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.

At least 10 years have gone by since I’ve read a little Waugh. And that, my friend, is simply no good. I’d forgotten more of Evelyn than I’d remembered. From what I could recall, he was a serious writer with serious stories about the decline and fall of a way of life. The sort of writer who picked up the last handful of dust and pondered loss with a heavy heart and civilized snifter of sherry. And when Tony wound up in the jungle, I always found it odd, over-the-top, goofy.

Fact is, the jungle made sense. I’d forgotten just how Wilde he could be. Nonsense is not just another element of his writing, it’s a critical component of his continual commentary, a Yin to his Catholic and Cultured Yang.

In Put Out More Flags, Waugh applies the same deconstructable style to the most hallowed of recent human endeavors: the Greatest Generation’s Band of Brothers who laid down life itself to bash back against the buzz-bombing Nazi threat. His descriptions of the inner workings of Her Majesty’s Royal Forces are Kafkaesque; his soldiers are well-meaning but ill-informed; his recurring characters are by turns self-centered, aloof, removed. But things do turn serious as the war heats up, and there is maturation and growth all around. And things do turn serious for Waugh as he introduces and replays a new theme mid-novel:

“Culture must cease to be conventual and become cenobitic.”

Waugh sketches out a contrast between the mind of the modern European man (excited to be wrapped up and bound up and swept away by the latest line of thought, be it Nazism or any other sort of less-destructive fashion or fever) and the the life of a Chinese monk content to think his own thoughts in solitude without being chained to the greater collective (un)conscious.

Applied to the present conflict, he continues:

“The great weapons of modern war did not count in single lives; it took a whole section to make a target worth a burst of machine-gun fire; a platoon or a motor lorry worth a bomb. No one had anything against the individual; as long as he was alone he was free and safe; there’s a danger in numbers; divided we stand, united we fall…”

To sum, the cenobitic culture would not form an army, would not drop a bomb, would not round up the Jews, and would not Put Out More Flags. However, it would produce plenty of snarky fiction and the time to really read it.

Perhaps we all just want to re-create the world in our own image.

Interesting article in The Other Paper last week focusing on our (Democratic) Governor Ted Strickland’s marksmanship and subsequent high marks from the NRA. Although I’ve got an opinion or three on the issue, it’s not really an issue for me. What fascinated me was the unabashed contrarian position taken by The Gov vis-a-vis his party’s line. So rarely does this happen!

For instance, I can’t find a single Hillary supporter who thinks that Florida and Michigan should be excluded from the delegate vote. I can’t find a single Obama supporter who thinks that they shouldn’t. Back in 2000 there was nary a Democrat who thought that Florida and the courts were on the path to Truth after the election. There wasn’t a Republican to be found who thought otherwise.

Doesn’t anyone think for themselves anymore? How can we trust people with guns when we can’t even trust them to think? For that matter, how can we trust them to raise children? Even in Texas?

Anyway, the real reason for this post is just for a chance to post this:

The moral of the story: Like a pink Kalashnikov, the Trigger of Truth might be a mash-up we’re all afraid to fire.

It always warms my heart to have a little local flava in my national media. Spin brought back the love this month with a pithy article on a local audio contagion known affectionately as “Shitgaze”, written by local boy Joel Oliphint and centering on the bands that call Cafe Bourbon Street home sweet home. (But no reference to the Taco Ninja. Tragic.)

Out of love and respect I won’t mention the fact that I have nearly no patience for the stuff. What can I say, I like my music a little more crispy. I’m all for low-fi and DIY, but still, I’m the guy who’s favorite Clash album is Sandanista and who was secretly relieved when Iggy lost some of the Raw and just kept the Power.

Still, for a second-string city, Columbus has so much going for it. It’s a place where the little trickles of mid-western creative juice pool up and nurture something new. Not every blossom blooms to my liking, but sometimes you’ve got to gaze on some stinky shit to make the garden grow. I’m glad we’ve got it. I’m going to miss it when I’m gone.

To each their own.

If you like sports, read Sports Illustrated. If you’ve got the entrepreneurial bug, check out Fast Company.  And if you think words are fun, pick up Eats, Shoots & Leaves.

Much as I get a hankering for some Strunk & White from time to time, there’s something far more entertaining about the way that Ms. Truss goes about pausing to consider the placement of a comma. Indeed, I learned a thing or two.

