The Whining Stranger's Song of the Day

31 May 2006


"Going Back to Miami" by the Blues Brothers (from the album Made in America, 1980)

For Tayshaun Prince.
For 29 points.
For one more day of breathing easy with those crazy "If it ain't rough, it ain't right" Detroit Pistons.

Back to Miami for Game 6.
Let's get 'em.

The Whining Stranger on Books and Reading

What to read, what to read?



On the heels of the other day's post about all-time great summer reads, I am finding myself undecided about what this summer's big book should be. I confess I'm not a huge fan of some of the subgenres of big novels--e.g. 18th century and Victorian English novels--so inevitably my consideration of big books draws out of the postmodern American (e.g. Underworld) or world classics (e.g. Ulysses or One Hundred Years of Solitude) vategories.

I am trying to decide between some of the following for this summer's big read, and am thinking that I'll even put this up as a poll on the sidebar to the right, so that any well-meaning, bossy booklover, or just bored blog-browser, can chip in his/her two cents:

Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon [yes, all these years later, I still--like Norman Mailer--haven't gotten past the damned bananas]
Divine Days by Leon Forrest [this one's a monster at 1400 pages]
Swann's Way by Marcel Proust

Any other suggestions?

Proustian Years in Review

Part 2: 1984



Tonight, in a moment of video store panic, looking for some serial television narrative to consume on DVD, put finding no Curb Your Enthusiasm to be had in the store, the WS cracked and rented Season 1 of Miami Vice. Predictably, the show's uber-cool and wet-street neo-noir didn't hold up well from what I remembered watching as a mesmerized ten year old. Don Johnson's pastel suits look now, well, about as chic as a pastel suit. (Worse than Don's outmoded sartorial style is his ridiculous acting. Crockett, we're told, is a former college football star, and accordingly, DJ delivers every line like a quarterback shouting an audible with the crowd baying all around him...) Revisiting this piece of crime-kitsch from my youth did send me deep into the nostalgia bank again. And so, it's time for another Proustian Year in Review.

For me, 1984 was:

• A Detroit Tigers t-shirt (with the old logo), that featured the slogan "Bless You Boys" on it. This slogan was, of course, the catch phrase from their World Series championship run that season.
• A paperback copy of an Enid Blyton book that a friend brought back from a trip to England, and which I read on the train, coming back from visiting family friends out of town with my mother and my sister.
• Comic books bought on Saturday afternoons from the skeezy guy who ran a comics and magazine stall at the flea market in the neighborhood.
• Olympic medals cut out of poster board, which my friends awarded ourselves for various athletic events in our own neighborhood Olympics in the heat of summer. (I won more silver than anything else.)
• A copy of Michael Jackson's Thriller on vinyl, naturally.
• Seeing Ghostbusters at a multiplex on the other side of town, and enjoying the long bus ride (sans parental supervision) each way.

And what, may I ask, was 1984 for you?

The Whining Stranger's Big List of Ultimate Fetish Objects and Talismans

Part 2: The Moleskine Notebook



Want to feel like Hemingway ca. 1925? Need a notebook that's chic and fits in the pocket of your blazer, and even has a snazzy little pouch inside its cover for receipts or ticket stubs? This is it. The classic. Available with ruled pages or graph paper pages or blank pages for sketching.

I have one that I use to take notes when I go to art galleries. This notebook is so perfect I was afraid to write in it at first, for fear my penmanship wouldn't match its exquisite charm.

The Whining Stranger's Song of the Day

30 May 2006



"Egg Man" by The Beastie Boys (from the album, Paul's Boutique, 1989)

An old school hip hop jam with a moral, complete with machine-gun rhymin' ("Sam I am / Down with the program / Green Eggs and Ham / Yosemite Sam") and a sample to die for ("Pusherman" by Curtis Mayfield), "Egg Man" is a nice relief from the misery of last night's Pistons' meltdown and the grueling heat of a late May day.

