The Things You Find Important? Most People Don't Give a Fuck . . .

I was very excited for school today because-- due to a serendipitous string of coincidence-- my senior English class was expecting a visit from Academy Award-winning director Marshall Curry; Curry won the Oscar in 2020 for his short film "The Neighbor's Window"-- which is based on this amazing true podcast-- but we were having him in because my students watched Street Fight, which is the story of the 2002 Newark mayoral election . . . a charismatic and intelligent grassroots candidate named Cory Booker took on machine politician and uber-charlatan Sharpe James in a profound battle of political rhetoric; the documentary was nominated for an Oscar and it's one of my favorite movies of all time-- if you haven't seen it, check it out . . .

anyway, I've used this documentary for many years at school and it's an excellent primer to teach kids about the reality of elections and political rhetoric-- it's also nonpartisan: both Booker and James are Democrats . . . Republicans aren't really a factor in Newark, so that makes it perfect for the classroom as well . . . so this year I wanted the kids to watch it and connect it to our skepticism unit-- conspiracy theories, fake news, logical fallacies, etc.-- but school is remote, so to ensure diligent viewing, I made an epic forty question digital quiz about the documentary-- it's partly humorous but it definitely checks to see if you fell asleep during the video-- EVERYTHING is in there-- and my friend Ann went to school with Marshall Curry's wife so she has a connection to him, and she sent him my quiz and he thought it was hysterical and offered to visit the class and do a Q and A session . . . very nice of him;

I was REALLY excited for this event-- I had the kids draft questions and I sent a detailed email to the principal explaining my lessons on political rhetoric and how I connected the film to them, and I gave him examples of the assignments the kids were doing-- the kids always love the film and do great work-- and I wanted to alert him that we were getting a surprise visit from a very successful director; oddly, the only thing I got back from the principal was a forwarded email that said "Fill out the guest speaker form" . . . that's it . . . nothing else . . . no "wow!" or "cool!" or "these are really great lessons and I'm impressed that you managed to get an Oscar winner to come to virtual school" and while I shouldn't be surprised-- it's rare that anyone cares about what you care about-- the disconnect seemed pretty weird; he should have at least feigned some enthusiasm; so I filled out the guest visitor form and sent it to the vice-principal in charge of guest visitor form (and received no "nice job!" or kudos from him either) and I set up my Teams Meeting, sent the link to Marshall Curry, put his phone number in my phone-- in case of emergency, he graciously provided it-- and then met with my class a bit early and set up a Google Doc Question Queue so we wouldn't have any dead time or repeated questions . . . and then 10 AM rolled around and . . .

he couldn't get in . . . despite the fact that we had tested the link from an outside email, it wouldn't work . . . so I had to set up a Zoom Account and meeting on the fly-- I had to click on captcha boats and stop signs to get things running;

in the end, we got a meeting going and Marchall Curry and my students were fantastic; he talked a lot about how taking 200 hours of film-- captured over five months-- and eight months of editing (and learning to edit because he couldn't get a grant) made him a much better writer . . . he learned that everything is perseverance and revision and his words of advice: "you can fix something, but you can't fix nothing," will work really well in all my classes;

anyway, after the presentation, I emailed the vice-principal and told him my guest visitor couldn't get into the meeting (despite the fact that I had filled out the form) and he wrote back, "yeah, we've had some trouble with that" and while I refrained from sending a follow-up email, I was seriously wondering why he didn't tell me that BEFORE my guest visitor . . . but despite the apathy of my admin for such a cool event, everything went as well as it could and hopefully it will be something the kids remember in a very monotonous year; my big three takeaways are this:

1) it's all in the revision and editing . . . very few people do anything good on the first try;

2) choose a topic that has a narrative arc built into it-- like an election;

3) you can fix something, but you can't fix nothing.