For instance: Did you know that the British call a period a “full stop”? Mind blowing! Made me feel like Albert Hofmann after a hard day in the lab.

It has made blogging a little tougher on the noggin. Whereas my thoughts used to flow to the page with the grace and agility of a teenage Marylou Retton, I’m now constantly stuttering upon the keyboard debating both the accuracy and necessity of every minor mark, each stroke stuck in sacrifice to the gods of grammar, lest they damn me for running on a sentence too long.

Who me?

Overall I found the British/American usage debates interesting, agreeing more with those across the pond than with the rules passed down to me from generations of jingoistic grammarians. I’m bound to lose on that one. It’s only a matter of time until we’re all speakin’ ‘Merican.

And I got to toy with the Oxford Comma a little longer. Life is good.

(Spoiler alert: I spoil it a bit if you haven’t read it. Continuing…)

A few weeks back I found myself stuck at O’Hare with a good many other wayward travelers. We were cuddling up to the fluorescent glow of a late night terminal that was supposed to be just another stop along the way. Everyone knows someone in Chicago, but when it’s 11:00 pm and you’ve got to get checked back in by 5:00, there’s not much they can do for you anyway. So you sit. So you wait. Sleep comes and goes and comes back again.

So, adrift in the modern world and waylaid at the intersection of the Jet Set and Snow, I docked my mind to the final pages of Life of Pi, tossed and turned on Yann Martel’s waves of truth and fiction, and enjoyed a rare and satisfying lonesome.

And, in my state of relaxed resignation, I let Yann toy with me for a while longer.

He starts with his own story. In the for-once-necessary introduction he spins a tale of writing about Portugal while traveling through India. He sets us up to believe. He gives reason for the faith he later demands. I don’t ask if he’s really in India. I don’t ask if he really sent his first manuscript to Siberia (though, from a postal point of view, it’s akin so sending a package addressed to the Midwest.) He introduces us to the people that he meets, and tells us how he met them. And then he tells us Pi’s story as not much more than a stenographer. He writes in Pi’s voice (try reading any page with that stereotypical Kwik-E-Mart Indian accent — it works! it’s fun!) and he gives us facts. He gives us facts about zoos. He gives us facts about animals. Facts about husbandry. Facts about India. So many facts, it must all be true.

It must be true that Yann met an old man in Pondicherry who said, “I have a story that will make you believe in God.”

But a true story may not be a better story. Ask James Frey, ask Margaret Seltzer. There’s a reason for writing fiction. Life is good, but a story wants to be better:

Page 317:

Pi: “Which is the better story, the story with the animals or the story without the animals?”
Mr. Chiba: “The one with the animals.”
Pi: “Thank you. And so it goes with God.”

Page 64: (again, Pi:)

I can well imagine an atheist’s last words: “White, white! L-L-Love! My God!” — and the deathbed leap of faith. Whereas the agnostic, if he stays true to his reasonable self, if he stays beholden to dry, yeastless factuality, might try to explain the warm light bathing him by saying, “Possibly a f-f-failing oxygenation of the b-b-brain,” and, to the very end, lack imagination and miss the better story.

Thus it is resolved: Religion is the better story. Faith is the better story. And the sanctified imagination of the creative soul is the eye to the better story. And we must be like our Japanese inquisitors and embrace it as Truth.

Life is a creative act. That which happens, happens. In the mind of Pi, it is not about which story is “true” it is about which story is better. The better story is the story that should define one’s life. Again, from the introduction, “(we must not) sacrifice our imagination on the altar of crude reality and end up believing in nothing and having worthless dreams.”

And so here I am shipwrecked in Chicago, trying to get home from an expedition I didn’t want to take, my life torn and tattered at the mercy of much larger Plan. Crude reality be gone! Derailment is an opportunity, a chance to Create a Better Story for me, for my family as we ready ourselves to sojourn on. There’s a big fuzzy boundary between this world and the next, between fact and fiction. Who’s to say what’s real and what’s not. Who’s to say where one begins and another ends. I’m enjoying my stay here in the terminal stuck between this world and the next. My flight’s not due for a few more hours and then I’ll be off to something more. So it goes with me. And so it goes with God.