The Whining Stranger's Song of the Day

29 May 2006



"Fujiyama Mama" by Wanda Jackson (from the album, Rockin' With Wanda, 1958)

Lest we get too sentimental and patriotic this Memorial Day, and begin to think that those of us here in the Home of the Brave have always sat comfortably on the right side of the moral fence, go ahead and have a listen to this hard-swingin' bit of Americana from the late 1950s. Ostensibly just a bit of hell-hath-no-fury-like-a-rockabilly-woman posturing, Jackson's song makes good fun with the carnage of Hiroshima and Nagasaki from the middle of the previous decade. O, the compassion when Wanda compares her hard-lovin', take-no-prisoners bad self with the atom bomb's awesome might:

I've been to Nagasaki, Hiroshima too!
The things I did to them, baby, I can do to you.

Whoa.

Still, the tune does have a good beat, you can dance to it, and it features at least one inspired rhyme (my favorite is "sake" with "terbaccy").

But while you're celebrating your freedom, and paying tribute to those who've given their lives (and are still giving their lives) to support various key interests here in the Land of the Free, don't forget to think critically about that history as well.

Even with a rockabilly beat, it ain't always pretty.

The Whining Stranger's Song of the Day

28 May 2006



"Junk" by Paul McCartney (from the album, McCartney, 1970)

A contrast to the bombast of yesterday's Springsteen number, this is one of those silky McCartney slow songs that were made to be played by candlelight late in the evening, when you've opened that second bottle of wine. It's from his first solo album, recorded in a home studio around the chaos of the Beatles' break-up. A simple melody, an aching lyric about the material leftovers of lives lost and relationships past, "Junk" is one of McCartney's finest stripped-down melodies. It ranks, for me, alongside "Blackbird" and "Mother Nature's Son" and "Yesterday" as one of his loveliest introspective songs.

The Whining Stranger's Pantheon of Great Heroes and Key Influences

Part 3: Alan Trammell (1958- )



The Tigers' hot start to the season got me thinking that it was time to present this inevitable hero from the pantheon. I have a minor shrine to the man in my home, with an autographed 8x10, a replica jersey, Sports Illustrated back issues with Trammell on the cover, a slew of his baseball cards, and even two Trammell action figures!

Here's why he's so enshrined:

He batted .300 or better in seven different seasons.
He was a six-time American League All-Star.
He won the Gold Glove at shortstop four different times.
He was awarded the World Series MVP award in 1984, when the Tigers won their only championship of my lifetime.
He should have won the regular season MVP award when he carried the Tigers over the Blue Jays in the American League East pennant race. (If you want my full, vitriolic tirade about the absolute cosmic wrongness of George Bell's winning the award that year, email me and I'll fill you in...)

And he hit a bottom-of-the-ninth grand slam home run to beat the Yankees at a game I attended with my father, when I was 14 years old.
And he was always a gentleman, graceful and kind on and off the field.

Why is this man not in the baseball Hall of Fame?

The Whining Stranger on Books and Reading

A Short List of Some of the All-Time Great Summer Reads



Memorial Day weekend is, of course, when North Americans have to start hearing ad nauseum about the summer movie season. This is when Hollywood first starts firing their big guns and trying to ply us with the supposed-to-be-big-hits-of-the-season. But let's talk about summer reading. With the temperatures rising, with longer days, also comes--hopefully--lots of lazy reading time. I've started the summer reading season this time around with Yann Martel's Life of Pi, so that I can at last relinquish my status as the-last-literate-adult-in-North-America-who-has-not-yet-read-Life-of-Pi.

But here are some memorable summer reads from my near and distant past:

1. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. [read over multiple summers]

This, in my mind, is the ultimate summer read. It's short, it's emotionally gripping, it's beautifully written, and it takes place over one fateful summer in the mid-1920s. The past few years my partner and I have taken to reading it aloud with mint juleps around the Summer Solstice. (The idea started because we wanted a way to ensure that we--unlike Daisy Buchanan in the novel--wouldn't miss the longest day of the year.) We're a month off from revisiting this one together for the fourth year in a row, but I'm already keyed up. The novel, after all, does have the best last page of any novel I've ever read.

