The thesis of Jon Mooallem's book Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Looking at Animals in North Americais that preserving the "wildness" of many endangered species may well be impossible, now that human influence is "bleeding into virtually all the available space," and he uses stories of the Lange's metalmark butterfly, the polar bear, and the whooping crane to show that there is a "fluidity to nature that's not easy to recognize or accept" and how climate change and human expansion is certain to eventually put these particular animals out of business -- but even though there is a certain futility in trying to save them, people do . . . and their actions, though ludicrous (tedious butterfly breeding and counting, airlifting starving polar bears, and dressing in whooping crane costumes and going on a year long epic journey in a caravan of trailers and ultra-light planes, in order to teach the cranes to migrate without having them become accustomed to humans) show an essential human goodness, but in the end, these very wild species may die out, and be replaced by synanthropes -- wild species that coexist with man with relative ease: rats, jellyfish, kudzu, roaches, starlings, raccoons, pigeons, etc, and while these species are likened to "ecological Applebee's and Walmart . . . spreading through nature and homogenizing it, while putting the more fragile mom-and-pops out of business," at least we will have some wildness near us (and judging by how some whooping cranes are adjusting to humanity -- eating seed from bird feeders and corn scraps from an ethanol plant -- they may end up like my least favorite bird, which was once endangered, and now defecates on every golf course in our country, the Canadian goose).
I finally finished Carl Safina's book Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel and it's one of the most powerful and moving things I've read in a long time-- I actually had ambitious plans to summarize numerous portions, but the book is over four hundred pages and dense with details, so you're going to have to trust me, this is a really good one; here are a few things to whet your appetite:
1) Lyell Watson's description of an old lonely matriarch elephant standing beside the ocean enjoying the ultrasound rumble of a blue whale and possibly communicating back with her own deep voice: "the blue whale was on the surface again, pointed inshore, resting, her blowhole clearly visible . . . the largest animal in the ocean and the largest living land animal were no more than a hundred yards apart, . . . commiserating over the back fence of this rocky Cape shore";
2) the cruelty of the ivory trade, both to human-slaves and to elephants . . . as late as 1882, slavers chained humans together and had them carry the heavy tusks from the Upper Congo to port-- a 1000 mile slog-- and, as protocol had it, if you got sick, you were killed (to prevent malingering) and if you grew to weak to carry your tusk and your child, then your child was killed, because, as the headman logically explained: "We cannot leave valuable ivory on the road . . . we spear the child and make her burden lighter . . . ivory first";
3) the descriptions of wolves in Yellowstone, their infinitely complex personalities and hierarchies and forays and betrayals . . . the touching moment when Wolf Twenty-one, at the tail end of his years, watched his pack hunt an elk and then headed in the opposite direction, to the top of Druid Peak-- his favorite family rendezvous point-- where he lay down in the shade of a big tree and died . . . on his own terms;
4) the tool use of various animals, including apes, chimps, elephants, insects, dolphins;
5) the self-awareness and theory of other minds that dogs, dolphins, killer whales and primates possess;
6) the variety of killer whale types-- fish eaters, whale eaters, dolphin eaters, seal eaters-- and the various strategies that different tribes of whales use to hunt;
7) the intelligence and creativity of dolphins . . . you can train dolphins to "do something new" for a treat . . . and they will synchronize this creativity with another dolphin . . . my students have trouble with that task;
8) the vast intelligence, empathy, and abstract thinking ability of killer whales . . . and the many injustices done to them in the wild and in marine parks;
9) a lot of other stuff . . . this book is groundbreaking and belongs on the same shelf with two other recent great books about nature: The Sixth Extinction and Wild Ones . . . read all three before you die!
I have been accused of having no discernment in my ratings of books -- everything I tend to review has completely captivated me, and thus I praise the thing to death -- but this is because I work really hard to find books that I like; recently I tried to read Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth and Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq . . . and though I can't speak poorly about either book, as I certainly learned something from each, they didn't fully engage me, and so I dumped Jesus in the library book slot, half read, and barely made it through the first chapter of Overthrow, because I had to keep reading the name Queen Liliuokalani . . . and I must say that I do this quite often: take books out of the library because I want to have read them, not because I want to read them (I actually have a book in my house called The History of the Vikings . . . I've never opened it) but I am now fully in the grip of a wonderful book that I will certainly finish in a day or two, it's called Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About People Looking at People Looking at Animals in America and it's got everything I love in it: mega-fauna, meta-media, and monomania; I am currently reading a section about photographing polar bears, and the trickery necessary for a photographer to shoot "an image of nature that's already lodged in our heads" . . . the footnote in this section points out that lemmings don't actually run off cliffs -- the folks at Disney propagated this in the film White Wilderness, where they paid a bunch of Inuit kids to round up lemmings, then forced the lemmings to run on a treadmill covered in snow, and then threw the lemmings into the water, and created the sequence that created the stereotype . . . but Chris Palmer, famous wildlife photographer explains that these folks aren't "evil or malicious . . . you're just trying to get the damn shot so you can go home and have dinner with your family . . . so you put the monkey and the boa constrictor in the same enclosure."
Jon Mooallem's book Wild Onestells the story of the nearly extinct Lange's Metalmark butterfly, and it also tells the meta-story of how people react to the story of the nearly extinct Lange's metalmark butterfly; you'd think lepidopterists would stick together, simply to fend off bullies, but apparently they have divided into two camps: "lumpers" and "splitters" . . . lumpers are "comfortable gathering up large groups of different looking butterflies under the same species or sub-species" while splitters prefer "more painstaking divisions," and while this sound like a ridiculous feud, it can have consequences when the federal government is deciding which animals and/or environments to protect under the Endangered Species Act . . . but it mainly makes me think of Monty Python's Life of Brian . . . Mooallem also brings up my favorite sub-species nomenclature dilemma: because of global warming, grizzly bears have been encroaching on polar bear territory, and mating with them, and scientists can't decided whether to call these hybrid creatures "grolars" or "pizzlies," and while Mooallem wisely avoids chiming in on this debate, I'd like to say that I strongly prefer "grolar bears" over "pizzly bears," and I honestly don't even see how this is debatable-- when I hear the phrase "pizzly bear," I get a psychedelic vision of a pink and yellow dancing gummi-bear, and that's not going to help combat global warming at all.
