it’s my role to really push this.” And I think that generally it is a service, although sometimes it can come off as being heavy-handed. The way any American critic is going to be writing about foreign films is going to be inherently problematic. The more and more you get into this stuff – especially if you’re getting into this more selective class of films or music or books – you’re necessarily crossing borders.

NF: You talk about the different ways to be a critic, but how do you see the role of the critic in our culture?

MG: Actually, one thing I did in preparation for your calling, I remembered this great quote I found some time last year. I’m paraphrasing it, it’s something that the French critic Serge Daney said: “A critic should either know something or love something. Or even better, know how to share this love with the general public.” I think that certainly appeals to me, especially because I naturally gravitate to what I guess you could call “affectionate criticism.” I’m usually drawn to writing about something because I’m interested in it and to some extent I like it, and that’s what drives me and that's what I want to express in my pieces. I never feel the urge to lay the smackdown on something that I’m writing about in feature-length. It could be fun to do in some little blurb on some schlocky movie, but not generally.

NF: That was definitely something that I appreciated when I was reading your pieces. Do you feel like you can account for why so many critics can be so negative?

MG: For one thing, I think some people are just good at it. Someone like Pauline Kael is an amazing stylist who can deliver this debilitating critique of a film. On the other side of her there’s someone like Susan Sontag who is so very, very intelligent, and her intelligence just towers over anything that she looks at. I think there are just certain critical voices that lend themselves to that kind of writing.

Accounting for my position, I think that part of it is certainly just a product of my greenness, my inexperience, and my nervousness to be too deliberate about something that I’m having a mixed reaction to. Also, I don’t have a weekly column or anything like that at the Guardian. If I did, I might see myself having more space to go after something.

So I think part of it is that I don’t get to step up to the plate every day, so when I do write, I want to spend time on something I’m drawn to. There’ve been certain things where I think I tried to register something’s being somewhat disappointing or in consideration of what came before it, its being problematic – but usually I try to integrate it into a pros and cons type picture, so it’s never a leveling critique. One day, I’d love to be able to lay the smackdown on something. I think of Susan Sontag’s essay on Diane Arbus, which I read not that long ago, and it’s so devastating and so overpowering. I just I can’t look at this woman’s photographs again, Sontag really delivers the death-knell.

NF: What’s your relationship with your editors? Do you feel you can articulate some of the things they’ve taught you?

MG: I think the things I’ve gotten the most from them haven’t been so much a product of intensive editing so much as direction in terms of “you should see this” or “you should read this” or “you should think about this.” Again, it speaks to my greenness and how much I have to catch up on. It’s a really good, broadening thing. When I’m Not There was coming out, I was talking to Johnny Ray about Todd Haynes. He has so much more of a direct plug-in with that because he was there writing about Haynes when he was first coming out and he was getting to know him. In that respect, there’s just a lot of knowledge to pass on.

But then, more generally, the encouragement that I’ve gotten from Johnny and Kimberly, the music editor, on specific pieces has been fortifying. There was one instance during last spring’s San Francisco Film Festival when Johnny asked me to write about this documentary called Forever by Heddy Honigmann about Père-Lachaise Cemetary in Paris. And again, it was one of these things that’s exciting when Johnny has seen something and he says “I think your sensibility would be great for this.” But I really struggled with that movie. I don’t know what it was, it’s a really beautiful film, but I just didn’t have some normal footholds, I didn’t have a good sense of reference for it, and she’s directed a ton of other documentaries, and I hadn’t seen any of them, so I felt really at a loss in a certain way. I was e-mailing with Johnny about that, and we had a nice correspondence about certain scenes in the film that we both really liked. And then I ended up writing a much more personal reaction to the film than some of my other aesthetic, or historical, pieces. This ended up being more of an emotional reaction. Johnny was so encouraging about that. It was a great feeling to know that I could respond to something with just me and read it in this way and the writing will still have value.

NF: You were just talking about I’m Not There, and there’s something you wrote about it in your piece on biopics, you said “It is epigrammatic, rather than evocative, and made to be written about.” How do you feel about films that need to be sussed out verbally, as oppose to more visceral ones?