And Now For Something Completely Different

I made a vet appointment for my dog weeks ago, and I thought I scheduled it during a "B-Day" of remote school-- because on B-Days I have a free period before lunch . . . but I didn't realize that we started back from break on a B-Day rather than the more logical A-Day so my math was thrown off . . . long story short, I had to take my College Writing class on the road today, I ran my Team meeting on my phone while I drove to the vet . . . and as I was driving, a snow squall blew in-- so I was conferencing with a girl about her thesis, discussing Anand Giridharadas's explanation of the plutocratic tendency to "Pinker" things-- to take the long view of history and claim that because the human condition is improving, individual inequalities are not important-- and how this connects to the unfettered emergence that Steven Johnson is mesmerized by (but is Johnson a thought leader or a public intellectual? who knows? I was trying not to veer off the road) and I'm happy to say that I helped the girl through a rough patch of writing, I made it through the blizzard intact, and Lola had a successful visit at the vet . . . who knew I would be able to do all these things simultaneously?

Go Ahead, Listen to Some Old School Hippie Hip Hop (in the rain?)

Hanif Abdurraqib's rambling and perceptive "love letter to a group, a sound, and an era" inspired me to listen to a number of old school hip-hop albums-- most of which I am familiar-- but a few of which I never heard; his book, which Zman recommended to me and I recommend to you, is called Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to a Tribe Called Quest and it astutely points out the difference between the gangsta rap of NWA and the mellower musings of A Tribe Called Quest, De La Soul, and the other Native Tongues rappers is that the members of NWA were “absolutely rooted in some idea of what would make young white people most excited and old white people most afraid”, while the Native Tongues rappers were “absolutely rooted in some idea of what would make young black people most curious and old black people most welcoming”;

Abdurraqib explains that the jazz samples of The Low End Theory was the first hip-hop that he could really play around his parents without fear of criticism; I also learned that the hip hop magazine The Source only gave their coveted five mic rating to a select group of albums:

• People's Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm – A Tribe Called Quest
• Let the Rhythm Hit 'Em – Eric B. & Rakim
• AmeriKKKa's Most Wanted – Ice Cube
• One for All – Brand Nubian
• De La Soul Is Dead – De La Soul
• The Low End Theory – A Tribe Called Quest
• Illmatic – Nas
• Life After Death – The Notorious B.I.G.
• Aquemini – Outkast
• The Blueprint – Jay-Z
• Stillmatic – Nas
• The Fix – Scarface
• The Naked Truth – Lil' Kim
• Trill OG – Bun B
• My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy – Kanye West

and while I've listened to most of these, I missed "One for All" from The Brand Nubians-- it's a clever, allusion laden rhymefest-- and I never listened to "De La Soul is Dead" much either because it's not on any streaming service-- but my son pirated that album and 3 Feet High and Rising and he somehow got them both onto my Spotify as local files, so now I can stream them . . . I also noticed that The Chronic is also available now on Spotify, so they must have cleared the samples for that one.

Dad is Extra

I might have been a wee bit melodramatic yesterday when I arrived home from my tennis match with a pulled quadricep muscle; I called the boys downstairs to break the news to them and once I had assembled them in the living room and I told them the news-- the fact that their father was injured-- indefinitely injured, perhaps even crippled-- and that they would have to pick up the slack around the house: help their mother, walk the dog, take out the garbage, play tennis with each other, get jobs, help pay the mortgage, look after the bamboo and the sapling I planted, etcetera-- once I had told them this tragic news (and the fact that I was very sad because I had disappointed the family-- I wouldn't be able to take Alex snowboarding next week, I wouldn't be able to hit tennis balls with Ian, and I had abandoned the tennis match, leaving my poor opponent without anyone to play after a measly twenty-minutes of tennis) the kids took a look at my pathetic figure on the couch and laughed at me; Alex said, "Jesus Dad, the way you called us down, I thought someone we know died from covid . . . you'll be fine, just rest it" and he was right-- I took some Advil and a nap and today it feels a bit better-- I'm still going to take two week off from tennis and I ordered a roller and a thigh wrap-- and then after some consultation with the sports medicine people at the dog park-- I purchased a "muscle gun" . . . these things are supposed to work wonders and now I know that I need to REALLY warm-up before competitive tennis-- not just some light stretching, but some vigorous stationary-biking and some short sprints . . . so I'm in a better mood today and I'm going to use this injury as a portent for changing things for the better in my life, I'm done wallowing in misery for now).