Robert Gordon's bookThe Rise and Fall of American Growthasserts that some economic advances are unrepeatable-- technological innovations such refrigeration, air-conditioning, television, air travel, and motor vehicles are probably never going to be surpassed-- and thus, the era of massive economic growth is coming to an end; running water and indoor plumbing are in this exalted category, and though we survived a day without running water, flushing the toilet with melted snow, we were very happy when the well started pumping again this morning-- we were able to shower, brush our teeth, go to the bathroom conveniently, and do the dishes . . . and this also freed us up to do other leisure activities (just as all those major advances created massive economic opportunities) and we built a wild and fast sled run through the woods-- Catherine set a new landspeed record-- and played Settlers of Catan (I won, but more significantly, Ian bult a wall across the island, blocking all our advances and Alex called him Donald Trump and then Ian tried to engineer an absurd trade with me so he could bolster his wall and Alex said, "He's making you pay for it, Dad! You're Mexico!") and then Cat and I dug the car out-- we got over a foot of snow-- and we drove down 91 and ate lunch at the Whetstone Station in Brattleboro (I finally tried some Hill Farmstead beer: Edward and I pronounced it very very good, also had Legitimacy IPA, almost as excellent . . . wish I could find cans of this stuff in the stores here) and we wandered around town until we found a couple of new sleds for the boys (the old ones were fairly shredded) and some very good coffee and some houseplants for my home improvement project . . . you'll have to see it on Pinterest, and we plan on getting up early tomorrow to go snowboarding-- I was quite impressed by the job the plows and sanders did on the roads, even the dirt ones, so we should be able to make it west through the mountains to Bromley . . . and all this vacation stuff was made possible by running water . . . aside from the dog's vacation dream: he found a frozen dead mouse on the porch and ate it.
Saturday morning, I walked Lola to Gypsy Hill Park. Like everything in Staunton, the park is very well maintained. But that doesn't mean they can get away with a pun like this:
In case you can't tell, on the swimming club grounds, there are hundreds of decorative deer. And a banner that reads:
Field of Deer . . . in Honor or in Memory of Our Dear Ones
Puns are not appropriate for sentiments like that.
The weather was crazy warm, so we headed out to hike Elliots Knob. At over 2400 feet, this mountain is one of the highest in Virginia. We didn't figure on doing all 8.5 miles-- the description said that would take at least five and a half hours-- but we wanted to at least see the waterfalls and a couple of good views of the valley.
Then we talked to an old guy with a couple of hunting dogs in a truck at the trailhead. He said we'd have no problem making it to the top. I told Catherine I would consider going all the way, but if after two hours we were still walking uphill, I was heading down. That seemed reasonable.
Soon enough, we saw some waterfalls. This was when we were on the Falls Hollow Trail.
On and on we hiked, higher up the mountain and deeper into the woods. An animal poked its head onto the trail and Lola ran it off. I thought it looked like a small wild German Shepherd. Cat thought it might have been a large gray fox.
Later on the hike, with the help of some locals, we learned that the animal was actually a coyote. In the Blue Ridge Mountains, coyotes look like this:
Lovely Blue Ridge Coyote
This coyote behaved like a proper wild animal and ran away when it saw humans and a dog. That's why we had trouble identifying it. We are used to Jersey coyotes, and they don't behave at all. They bite people and dogs alike, and they will stand their ground until the police shoot them.
They also look mangier . . .
Dirty Jersey Coyote
As we went up, the weather kept getting hotter and hotter. The trail widened and there were many views. Our mood was optimistic about making it to the top. I even took an artistic selfie of Cat and me.
Artistic selfie by Dave
Then we left the woods and hit the final stretch to the top: a gravel fire road which some folks we met described as "very steep." They advised us to take frequent breaks. The Falls Hollow trail through the woods was no longer navigable, so if we wanted to get to the fire tower at the top, we had to head up this road. We had only been hiking for an hour and twenty minutes, and though we were tired, I figured we would make it to the top in my two-hour window. So off we went.
Walking up the gravel fire road was brutal, but the top seemed so close. We just kept trudging away. Lola was fine. Four legs are better than two. We passed the two-hour mark, but we were so close that we kept going. It took us 2.5 hours to get to the tippy top. My legs hurt and I felt old.
Then I saw some actual old people at the base of the fire tower. They were making soup. It was inspirational. They said they came up in all kinds of weather. They were decked out in serious gear and had a lot of cooking equipment. They were having a grand time. We chatted with them for a while-- they had seen the production of Midsummer Nights Dream we were going to see-- and they taught us how to pronounce Staunton properly (don't say the "u"). They also convinced me to climb the fire tower-- I was done climbing but they said the view was worth it. Cat and I both did it and they were correct.
Whew
Going down the fire road was painful . . . way too steep, but once we got into the woods we flew down the rest of the way. We passed the young couple that started ahead of us, the girl was holding the small of her back as she walked and she said she was really feeling it.
We drove back to Staunton and stopped at Queen City Brewing, a brewpub with outdoor seating right by our place. We sat outside and had some delicious celebratory beers and talked to some locals. We learned that it's near impossible to buy any houses in central Staunton-- no one is selling-- and that if you do own one of those houses, you can't breathe on it the wrong way. Everything has to be historically accurate and such. We learned this from some retirees. They loved the town and the vibe.
Then we talked with a couple of Harley guys. They were youngish, wearing black leather, sported beards, and appeared to be tough motherfuckers. But one of them was quite chatty. He said he didn't know our politics and wouldn't hazard a guess-- which we found hysterical-- a couple hiking with a dog from New Jersey, excited to see a Shakespeare play should sound off some liberal alarms, but he forged ahead and started talking about how he didn't like the direction the town was going.
He was worried Staunton was going to enact some gun control laws that wouldn't allow AR-15s and handguns that could hold more than ten bullets. The surrounding counties had become "Second Amendment Sanctuaries,"-- an interesting play on that word-- but he was worried Staunton was going to become like Charlottesville. Liberal! We told him we didn't have much of a gun culture up in central New Jersey and we didn't really know the ins and outs of these laws. Sometimes it's best not to express your opinion.
Then we talked about the terrible state of I-81-- he was a truck driver-- and how he had lived in Baltimore for a while and it wasn't to his liking. His answer for most things-- crime in the cities, the deer population in New Jersey, coyotes, etc-- was more guns. But he was real nice about it. Through this entire discussion, his large bearded buddy said nothing. I think he mumbled something one time about what middle school he attended, but that was it. He just sat there and looked intimidating.
When we got in the car and started driving up the hill to our house, Cat and I parsed the whole weird interaction. Then we both said at once: "His friend was Silent Bob!"
Cat checked her phone and got a sad message. The play was canceled! The old couple on top of the mountain told us some of the cast was sick, and they were using understudies, so the sickness must have spread. We were disappointed, but also insanely tired and hungry. We hadn't eaten since breakfast. We went to Baja Bean Company for delicious and cheap Mexican food and then came home and watched a movie. While we missed watching with the kids, it was nice to select something without having a forty-five-minute debate, which is de rigueur for our house.
We watched Good Time, the movie by the same writers as Uncut Gems.Both highly recommended, if you can tolerate incredibly fast-paced bad decision making-- to the point where you want to bury your head in your hands and stop watching.
Everyone slept well-- including the dog-- after an epic day two in Staunton. Catherine actually got some sun on her chest it was so warm.
