Ouch. That’s Hot.

In recent issues of Wired and The Economist, the same quote was trotted out by both ‘zines to sum up a new debate on what to do with our financial institutions.  The quote was dispensed by future Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis in 1913 regarding his take on the economy a hundred years ago:  “Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants.  Electric lights the most efficient policemen.”  In other words, if you expose the back-room mechanisms by which big deals are struck, the temptation to lie, cheat, and steal will be gone.

It became a maxim under FDR and has continued to inform our thinking right through the post-Enron, Sarbanes-Oxley present.  However, as the headlines of the last year can tell you, our banks and businesses aren’t doing any better at avoiding disaster.

So what’s the solution?  Radical Transparency!  We need to see all of the numbers all of the time!  Wired takes this a little leap further with an eye-lens focused through the filter of the Open-Source movement:  Make the numbers such that anyone can understand and we will all become citizen-soldiers policing the commercial world through our wise and wily investment acumen.  Surely, only the cream of the crop will rise to the top if we vote with our well-researched dollars.

The Economist wishes it were that simple, but alas, reality is pin-pricking the Hindenburg of Good Intentions.

First of all, financial data is opaque and ambiguous because it’s dense and confusing.  This is why people with PhD’s who have studied the crap their entire lives come up with very different ideas about what to do with it.  The lack of clarity in Company XYZ’s quarterly report isn’t usually a result of malicious intent, but rather the outcome of some poor sap being forced to spend a caffeine-drenched weekend in the office cranking out something that looks respectable when the data he’s dealing with is incomplete and borderline incomprehensible after being thrown together by some other department that just lost their planned getaway to the Hamptons to the need to crunch numbers that may or may not have been entered correctly by Jimmy in cubical 83.  Good luck!

Secondly, We The People are really not to be trusted to make good financial decisions.  Studies have shown that we don’t know what we’re doing.  Better, clearer information does not lead to smarter decisions.  We The People make our calls based on what’s worked in the past, how much risk we’re willing to tolerate, and our general emotional dispositions.  And we don’t like math.

Thirdly, it’s not just the Enrons of the world that are causing the trouble.  The current crisis is one of faulty (or perhaps misapplied) mathematics.  The guy that wrote the formula on how to quantify the risk inherent in a big bag of bundled mortgages thought he was doing us a favor.  And for ten years it seemed that he was.  Then things kinda went downhill.  (This is worthy of futher reading.)

However, despite the talking-headed raving and expert-opinioned ranting on the daily news, we are a long ways away from the mess of 1929 and transparency has much to do with that.  How to take this further is a tricky task, but maybe we’re beginning to see the light.

Sure, it was the devilishly charming, always youthful, and darn-right talented Justin Timberlake that made the cover, but on page 206 GQ sent it’s crack team of cultural reporters to investigate one of the last lost little shops still trying to get by selling the packaging of a product that’s now almost free.  Music, baby!

Nothing new here.  I’ve read many great profiles of many great stores in Paste, Spin, etc., all aiming for the same thing:  To breathe a little life into a much-loved corner of the music industry before the ghosts are given up for good.  But this one one rang a bell.

[However, before that bell tolls, I wonder: Has death been knocking on these doors since the start?  The walls are adorned with posters of dead stars, the smell of incense smolders in the back room.  Yeah, it's pretty much a mausoleum for that one thing which would never die:  Rock 'n Roll, man!  And I love 'em for it.]

But back to that ringing bell:  This “Kiss The Sky” place sounded familiar, and I as read on I learned that the story was taking place in Geneva, IL, just up the Fox from where I used to live.  Ah, I thought, “That’s it! But wasn’t the store in Batavia?”  Yes, the story goes on to say, it was, but they moved a town to the north a few years ago.

What I can’t remember is the exact location of the old Kiss The Sky.  It might have been the record store in the strip-mall by The Jewel where I procured the debut CD by my old landscaping buddy Mark Schiltz.  The other option is that it was the record store in downtown Batavia next to the barbershop where the gregarious owner threw open mic nights on the summer sidewalk.  It was here that I, being assured that I was possessed of extraordinary talent, would pick at such great works as “Feelin’ Groovy” and revolutionary anthems like “Old Man.”  I was rediscovering the rock canon, enjoying my summers driving along Lake Shore Drive, and generally letting my Freak Flag Fly.  The only thing I really miss was that ponytail.  It really tied the look together.