2. The Mysteries of Pittsburgh by Michael Chabon [read in summer 1991, age 17]

A coming-of-age novel that takes place during summer, Chabon's first novel is stylistically indebted to Fitzgerald and Salinger in its verbal dynamics and world-weary young characters. There are memorable characters; there are funny set pieces; there's even some sex. I remember reading this one over a couple days back in the summer following my first year of undergrad study, in the air conditioning, eating turkey sandwiches and with baseball on the radio in the background.

3. Ulysses by James Joyce [read in summer 2000, age 26]

In June of 2000, while deep in the writing of my PhD dissertation, I boldly proclaimed that I was going to make that year the Summer of Reading Famous Big Novels. I initally planned to do Ulysses and Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow back to back but the Joyce wore me down, and I had to settle for the Summer of Reading One Famous Big Novel. (How's that for the hubris of youth, huh?) I read this book mostly in a coffee shop around the corner from my apartment, on afternoon breaks from dissertation-writing. I decided early on that I wouldn't try to understand every allusion in the book, and instead just immerse myself in the feel of the style. Six weeks of coffee breaks later, I had conquered one of the all-time heavyweights. It was well worth it.

4. The Shining by Stephen King [read in summer 1987, age 13]

I bought this one at the supermarket while accompanying my mom on the week's grocery trip and read much of it in the backseat of my dad's Thunderbird on a family road trip. When we checked into the Holiday Inn, I imagined it was the Overlook. I finished the book on the drive back home, listening to "Here Comes the Sun" by The Beatles on my Walkman, surprisingly touched by the emotional quality of the book's final scene.

5. The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem [read in summer 2005, age 31]

I still miss the book, nearly a year after I finished reading it. Rarely has a book been so emotionally in touch with my own memory: the bookish main character; the recreation of adolescent life in the city in summer; the fond descriptions of African American music; the difficult coming to awareness about how resolutely messed up the world can be; and the flights (both real and symbolic) of escape that help us to cope with that awareness. Maybe the most satisfying novel I've read in the past five years.

And you, reader, what are some of your all-time great summer reads?

Musings

Too Darn Hot!



Now, I know nothing is more mundane than a blog post about the weather, but I do have to vent briefly. Another day over 90 degrees today, and the WS is feeling drained and cranky. I like warm weather to a certain degree--well, I like tropical cocktails and baseball--but once the mercury climbs above 80, I confess I get ornery.

I think I will always choose a crisp autumn day or a snowy winter morning over a smoking summer afternoon, but just to think aloud and complicate my preference, I decided to make a summer versus winter list.

So, which is really better?

Winter = boots; Summer = flip flops.
Winter = hockey; Summer = baseball.
Winter = cocoa; Summer = iced tea.
Winter = argyle sweaters; Summer = Lacoste polos.
Winter = rosy cheeks; Summer = sunburned cheeks.
Winter = frozen eyelashes; Summer = perspiration.
Winter = holiday turkey dinners; Summer = grilling.
Winter = Ray Charles and Betty Carter singing, "Baby, It's Cold Outside"; Summer = Martha and the Vandellas singing, "Dancing in the Streets"
Winter = Reading with a blanket over me; Summer = reading in the backyard.
Winter = Starting the car and letting it warm up before I can drive; Summer = cruising with the windows down.

Hm, it's not so obvious a preference when I lay it out like that.

The Whining Stranger on Sport

A Mordant Post-Script to This Evening's Athletic Contest

As if it weren't bad enough that the Pistons fell apart in the fourth quarter, and dropped Game 3 of the conference finals to Miami tonight--

Jimmy Buffett was in attendance!

Curses!