Sassy New York Post reporter Susannah Cahalan tackles the most difficult story of her young career (even more difficult then when she went undercover as a stripper to procure illegal butt implants) in her memoir Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness . . . as best she can, she reconstructs her battle with anti-NMDA-receptor autoimmune encephalitis, a wild and malevolent disease that runs her through psychosis, delusions, seizures, convulsions, hallucinations -- bedbugs in particular -- obsessions, lethargy, comatose behavior, loss of verbal ability and social graces, and requires much research to diagnose and a fairly long recovery filled with drugs that bloat her body and slow her mind . . . but she is one of the lucky ones who does recover -- some remain afflicted and some die-- and so she wants to tell her story so that others can benefit, because this swelling of the brain is often misdiagnosed as mental illness, though it stems from a physical swelling of the right side of the brain . . . the book is one of those "there by the Grace of God go I" stories, as the disease has no known cause, and for me (and several of my readers) it has an added dose of reality, as Cahalan recovers at her mother's house in Summit, New Jersey, and visits her boyfriend's sister in nearby Chatham, New Jersey, so while the disease seems to be something out of The Exorcist, the fact that Cahalan has to undergo the scrutiny of "Summit moms" while trying to recover her wits lends the story a suburban surrealism.
In December, SNL aired a sketch about the band Weezer. Some folks are sitting down to what looks to be a lovely holiday dinner party, but then the music algorithm randomly spits out Weezer's cover of "Africa." The quintessential Weezer debate ensues. Leslie Jones and Matt Damon get into it, vehemently. If you're a Weezer fan of a certain age, then you've tread this ground before. And if you're not, then the debate probably didn't make much sense. The rest of the dinner party can't understand why Damon and Jones are getting so hot and bothered. The best line in the sketch might be when Heidi Gardner asks: “Is this a thing people care about?”
The Atlantic promptly posted an article called "The Saturday Night Live Sketch That Sums Up All Online Discourse." The author, David Sims, completely mischaracterizes the piece. He tries to glean a general, modern lesson from the particulars, and he bungles it. His big takeaway is this:
If you know Weezer’s back catalog intimately, every silly reference made in the sketch lands, but if you don’t, it’s still effective. Because above all, this is a sketch about the way some people discuss almost anything these days—with feigned politeness immediately escalating to personal cruelty. Though part of the joke was that this Weezer disagreement was playing out at a dinner party, I was immediately reminded of so much online discourse, where part of the point is coming up with the most extreme reaction possible.
No offense Mr. Sims, but you can burn in hell. And drink my hot blood. This sketch isn't about how people argue online. It's not about "feigned politeness escalating into personal cruelty." The emotions here are totally valid, because Damon and Jones are arguing about something much more profound than Weezer. Deep stuff. They know it. I know it. And my buddy Kevin knows it. We've been having this identical argument since 2005. Since long before online discourse. Pre-Twitter. The Age of Myspace.
Is This a Thing People Care About? Yes!
Kevin and I have been having this very same debate since Weezer released their fifth album, Make Believe. The one with "Beverly Hills." Yuck. "Beverly Hills," which features on-the-nose lyrics, an awkward faux hip-hop delivery, and a talkbox solo. I pronounced the album terrible. I swore I would never listen to the band again. Kevin kind of liked it. He didn't love it, but he also didn't consider it the end of times for Weezer. He was more forgiving than me, but I had my reasons. I knew better. I had been burned before.
And so the debate began. A debate much bigger than Kevin and me, a debate much bigger than the cheesy crap that Weezer started to produce, a debate much bigger than all of our meager and insignificant lives (whether we have a 90210 zip or not). People will be having this debate far into the future. Kevin and I might download our consciousness into the singularity and continue this debate until the sun burns out (which you will see would be highly appropriate). Intelligent carbon-based life-forms on other planets are having this debate right now. It's a discussion about the permanence of character and identity. It's discussion about the possession of an eternal and everlasting soul. Where lies your essence?
In this debate, I always play the role of Leslie Jones. To infinity and beyond. And Kevin will eternally be Matt Damon. It's a post-modern musical version of Sartre's "No Exit."
Here's a quick synopsis of the two positions. They are, of course, allegorical.
Matt Damon takes the stance that Weezer is "doing some cool things right now." He's looking forward to the release of The Black Album. Leslie Jones does not agree. She believes the band "hasn't had a good album since Pinkerton . . . in '96." She believes that all "real" Weezer fans know this. The two of them get deep into the band's discography. Matt Damon presents himself as open to the band's new music. He listens to all of it. He's "ride or die." Cecily Strong says, "For Weezer?" She doesn't get it. She doesn't know what they're really talking about (but she shouldn't feel bad . . . neither does David Sims, a Senior Editor at The Atlantic)
Damon labels Leslie Jones "a purist" because Jones only truly respects Weezer's first two albums (Blue and Pinkerton). Like me, she will deign to "go all the way up to The Green Album" (which is Weezer's third album). The rest of their material is "corny." I agree.
Matt Damon tells her to grow up. Stop living in the past. Jones calls Damon a "grown ass man" and chastises him that he should know better. He should be able to recognize good art and bad art. Things get pretty heated and both Jones and Damon behave badly, but this is not about online discourse and the lack of civility in conversation. This is about something bigger. Something that excuses bad behavior. Something scary and frustrating and philosophical. Also, I can't begin to explain how accurately this reflects the argument Kevin and I have been having since 2005, since Make Believe. It's almost like the sketch writers have been listening on on us.
A Magical Moment of Consensus
Things don't end well-- Damon storms out-- but there is a magical moment just before Damon leaves when Jones and Damon's sentiments align. Damon yells, "Can we all just agree that Weezer is the best band of all time?"
Everyone else at the dinner party yells "No!" aside from Jones, who says: "Yes!"
Watch and see (go two minutes and 53 seconds in).
This is why they are so passionate. They both truly, sincerely loved Weezer. Damon still does. Jones is conflicted. She qualifies her statement: "And then they became the worst band of all time." Damon still loves Weezer, while Jones loves what Weezer once was.
But aren't they the same thing?
Possibly. But probably not. We're talking about one of the stickiest philosophical dilemmas. A dilemma that involves consciousness, identity, art, and creativity. A dilemma that smacks of the infamous Ship of Theseus, but with something more malleable. You.
Are you your past self? What kind of relationship do you have with your past self? Is your brain the same brain you had in the past? Is your body the same body you had in your past?
This is why you have to excuse all the anger and arguing in the skit. Jones is reckoning with the fact that we have no soul, that we have no essence. There is no true identity. The old Rivers is gone. Damon is hanging on, but some part of him must realize that this is disturbing reality is true. Jones has simultaneously lost her faith in Weezer and in the divinity of the human soul.
Supposedly, most of our cells renew themselves every 7 to 10 years, but not the neurons in our cerebral cortex. We're stuck with them for life (and this is why we can get dementia). Other brain cells regenerate. But-- more importantly-- every time we remember something, that memory changes. Every time we recall something, we revise that thing. So in the biggest sense, our brains are not the same as they once were. Our memories do not accurately connect us to our past, they are creations of our present self. Yikes. The old Rivers Cuomo has been replaced, cell-by-cell, revised memory by revised memory. He's a living version of the Ship of Theseus. We are looking at a Doppelganger, a facsimile. Jones is not fooled. Damon is (or perhaps he doesn't want to grapple with this reality).