A decade or so later, it’s good to see that Kiss The Sky still stands, and that life goes on.  It was also nice of GQ to mention Magnolia Thunderpussy in the sidebar about great record stores around the country.  I might have to visit one of these places again someday, now that my son’s almost old enough to appreciate it.  He’s been sneaking my iPod when I’m not looking.  His favorite band so far is The Secret Sound Of The NSA.  Hey, the kid’s got taste!

So my sweet, straight-talking wife says that I’m an arrogant bastard.  She pointed out that every time I write up a little review of some old book or another I tend to knock it.   I really think I’m a fair-and-balanced kind of guy, but one negative comment has a way of erasing all of the rest.  As it is with the rest of life, you’ve got to be sure to sandwich the cold cuts with some fresh baked lovin’ from the oven.

Anyhow, she’s wrong (I’m totally awesome.)  Sometimes I do find something that I like the whole way through.  Top-to-bottom.  Stem-to-stern.  Or this case: wingtips-to-fedora.  Revolutionary Road is such a book.  And why do I like it so much?  Because it’s all about me!  See, I’m not really an arrogant bastard, I’m a selfish bastard.  Of this I quibble not.

But before the love-fest cranks into overdrive let me get something out of the way…

They went and made a movie of the damned thing.  Staring Leo, who looks like my old pal JR.  (Jonathan Robert Mitchell, where are you?)  And I was a little underwhelmed.  It was slow.  It plodded along, somehow failing to properly establish characters and motivations while leaving plenty of space for plaintive looks out of picture windows and numbingly redundant trips on commuter trains.  I thought they’d do the opposite — steam up the affairs, hype the small threats of violence, blow something up, add a homoerotic tryst, maybe some aliens.  But it just sort of hung there on the screen, pleasantly enough but somehow disappointing, much like the suburban lives of the Wheelers. (Ah-ha!)

(Cuing up Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate The Postive, returning to the book, delving into the text…)

I’m a suburban guy.  I say this much as one would say:  “I am a white guy”, or “I was born in Pittsburgh”, or “My mole-infested skin makes me a likely candidate for melanoma.”  It’s just the way I am.  Now, I’ve done my best to branch out and claim a spicier slice of life, but with kids and crap comes a tractor beam of responsibility that yanks you out to that balanced little patch of always-cut grass where you have space and safety within driving distance of shopping and shows, which offers a very comfortable life and a nearly bankable shot at a sensible return on your mid-sized mortgage .  It’s the Bang-For-The-Buck thing to do!  The smart money sez: “Sold!”  So I bought.

I’ve climbed out from the cradle to mount the saddle of suburbia, just like Frank sliding into the shadow of papa Earl Wheeler.  I’m back on a street that looks a lot like the street I grew up on in Stow (backyard adjoining that of Neel Kashkari.)  But there is one big difference:  South Dakota is my Paris.  My wife took the job out here.  I was lured with the promise of time, of space, of a chance to find the Thing I wanted to do.

Now, it’s not as clear-cut as that:  I have too many obligations, responsibilities, and opportunities to lounge about dreaming.  Plus there’s the fact that money must be made by me as well as she.  (The PhD is not a big-dollar guarantee, but academia is lovely place to land.)  But I do have a chance to breathe a little and leave the Paxil behind.

Of course, Paris didn’t work for the Wheelers.  There was a problem with Frank, and I fear it’s the same with me.  The trouble is that Frank didn’t have another game to play, just the promise that he’d be good at something sometime down the road. So eventually life handed him a game.  It’s called marketing, and it really wasn’t so bad.  But instead of finding peace in the present while exploring possible futures he just got grumbly.  I am guilty of the same, but things are looking up.

My apologies for the navel-gazing, but there are too many tangles tethering Frank Wheeler to Grant Wentzel.  But do stop by and join me in a toast:  To life, to the possibilities, to Paris.  Now that I’ve arrived, my book will have a different ending.

And the question is:  How great a sinner must one be, to write a compelling autobiography?

So a book like this has three things going on:  Pearls, Swine, and Slop.  It’s a pigsty of a thing, all mashed together bits of memoir and remembrance, deep-thoughts on the mundane, rounded out by random essays on random events tied together by the merest thread of a conceit:  This happened to me and it’s kinda spiritual.

That was too harsh.  My apologies.  I enjoyed traveling with you, Ms. Lamott.  Mercies, please.  So, let me break it down a little more.

Pearls:  Anne Lamott has some very winning observations here.  Some great descriptions. Shares some hard-earned lessons about forgiveness and overcoming and keeping on.   Some seriously good stuff, especially as she walks the tightrope between pissing off the Conservatives with her big “L” lefty take on all things social and political, and pissing off the Liberals with her insistence on conforming to a pretty old-school orthodox take on Christianity.  (I probably just pissed off all of you by invoking unfair stereotypes of all of you, but time is of the essence. Mercies.)

