elwood runs for v.p.

A few nights ago I dreamt a very revealing dream, one that drew attention to the irrational nature of my being.

It was beyond bizarre, this dream. I’d decided to run for Vice President of the United States, a procedural impossibility for more than a few reasons: I a) boasted zero experience (local or national) in public office, b) was running at my current age of 25, which disqualified me on account of my being ten years too young for the position in question, c) had no campaign money and d) was running for an office that one cannot run for. One must be nominated by his or her political party.

Owing to a sitcomish series of events, Elwood advanced thru a few primary-like things without encountering formidable opposition of any kind. Suddenly, inexplicably, only one man remained between me and the veep chair. Nationwide polls showed me leading this dude by a very slim margin (52 to 48) hours before the final votes were to be cast. The Vice Presidency was all but mine! Oddly, I remember no debates, no public appearances, no television spots, no self-promotion of any kind. People kept voting me thru to the next round, and I couldn’t for the life of me figure why. I think I was still living in Brooklyn, just hanging out.

Here’s where things got weird. I recall a sudden, distinct urge to get the hell outta Dodge and forego the rest of my run. I realized--in a moment of panic--that I wasn’t cut out for the job, but my reasoning was completely ass-backwards. Rather than concede the obvious, blinding truth (that my political non-experience rendered me useless in high public office), I decided that I didn’t want to purchase a new suit and participate in debates and whatnot (in the flawed universe within my dream, the Vice President apparently debates after securing his post). That was my reasoning.

In other words, my fears were juvenile and utterly baseless. It's kinda like being afraid of spaghetti because someone mugged you once while you vacationed in Rome. In this dream, I was fully prepared to piss away my political dreams for something so petty as a wardrobe upgrade.

Well, that’s not entirely true. I suppose my most prescient fear was one I suffer from in real life: the fear of public speaking. There are few things which frighten me more than a lone, naked microphone turned away from three or four hundred expectant faces (an aside: Jerry Seinfeld once pointed out that, “According to most studies, people’s number one fear is public speaking. Number two is death. Death is number two. Does that sound right? This means the average person, if you go to a funeral, you’re better off in the casket than giving the eulogy.”). The sudden realization that one of my duties as Vice President would be to speak in public settings--under America’s scrutinous eyeball--proved too much for me.

My dream reinstated something I’ve known for years; time and again I allow my fears to get the best of me, preventing me from taking definitive action. As a case in point, I’ve actually shied from jobs and social situations that might require me to get up in front of people. This cowardice shames me. Fears are to be isolated and conquered, not reinforced.

It’s one aspect of my being, however, that I’m determined to change. This dream woke me up (both literally and figuratively) and slapped me around a bit. Life’s too short to allow for the influence of unfounded fears.

A dream analyst would probably have something to say about me running for Vice President rather than going for the whole enchilada, too, but that’s a post for another day.
...

area grammar cop ruthless, uncompromising

Alright ever’body: shut yer yappers, flip those ballots and mark your selection with an X. Choose only one of the five, please…

1) ___You embrace the so-called Oxford comma (also known as the serial comma).
2) ___You reject the so-called Oxford comma.
3) ___You neither embrace nor reject the so-called Oxford comma, for you have no idea what an Oxford comma is.
4) ___You drown, all your writing, with as many commas, as you can, muster, because commas, are great, and, the more, commas the better, so you’re for ‘em, the Oxford commas, whatever they are.
5) ___U hate commas omg their so annoyying and given the choice U prefer to comunnicate ONLY LIKE THIS GRAMMER BE DAMMED HEHE LOVE U LIZA!!!

…and, while you’re at it, please X one of three options down at the bottom of the page:

6) ___You kinda like the innocuous Vampire Weekend, you guess.
7) ___You kinda dislike the innocuous Vampire Weekend, or whatever.
8) ___You have never listened to Vampire Weekend.

Now fold it up real tight and drop it off in one of these wooden boxes. We’ll tally* them all up later.