Is Weezer still Weezer? They've had a few line-up changes, including the loss of bassist Matt Sharp and the addition of guitarist Scott Shriner. But they are mainly the brainchild of Rivers Cuomo. Leslie Jones claims to know Rivers Cuomo "better than he knows himself." And she knows that he is no longer the Rivers Cuomo that produced Pinkerton and The Blue Album. She truly believes that Make Believe is make-believe. It's not genuine Weezer. I agree with her. Matt Damon is not so sure. He thinks Rivers is still Rivers. He's "into the new stuff." He encourages Jones to grow up and listen to some of it. He tells her that "she doesn't understand what Rivers is going through right now." He believes Rivers will suffer the ordeal, endure the crucible, and emerge hardened, annealed and even better than before.
What happens to our identity and our ideas over time? Do we have any sincere connection to our past selves? My guess is not much. I think we are always in flux. I am nothing like my twenty-two year old self. That guy was an asshole. He was also quite fast. But our athletic ability inevitably declines (except for Tom Brady, who -- according to my sources-- drinks a protein shake each morning laced with the blood and stem-cells of precocious toddlers).
While we physically decay, there's a case to be made that we should be getting better at things like music and drawing and writing and art (until we get dementia). Our artistic and cerebral skills should improve over time. But this doesn't always seem to be the case. Where is the Weezer that Leslie Jones once loved? And why hasn't the band improved with time, like a fine wine? Should she have the childlike faith that Matt Damon has? Faith that the past Weezer will return triumphant? Or is her skepticism more grounded in reality. I side with Jones. For whatever reason, Rivers is no longer (and will never be) his past self.
Jones and Damon are arguing over the existence and essence of the human soul. Is it eternal and unchangeable? Unable to be destroyed? And does it still reside within Rivers Cuomo . . . or did it evaporate when he moved to Beverly Hills? Was the soul of Rivers Cuomo make-believe all along?
Miles Davis said, "the key to creativity is a bad memory." I understand what he means. You have to keep changing, you can't get too attached to the past. Otherwise, you'll simply repeat it, in less and less sincere forms. You'll plagiarize yourself. You'll lose your soul. You'll sell your soul. I tried to find that quotation online-- to make sure Miles Davis said it-- and I had some trouble. I've been saying it to my Creative Writing classes for twenty years, but all I could find was this odd web page about painter Paul Solnes. So who said it? Perhaps Miles Davis. Perhaps not. But whether he said it or not, he lived it. Miles Davis constantly reinvented himself. The key to creativity might be to embrace the fact that we have no true essence, and we've got to keep moving on.
In 2012, David Remnick wrote an article about Bruce Springsteen, called "We Are Alive." Bruce had just turned sixty-two and Remnick marveled at his ability to produce new and relevant material. Bruce keeps figuring out how to remake himself. But the best thing in the article was what Remnick said about The Rolling Stones. I love The Rolling Stones. I love entire albums by The Rolling Stones. Some Girls and Exile on Main Street and Sticky Fingers. So many good songs on those albums. Remnick said that The Rolling Stones are now merely a high-end Rolling Stones tribute act, though they contain the same humans that were in the actual and legendary band. This may be the perfect example of the Ship of Theseus dilemma as an identity conundrum:
But, unlike the Rolling Stones, say, who have not written a great song since the disco era and come together only to pad their fortunes as their own cover band, Springsteen refuses to be a mercenary curator of his past. He continues to evolve as an artist, filling one spiral notebook after another with ideas, quotations, questions, clippings, and, ultimately, new songs. (David Remnick)
Most of The Rolling Stones are still alive, the same guys who wrote "Sway" and "Rocks Off" and "Dead Flowers" and "Gimme Shelter." Brian Jones died in 1969, just after he was booted from the band. Mick Jones didn't play with them for a long while, but other than that, they are intact. And all they can do is perform their old songs. Why? Why can't they occasionally write an amazing song? Why aren't they who they once were? It's frustrating and disturbing.
Remnick does raise the point that perhaps the Stones are mailing it in. They only get together for the money. This makes sense. he's probably right. But you'd think they would still want to write a few great songs when they do get together. Perhaps that is impossible without self-reflection, progress, and process. While Bruce Springsteen keeps evolving, the Stones became "curators" of their past.
Weezer is another story. Rivers Cuomo is working his ass off. He's got plenty of process. He's trying his damnedest to evolve. Listen to Song Exploder 70: Weezer for the details on how he wrote "Summer Elaine and Drunk Dory." Understanding all the work he put in makes me almost like the song. Almost. But it's still not "Surf Wax America." It's still ersatz.
Cuomo has spreadsheets of lyrics broken down by syllables and accents and prosody. Everything's tagged and searchable. He can "search for lyrics with five syllables and an accent." He's got Spotify playlists of cool old songs; he collects these songs and ruminates on them and finally dismantles them, unravels the chords progressions and the melodies so that he can transform the bits and pieces into something Weezer. He sings his guitar solos first. He eavesdrops and writes stream-of-consciousness journals and has been using the methods in Julia Cameron's classic book on creativity: The Artist's Way.
So why can't he knock it out of the park? Why can't he make another BlueAlbum?
I think I have one possible answer.
Jonah Lehrer wrote an article for the New Yorker in 2012 entitled "Groupthink." In it, he skewers the "brainstorming myth," the idea that spewing out a bunch of ideas is a valid path to creativity. There's something wrong with the "no wrong answers" approach. While it's fun to push for quantity over quality, and it feels positive to encourage freewheeling associations and censor all criticism, these methods don't produce good results. There's been plenty of research on this subject, and apparently working in a more critical environment is a better way to produce good ideas. There needs to be some constructive feedback and debate. Dissent is important; Charlan Nemeth discusses this in "Freakonomics Episode 368: Where Do Good Ideas Come From?"
The Lehrer article summarizes a research experiment designed by Brian Uzzi that explains a critical element in the creative environment necessary for achievement. Uzzi uses the idea of a "Q reading"-- which is basically how long and how well members of a team know each other-- to assess success.
Uzzi focused his study on Broadway musicals, which he calls a "model of group creativity." He studied the Q reading of Broadway musical teams from 1945 to 1989 and he discovered something exceptional. Broadway actors, producers, choreographers, lyricists, and stage managers tend to work together over and over. Broadway musicals are expensive. There's less risk if you know the members of your team. What Uzzi found was that teams with very low Q readings-- teams of artists that didn't know each other at all-- those teams were destined to fail. Q readings in the middle, teams comprised of a variety of relationships-- some old, some new, some in between . . . when the team was acquainted, these plays did the best. And when the Q reading was very high, when the team had worked together many times, then the chance of success went down again.
Total strangers don't work well together. People who have known each other so long that they can't criticize each other without taking umbrage and offense, they don't work well together either. In that middle ground, however, when people are professionally acquainted but not overly familiar, those teams succeeded.