Tennis Notes . . . I Am an Idiot

I was really looking forward to my tennis match this morning with Bill-- who is a consistent grinder a few years older than me-- because while I thought I would be able to win handily, I would get a lot of practice hitting slice backhands and cross-court winners, which are shots I need to work on . . . and when I took the lead 3-0 on him he started to mix things up and he hit a beautiful drop shot and my brain said It just might be possible to get to that and then I was sprinting and while I did get to the shot, I pulled my left quad on the way there-- something went "ping" in there-- and while I tried to continue the match-- I didn't want to put Bill out-- it was starting to hurt more and more and I couldn't push off so I abandoned ship and drove home and now I'm in pain and laid up and miserable-- tennis was my favorite part of the week!-- and while I can't complain, because I'm alive during a pandemic, I have learned that I need to REALLY warm up before I play-- I did some light stretching but that's not enough, I need to ride the bike and take a jog and make sure I'm ready to roll before I start sprinting around like a madman for no good reason.

Could This Book Explain That Book?

Now that I have begun Robert Kolker's Hidden Valley Road: Inside The Mind of An American Family, I am wondering if the mysteries and enigmas of the last book I read-- Piranesi-- could be explained by schizophrenia (an affliction that 1 in 100 people will suffer from at some point during their life).

Piranesi

Susanna Clark's elegant new novel Piranesi is a major departure from her last book; Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, which she published in 2004, is a massively footnoted faux-historical tome on magic during the Napoleonic Wars-- it's fantastic-- but I think her new work is something special as well; it reminds me a bit of Nabokov's Pale Fire . . . or a more abstract Eternal Sunshine . . . or Inside Out for adults . . . or none of that, it's unusual and surreal, but precisely written-- I'm not sure if I fully understand the mystery-- or if that's even possible, but I will say this, without spoiling: it's the perfect book to read in quarantine.

Sam Harris Adds Clarity . . . Lawrence Wright Adds the Anecdotes

The new Sam Harris podcast An Insurrection of Lies provides some clarity of thought about the storming of the capitol; Harris is worried about two misconceptions, one on the right and one on the left . . .

he is worried that the right is falsely equating the storming of the capitol with the riots, looting, and burning that occurred during the BLM protests-- and while Harris believes that the media did an abysmal job reporting on the chaos that occurred during those protests, that the media bent over backwards to not appear racist, and that Biden and Harris could have criticized the criminal behavior more overtly-- he still thinks you can't equate the natural eruption of mob criminality that happened in certain instances with a sloppy and disgraceful coup spurred on by a sitting President who knows he has a cult-like following of misinformed and delusional zealots and backed by a number of Republicans who fully well know that the election was not stolen but kowtow to Trump for strategic reasons . . . especially since this is an embarrassment on the world stage and perfect proof for regimes in Russia and China that democracy is bullshit;

he is worried that the left is equating the police action during the siege as more proof of white supremacy and systemic racism . . . that if this was a BLM protest, folks would have been treated differently; he brings up the point of the black cops being pursued by the white mob . . . these black cops weren't complicit in the siege, they were in an untenable situation-- fearing for their lives-- and a white woman was shot in the neck and executed by police . . . if this happened at a BLM protest, it would have been cause for further rioting; there may be a sinister conspiracy as to why the police presence was so small (or it might be the fault of the DC mayor, who didn't like the heavy-handed tactics of the National Guard at the BLM protests) but Harris is worried that the left will racialize this event instead of using as a starting point for laws instead of norms for the president-- he's hoping Biden enacts some laws to make the Presidency "psychopath proof" but of course the best way to avoid this is to NOT elect a psychopath;

his main thrust is that if you wholeheartedly believe everything you hear from either the right OR the left, your thoughts will achieve a cult-like conformity . . .

for another podcast that gets into this listen to the Joe Rogan featuring Lawrence Wright-- I enjoyed all three hours of the dialogue; Lawrence Wright knows his stuff on this topic-- he interviewed the son of Jim Jones (that's quite a story) and he wrote "Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood & the Prison of Belief" and "The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11."

Excursions of Dave

I'm reading Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest by Hanif Abdurraqib so today I'll let Q-tip do the talking:

Beats that are hard, beats that are funky
It could get you hooked like a crackhead junkie.