Your author, this blogger, very much disapproves of the Oxford comma and cares not for Vampire Weekend, band behind the breezy, weightless “Oxford Comma” (first line: “Who gives a fuck about an Oxford comma?”). Within the confines of the above rubric, I’m all of a 2) and ¾ of a 7). That said, I grudgingly admit there’s a time and a place for that stiff-collared protuberance (the comma, not the band), though it’ll be a cold day in hell ‘fore I recognize Missour-ah as a state!

Before we proceed, let’s identify and define this grammatical eyelash I insist on blathering about. Lay your peepers on these two statements:

a) Soundgarden, Bush and The Toadies were all decent 90s bands.
b) Soundgarden, Bush, and The Toadies were all decent 90s bands.

Close observation of statement b) reveals an added comma after Bush; that, folks, is the Oxford comma. Such commas are employed after the penultimate item in a list, right before the conjunction. Both a) and b) are acceptable sentences, technically speaking. Just as a fellow might spell grey (my preferred spelling) with an e OR an a, one sha’nt be chastised for utilizing (or shunning) the Oxford comma as he sees fit.

The literary community seems a bit divided on the issue, and I’ve yet to detect a decisive trend in either direction. Author/pop culture enthusiast Chuck Klosterman proudly wields the comma, and you needn’t look further than the title of his most well-known book (Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs) to suss him out! His seemingly superfluous comma drove me crazy ‘fore I even cracked the spine.

Last night on the subway I thumbed thru this week’s Onion and came across Klosterman’s guest review of Axl’s Chinese Democracy (an inspired piece, btw). Here’s the caboose of a rather long-winded sentence from the review:

“…a few Robert Plant yowls, dolphin squeaks, wind, overt sentimentality, (←!!!!!) and a caustic modernization of the blues.”

There it is again! Newman!

Needing a grammatical brush up (and preparing to cry foul on Klosterman), I appealed to Wikipedia. Turns out there are very specific instances where that extra comma resolves contextual ambiguity. For that reason (it pains me to admit this), the clunky Oxford deserves a fair shake.

Take Teresa Nielsen Hayden's book dedication (this was pulled straight from the serial comma Wikipedia entry):

To my parents, Ayn Rand and God.

The absence of that second comma makes for a bit of confusion. Who are her parents? Ayn Rand and God? Unlikely. Let’s airbrush in the ol’ Oxford:

To my parents, Ayn Rand, and God.

Ah, better!

Chuck's in the clear, as am I. We’re all** in the right, commatically speaking, so long as we're careful not to misrespresent the listed items.

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*Results not yet in. Appears several ballot boxes have gone missing.

**Except, of course, those who checked 4) or 5). I’m looking at you, Perez Hilton commenters.

i might like you better if we slept together...

Been well over a month since my last music blog. Too long, I say. Too long!

Let’s start with the shows.

Wire.

Badass Brits Wire (heyday: 1977-1979, a three-year span yielding three of the greatest albums—Pink Flag, Chairs Missing and 154—of all time) performed a free* concert at the Fillmore on October 9th. Only problem?

*tickets required for entry.

Naturally—no surprise, really—I found out about the show four days too late, meaning every last ticket had been released/issued to the general public ‘neath my unsuspecting nose. Shit, I wailed, forehead in palm. One of the greatest bands of the past thirty years playing a freebie in MY city and I’ll be sitting at home o'er a bowl of mac ‘n’ cheese!

Craigslist. Please, I pecked out, my tears messing the screen. Please! I’ll giveya 10 apiece for the pair, whatdya say? No takers. All’s I encountered were greasy opportunists asking 35 or 40 bucks or even higher, yellow bastards the lot of ‘em. Mike’s morale made for the cellar. Day of the show I spent the better part of the afternoon scouring Craigslist for one of those kindly samaritan types I’m always reading about, my hopes snorkeling about in a muddied puddle reserved for wagon tires.