The best Broadway shows were produced by networks with an intermediate level of social intimacy. The ideal level of Q—which Uzzi and his colleague Jarrett Spiro called the “bliss point”—emerged as being between 2.4 and 2.6. A show produced by a team whose Q was within this range was three times more likely to be a commercial success than a musical produced by a team with a score below 1.4 or above 3.2. It was also three times more likely to be lauded by the critics. “The best Broadway teams, by far, were those with a mix of relationships,” Uzzi says. “These teams had some old friends, but they also had newbies. This mixture meant that the artists could interact efficiently—they had a familiar structure to fall back on—but they also managed to incorporate some new ideas. They were comfortable with each other, but they weren’t too comfortable.” (John Lehrer)
I think this often holds true for bands. Michael Azerrad's book Our Band Could Be Your Life is a comprehensive and vivid depiction of post-punk Q readings. A band's first album is usually made after many months of touring and practice, so the band has gotten to know each other quite well (usually because they've been living in a van). But they're not so well acquainted that they can't surprise each other. First albums are often good because the band is in that sweet spot of the Q reading. They know their band mates well enough to debate and dissent, they can recognize the good ideas and toss out bad ones. As time passes, it's often all downhill. The Rolling Stones are no longer professionals in a working band. They are long-time friends. Once things get too comfortable (unless there's a major change, such as Johnny Cash working with Rick Rubin) then it's just going to be more of the same.
Why Is There No Sequel to The Big Lebowski?
Perhaps this is why the Coen Brothers can't make another Big Lebowski. It's why Pavement couldn't make another "Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain." Once in a while, an artist creates something new and unusual and awesome deep in their career. Willie Nelson made Spirit and Teatroin the late '90's. Who knows what got into him? Maybe it was the weed. Radiohead does their best to break new ground with each new album, but most people still prefer The Bends and OK Computer. And these exceptions are the rare counter-examples that prove the norm.
This truism, that artists often peak somewhere in mid-career, seems to hold true for individuals as well, perhaps because every individual artist is ensconced in a nest of relationships and stimuli. Every human is part of a team. And when that network gets old and hackneyed, then things get stale. It's why Liane Moriarty's middle books (Big Little Lies and The Husband's Secret) are so damned good, and why her latest (Truly Madly Guilty) just seems to just be checking the "Liane Moriarity" boxes. It seems derivative. It's why Thomas Pynchon can't do it again.
It's tough to be your past self. It's even tougher to beat your past self, to out-compete that person. Especially when your audience is no longer their past self. They are older and smarter and more experienced. As Heraclitus said, "You never step in the same river twice."
Ride or Die For Strat-O-Matic Hockey?
My buddy Kevin is something of a completist. He reads all the Michael Pollan books. He listens to all of the Weezer and Radiohead albums. He collects things. He still plays Strat-O-matic baseball (and Strat-O-Matic hockey . . . Strat-O-Matic hockey?) He buys the physical cards every year for his Strat-O-Matic sports, even though he doesn't roll dice any longer. Even though the game is now computerized. He's ride or die for Strat-O-Matic.
Kevin feels the same way about Weezer and Michael Pollan. He's a fan of the artist. I'm a fan of the art. Once I don't like the art, I defect. I love Life's Rich Pageant and Murmur, not the band R.E.M. It's because I learned my lesson early on. More on this later. I hate R.E.M.'s Out of Time, even though it was made by the same humans that made Reckoning. "Losing My Religion" is the worst. The fact that Michael Stipe wrote "Talk About the Passion" and also wrote "Losing My Religion" has made me lose my religion, made me lose my belief in an eternal soul.
Strat-O-Matic Hockey?
I'm the opposite of a completist. I only want to listen to the best things. I read Omnivore's Dilemma, but I might never read another Michael Pollan book again. That was his high point. I'd rather listen to first-rate jazz than second rate Weezer. I'm a grown-ass man! I'm logical about it. Old R.E.M. is slightly better than old Weezer, and new R.E.M. is slightly better than new Weezer, but I'm not going to spend my time listening to new R.E.M. because it's slightly better than new Weezer. Instead I'll listen to first rate something else. I'll move on. In this case the newer stuff-- whether it's Weezer or R.E.M.-- is ersatz.
Kevin is loyal and faithful and believes that his favorite artists are still his favorite artists. They can do it again. I'm not so sure. I think we're a constantly changing-- our cells, our memories, our routines, our thought patterns-- and we are surrounded by a constantly changing collection of people. It's really hard to replicate a particular time and place. This may also point to the impossibility of loving a Weezer album again. I am a different person. I'm not in my twenties. I'm not childless and open to the infinite possibilities of the universe and both overly-confident and slightly scared of what that means. Pinkerton really nailed that feeling. But now I'm a grown-ass man. Perhaps that kind of music could never speak to me the way it did back then.
When my wife and I lived and taught in Syria, I played a lot of music with my friend Matt. We both loved Pinkerton and so we learned a bunch of those songs. They were hard to play and sing. Weird chord progressions and some high notes. Weezer was still rolling along. The Green Album had just come out and it was short but good. Catchy and driving. We were young and without children, living in a foreign country, and when we played "The Sweater Song," everybody sang along. It's a time in my life that's impossible to replicate, and it would be silly to think that it's even possible to do so. Matt and I were on exactly the same page, musically. We were in a "strange and distant land," a weird holiday of sorts. Weezer was our common ground.
When Weezer's time was over, I had no problem abandoning them. I may have learned to defect so readily because of what happened when I was a teenager. I had a comically traumatic experience with my favorite band: The Cult. The Cult were the masters of creative transformation. The real version of Spinal Tap. They began as The Southern Death Cult, a goth/post-punk band in the spirit of Bauhaus. Then lead singer Ian Astbury teamed up with his artistic soulmate, Theater of Hate guitarist Billy Duffy and they stripped their name down to The Cult. In 1984, they put out the Dreamtime, a weirdly awesome brew of apocalyptic Wild West riffs, Native American chants, and tribal rhythms. A year later they released the cerebral-sounding college rock classicLove: an impeccably produced collection of droning, ethereal guitars and wailing reverb-laden vocals. The album with '80's anthem "She Sells Sanctuary." I totally dug that album, but the The Cult's next move separated them from the other alternative post-punk bands of the time. They hired Zodiac Mindwarp's Kid Chaos on bass, teamed up with producer Rick Rubin, and made Electric, a raw, stripped down freight train of a record. It was 1987. I was 17 years old, and the album spoke to me and my friends. We felt wild and violent and unhinged, and so did this album. We loved it.
I was ride or die for The Cult
This was one of the reasons I couldn't talk to girls. I really wanted to ask them whether they preferred the celestial sound of Love or the crisp overdriven guitars of Electric. The production values of Steve Brown or Rick Rubin. I wanted to know their opinion. It was a litmus test. Kind of like The Weezer debate. But this was not a thing most people cared about. Certainly not most girls. The only people that cared were my high school buddies, who liked The Cult as much as me. And we loved Electric. We loved moshing at the shows, we loved when Ian Astbury-- drunk-- clambered to the top of the speaker cabinet at the Felt Forum and couldn't get down. It was Spinal Tap embodied. Billy Duffy kept on soloing on his giant White Falcon Gretsch hollow-body guitar, hanging it over the crowd so you could touch it while he played, soloing and soloing until the roadies got Astbury down.