MG: I think that’s a really important distinction and certainly a hard thing to make categorical judgments about. We don’t have to decide whether we want the slow and lyrical movie where it almost feels like a betrayal to put into words because it’s so much about the experience of the film, versus the movie that feels like a dissertation, that’s just built out of reference and is there to be written about. I mean, those films challenge me as they’re meant to be challenging, and they put me a little off-guard, which again, they’re designed to. Just think about Godard’s movies and how you’re playing this game with it, you know, responding to it with all this interpretation but then the film is doubling back on you. With the I’m Not There piece, I gave Todd Haynes the benefit of the doubt just because I think his motivation for making that was totally sound and it was a really interesting project, although at a more personal level, I was somewhat disappointed by that movie because I didn’t feel like there was quite enough “soul” in it.

NF: Along those lines, has having to write about music and movies gotten at all difficult when, for example, you’re trying to engage with something that has, as you said, “soul?”

MG: Yeah, absolutely. I think there are situations in which I feel myself pushing up against and experiencing my limits as a writer. And again, I am relatively new to this kind of expository writing, you know. When there’s something that has this “soul,” sometimes all I can do is take a deep breath. It’s always tricky to be putting something into words in this way, especially with music, which is one of these things that can be so silly. Sometimes you’re reading something about My Bloody Valentine and you think “how many different ways can I say ‘ethereal’?” If I’m ever feeling a little adrift in my writing, I try to remind myself that I’m really trying to give a person a sense of this work. I don’t need to wrap it up or totally explicate it, or even solve it.

NF: Do you feel like the stuff that we’re saying needs to be written about is any more or less valid? Do you see anything wrong with making a movie like that?

MG: No, not inherently. The best kinds of movies, I suppose, are really plugging in to their moment in culture and in politics and in history, and they let loose with this charge of what all the different, often fractured, strands of thought are at that particular moment in time. Some of the movies of Godard’s that I like best do actually have this cathartic quality for me, so that it feels like something has been thought over and worked out in some way, so I think it can be a necessary thing.

NF: Incidentally, I was recently reading something Harold Bloom wrote where he basically said he felt like looking at art through any lens other than a purely aesthetic one cheapens that work.

MG: Well, I naturally tend towards the aesthetic myself, that’s kind of just my taste, but…I’m not ready to argue the point with Harold Bloom. I do think it’s kind of silly in a way to be contending that the aesthetic doesn’t have shadings of other, political components. I guess he writes mostly about literature and poetry, which, since there is such a definite author, it’s easier to essentialize the aesthetic and the voice. Whereas, working with something like film or often with popular music, it’s a much messier picture.

NF: What was your reaction to that whole Sascha Frere-Jones article about indie rock needing to be “blacker?”

MG: (Laughs) It was…interesting…. I mean, I don’t quite get him in general. It feels like he has this amazing post at the New Yorker, but it’s confusing why it’s him. To me, the New Yorker is such a strange thing. I get it, and I love it, but for film and music criticism, it’s a bit of a strange beast. It often feels patronizing to me. I thought that he was certainly addressing something that we’re all aware of and that is very much present and I think is good to be talked about in this way because this is such a white-dominated subculture he’s talking about. Being in California these few years, it’s been a treat for me to dig in to what’s often called “freak-folk,” which is something I really enjoy for the most part, but at the same time, quickly gets ridiculous. I think that when I look back on this time it’ll be something I see as a trend that I really engaged with. So I sort of sympathize with where he was coming from – although I don’t know if I agree with what he said in this particular sense.

Maybe this is wishful thinking on my part, but generally it seems like “indie rock” is becoming a less and less useful designator. I think there’s a more interesting argument to be made with someone like the Talking Heads where you’re dealing with artists who contradict Jones’s premise. I think there’s a richer argument to be thinking about – to what extent are David Byrne and Brian Eno appropriating this music? You can acknowledge why something is important and at the same time try to get your hands dirty with what’s going on with it. Something else that I’m thinking now that struck me about that article is that it doesn’t ring true with my experience – and that’s part of my problem with the laziness of the “indie rock” tag – it sort of presupposes that there’s this small group of bands that’s the be-all, end-all for a lot of listeners. In my maybe skewed reality, all of my friends had momentous experiences with Pavement and all the other “canons” of indie rock, while still having hugely eclectic tastes. I could look at their iPods, and it’ll have the bands that Sascha Frere-Jones is talking about – the Pavements and Modest Mouses – but it’ll also have the Anthology of American Folk Music and the Goodbye Babylon set, and a Sly Stone album. It doesn’t ring true to me that there’s this group of people that’s cutting itself off from other kinds of music.

