Hungry men of all ages stare up at stuffed crotches and marble thighs. They curve dollar bills into underwear that cost as much as the boy’s weekly food budget. They leer; they stare; they feel economically superior and physically inferior all at once.

And it occurs to me: go-go boys are just naked panhandlers. They are engaging in the same basic activity: a bare-bones display of themselves, in the hopes that it will move someone to give them a dollar. And people give for a lot of reasons, with pity being right up by the top. Pity and the momentary relief of feeling like no matter how poorly you might be doing economically, there’s someone worse off - there’s a desperate human being literally begging for one of those crinkled damp singles in your pocket.

I’m not saying this to be mean to go-go boys. I work closely with and consider myself friends with a lot of people who are panhandlers, so I recognize the courage and the sense of self that are necessary for both forms of soliciting the public.

But I do find it ironic/offensive that the fine upstanding Chelsea men who are so happy to ogle a gym-addicted go-go stud will then turn around and lobby hard to oppose the opening of a homeless shelter in their neighborhood, using deeply problematic fear-mongering language about “those people” taking over “our streets,” all with a heavy, hard-to-miss racist subtext when you consider what a disproportionate percentage of the homeless community is African-American.

The club was lame. The party was lame. The go-go boys and the bad music and the anti-homeless hostility of the property-owners and “community leaders” in the city’s foremost queer neighborhood had me depressed.

… and then on CNN it’s a series of business-suited men talking about Afghanistan, a new report or handful of casualties requiring the talking heads to start spinning again.

These three, they could be the same white man at 30 and then at 45 and then at 60. They work for the Wall Street Journal or the Council on Foreign Relations; they went to Harvard and West Point. They disagree on little things and agree on the big ones. Like we need to be in Afghanistan.

Before commercial we cut to the handsomest man at the table, who says that yes, sure, of course, there are lots of reasons why the war is a big terrible mess, but that if we pull out of Afghanistan, “there will be human rights abuses that will shame us.”

From this, we cut immediately to the sharp blue star logo of Lockheed Martin, and the words WE NEVER FORGET WHO WE’RE WORKING FOR.

Who are they working for, exactly? And who is CNN working for? And who is that handsome man, who by virtue of his handsomeness becomes the one whose words matter most, working for?

This is the same day that Wikileaks makes what it is calling the “largest intelligence leak in history,” six years/91,000 documents/200,000 pages worth of reports and documents by soldiers and analysts. These pompous grave-faced men on CNN are telling us how pulling out of Afghanistan would undo all the hard work that our deal beleaguered vital ally Pakistan is doing… even though, according to these astonishing leaked documents, “Americans fighting the war in Afghanistan have long harbored strong suspicions that Pakistan’s military spy service guides the Afghan insurgency that fights American troops, even as Pakistan receives more than $1 billion in U.S. aid.”

To me, this is perfect evidence of how hard mainstream media works to keep you from understanding the realities behind the war. But then again, I already believe that this is the case, so it’s easy for me to see it. I wonder what someone who didn’t would see. They would probably see handsome confident men saying things they desperately want to believe are true.

The Kenyon Review, via my Google Reader, informs me that it is Dalloday - which I take to mean the day on which Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway takes place, or at least a day when people are supposed to read the book. And I realize I need to re-read it, not having done so since college. I loved it then. but could not help read it as an attempt at another Ulysses, rather than a critique of it (or maybe I did read it as a critique and could not see where it succeeds as such). What I see now is that Mrs. Dalloway is a book about people living life, in community, in an astonishing state of interconnectedness, whereas Ulysses is about people who are fundamentally alone, whose interactions and circumperambulations (not a word, I know) and encounters only serve to underscore their basic isolation from one another.

And then I’m at a funeral and overhear someone say that it’s the 118th birthday of His Imperial Majesty Haile Selassie, and just last week I was reading about his death in prison, where he was held by a Soviet-sponsored military junta. And how when he died, his captors declared “the end of the Solomonic dynasty.”