Then I went to college, and my freshman year The Cult released Sonic Temple. It was 1989. They got yet another drummer-- Mickey Curry-- and a new big-time producer: Bob Rock (who has produced acts such as Metallica, Aerosmith, Bon Jovi, Mötley Crüe, the Offspring, and David Lee Roth). I heard a couple singles from the new album on the radio and MTV-- "Fire Woman" and "Sun King"-- and while they sounded a bit over-produced, they still rang true, they still passed as genuine Cult songs (if a bit cheesier than the old stuff). I heard Astbury in an interview and he said he wanted to make "sonic landscapes," like the Fleetwood Mac song "The Chain." That sounded fine to me. "Sun King" certainly did that.
I bought the album on CD, though I didn't own a CD player yet. I could see the writing on the wall for cassettes (but I couldn't fathom that vinyl would make a comeback). My buddy Whitney and I went into a friend's room who had a CD player. Whitney knew I was a diehard Cult fan. He listened with me and watched me nearly shit my pants when I heard the corny strings at the start of "Edie (Ciao Baby)" and the goofy organ at the start of "Sweet Soul Sister" and the abominable a capella chorus at the start of "Wake Up Time For Freedom." I was disappointed. But I hadn't yet become a defector. I blamed Bob Rock. I enjoyed what I could from the album-- mainly "Sun King" and "Fire Woman"-- and waited patiently for the next one. I was young and dumb and optimistic.
Before Ceremony came out, in 1991, I made the absurd decision to have the logo from the Electric album tattooed on my ankle. I was ride or die for Electric. I liked it that much. And I had faith that The Cult would return triumphant.
Then I listened to Ceremony, and it broke me. I realized that these were not the same dudes that made Dreamtime, Love, and Electric. Nor was I the same person. I realized that, in fact, people weren't people at all; they were conglomerations of memories and molecules in a particular matrix of time and relationships. There was no continuity to anything. Ceremony was so fucking bad. It was derivative. It consisted of mashed-up versions of every lousy Cult song, squashed together, with cheesy super-slick production. Self-plagiarism of the worst kind. I defected. I learned my lesson. I eventually covered my Cult tattoo with another absurd tattoo (grist for another post).
By 1991, R.E.M. was dead to me as well. While I could tolerate a few songs from their 1987 effort Green, it was the same routine and timeline as Sonic Temple and Ceremony. "Stand" was "Wake Up Time For Freedom" awful, but "Pop Song 89" and "Orange Crush" were fun. But Out of Time, that whole album seemed ersatz to me. Not genuine R.E.M. I heard "Losing My Religion" and "Shiny Happy People" over and over on the radio. I was angry. I realized you couldn't go back to Rockville. What the fuck? What had happened to the artists I loved?
And then I got over it. I moved on. I discovered new stuff: Cake and Wilco and Ween and Beck and Underworld and Crystal Method and Tribe Called Quest. I got into jazz: Wes Montgomery and Grant Green and Charlie Parker and Jimmy Mcgriff and Jimmy Smith. I went back to old familiar stuff and realized I liked it more than I thought: The Rolling Stones and The Talking Heads and The Cure. I got into hip-hop beyond The Beastie Boys. I learned to find new art-- or art that was new to me-- instead of relying on my old favorites. Why bother being loyal when the cards are so stacked against success? Rivers Cuomo sang it on Pinkerton:
Why bother? It's gonna hurt me.
It's gonna kill when you desert me.
This happened to me twice before
Won't happen to me anymore.
Weezer
I'm no longer angry. I learned not to be offended when an artist I liked produced something shitty. That artist is no longer the artist they once were. It's not a betrayal. You're different, they're different, everything is different. The Artist Formerly Known as Prince got it exactly right when he renamed himself. I'm happy that people can come together at all, in any time or place, and create something of significance. It's really hard. And it can't last. Everyone has to be in the right space. There's some real vitriol out there about Rivers Cuomo and Weezer, but I'm just glad they made the Blue Album and Pinkerton (and the Green Album is decent, I just gave it another listen). You can't expect much more.
I was lucky enough to move in lock-step with The Cult and some other bands-- including Weezer-- for a few years, for a few albums. But what are the chances for that to continue? For you and the artist you love to evolve in the same way, so that you enjoy everything they make? Slim to none. It's just not feasible, for a variety of reasons. I was fourteen when The Cult made Dreamtime, and investigating punk-rock and goth and underground music. It was a perfect fit. A year later I had picked up the electric guitar and the droning riffs on Love were intriguing. Every budding guitarist in the '80's who liked alternative music learned the opening to "Rain" and "She Sell Sanctuary." And when I was seventeen and full of testosterone, The Cult put out Electric. Perfectly appropriate for me and my buddies. These albums are touchstones of time as much as they are of sound. They moved in parallel with my aesthetic sensibilities. That was a happy accident.
Our identity depends as much on who surrounds us as it does with what is within us.
There's a fantastic artifact from The Cult discography symbolic of this theme: that our identity depends as much on who surrounds us as it does with what is within us. The Cult recorded an earlier version of the songs that eventually became the hard-driving Electric. These tracks are called The Manor Sessions. They were produced by Steve Brown, the same guy who produced Love. If you like The Cult, then these are fascinating tracks.
It's the songs from Electric but they sound like B-sides from Love. The band decided these recordings didn't reflect their new direction. They enlisted Rick Rubin and made the "real" version of Electric. And it was all about the production. If The Cult had stuck with Steve Brown and made another album that sounded like Love, I would have liked it. I like The Manor Sessions. I would have liked The Cult, the same amount that I liked Jane's Addiction and Guns N' Roses and Soundgarden and The Cure and Danzig. A lot. But I wouldn't have gotten a Cult tattoo. That Electric album that spoke to my me and my friends in a very special way when we were high school seniors, when we were drinking beer, driving around, doing vandalism-- that album almost didn't exist. You can actually hear what it could have been. If this had been the case, we would have driven slower and done less vandalism. Maybe we would have been more cerebral and sensitive. We certainly would have been different. It makes me realize a piece of art is so dependent on the circumstances. It's a product space and time and relationships. It's a miracle that it ever works at all, that a bunch of sounds could mean so much. And it's greedy to think that it can be repeated, especially by the same humans at another time, in another place, when everything is different. Weezer is never going to make another Blue Album, and that's okay.
I'm doing something annoying and pretentious right now, but it fits perfectly with this philosophy. My family is taking a trip to Costa Rica this summer, so I started brushing up on my Spanish. This led me to search for some great Latin American alternative albums. I stumbled on some fantastic stuff. Cafe Tacuba's highly regarded Re. Los Amigos Invisibles' funk album The New Sound of the Venezuelan Gozadera. Soda Stereo's alternative classic Sueño stereo. And Jessico Megamix byBabasónicos (a band regarded as the Argentinian version of Beck).
Listening to this music is like stumbling on buried treasure. These are the best albums by these bands. You can tell they are in the Goldilocks Zone for Q reading and creativity. It's a real treat. And I'm learning some interesting Spanish idioms (such as Cómanse a besos esta noche. . . you can eat kisses tonight?)