NF: Well let’s talk about what you mentioned in your e-mail earlier, the experience of writing about friends and their art.

MG: That’s so…big! That’s a different thing for me.

Frank and Dave, who work together as Ribbons, had a gallery opening last week showcasing some of their work. My essay looked at their collaboration, specifically their collaboration as Ribbons for the last couple of years, and then it looked at the specifics of this show which involved a lot of their individual contributions, whereas before the whole Ribbons entity was their joint thing to put on their different concerts to gather designs and put on shows. But this was something different – they were having this show that wasn’t so much a retrospective of what they’ve done so much as a celebration of the spirit of it, something to which they were both contributing their individual art pieces.

This funny thing occurred to me while I was writing that piece – the other big writing project that I had going on at that moment was something about Jandek, who’s a famously obscure, recluse musician. So here’s this piece for the Guardian and the nature of it is that you really can’t know anything about the author. You can speculate and look for different ways to get into the work. Ribbons was the total opposite, something I’m so intimate with. I mean, I live with Dave! So for me the challenge of that was how to strike some balance between having some level of critical distance to try to express something more objective about what it is I think they’re doing, and it was also important for me to be taking them seriously as artists. I think that’s something that’s often the case when working with friends or people you’re close to is that you’re always keeping tabs on a person and you know what it is that they’re up to and you know their style and stuff like that, but it’s kind of bracing to them to take a whole day to really really talk about where you’re coming from right now and what is this you’re creating. It was definitely a necessary thing to get going on the essay. I was absolutely drawing on my special experience and knowledge with them and using that to give a more intimate portrait, but it was a challenge, for sure.

NF: I guess last question is do you have a shortlist of movies and/or albums that have been criminally underrated over the years?

MG: Do you know Entrance? I feel like my experience with music is so local. I’ve had the opportunity to see him over the past few months – I think his last album is so good. Everything I read about him – it seems like people aren’t taking him seriously, a lot of people write him off as being this retro thing. Right now I feel like he’s operating on a totally different level. He’s someone I’ve totally been pulling for. I’ve also been really smitten with this songwriter Michael Hurley for the last year or two – that’s been another thing where I’ve had the chance to see him a couple of times and he’s totally a West Coast dude. He’s one of these people who has a really small base of people who admire him, but it’s one of those things where to know is to love him. He just has so many great albums and so many great songs, you wonder why this dude is not recognized in a broader way. It’s always good to have your stock of undervalued treasures.

NF: Are you making music these days?

MG: I’m not (laughs). My relationship to making music is kind of strange, or I guess estranged, right now. I was still doing it the first year I came out here. I don’t’ know if it’s right that writing has supplanted my music…that’s sort of the corollary, but I’m not sure I buy it. There’s part of me that still feels like I’m on vacation from doing music. It’s a strange little ghost around me. Talking so much to Ribbons about their processes, it was really helpful for me to reflect and recognize that “oh, these are some of the same things that I am doing, just in a different form, even if it’s a kind of secondary creation, since I’m jumping off of someone else’s work.” But in terms of the process and the commitment to it, it does feel artistic to me.

NF: Does that mean that Stop Plate Tectonics was kind of the last project you worked on?

MG: Yeah. Actually, the first year I lived out in California was such a different year for me because it was before a lot of my friends lived out here. So that whole year, in terms of music, I was just messing around on my own, never getting too deep into something. When Dave moved out here, it was such a treat – we were excited to be around each other and we played music together for a lot of that second year. We played together as Brothers because we were getting a lot of people thinking we were brothers. It was just this really casual, informal thing. We just each had a few songs and were just playing guitar together. I think because it was so casual, we both started to naturally gravitate to other things – Dave to his artwork and me to my writing. It was a natural-feeling thing to me because it was at a moment when I felt like music was something I enjoyed doing, but it wasn’t something that was firing me up. But there’s still a part of me that has my fingers crossed for some reawakening.





Stop Plate Tectonics - Spring Forward Fall Back.mp3