But lo! a white dove nestled square on my checkered beret just as the clouds parted like a biscuit, revealing soft, buttered skies and all the nectars of the world. Some dude in Brooklyn responded to my desperate pleas via electronic mail, reaffirming—in one fell swoop—my faith in humanity. You want ‘em? he said. Come an’ get ‘em, but make it quick. Leaving for the Village in 20 mins. I Billy Ellioted to the train, heels clicking all the while in cartoonish fashion. Sure ‘nuff this swell fellow, an altruist of the highest order, handed over two golden tickets, two of ‘em, one and then another, a pair! What do I owe you, bub? I coughed out, weary from all the heel-clicking. Nada, said he. They were free, I didn’t pay nuthin’. Enjoy the show.

So no time for dalliance I rang my buddy John quick as you please, burbling all over the place: “John I gotta ticket for ya to Wire you know them right of course you do you were the one ‘ntroduced me anyway free Irving show tonight in ‘bout an hour let’s go I’ll meet you ‘round Union ‘fore sundown eh?” He bit. Sure Mikey, he said. I’ll be there.

Wire. One of the best shows I’ve ever seen. Top three even (Iggy's still #1). Wire were professional, tight. Nary a stray note, nary a wasted motion. All these Nickelback shits and pansy Daughtry dreamers could learn a thing or two from Wire. Rock is work. Rock ain’t easy. Rock is not G-D-A and then a chorus and some carboned Perry-esque falsetto thrown in for good measure. Rock is precision and energy and INNOVATION and sweat and subversion and determining when to scrap convention for five or ten or twenty seconds of sinew and grind and unhinged whammyage. Wire (all three of the attached pics, btw, were taken at the Fillmore show) exceeded all expectations, foregoing slower numbers in favor of aggressive, bass-heavy pulls from their early catalogue. For those new to Wire, I recommend you start with Chairs Missing, their 1978 sophomore release. Sonic perfection. Bands don’t get much better than this.

Here's "Heartbeat" from Chairs Missing.



A Place To Bury Strangers.

Saw these fellas twice during CMJ week (Oct. 21-25). In a fitting close to the summer, I attended both shows with my buddy Lucas, a dear friend of mine who I met ‘round five months ago at, um, an outdoor Strangers concert.

These dudes are super loud. So loud, in fact, that they’ve taken to distributing earplugs at the door like My Bloody Valentine. Faint of heart and faint of ear ain’t welcome in their parts. They’re damn proud of their well-endowed sound, too, proud enough even to (self-)proclaim themselves The Loudest Band In Brooklyn, a tag which ain’t misleading in the least.

Lucas and I (and Travis, who joined us for the second show) rocked the free earplugs, but I’d be lying if I said those mufflers were entirely necessary. During the second show (2 a.m. on the morning of the 26th, a mere eight hours after their afternoon set) I said sorry, ears to my ears and discarded all that foam after the third or fourth song. You know what? I didn't go deaf. No ringing/tinnitus. I’ve gone plugless at an A Place To Bury Strangers concert and lived to tell the tale.

To be fair, though, we were forty feet from the stage. My testimonial might not jive with those who braved the stacks full-on from three, four feet and had their ears blown off.

But, shit, enough about their volume. Great, Mike, we get it. Their amps go to 11. Why don't you tell us about their SOUND?

Well, they’re the real deal. Call them what you will, genrenize them how you will, but there's no denying they're one of the more intriguing noise acts emerging from the New York scene.

APTBS are NOT a shoegaze band, and to label them as such is to misrepresent them. They’re onto something else entirely. Yes, they’re into crunch and fuzz. Yes, they’re noise obsessives. Yes, they’re out to challenge and disrupt. That said, they have one thing that shoegaze bands, by definition, sorely lack: wicked stage presence (see top pic!).

Guitarist Oliver Ackermann tears a few pages from the notebooks of Sonic Youthers Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo (and Hendrix and Townshend and...), raping his vile instrument and wresting from its strings an irreverent, incendiary attack directed at the brain’s very core, probably the part that processes wonder and sublimity.

They make great use of strobe, too.

Check the vid.



Sure, there’ve been other shows, but none I feel like documenting at the present time.