And then I’m at Walking With Dinosaurs at Madison Square Garden, me and J. taking Christina out for her birthday, and there are ENORMOUS ANIMATRONIC FRICKIN DINOSAURS, and the place is full of squealing dinosaur-obsessed kids, like I used to be, like I still am.

But the dinosaurs are all dead now. They were awesome and huge and had big claws and fangs and ruled the earth for hundreds of millions of years - and they’re gone. Everything ends. Every system eventually sputters out. No oppression goes on forever. Dynasties fall. Corporations and governments crack apart or get consumed. People die. The fat wheezing man behind us, the little kids shaking their plastic glow sticks in the row in front of us.

Everything dies, and is it any wonder we want ways to keep on living? Royal dynasties, great books we hope will keep on being read long after we’re gone? The hope that one day someone will dig up our bones and bring us back to life as robots?’

Jim asks: “If we can decry the way politicians and the print media consistently trade in (verbal) euphemisms (as I have done here repeatedly) isn’t it possible to see the ‘human interest’ approach to war photography as a form of visual euphemism?”

So much war photography serves to suck us up in the human drama, the pathos of real people in intense situations, that we lose sight of the bigger picture. We forget about the policies and the greed and the politics and the land-mine manufacturer executives and the babies buried in the rubble.

He uses the phrase “visual euphemism,” to link war images with the way we understand war journalism - as something with a fundamental underlying dishonesty, as something built up out of deliberate obfuscation and the parroting of lies - with the end result that we walk away from each piece understanding the conflict a little less.

I see an unmistakable eroticism to the way soldiers are depicted in war photography. Young, strong, brutal men, occupying a weird moral space where the normal rules do not apply. The exhibit under discussion in this post includes a series of photos of “Soldiers Sleeping,” their shirtless tattooed bodies and open guileless mouths bespeaking simultaneous innocence and heroism. This follows a long tradition in representational art, going back to The Dying Gaul and beyond (at the time of that sculpture’s creation, nudity connoted heroism, and his representation in the nude in a Roman sculpture was an uncharacteristic “memorial to their bravery as worthy adversaries”).

We respond to stories. Stories help us understand otherwise unimaginable things - the unthinkable suffering of war, for example, becomes real to us through our relationship to Achilles and Patroclus in the Iliad. And we respond to sex, to desire. To fear. To quote a poem I quote way too often:

Every woman adores a Fascist,

The boot in the face, the brute

Brute heart

My theory is that we are socialized to respond to these images, to men who exemplify strength and violence and brutality. That we fetishize these men who are, depending on where you stand, heroes or hooligans or cannon fodder. That we start from fear and eventually reach a sort of Stockholm Syndrome thrall to these men whose sacrifice and slaughter help keep the game going, the wealth and the poverty and the profit and loss.

I’m really happy with it - very short, but hopefully carries some weight…

Ben doesn’t scream or cry or call for his mother when nightmares wake him up. He wails, a sad train whistle of a sound, something he’s trying hard to keep secret. Pipes clanging; animals moving through fallen leaves; a car door slamming down the road… he handles his fear on his own. He’ll only cry when Beth or I arrive at his bedside, and by then it’s more shame than fear.

“I’ll get him,” I say, when the sound finally stirs Beth from her sleep. I’ve been listening for fifteen minutes.

The hall is dark, its ceiling low. Every night I stand here. Tiptoeing through the house, hoping to tire myself out, I stop to stand still in utter blackness and listen to the wind. Goose bumps prickle my arms, tighten my testicles. The boiler’s broke, demanding eight hundred dollars we don’t have. Space heaters help out in the bedrooms, but the hallway’s just four walls to keep the wind off. Every night I listen, waiting for when the wind will pull the walls down.

“Hey,” I say, pushing open the door, “hey little man. Everything okay in here?” I leave the light off. Sometimes he won’t sob if he can’t be seen.”

photo by me!

Last night we watched the fourth episode from Season One, “The Warriors of Kyoshi,” and it’s astonishing the level of storytelling that they achieve here. 22 minutes, and the writers and producers manage to pack way more character development and emotional engagement than in the entire 90+ minutes of the film.