The Whining Stranger's Song of the Day

27 May 2006



"Glory Days" by Bruce Springsteen (from the album, Born in the U.S.A., 1984)

It's Memorial Day weekend in the You Ess of Eh, readers, and what better way to kick off the holiday festivities than with a loud, sing-a-long rock number that makes you want to put your hands together and clap like you're bombed on Budweiser listening to a cover band at a county fair. I heard this number in Big Lots yesterday, when I was indulging in one of the great national pasttimes--i.e. looking for useless crap to buy on the cheap--and I found myself bobbing my head, singing along under my breath, and thinking, "Damn, right. Bruuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuce!"

This song offers the best of all the Whining Stranger's aesthetic preferences: pop musical earnestness (the high point of which is when the Boss, on the out-chorus shouts, "Come on now. Keep it rockin,' boys," as though he and the E-Street band are doing a special appearance at a tailgate party in your driveway); and a disaffected lyric about how, sadly, the good things never last. And if that weren't enough to make my heart swell with rock-and-roll love, recall that Bruce wears a Detroit Tigers cap in the song's video. (Which reminds me, it's Memorial Fuggin' Day weekend and the Tigers have the best record in baseball! Woo-hoo!)

So, go on. Live it up. Skip the X-Men movie. Stay home. Put the Bud on ice. Pull your speakers out into the backyard. Let the Springsteen blare. And don't forget to watch the Pistons open up a can of whoopass (I know, I know, I am so 2001) on the Miami Heat tonight.

God Bless America. And less than 1000 days now till Hillary's in office.

The Whining Stranger on Film

Celluloid Professors



The other night, my partner and I went to the movies to see the enjoyable Art School Confidential, a winning satire based on the work of comic artist Daniel Clowes. Many of the jokes that inspired the biggest belly laughs for me were those that poked fun at the faculty at the film's fictional art college. John Malkovich, for instance, offers a hilarious performance as the pretentious windbag who has an overstated appreciation for his own paintings, a Donald Judd-esque minimalist series of triangles on monochromatic canvasses. But after I stopped laughing at the absurdity of the film's self-obsessed professors, I started to fret about the perennially unflattering representation of professors I always see on film. Well, art and humanities professors anyway. Mathematicians and research scientists get a semi-flattering light shone on them; they're allowed to be geniuses, if not recurringly schizophrenic. (Think Russell Crowe in A Beautiful Mind, or Anthony Hopkins in Proof.)

But literature professors, like myself, onscreen? Oh, they're a pathetic bunch. Literature professors in movies are longwinded, lecherous, and egotistical. They teach because they're failed writers. They parade foppishly through the ivy-covered walls of the mise-en-scene with their pipes and their corduroy sportsjackets and their ill-tended beards. Their main narrative function is to provide a momentary obstacle for younger, obviously more talented, and better looking characters. Think Donald Sutherland in Animal House, or Jeff Daniels (pictured above) in The Squid and the Whale, or Michael Douglas in Wonder Boys. The main message about these characters seems to be: "Get out of the way, old man. You didn't write The Great American Novel and now you chase skirts, and/or drink yourself to death, and/or bust the backs of promising students who exacerbate your own self-loathing."

Sheesh.

I mean, those characters do make me laugh uproariously, until I remember:

I am a college literature professor. My favorite sportsjacket is corduroy (sans elbow patches, thankfully, but I do wear it with jeans, like Jeff Daniels). I smoke a pipe (well, it started as a joke, but I like the taste, and I only smoke it in private, I swear!). I write fiction but haven't published much of it. And, God save me, since classes ended for the semester, I stopped shaving and find myself sporting a beard.

Uh oh.

So, what do you say, Hollywood producers? Could you give me a flattering representation of a literature professor so I don't have to feel so anxious about progressively embodying (hell, I'll admit candidly I even court the image to some degree) your oh-so-unflattering celluloid cliches?