Tennis Notes

I took it easy this week-- alcohol-wise and exercise-wise-- because I thought I was playing an excellent in the Saturday morning tennis league . . . last week I had an easy match where I got to practice various serves and shots (as I destroyed my opponent . . . he had no killer instinct) which was kind of a nice break because the scouting report I received on Manoj was that he tough to beat, especially if his first serve was on-- but I arrived at the club this morning and found out that Manoj pulled his groin and hurt his elbow-- so he is out for the rest of the season-- and I was playing his replacement, a guy with a Russian accent named Alex . . . this was a bit of a letdown as I was amped up to see how I would fare against Manoj-- but when I started warming up with Alex, I realized I was going to have my work cut out for me anyway-- Alex was hitting the ball hard in warm-ups-- a strong forehand and a big first serve and he wanted to take a bunch of overhead smashes, which he killed . . . then we started playing-- and while his first serve was intimidating (he even aced me once) I noticed he didn't have a great backhand, it was a spinning slice shot which skipped low, nor did he have a great second serve and he sometimes made unforced errors-- and so instead of attacking the net and trying to hit winners-- which wasn't working all that well (after some long games full of errant shots, we were tied 4 to 4) I started concentrated on something simple-- keeping my eye on the ball-- and I hit my serves to his backhand, kept the ball in play, and watched him run around his backhand and feed me hittable balls . . . with this simple strategy, I won the next seven games straight and beat him 11-4.

Dave Reads His Second AI Novel in as Many Months

I am becoming a bigger and bigger fan of sci-fi writer Becky Chambers . . . I loved her novel The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet-- her future world is a topical and wry combination of Star Trek and The Hitchhiker's Guide, from a feminine perspective-- and her second book in the Wayfarers series, A Closed and Common Orbit, is something special; it's more of a spin-off than a sequel, told from several interesting points-of-view in two distinct time frames . . . and while I recently read a funny and poignant book written from the perspective of an AI, which I thoroughly enjoyed, this one is more detailed, developed, and profound about the nature of consciousness-- artificial, enhanced, cloned, and alien . . . and it's also quite clever about how these various cultures might exist together:

"Why don't different species sit together?" she asked . . . 

segregated transit cars didn't mesh with what she'd read of Port Coriol's famed egalitarianism . . .

"Different species," Blue said, "different butts."

My Son Might Be Smarter Than Me?

During this pandemic, I've seen my kids do number of things that don't seem smart at all-- for example, my sixteen year old son Alex likes to cut an avocado in half while holding it in his hand, with a giant knife, while walking around the kitchen-- and it's exhausting to be constantly suggesting things that seems commonsensical, like "why don't you put that thing on a solid, less fleshy surface, and use a cutting board?"-- so when Alex wanted to watch Primer last week, I assumed it would be a disaster-- Primer is the most realistic (and the most difficult to understand) time-travel movie ever made-- Chuck Klosterman has a great essay about the film in which he lauds it to no end but he also reminds folks that:

"Primer is hopelessly confusing and grows more and more byzantine as it unravels (I’ve watched it seven or eight times and I still don’t totally know how it works)"

so I advised my son to turn on the subtitles, but he refused-- he wanted to "do it the hard way"-- and I told him that it took me a couple viewings to get it, and some charts, and a whiteboard . . . and then we watched the movie and he understood the first time through . . . and not only that, he predicted the existence of the failsafe machine-- a plot device I did not understand until I had watched the film a half dozen times . . . he said that taking A.P. Physics helped him understand the incomprehensible jargon at the start of the movie and the rest . . . well, though this is the same kid that picked up a rotisserie chicken with cloth oven mitts (because he thought you used oven mitts to pick up things that are hot . . . I had to explain that if the item is hot, moist and greasy-- then you DON'T use oven mitts) but despite the e lapses in common sense, I think it's time for me to admit that his brain might function a lot better than mine (he is taking four AP classes this year and aims to be an aerospace engineer . . . maybe someday I'll convince him to read Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow).

To Infinity and Beyond . . .