Aang gets his first taste of Avatar fame; it goes to his head; he behaves in a selfish way that puts the entire village of Kyoshi in danger; the Fire Nation attacks; he repents; he takes a risk to ride the Unagi and put out the fire.

Sokka is a misogynist. The Kyoshi Warriors stomp him flat. He has some internal turmoil. He humbles himself and asks to be trained by them. They make him wear a dress. The training they provide allows him to help fight the Fire Benders who invade the village. He says to Suki “I treated you like a girl, instead of like a warrior.” She says “I am a warrior. But I’m also a girl,” and he gets his first kiss.

I’m going to stop comparing the show to the movie as a way of showing how great the show is, because I could compare fecal matter to the movie as a way of showing how great fecal matter is. Taken on its own merits, this episode - like almost every other episode - is a marvel. The humorous touches throughout (especially the recurrent theme of Momo eating too many sweets and then getting sick); the balancing of the Series Story (Zuko chasing Aang; Aang’s preparation for his fight with Ozai) with the Season Story (Aang’s journey north to the Northern Water Tribe) and the Episode Story - it all adds up to some of the most charged, fun, emotional television I know of - and the fact that it’s a half-hour animated series on Nickelodeon is just more proof that amazing things can come out of any system…

And it’s funny, going back to the beginning, knowing how everything will end, how much more we can appreciate the complexity of character and the choreography of the fights and the art and the music. Freed from the obsession with what will happen next.

Eric and Sookie and The Vampire King and Jessica and Sam are all going in interesting directions. I like the werewolves. I’m very curious about what Bill’s research into Sookie’s past is all about, and what the “payoff” is, but overall I’m not finding anything in his character’s actions or emotions that I can sink my teeth into. He’s being an asshole, and he’s being remorseful, but he’s not really giving us any of the WHY - obviously I don’t want to know all the answers, but I want to get a sense from the acting that Bill knows what he’s doing and why. Which I don’t.

Sam’s dad is definitely up to some ill shit, right? like, REAL ill. Like, molest-his-own-son ill, or truck-with-the-devil ill.

Jason Stackhouse’s storyline is really stupid and I’m done with it. BUT I am a little excited about this freaky chick he’s meeting up with. I’m wondering what new element of supernatural creature she’s going to bring.

It’s upsetting to me that every one of Tara’s plotlines seems to involve her getting manipulated/kidnapped/controlled by someone else. Last season it was Maryann, this season it’s Franklin. There’s a little glimmer of hope that she’ll fuck his shit up, but there’s also a lot of evidence that they’ll do like they did last year - have Sookie or some other gallant friend intervene to save her.

I really love Pam, and I wish the show realized what a great thing she is, how much potential she has to play a real role in the story. The first few episodes held out hope for her having more to do and say, and maybe the resolution to her current situation will put her front and center and give her more of a heavy narrative lift, but it could also go SOME TERRIBLE HORRIBLE OTHER WAY that would be one more dreadful character error, on a par with Godric’s badly-dropped narrative arc in Season Two.

It’s nice to see Lafayette losing his cool! And I’m wondering when the other shoe will drop with that fine fine man who is all over him, and the dark shit he no doubt has in store for us…

Pam: “I don’t know why people feel they can confide in me. Maybe I smile too much. Maybe I wear too much pink. But please remember I can rip your throat out if I need too”

There’s a detailed analysis of a successful “case study”—Brita’s re-marketing/re-positioning of itself, after “sales were siphoned opff by the rising popularity of bottled water, which exploded into a billion-dollar business… [Brita] managers pursued an integrated cross-media communications strategy to tout Brita’s green attributes, educate consumers about bottle waste, and encourage a switch to greener alternatives… within a year the company’s water pitcher sales jumped a robust 23%…”

It then goes on to ask things like “How can we exploit our competitors’ green weaknesses?” “Will our green claims be credible—or are we vulnerable to accusations of “greenwashing”?”

My initial response is to roll my eyes and call it bullshit—to say that this is only one more instance of business jumping on a bandwagon that will make them some money for right now. That they’ll do this because it’s “good money,” not because it’s the right thing to do.