The Whining Stranger's Song of the Day

26 May 2006



"The Streetbeater (Sanford and Son Theme)" by Quincy Jones (from the album You've Got It Bad, Girl, 1973)

This track brings me as much pure visceral joy as a song not performed by Louis Armstrong is capable of. The pulse of the tune struts with attitude. It's an instrumental that offers a complex, layered melange of textures (harmonica, saxes, bottom-heavy bass). It's got the greasiest greasy Hammond organ sound this side of Charles Earland. It's got a boss cowbell part even!

This tune makes you want to dance. It is inextricably attached, for me, to the image of Fred and Lamont pulling up in the driveway, in that ol' streetbeatin' pick-up truck--a vision I saw so many late-nights, when I was an insomniac teenager addicted to the UHF channels on my black-and-white TV.

If you don't dig this one, I got just one thing to say, in the best Redd Foxx spirit: "You just a big ol' reg-uh-ler dummy, dummy!"

[Cue audience laughter and applause.]

The Whining Stranger on Music

Wasting Away in Mediocre-ville



Note: If you are a fan of singer-songwriter [sic] Jimmy Buffett, you probably don't want to read this post.

So, this morning, the Whining Stranger had the pleasure of watching a Today Show summer concert by that balladeer of the resort package, that raconteur of the faux Caribbean, the Cheeseburger in Paradise himself--Jimmy Buffett. Wow. And you thought the Rolling Stones were the quintessence of pop-music-corporate-whoredom! Jimmy Buffett has his own line of tequila. Jimmy Buffett has books that he's "written" [when they release handwritten manuscripts to the public, I'll let my incredulity subside] about life in Margaritaville. Jimmy Buffett has a chain of restaurants. Jimmy Buffett is not so much a singer as a marketing phenomenon. He is the ultimate salve for boring cubicle-dwellers (by which I mean those people who work in cubicles and think, "Yeah, baby, this is the life") and middle-aged-guys-in-suits who like to think they still got it, that they're still wild and crazy for having a drink before noon or for padding around in bare feet on a weekday. He is the soundtrack of your travel agent-devised tropical vacation. He provides the music for exploiting warm but poor nations. He epitomizes that beachy lifestyle because he uses steel drums in his tunes. Heads up, Peter Tosh. Jimmy Buffett is the poet laureate of warmer latitudes.

Not.

Sorry to be negative, but the shamelessness of his Let's-get-crazy-in-the-surf-I-don't-work-I'm-drunk-by-nine-a.m.-and-I-don't-care-in-a-Hawaiian-shirt nonsense burns me up. The man is a farce. Here's maragarita salt in your eye, Buffett.

And while I'm ranting, I think I am going to send the local weather girl--the one Al Roker throws to periodically to tell me what the temperature's like in my neck of the woods--money for elocution lessons. I haven't understood a thing she's said in two years. But she seems to have an expensive haircut, which is, I imagine, how she keeps the job.

The Whining Stranger's Song of The Day

25 May 2006



"Head Over Heels" by The Go-Gos (from the album Talk Show, 1984)

The Whining Stranger confesses, under the shroud of anonymity, that he has a real weakness for tight, chipper pop tunes performed with big bouncy beats and adolescent earnestness. It's the earnestness that makes it redeemable. So, pre-fabricated pop groups put together by modelling agencies and quasi-pederastic slovenly male record producers are bad, but "Hey-kids-let's-start-a-band-and-maybe-we'll-make-it-big" groups in the Josie-and-the-Pussycats vein, composed of bright-eyed kids with guitars who emerge from the basements of nuclear family homes or the school dances of forgotten towns, are A-OK with me. Well, usually.