Swine (aka “The Naughty Bits” or “The Fun Parts”) : There’s a lot of good little vignettes of adolescent kicks and starting-to-rot 60s experimentation that eventually dries up and devolves into crusty old lonely alcoholism.   (To be explored, literarilly, in a moment…)

Slop:  This is the only place where I’ve really got a real beef with the book.  It’s pretty cut-n-pasty and could have used an editor a little less enraptured with Anne’s direct line to the sublime.  (But who am I to argue?  Would my private moments be any more meaningful to anyone else?  Doubtful.)

Back to the original question:  How great a sinner must you be to write a compelling autobiography?

Seems they come in three types:  There’s the memoirs about your troubles.  Then there’s the self-gloat about your accomplishments.  And finally the best of both worlds: Troubles overcome, while you achieved anyway.

I suppose that Anne hits number three with her balance of brain cells lost vs. books published.  But is it enough?  I just don’t know.  For instance, have I sinned enough to ensure a convincing expose? I’ve made my share of mistakes while attempting to grease the bumps in the road while driving alone during a dark night of the soul, been through therapy to work it out, got better, etc.  But am I unique?  Or at this point do we all have enough pictures of dumbness on facebook to make the point moot?  Maybe the point is that exceptionally bad behavior isn’t all that exceptional.  Maybe that should be the boring part of the book instead of the hook.  Maybe we should all take a little longer to blog about the Traveling Mercies than the trash we’ve all got to dig our way through.  Maybe Anne is right.

(And, just maybe, I should give up my insistence on using “There’s” as a contraction of “There Are.”  But that just how I was raised.  Along with Nucular.  Now that’s some fertile soil to mine for the memoirs!  Let’s get typing!)

After scandalizing the sensible citizens of the Seine, Michel Houellebecq’s novel of the days to come has reached translation to our American shores to burn my eyes with its sex and its death and its frustrated attempts to jerk a little more life out of the last days of mankind.

That being said, I don’t think that this novel has an ax to grind.  Conservatives on both sides of the pond hated it’s porno-licious portrayals of various turpitudinous attempts at transcendence.  (Fucking to forget, as it were.)  Liberals were outraged that Michel would implicate a sensible Continental love-the-one-you’re-with modernity with all that is crass and despairing and destructive and — heaven forbid! — American.

But it seemed he was just stating facts.  The book is riddled with science:  Biology, Evolution, Chemistry, Physics — all forces just a wee bit bigger than any one man or even one ideology.  These forces march on and have their own mysterious ends, we are merely swept along for the ride.  As a man lives and dies, so does a culture, so does an epoch, so does an era.  In the first pages, Houellebecq makes the sweeping statement that just as the Roman Empire was undone by the Christian era, so the Christian era — and it’s moral code — is now being undone by the rise of Modern Science, the latest “metaphysical mutation.”

His characters have been born at the wrong time:  Now.  Plagued by Anxiety, Depression, Dissatisfaction, Suicide Slow, Suicide Quick, they float about like Elementary Particles, unable to latch on and bond in a necessary order to build a future, a family, a community.  Without purpose they are indeed unbearably light in their being.

However, the book is more than a pocket-sized pulp soap opera.  It’s also got a sci-fi twist!  (Fear not, its more Margret Atwood then H.G. Wells.)

Yes, the Brave New World is at hand.  Huxley is proven right.  He saw the future, and now we see that it was not birthed out of fear, but by our own desires. Our desire to divorce sex from reproduction.  Our desire to find happiness in a pill.  The schema of Organized Religion made life bearable for two millennia.  But now the comforting chains have started to crack thanks to the Darwins and the Curries and the Freuds and the Fords of this world.  Now we are selfishly working towards the next big thing, and shattered lives and shredded psyches are the price.

A doctor I met last summer echoed some of these thoughts.  I was freaking out and went in for some meds, something I had always considered weak, cowardly, shameful, and downright anti-Christian up to that moment.  I asked him why so many of my friends — mostly college educated, middle class, i-pod owning types - are on the pills. He said that he’s pretty sure we’re not equipped to handle things the way they are:  Cars, constant media, etc.  Too Much, Too Fast.  He said either we’re heading for an apocalypse or a great leap forward in our evolution.  But that’s just his professional opinion.  He was sticking to the comfort of his hard-working, latin-loving, Cleveland Catholicism and seemed to be doing ok.  But wasn’t as sure about his grandkids.