But my friend Eric made a great point: “That’s what the environmental movement needs—is for the Harvard Business Review to say “this is good business sense.””

And I guess I do see it that way. Until executives get behind real, substantive green/sustainable solutions, no big change is going to happen. And executives will only do it if they think it will make them money. Government can’t make them do it, at least not in the US. Government simply does not have the power, because there just is not the political will for it.

So I’m willing to concede that the little voice in the back of my head that’s always saying things like “everything a corporation does is fundamentally immoral” might not be the most helpful. And that “corporate competitive strategies” might just be one of the most promising sites for real change to happen, in this era where deficit-hawking and tax cuts have basically robbed government of its ability to protect and provide for its people…

A lot of reasons, of course - just like why I love some movies and not others. Pacing, colors, music, story, action, ending… but I think that, above all else, it’s the characters. How strong is my connection to them? How much do I care about what happens to them? And as much as I hate to waste time arguing with ignorant people, I have been thinking a lot about Roger Ebert’s recent BS comments about video games not being considered an art form, and how his nonsense has challenged me to think through HOW and WHY it’s so obvious to me that video games are art.

And it’s this - the characters. Narrative art lives and dies on the strengths of its characters. That’s as true for Oedipus and Anna Karenina as it’s true for Alien and Mega Man.

Ninja Gaiden (1989) was the first video game that I ever formed an emotional connection to - because I was engaged by Ryu’s story. His quest to avenge his father’s death; the mysterious woman who shoots him and then hands him a creepy statue; the CIA agent who contracts him to infiltrate a South American temple where an identical creepy statue is stashed… It was also the first game I had ever seen that intercut story sequences between the action (”cinema display”), which gave a richness and detail that is missing from most of the other video games of the period.

Ryu is not, in the final analysis, a particularly fascinating literary character. He is not complex. He wants to avenge his father’s death; he wants to kill the bad guy; he wants to rescue the girl. But the game’s plot twists are compelling (your father is alive! you have to fight your father! your father sacrifices himself!), and they are happening TO US, and they give us that extra motivation to hassle through ALL THREE LEVELS OF F*CKING ACT SIX FOR THE TENTH TIME, because THIS F*CKING DEMON KILLED ME. AGAIN.

Complex stories and characters developed organically in video games, for the same reason they did in cinema: constant capitalist competition forced developers/authors to create increasingly rich and elaborate video game experiences. Better graphics; bigger worlds; prettier music; actual storylines. I imagine that’s how great art evolved in the first place: the best stories were the ones that people kept on telling, around the campfire, until they became myth, epic poetry, tragedy, religion, opera, play, novel, short story, film, until they helped shape human civilization, until they became the miraculous things that make this life liveable.

I put in four different texts, and three out of four times it said that my writer was David Foster Wallace. I don’t have the faintest idea how this thing works or what kinda stuff it keys in on (and there’s no breakdown of what characterizes David Foster Wallace’s style (which would be really helpful, right? What does this SAY about my style))… BUT I am impressed with its consistency, that it could spot a resemblance to the same writer in three texts that I thought were pretty different from one another.

Of course, this is where I make the totally unacceptable confession that I’ve never read David Foster Wallace. I bought Infinite Jest when I was eighteen, but never even started it (initially impressed with its size, I was subsequently intimidated by it). Many dear friends and writer-heroes have tried to get me to read one thing or another, but it’s just never happened. I don’t have any prejudices or preconceived negative ideas about Mr. Wallace and his writing, but then again I read a lot of books, and the fact that one of his never once made it onto my bedside table probably means that his work *do*es have some kind of stigma in my mind, even if it’s just the stigma of “meh”…

So now I figure I’ve GOT to read him, right? Since, y’know, I’m him. Or he’s me. Or whatever.

Where do I start?

I write like
David Foster Wallace

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Along with about a billion other stories and poems! Seriously, the thing is massive, and the overall quality level is very high. If you’re gonna buy a random issue of a random literary journal, there’s a good bang for your buck if you go ahead and get this one.