In any case, I have a soft spot for the Go-Gos. Especially for pre-makeover Belinda Carlisle, with her chubby cheeks and her totally-80s onstage hip-shakin'. (And while I'm being candid, The Go-Gos in their skivvies image that graced the cover of Rolling Stone in, what was it, 1982? left an erotic imprint on my elementary schoolboy's psyche that remains unrivalled by few images this side of Catherine Deneuve in Belle du Jour...) Today's song of the day, "Head Over Heels" is actually late period Go-Gos, from their third album, Talk Show, after the big splash of Beauty and the Beat and their sophomore follow-up, Vacation. Even though it's not from the post-punkish-new-wave golden age of the Go-Gos' existence, it's still a catchy tune. Perfect for summer car rides with the window down or doing the mashed potato in the privacy of your own living room when you need a little endorphin boost.

And yes, it is that song you hear on that woman's hair product commercial in wide circulation on the tube right now.

That's what reminded me.

Proustian Years in Review

Part 1: 1994



Suffering the other night through Gus Van Sant's interminable film, Last Days--a flick that reimagines the final march to suicide by a Kurt Cobainish depressive rock star, and a movie so slow-moving that even the usually patient WS had to watch it, in part, on fast-forward--I found myself indulging in that old memory game, "Where were you when...," applied this time to Kurt Cobain's famous moment of celebrity seppuku in early April of 1994. I can remember exactly where I was, lying on the couch in my mother's living room, twenty years old, and suddenly stunned by a report of the story on ABC's World News Tonight. But from there, the memory prompt took me on a broader return to 1994, and made me meditate on the key minutiae and tangible details (a la Proust's madeleines) that defined the year for me.

So, indulge me, when I tell you that for me 1994 was:

• A blue hardcover copy of Russell Noyes's English Romantic Poetry and Prose, from which I read Keats's letters for an undergradate paper.
• Crusty garlic rolls from an Italian bakery on the south side of town that a friend and I made a special trip to fetch for lunch one afternoon.
• Keith Jarrett's At the Deer Head Inn, listened to on low volume while sleeping on the couch in the air-conditioned cool of my mother's basement on the hottest days of summer.
• Rickard's Red beer, consumed by the pitcher.
• A navy blue wool cardigan sweater vest that I wore till it pretty much fell apart. And a navy blue sweatshirt with the name of my undergrad school across the chest that shrunk way too much after the first washing.
• John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, which I finished reading one day in late summer at around 6 in the morning when--sadly--nobody was awake to talk to about it.
• Robert Altman's Pret-a-Porter, which I saw by myself at the movies a few days after Christmas, and which left me sorely disappointed.

And what, may I ask, was 1994 for you?

The Whining Stranger on Music

CDs You Should Own By Now If You Still Own CDs, Part 1



Bill Evans, Everybody Digs Bill Evans (Riverside Records, orig. released 1958)

Now I know we're in the late stages of the compact disc era. I know that the upcoming generation (punks!) regard music as a thing to be kept in small digitized fragments on a handheld device, and that the idea of the long-playing album as viable work of art seems antique.

But some of us still like CDs. (Well, yes, vinyl is better for its big cover art and its crackly warm sound, but even I've moved past that level of technological nostalgia.)

This one is a keeper, a comforting landmark from my favorite period in jazz (1945-1965). It's the first great album by one of jazz music's revered pianists. Evans was a poet, an impressionistic master, a genius of hanging chords and wide open spaces and exquisite voicings. This disc is worth having just for the famous "Peace Piece," a spontaneous improvisation that Evans performed (with the tapes running, thankfully) while trying to figure out an introduction to Leonard Bernstein's "Some Other Time," included here as a bonus track. In other places, Evans swings with the trio (filled out by his Miles Davis Sextet bandmates Paul Chambers on bass and Philly Joe Jones on drums), but it's the solo piano moments that get me. Listen to "Lucky To Be Me," which Evans presents in heartbreakingly ironic terms here, and see if you can leave unmoved.