Will the Houellebecq prophecy come true?  Will it all work out for the rest of us in some grand New World Order?  We shall see, but I guarantee that Pfizer has a Soma division down some dark hall.   Eventually it will be time to turn the lights on.

To lead a life more lovely, to live a life more divine, one must find inspiration from greater men, sip enlightenment from a deeper well.  Perhaps he’s not the guiding light for every dark night of the soul, but this self-penned timeline of Tony Visconti’s good times is a fascinating read if you agree with me that the best tracks ever put to tape happened somewhere in the 70s.

If you don’t know the name, you will know the sounds.  Certain inescapable moments of pop history were captured while Tony manned the helm of the great ship H.M.S. Rock ‘n Roll.  He midwifed the birth of Bowie, helped McCartney find his Wings, and made sure that all of us were Blinded By The Light.

Though his many wives may agree that he wasn’t much of a saint outside of the studio, he lived a life worthy of an introduction by Morrissey.  And that’s gotta count for something.

It’s a classic!  So I’m told.   The boy in me likes to climb up out from under the covers once a year or so to nix another seminal sci-fi classic off the list of Things To Read Before I Die.  Usually - I’m being honest here - I’m a little disappointed.  But dagnabbit! this one seemed to have potential.

First of all, there’s the movie. I rather enjoyed Paul Verhoeven’s cheese-ball-o-fun from 1997.  Lit up with the sparky charisma of thespian Denise “Wildthing” Richards, this little romp through the bug-infested universe proved to be worthy of every one of it’s direct-to-dvd sequels.

Secondly, there’s that 5-syllable word plastered all over every pulpy paperback reprint of the thing: Controversial!  That’s it!  Money on the barrel, baby!  I’m sold!

And now I know what the fuss was all about: It seems that  Mr. Heinlein decided to write in the Randian tradition, heavy-handedly dictating the tenets of the ideal republic while fantasizing about what he’d a-done if he was lucky enough to storm the South Pacific with the doughboys of the big one.

Fine by me.  It’s his book after all, and if he has a few grudges to grind against the axe of postwar America he should feel free.  And so it was that the man was branded a fascist for his futuristic fancy of a benevolent military-led limited democracy and it’s get-your-ass-in-gear final solution to all of the 20th century’s ills.

However, I’m intrigued enough by Heinlein to dig out a copy of Stranger In A Strange Land.  Turns out that his depiction of a do-as-you-please Martian civilization spawned not only a cult following but an actual cult of free-lovin’ longhairs in the 1960s.

I have a feeling people take this guy way too seriously.

[Question for bloggers:  Am I alone in this, or do you all have dozens of half-finished posts lying about the crannies of your administrative screens?  Might as well wrap this one up.  If only I could remember anything about it... seemed like a good read at the time.]

If you’ve been listening to This American Life (or watching it on the tube, something I’ve never done) and thought to yourself, “Golly, I wish this would come in paperback so I could hang with Ira whilst in el bano…” here’s your chance.

The New Kings runs with the same formula as all things TAL — Ira drops in for an introduction and then turns it over to his troop of sly scriveners who toe-dip into unknown waters to bring light and life to the long-forgotten, overlooked on-goings that are going-on somewhere between sea and shining sea.

Although I’ve always been impressed with the range and depth of the guests that pop in on Ira’s weekly chats, I noticed something while reading this collection that I wouldn’t have snatched had I been catching the broadcast in the interstitial way that radio reaches the mind:  Ira has specialized in Long-Tail Journalism.

Although we lie to ourselves about it every day, very few of us can hope to be famous.  The world just isn’t big enough for us all to be the best (unless by “being the best” you just mean “being the best you”.  Which is fine and all, and if you’d like to borrow some Joel Osteen to help you out with that come on over, I’ve got a few tracts to lend.)  But for every winner, there’s usually more than a few losers.  As Ricky Bobby likes to say, “If you ain’t first, yer last!”  And no matter how hard you try, odds are that first just isn’t in the stars.  Now at some point we must recognize this and move on or else we risk a bitter and miserable old age impotently pissing into our bedpans while chewing off the ears of any nurse or other whipper-snapper who seems prepared to pretend to politely listen.

[But back to the Long Tail of Journalism.]

In other words, for every Best out there that’s worthy of the big-budget James Cameron treatment, replete with a heartfelt crooning love theme by Celine (Dion), there’s dozens of also-rans. And the also-rans have probably also-run a pretty interesting life.  Not the sort of thing that makes it into the history books, or even into the Sunday supplements (love me my Parade!), but the also-rans have a story to tell, and the wit and charm to be the life of your party, at least for the hour or less that it takes to listen to the weekend broadcast from PRI and Chicago Public Radio.