So no more ride or die for me. I'd rather listen to some nearly incomprehensible first rate Latin American music than second rate stuff from my favorite bands. I've embraced the Miles Davis philosophy. I have a shitty memory, and it keeps me moving. I'm not going to wait for lightning to strike twice when I can search for a fulgurite.
I'd like to apologize to David Sims for "escalating to personal cruelty." I don't actually want him to burn in hell . . . but I do want him to read this and understand the true significance of the SNL Weezer sketch, and the true significance of the Weezer debate. It's about the continuity of our identity, and the truth might be disturbing. There might not be any continuity of our character. Our soul might be an illusion. There's an up side to this. Change is not only possible, it is inevitable. I'm in a better place now. I've dredged up lots of memories, and my brain has revised them. I've listened to a bunch of old music and it's made me nostalgic. I'm nothing like the guy who started writing this post. That guy was a little disappointed with Weezer. That guy was angry at David Sims. That was my past self. But nearly six thousand words later, this new guy, this new Dave, he knows better.
My wife is turning fifty tomorrow-- quite a milestone-- but more significantly, I just finished my fiftieth book of the year The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-centered Planet by John Green. . . and judging by the number of passages I highlighted on my Kindle, it's a good one-- here are the highlights, with some fragmented commentary:
there's a lot of stuff on understanding the vastness of time . . .
Complex organisms tend to have shorter temporal ranges than simple ones . . .
When you measure time in Halleys rather than years, history starts to look different. As the comet visited us in 1986, my dad brought home a personal computer—the first in our neighborhood. One Halley earlier, the first movie adaptation of Frankenstein was released. The Halley before that, Charles Darwin was aboard the HMS Beagle. The Halley before that, the United States wasn’t a country.
Put another way: In 2021, we are five human lifetimes removed from the building of the Taj Mahal, and two lifetimes removed from the abolition of slavery in the United States. History, like human life, is at once incredibly fast and agonizingly slow.
John Green, who is very literary, actually missed an easy allusion here-- see if you know what I'm talking about:
Eventually, in what may have been the most entitled moment of my life, I called and requested a room change because the ceaseless tinkling of the Gatsby Suite’s massive crystal chandelier was disturbing my sleep. As I made that call, I could feel the eyes of Fitzgerald staring down at me.
he should have referred to the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg on the billboard over the valley of ashes-- as they were the eyes of God, staring at the corrupt and immoral wasteland of America . . .
on imagery
We’ve long known that images are unreliable—Kafka wrote that “nothing is as deceptive as a photograph"
on the stupid geese in the park . . .
Like us, the success of their species has affected their habitats: A single Canada goose can produce up to one hundred pounds of excrement per year, which has led to unsafe E. coli levels in lakes and ponds where they gather.
on the lawns which we mow, water, fertilize and manicure:
In the daily grind of a human life, there’s a lawn to mow, soccer practices to drive to, a mortgage to pay. And so I go on living the way I feel like people always have, the way that seems like the right way, or even the only way. I mow the lawn of Poa pratensis as if lawns are natural, when in fact we didn’t invent the suburban American lawn until one hundred and sixty years ago. And I drive to soccer practice, even though that was impossible one hundred and sixty years ago—not only because there were no cars, but also because soccer hadn’t been invented. And I pay the mortgage, even though mortgages as we understand them today weren’t widely available until the 1930s. So much of what feels inevitably, inescapably human to me is in fact very, very new, including the everywhereness of the Canada goose.
on the past and the future
And I suspect that our choices will seem unforgivable and even unfathomable to the people reading those history books. “It is fortunate,” Charles Dudley Warner wrote more than a century ago, “that each generation does not comprehend its own ignorance. We are thus enabled to call our ancestors barbarous.”
something that might be true (but would make me uncomfortable)
Taylor Lorenz tweeted that office air-conditioning systems are sexist, a blog in the Atlantic wrote, “To think the temperature in a building is sexist is absurd.” But it’s not absurd. What’s absurd is reducing workplace productivity by using precious fossil fuels to excessively cool an office building so that men wearing ornamental jackets will feel more comfortable.
a sports essay that made me cry
Dudek’s spaghetti legs, and this will end, and the light-soaked days are coming. I give Jerzy Dudek’sperformance on May 25, 2005 five stars.
and another sporting essay that made me cry-- this one on the yips-- I am a sucker for sports . . .
And then one day in 2007—six years removed from the wild pitch that took away his control forever—the St.Louis Cardinals called Rick Ankiel back to the major leagues as an outfielder. When Ankiel went to bat for the first time, the game had to be paused because the crowd’s standing ovation was so long and so loud. Rick Ankiel hit a home run in that game.
Two days later, he hit two more home runs. His throws from the outfield were phenomenally accurate—among the best in baseball. He would go on to play as a center fielder in the major leagues for six more years. Today, the most recent player to have won over ten games as a pitcher and hit over fifty home runs as a hitter is Rick Ankiel. I give the yips one and a half stars.
more on lawns . . .
more land and more water are devoted to the cultivation of lawn grass in the United States than to corn and wheat combined. There are around 163,000 square kilometers of lawn in the U.S., greater than the size of Ohio,or the entire nation of Italy. Almost one-third of all residential water use in the U.S.—clean, drinkable water—is dedicated to lawns. To thrive, Kentucky bluegrass often requires fertilizer an pesticides and complex irrigation systems, all of which we offer up to the plant in abundance, even though it cannot be eaten by humans or used for anything except walking and playing on. The U.S.’s most abundant and labor-intensive crop is pure, unadulterated ornamentation.
Green writes about my favorite literary term, the pathetic fallacy!
There’s a phrase in literary analysis for our habit of ascribing human emotions to the nonhuman: the pathetic fallacy, which is often used to reflect the inner life of characters through the outer world, as when Keats in “Ode on Melancholy” writes of a “weeping cloud,” or Shakespeare in Julius Caesar refers to “threatening clouds.”
and he writes about my favorite poem . . .
There’s an Emily Dickinson poem that begins, “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain.” It’s one of the only poems I’ve managed to commit to memory. It ends like this:
And then a Plank in Reason, broke,
And I dropped down, and down -
And hit a World, at every plunge, And
Finished knowing - then -
and he writes about America's proclivity for large balls of stuff, like the largest ball of paint, which started as a baseball:
“My intention was to paint maybe a thousand coats on it and then maybe cut it in half and see what it looked like. But then it got to the size where it looked kinda neat, and all my family said keep painting it.” Carmichael also invited friends and family over to paint the ball, and eventually strangers started showing up, and Mike would have them paint it, too. Now, over forty years later, there are more than twenty-six thousand layers of paint on that baseball. It weighs two and a half tons.
and he describes a photo I'd like to know more about and a novel based on the photo . . .