The Whining Stranger on Politics and Current Events

Breaking News: Further Proof that Statistics (like Oilmen and Carnival Barkers) Lie



Reading the nation's news stories over my morning coffee just now, I noticed that [unnamed dusty college town] has been ranked among the state's safest driving towns in Allstate's second annual safedriving report. [You can check this out in the media releases section at Allstate.] Now, I am not completely adverse to scientific practice or resistant to statistical evidence, but-- This is a town in which it's not uncommon to hear on the local news, "And another city driver has collided with a building." Another? Sadly, folks crashing their cars into homes, office buildings, storefronts--these are not anomalous occurrences here. As well--and I know that this is merely anecdotal evidence and thus subject to all sorts of scientific suspicion--I swear to you that during the past six months, I have seen reports of drunk-driving-related car wrecks at least three of five mornings each week, in those little local news headline breaks when Katie Couric goes to refill her coffee on The Today Show. (And frustratingly, the city police must be among the most inept in the country at nabbing drunk drivers. I saw a news story one day reporting on the local PD's new strategy: to hang out at bars and test people's levels of impairment by plying them with alcohol until they couldn't walk. "Yes, this 1-Adam-12, we've figured out that you can't drive after eleven mojitos. Ten-Four." Um, guys. I know I don't have much police experience, but maybe you want to redirect your constabulatory energies a little. While you were buying college kids shots of Jagermeister, yet another shitfaced driver or two was getting behind the wheel of his Land Rover and hitting the road for some Burt Reynolds-in-a-70s-movie-esque hijinx on our city streets.)

And speaking of Land Rovers and anecdotal evidence-- Last fall, my partner and I were in a minor accident here on our city streets. We were procdeeding straight through a downtown intersection when all of the sudden a military-issue Land Rover (the kind with one of those small-fuel-efficient-car-crushing grills on the front) made an unexpected left turn from the other direction and smushed our beloved vehicle pretty soundly. When the police arrived to suss out the mayhem, the other driver--who was, sadly, for me, who tries not to believe in cliches, an uber-spoiled all-American princess type who kept blubbering, "You guys! I'm so sorry" throughout the ordeal--told the cop who was interviewing her that she failed to yield to our car because she thought that it was parked. Parked. God save us.

So, sorry if I refuse to believe this city is better than the national average in terms of driver safety.

Statistics lie. I swear it.

Musings

The Whining Stranger on Invisibility, Ethics, and Confrontation.



Last week, a friend with whom I have a vexed relationship at times really pissed me off. The short version of the off-pissing is this: he has a history of self-promotion, which is as cardinal a sin as one can commit in the Whining Stranger's book, so devoted am I to some juvenile, Holden Caufield-inspired distaste for the ostentatious. (I'll admit here candidly that while I'm perhaps not always faithful to my desire for modesty, I'm at least mostly faithful to the performance of modesty. I know, I know--splitting hairs; hypocrisy; pot calling kettle black, yada yada... As Whitman famously said, "Do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself. And keep on rocking in the free world.") In any case, what rattled my sensibilities by said friend-with-whom-I-have-sometimes-vexed-relationship is that he used, it seemed to me, the occasion of our beloved undergrad mentor's passing [see earlier post below] to insert himself quite forcefully (and shamelessly, I feared) into our mentor's life narrative in a long eulogy he posted to his blog. (And if you're trying to do a psychoanalytic reading of why said friend and I sometimes don't see eye to eye, consider the difference between posting a long eulogy in which you are central to many anecdotes on a blog that bears your real name and real photo vs. posting a brief eulogy on an anonymous blog... Anyway--)