Rather, I’m gonna list a few songs that have been rockin’ my world:

Soft Cell—“Insecure Me”
COIL—“The Last Amethyst Deceiver”
Queens of the Stone Age—“Never Say Never” (cover)
Caribou—“Melody Day”
Yo La Tengo—“Moby Octopad”
Suicide—“Ghost Rider”
Yeasayer—“Wait For the Summer”
Grizzly Bear—“Knife”
The Doors—“The Soft Parade”
Gillian Welch—“Ruination Day (Pt. 2)”
Beach House—“Master of None”
CAN—“Vitamin C”
Morphine—“Let’s Take A Trip Together”
Paul Simon—“Slip Sliding Away”
Charles Manson (yes, THAT Charles Manson)—“Look At Your Game, Girl"
...

this grammar cop will billy club YOUR ass

Let's work on this, people.

Your = the possessive. Ex: Is this YOUR baseball glove?

You're = a contraction meaning "you are." Ex: YOU'RE quite an athlete.

elwood's a uniped

I come before you half the man I used to be, a humbled and broken vestige of my former self.

Times like these I’m reminded of that great thinker (a Bostonian, surely) who proffered,

"THOU shalt not, but for a fool, venture into faire New Amsterdam with only thy walking sticke and flimsee foote-cloth as companie, for foote of a pleasante flesh and con-crete of firmest tread ought never fratonise nor mairie. Walke, then, and paye no mind, but you’d well to bend thy ear and taketh note; ye shall henceforth suffer paine of the ankle and pull of the crotche. Wince ye muste, and wince ye shall."

Well put.

Today I pullethed my crotche and suffered great paines of the ankle while walking the entire length of Manhattan from north to south. I also bruised the lateral musculature of my left foot, resulting in a pronounced limp. Your protagonist chose unwisely his wardrobe: dubious footwear, thin socks and invasive, motion-restricting blue jeans. When the sky fell and Aretha postmaturely took to the stage for her song of death, I Tiny-Timmed into Battery Park nine hours and twenty miles removed from Broadway Bridge, victorious and beaten both.

Surely this warrants more discussion in a later blog, as it’s hilarious. Sleep, now, for the dawn will fast and soon and an invalid am I.

(Both photos are from today's adventure. First was snapped at 208th, the second at South Street Seaport.)
...

for the lobsters

This entry, though it’s gonna be about writer David Foster Wallace (and me, since I’m intrusive), is not an obit. Every major news outlet in America supplied one of those in the days following his death, so to attempt another would be redundant. I’m writing about Wallace because he’s blown my mind twice in the last month.

I’ve never read Infinite Jest, Wallace’s tree-killing doorstop, though I intend to do so soon. On two recent occasions—once with Marlo on a bench at Black and White tavern, the other with Travis over a burger at Applebee's (har har)—I’ve been alerted to his genius by literary people I know and trust. Bolstered by their endorsements, I pounded a fist in my brain on a table in my brain and shouted, “that settles it! I’m gonna read David Foster Wallace, that guy who wrote that freakin’ humongous book! Infinite Jest, you scare the balls offa me, but I’ll soon be cracking your spine.” Maybe he’s worth checking out after all, I thought. Maybe the hype is actually well-deserved, unlike, say, the curious praise for another Dave, Dave Eggers, and his Incredible Staggering Pregnant Ego novel of Genius, which—if I may borrow a few words from comic Lisa Lampanelli—sucks out loud. Eggers, you owe me $16.21 and an explanation.

My first exposure to Wallace’s writing came in a very unlikely way. While working at Fordham University back in September (this was a week after he commited suicide at 46), I sat around one afternoon on a plastic chair in a windowless room, bored as shit. My task that day had been to deliver mail to all the law professors, but when that wrapped at two pee em I had very little else to do so I flipped through a newspaper that I rarely understand and almost never read: The Wall Street Journal. That day's Journal ran Wallace’s commencement speech to the 2005 Kenyon College graduates on the back page. Here’s a passage:

“…our present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom to be lords of our own skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying. The real important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default-setting, the “rat race”—the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing…”

Before the day was up I’d read the speech four or five times, awed by Wallace’s intellect, message and choice of subject matter. Rather than offer up a generic, inspirational speech—“many of you will go on to do great things, the torch has been passed,” etc.—Wallace spoke frankly and matter-of-factly about the world, warning of pitfalls ahead and encouraging the graduates to subvert those “default-settings” we’ve been programmed with from birth.