Richard Powers’s novel Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance
We were barraged with salvos of information from Sunday evening through Monday, probably too much to absorb, so don't quiz me on any of this-- and if you need any visuals, head to Captions of Cat:
1) on our way to dinner at the Firehouse Brewing Company in Rapid City-- highly recommended for both for the food and the beer-- we took an impromptu presidential quiz, as Rapid City has a presidential statue on every street corner; Ian would run ahead and stand on the plaque, blocking the name, and then we would guess which president the statue depicted . . . a number of them were easy: JFK, Taft . . . who was a fatty, John Adams (thanks Paul Giamatti!), Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter, George H.W. Bush . . . and I nailed a number of more difficult ones: Herbert Hoover, Andrew Jackson, and Harry Truman . . . but some were impossible for us: Martin Van Buren, Chester A. Arthur, and James K. Polk;
2) after a fantastic meal at the Firehouse, we walked through Main Street Square and stumbled upon a theater group setting up an outdoor production of Hamlet-- which was to begin at dusk-- and though we were full of food and beer and tired from a day of hiking, this piqued my curiosity-- were they going to do all four hours of the most famous Shakespearean tragedy on a tiny stage in a South Dakota park? or was this going to be a parody?-- so we stayed to see and it was fantastic: a boiled down, eighty minute version of the play, but all Shakespeare-- just the best bits-- and my kids loved it (I was also giving them a running commentary, using my brother Marc as King Claudius, which was probably very disturbing . . . you come home from school and I'm dead and Uncle Marc is in our house and he says I'm your new dad and then I show up as a ghost and tell you that Uncle Marc murdered me . . . so what would you do? . . . and my son Alex didn't bat an eye, he said "kill him" and then I remembered that The Lion King was a less disturbing parallel to the plot, and used that for reference) and my kids also loved watching the South Dakota delinquent teenagers hanging out in the parking deck just behind the stage, setting off car alarms and smoking cigarettes and acting cool (and Ian also loved sneaking behind the stage to see what character was going to enter next);
3) Monday morning we drove to Wind Cave National Park and I learned, for the seventeenth time, that I don't like cave tours and that if you've seen one cave, you've seen them all-- but my kids loved it and they want to do the four hour "Wild Cave" spelunking expedition once they are old enough (I also learned that some people are really really stupid . . . who brings an 18 month old screaming child on a cave tour? . . . though this wasn't as bad as when Cat and I went through Mammoth Caves in Kentucky and got stuck behind a family with horrible body odor);
4) we learned that bison really do roam free on the plains of South Dakota;
5) we learned that Hot Springs is the most scenic town in the Black Hills-- all the buildings are made of light red sandstone and some are stately, a warm stream runs through the center of town-- fed by the springs-- and there is a even a waterfall . . . the place has none of the tourist vibe of the towns up near Mount Rushmore (it actually has a sense of decay, which is paradoxical, considering the solid nature of the buildings);
6) my children learned that Evans Plunge is their favorite place on earth-- it is billed as "the world's largest natural warm water indoor swimming pool" and it is quite huge, a giant gravel bottomed pool filled with 87 degree mineral water from the eponymous hot springs of the town . . . and it has some old school water slides-- extremely fast and scary-- and rope swings and rings, and an outdoor pool and water slide as well . . . worth visiting;
7) and though we had learned too much, we had to visit the Mammoth Site, as that's the reason we were in Hot Springs-- so we took another tour, and it was well worth it-- this site rivals Ashfall-- but this time the fossil trap was a slate-ringed waterhole . . . animals would come to snack on the plants that grew year round at the site (because of the hot springs) and then would slide down the slippery slate into the pool of water and drown or die of starvation; the site is sixty seven feet deep, a treasure trove of Pleistocene bones preserved in sandstone like fruit in jello-- mainly mammoths (there are several different species represented, including the gigantic Columbian mammoth, see the photo below) but they also found the remains of the giant short-faced bear, the biggest bear and possible one of the biggest mammalian terrestrial carnivores to ever live on our planet;
8) we learned about Crazy Horse on the way to Wind Cave National Park-- the twenty minute film at the monument nearly made me cry-- carving this mountain is like a great underdog sports movie . . . a far more moving place than Mount Rushmore (in fact, you could fit all four busts at Mount Rushmore in Crazy Horse's head);
9) I learned that nothing looks sillier than a skinny dude in full cowboy attire-- black Stetson, black pinstriped button down long sleeve shirt, blue jeans, boots-- discerningly tasting an ice cream sample on one of those cute little spoons.
Yesterday, on my way to happy hour, I did something very uncharacteristic: I made an impulse buy . . . I had watched Juno the night before and I had a desire for orange Tic-Tacs which was obviously generated by the clever product placement in the film; normally I never make any frivolous purchases-- especially ones dictated to me by the media-- but I was feeling wild, and they were only a dollar (they tasted so good that I finished the entire box on the way home).
I finished two powerful and poignant books (and thoroughly enjoyed both) on vacation that hammered home the exact reason you go on vacation-- because when you locate yourself to a different place, you become a different person-- there are many conservative folks that bristle at this, people who believe in choices and autonomy and free will, and while I will acknowledge that it certainly might be good to believe you have control over your life, it probably isn't true;
1) Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America by Jill Leovy, uses one South Angeles murder to look at the big picture-- black-on-black violence in traditionally African-American enclaves like Watts and Compton are generally under-policed and justice is rarely meted out . . . Leovy turns cause and effect on its head, proving that it's not because these places are inhabited by gang members that make them difficult to police . . . instead, because they have never been policed with much intensity and intent-- unlike white neighborhoods in the same city-- the denizens have learned to solve their problems outside the aegis of traditional authority, witnesses-- fearing injury or death-- have learned not to testify, and it has come to be understood that in these places-- whether it be the Wild West, the territory of the Yanomami, or South LA-- that the state does NOT have a monopoly on force and violence . . .
"take a bunch of teenage boys from the whitest, safest suburb in America and plunk them down in a place where their friends are murdered and they are constantly attacked and threatened . . . signal that no one cares and fail to solve murders . . . limit their options for escape . . . then see what happens"
and if the book sounds depressing, in the end it is not-- because there are select police that work homicide in the ghetto in an inspirational manner, and this details such a case and the men that solved it-- and this is a case that has to be solved, because it is the murder of Bryant Tennelle-- 18 years old-- the youngest son of a highly respected Los Angeles detective Wallace Tennelle . . . a principled officer that chose to live where he worked and paid the ultimate price for it; the book might change your mind about how gangs work (far looser and more disorganized that you might think) and how murders are handled when they are insular and comprised only of African-American men, and it will remind you that you really can't control where you are born and where you live . . . or often not until it's too late;
2) Sherman Alexie tells a similar story of growing up in a difficult, possible barren and futile environment in his YA novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian . . . my wife coerced me and the kids to read it for a family "book club" and we all loved it; Alexie tells the semi-autobiographical story of Junior's life on the Spokane reservation and his daring "escape" to the nearest white high school off the rez-- 22 miles away-- because Junior recognizes that though he loves his family, his people, the land, and his best friend Rowdy, that the setting is inevitably hopeless, fostering alcoholism and endless repetition of the same losses and drama . . . this is the story of his commute and his very real adaptation to a new setting-- Alexie says the book is 78% true and it rings true, it's gross, sincere, candid, hysterically funny, and really moving (plus it has lots of basketball, so I was getting choked up fairly often, because sporting stories are the only ones that make me cry).