Here’s the opener (and by the way - in copy-and-pasting this in, I noticed a typo in the very first paragraph. dammit!):

“By the time I got to Hettie’s house, most of the blood in the seat of my briefs had dried. My watch said midnight. I crouched on her porch, hands in pockets, ear against the door. A pane of ribbed glass ra alongside it, so you could see inside but only make out light and shapes.

“Temperatures will continue to fall as the storm moves east,” said Hettie’s television. “Record snowfall tonight, so plan on staying home tomorrow. And don’t venture out unless it’s absolutely necessary.”

Snow covered me. I rang the doorbell and the weather man went dead. Soon Hettie came towards the door, ghostlike, a bright glob.

“Hello?” Fear smeared her voice.

“Hettie, it’s me,” I said. “Shane. Timmy’s friend?”

No one makes dolls that look like old ladies. Babies and toddlers and buxom Barbie businesswomen, but never the aged. Yet the woman who opened the door was a doll—a tenth the size of the Hettie I remembered. Could Alzheimer’s erase body mass along with brain function? Cold wind hit her face, and she flinched.

Well, now they’re issuing semi-dire warnings about the arrival of peak oil. Some of the things they’re predicting: “Businesses which prepare for and take advantage of the new energy reality will prosper - failure to do so could be catastrophic”; “China and growing Asian economies will play an increasingly important role in global energy security”; “We are heading towards a global oil supply crunch and price spike”; “Energy infrastructure will become increasingly vulnerable as a result of climate change and operations in harsher environments”…

This is great, right?  It’s about time that big evil corporations are running scared. I’m sure there’s a proverb to be quoted or invented there - when the wicked are afraid, the righteous rejoice?

Right?

Or does this just mean that shit is just poised to get a whole lot worse, A WHOLE LOT FASTER? The status quo won’t change until it absolutely has to…

Any kind of major transformation carries the seeds of radical progressive change - but in practice, big catastrophes seem to get exploited by the rich to consolidate power and resources (9/11, Katrina), while the poor lose everything they own, and starve, and die…

65 million is how much Blockbuster lost last year.

And now, according to this article on Yahoo, Blockbuster is going the way of the dinosaurs.

The author looks at ten brands that are likely to disappear in 2011, and it’s a perfect little rogue’s gallery of dying business models. And a few surprises. Also included:

Radio Shack: every time I pass a Radio Shack I feel sad for it, like it’s Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard, some old and bat-shit crazy thing who had the misfortune to live on into its own irrevelance, its primacy stolen by sleeker sexier newcomers and big-box behemoths.

Reader’s Digest: This one is a shocker to me, but a welcome one. I see Reader’s Digest and think of nursing homes, the waiting room at the doctor’s office, the coffee tables of elderly relatives. Reader’s Dogest epitomized the status quo of professional magazine writing: vapid, unsurprising, un-edgy, fluffy, neutered, cheerily apolitical. Once the most widely-read magazine in the world, the thing saw its readership decline from 8 million to 5.5 million.

T-Mobile. Wait, what? Shit.

Zales: I’m not sure how to take this. I don’t know enough about the current state of the diamond industry to say whether or not Zales is currently engaged in any meaningful efforts to ensure that the diamonds they sell are non-conflict - certainly their WEBSITE hypes all the fine policies they put in place, but that could be a whole lot of meaningless distraction (blood-washing?). I’m hopeful that this is evidence of a global change in the diamond market (i.e. the beginnings of its death) and not a first step towards an even more fragmented and chaotic industry with even LESS ability to regulate itself or be regulated from outside. Because people will still want diamonds. And other people will still be willing to chop off other people’s hands to get them to sell them to finance all manner of horrific activity.

BP: hmmmm. I certainly HOPE so, but the writer of this article thinks it’s more likely that the company will break itself up and sell its pieces off, to push all the oil spill liability into one scapegoat escrow corporation. BP should be destroyed, but not on its own terms. When you cause that kind of destruction, you don’t get to pick your own exit strategy. You need to be DEMOLISHED.