[Anyway - do I need to define this Long Tail thing?  You say yes, I say go:   1 2 3]

So here we go with The New Kings:  With a few exceptions — yes, Saddam, I’m talking about you — it’s a list of almosts, of near-misses, of what was yet to be but what never was.   We’ve got a kid that was almost a financial wiz.  An environmental disaster that wasn’t quite as toxic as we’d hoped  A well-connected Chicagoan who never made a dent on national affairs.  A gifted artist who just missed out on the boom of Pollack and do Kooning.  A guy who almost got in trouble with a bunch of rowdy hooligans.  A right-wing DJ riding a wave of conservative culture ’cause it’s his only skill to pay the bills.  A hostess with the luck to hang with the famous while the club was still hopping.  And finally a guy who almost won big at poker.

All good stories, all better than what you might have to listen to around the family table this Christmas or Kwanzaa, and all very well written.  And that’s the thing:  The stories are out there, everywhere!  The trick is to find the right hook to catch ‘em before they slink off into the spectral mists of memory lost.  You’re all a few degrees from greatness — you just need a little help getting out there to sing your life!

After college let out for the last time — and before life lapped up the last few allowable drops of adolescent indulgence — I spent a summer wasting.  Living on Mac ‘n Cheese swashed down with MGDs.  Walking my sand-scratched crack back from a dive called Shagg’s.  Trying to beat the moon to bed and dodge the sun while quoting Donne.  Ah yes, it was time well spent.

The summer was needed.  There was a girl to purge from my mind, some pale pasty parts to drop from my body.  But most of all there was an “I can do it!” ego that needed to fail miserably night after lonesome night as friends returned to more responsible endeavors and the long sweat of an endless summer turned chilly and sad.

There’s a novel in that summer.  Life began one way and turned out another.  There was conflict, there was resolution, there was dénouement as the players drifted on to next things.  Nothing of the sort happened during A Year In Provence.  To be fair, Peter’s publication claims to be filed under “Travel,” and as a bit of long-form journalism it amuses nicely.  However, I’ve seen more contemplation in magazines, more emotion in the newspaper, more reflection on facebook and blogs than I found here.

Inspire me Peter!  Life seemed lovely: Libidinous lunches drenched with young rosé, days spent weaving through vineyards and truffled woods, recovery meted out by the pool and the omnipresent pastis.  Why couldn’t you fall in love with it all?  Why couldn’t you get sick of it all?  Why couldn’t you treat your caring neighbors as more than cartoons with outrageous accents?  Why?

Perhaps he’s fried his heart on too many lovers, frozen his soul from fear of an un-assured salvation.  Perhaps he’s a sort of idiot-savant:  Gifted ear, sharp wit, unassailable palette, but complete confusion when confronted by emotion.   Perhaps we’ll never know.  I won’t be sticking around for Toujours Provence, though I’m tempted to visit.  I have nothing against “Travel” you know.

__________

Someday I’ll write a slim volume about what I found during my lost summer.  It’s a place I revisit with each listen to Belle & Sebastian’s “A Summer Wasting” — a two minute tune that moves more than Peter Mayle’s two hundred pages:

I spent the summer wasting
The time was passed so easily
But if the summers wasted
How come that I could feel so free
I spent the summer wasting
The sky was blue beyond compare
A photograph of myself
Is all I have to show for

Seven weeks of reading papers
Seven weeks of river walkways
Seven weeks of feeling guilty
Seven weeks of staying up all night

Here’s a little tidbit from this month’s Wired:

“By 2020, native English speakers will make up only 15 percent of the estimated 2 billion people who will be using or learning the language. Already most conversations in English are between nonnative speakers who use it as a lingua franca.”

Ah, this warms my heart. I never was much for foreign language. Never really had the patience to put my mind to something so, uh, foreign. My grades the second semester of college looked something like this:

American Lit Survey: A
Literary Criticism: A
19th Century British Novel: B
Introduction to Physics: A
Spanish 3.0: F

As an excuse, I always copped to some sort of imbecilism whenever the topic came up. My father pronounced my failure to achieve in the southern tongue an “anomaly” and left it at that. Unfortunately, I was mostly just lazy. I was well aware of the difference between a gerund an infinitive. I had a fondness for the culture, cuisine, and charisma of my chicano friends. I just didn’t try.

Now, thanks to trends beyond my control, I may not have to. Funny how such an awkward little language is taking over. Lucky me.