Now, as in the past, at first I was willing to let said shameless-self-promotional offense pass with only my usual moody grumbling in private. (My poor partner has had to endure countless low-key jeremiads over the past few years in which I voice my annoyance with this friend's tendency toward self-mythologization and relentless advertising...) In fact, I might even hazard a guess that this friend doesn't even know that I think he and I have a vexed relationship at times because I have been so skittish about ever voicing my grievances and risking confrontation. (Ah, a second cardinal virtue of the WS's: avoid confrontation, even if you can feel your ulcer growing because of it...) But amidst this latest round of private grumbling, I actually considered a pseudo-aggressive (by which I mean not aggressive at all, really) act: I would take advantage of my new beloved expressive medium--this blog--and post a rant about his perennial look-at-me tendencies. This close was I, gentle reader, to composing an acerbic poison (digital) pen entry about his enormous ego, his lack of self-consciousness, his recurring acts of bad taste, etc. But suddenly I was consumed by a twinge of anxiety: what if, by some stroke of bad net-surfing luck, the friend found my blog, read the content, somehow sussed out that WS was me [Carl Hubhomeski], realized the contempt I've nursed at times over the past few years, and then, worst-case scenario, charged toward me like a rhino in full-out confrontation mode. (And trust me, this friend has a temper on him like Achilles, and a capacity for grudge-holding that would freak out even Old Testament Yahweh...) So, ever the diplomat (by which I might mean "wuss") I bailed out on the (sort of) public rant and went back to my private under-the-breath cursing.

Which begs that ol' Platonic conundrum for me. (And here, in case you're missing it, I refer to the narrative Plato offers about the ring of invisiblity and how the truly ethical person would still do the right thing even if s/he had a ring that made him/her invisible and thus offered him/her the potential to get away with all sorts of nasty shit... [This is a fantasy--oh! what I could get away with if nobody knew and I had preternatural control over my environment--that of course recurs throughout our culture, from Nicholson Baker's The Fermata to that new Adam Sandler movie I keep seeing commercials for, but really kind of looks like every other crappy Adam Sandler you've ever seen, save for Punch Drunk Love.] And this Plato business, I'll note, is one of the two things I really remember about Plato from my undergraduate days--the other being of course, the famous riff about handpuppets from The Republic. Well, and also that platonic love, as a friend explained to me insightfully one day in the fifth grade is the kind of love we see on Three's Company.) So, am I only an ethical (or diplomatic; or thoughtful; or unhurtful) person because of surveillance and public reputation? If given the complete assurance of invisiblity and anonymity, would I, at least rhetorically, tear my friend a new one without fear of consequences?

Maybe, I realized, with more than a tiny pinch of self-disgust. Maybe that's it exactly. I'm the king of the rhetorical sucker punch, but I tremble at the thought of a full-on drag-out slugest.

Sigh.

For instance, in the park at which I run, here in my neighborhood in [unnamed dusty college town, parts unknown], I often notice idiot dog-owners letting their dogs crap all over the grass and then leaving without picking up the mess and depositing it any number of trashcans around the park. This occurs--and here is where they really boil the Whining Stranger's bacon, baby--even though there are dog-crap-bag dispensers around the park to assist dogowners when they've forgotten to pack one for the road. After witnessing this egregious offense time and again, I started to think that it was up to me--responsible democratic citizen--to confront the dog-owners and set them straight about what role a public park is intended to play in a civilized society, i.e. it's not a big doggy toilet. But the solution that seemed most reasonable to me wasn't, sadly, just stopping mid-stride during my morning run and saying to these offenders, "You know, sorry to bug you, but I think it would be polite for you to clean that up so other park-users don't step in it," but instead to return to the park in the dark of night and post big signs on the dog-bag-dispensers which read something like, "Hey! You stupid fuck. Quit leaving your steaming dogshit and use one of these. What do you think they're for, dumbass?" See. I am the king of anonymous confrontation. With my sunglasses and my bandages removed, unseen by my opponent, I can be just as belligerent as Claude Rains with a touch of 'roid rage. But if I have to show my face, um, I suddenly turn into a quivering leaf, a diplomat by design, the kind of guy who tries his utmost to avoid getting sand kicked in his face. [And a sidenote, I abandoned the big-sign-approach; alas, dog shit steams there still.]

So, a resolution: don't be afraid to be assertive. If you really believe it, don't hide behind your invisiblity.

And so, next time I run, I, Carl Hubhomeski, will be watching the park with confidence, with assertive bluster. Dog-shit-leavers (and shameless self-promoters, for that matter), be warned.