There will be days, he said, when you’ll find yourself in a poorly designed supermarket, vexed and impatient. The overweight woman blocking the narrow aisle with her cart (and her body) slows your progress. You snatch at seemingly random items—some you need, some you surely don’t—and transfer them to a handcart, finally returning to the front of the store after fifteen minutes spent slaloming around oblivious housewives, crying children, teens broadcasting inanities into a cell phone...but wait! Your troubles have only just begun, because now you’re queued behind half a dozen sad-faced simpletons hoarding their pathetic, non-nourishing items (which they sadly load onto the sad conveyor) as the sloth behind the register receives on-the-job training. The music bleating out from overhead—a soulless, plasticine, FM-friendly waltz of death—sucks, all the lighting is yellowed and artificial and unflattering to the skin, and you want nothing more badly than to be home, away from it all. To top it off, the check-out line is six or eight carts deep and the woman in front of you has about twenty coupons in her white-knuckled fist.

Here, Wallace argues, choice enters the equation. You can CHOOSE how to approach this situation…it’s all a matter of perspective. Our first instinct, as anybody knows, is to damn the vile scenario and curse beneath our breath. We’ve cursed it before, and we'll curse it again. Sun rises, sun sets. However, Wallace points out, it’s actually

“…within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down. Not that that mystical stuff is necessarily true. The only thing that’s capital-T True is that you get to decide how you’re gonna try to see it…”

A valid point. We spend most of our lives operating on autopilot. To approach a potentially awful situation with wide-eyed wonder (after all, we’re aLIVE!) is not easy, but should we defy all odds and pivot that scene for the better, we've succeeded in conquering the moment. On those rare, rare instances where I’ve been in a “consumer-hell” situation and marvelled at the wonderful madness of it all, I’ve known what it is to be a fully autonomous human being, ecstatic and fully sated.

I recommend you all check out the Kenyon speech, which can probably be found online somewhere.

Then I read Wallace’s “Consider the Lobster,” his 2004 essay for Gourmet magazine, which is all sortsa brilliant. He was assigned to cover the Maine Lobster Festival, an event held every July in the state’s midcoast region. As you might expect from a writer of his intellect and ingenuity, Wallace submitted a highly unconventional article, one that almost didn’t go to press.

Now, I’ve never read Gourmet, but I’m assuming it’s a relatively straightforward cooking mag for food aficianados. In all likelihood, its readers are not after dense, challenging literature...what they're after are fresh recipes (looking back at these last two sentences, I realize Wallace would have tsk tsked my journalistic passivity). Wallace’s article on lobster was a dense, challenging dissertation of the highest order. Anything you’ve EVER wanted to know about lobsters was included within—anatomy, mating habits, history in the culinary arts, brain capacity, pain threshold, preparation of, etc. Brilliant approach, for two reasons:

1) Wallace researched his ass off for this article. You have to admire the guy for his commitment to furious study.

2) His decision to cut straight to the lowest common denominator (lobster, obviously) is what separates him from many of his contemporaries. Let's face it: most writers assigned to such a festival would likely provide a detailed piece concerning the menu, venue, crowds, ambience. Not Wallace. When his brain runs off, he encourages (rather than apprehends) his spastic imagination, which accounts for nearly 80 percent of this article being about a crustacean, not a festival.

To top it all off, Wallace fades out with an open-ended ethical question involving lobsters and their ability to feel pain. Many cooks prepare lobster by dropping the still-living creature into a pot of scalding water, a process that may or may not torture the soon-to-be entrée. Wallace points out that we really don’t know enough about the inner wirings of the lobster to determine their capacity for discomfort, or whether they even "feel" discomfort in the traditional sense of the word. Though he doesn't chastise those who feast (Wallace himself is not a vegetarian), I applaud his decision to explore the issue. Once more, he's encouraging us to adopt an alternate perspective, if only for a brief while.

See ya, David. I’m gonna read your big-ass book soon.
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