While we were watching football, my son Ian asked me if you had to kick a field goal through the goal posts and I told him that you did not-- you could kick the ball as high as you like, because the goal posts extend upward to infinity . . . this is also true for the goal-tending cylinder in basketball: I can't think of any other infinite sporting boundaries of significance, but perhaps there are others . . . and I think I might extend this sentence to infinity . . . why not . . . ellipses are cheap . . .

Rule Number One for the Ladies: Don't Compliment Dave

Normally, folder review for the Rutgers Expos Class is at least a little bit stressful; a team of us teach the course-- which is notoriously difficult-- at my high school and if the kids pass, then they can buy the credits and avoid taking the class freshman year . . . folder review is when Rutgers makes sure that we are grading up to their rigorous standards, and while it's always done in an open and academic fashion, any time someone grades your grading, things can get contentious-- my reputation used to be that I was a bit fast and loose with my grades . . . and I often found myself debating on behalf of a student and their paper in order to maintain a higher grade-- but this year we have a new liaison and I met with her today and she obviously didn't get the memo: normally, intelligent women only admonish and counsel Dave . . . they don't shower him with compliments-- because his self-esteem is already bloated and swollen (for no good reason other than using mental health strategies similar to the one the fox used to assure himself that those grapes were sour) so I was quite surprised when the new lady said my grades were "precisely what she would have given" and she said we see "exactly eye-to-eye" and she loved the specificity of my comments and my modeling of close reading and she couldn't wait for my input at the grading calibration workshop . . . this was very fun for a few minutes-- and it was especially entertaining to rub it in Brady's face, as he used to be the grading king-- but now I'm feeling a lot of pressure-- I'm more used to being the amiable screw-up that could use some constructive direction; we'll see how this new role goes.

A Solemn Promise

If I survive this pandemic-- either through avoidance, vaccination, or catching covid and developing antibodies, then I am never washing my hands again (even after using a gas station restroom where you need to get a key connected to a wooden block by a chain).

Air Fryer = This Moment from The Simpsons

After extensive research, many unsolicited testimonials, and some serious discussion, we finally broke down and purchased an air-fryer (but we're never getting an Insta Pot . . . never!) and I must admit, it works . . . and it works fast-- just like the internet; the first thing that came to mind when I used the air-fryer was a moment from a mid-90s episode of The Simpsons and I found it . . . fast . . . enjoy.

2020: A Good Year For Reading Books

I read 54 books in 2020-- the most since I've been keeping this list-- and one of those books was The History of Tom Jones: A Foundling, a monstrous time that should count as two books-- and while there are a number of good reads on the list, if I had to pick three favorites, they would be:

Best Literary Fiction:  Deacon King Kong by James McBride

Best Non-fiction: Why We're Polarized by Ezra Klein

Best Sci-fi: The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet by Becky Chambers

and the best detective series would be the first three Easy Rawlins books by Walter Mosley

here's the complete list, happy reading . . .

1) The Lost City of the Monkey God: A True Story by Douglas Preston

2) The Club: Johnson, Boswell, and the Friends Who Shaped an Age by Leo Damrosch

3) Our Kind of Traitor by John le Carré

4) Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe

5) This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

6) Devil in a Blue Dress by Walter Mosley

7) Wilmington's Lie: The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy by David Zucchino

8) A Red Death by Walter Mosley

9) White Butterfly by Walter Mosley

10) Death Without Company by Craig Johnson

11) Best Movie Year Ever: How 1999 Blew Up the Big Screen by Brian Rafferty

12) The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie

13) Dead Men's Trousers by Irvine Welsh

14) The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling by Henry Fielding

15) The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey

16) A Shilling for Candles by Josephine Tey

17) The Secret History by Donna Tartt

18) Phil Gordon's Little Green Book by Phil Gordon 

19) Elements of Poker by Tommy Angelo

20) Harrington on Hold'em Vol I by Dan Harrington

21) The Bat by Jo Nesbø

22) Small Stakes No-Limit Hold'em by Ed Miller, Sunny Mehta, Matt Flynn

23) Hold'em Poker by David Sklansky

24) Harrington on Hold'em Vol II by Dan Harrington

25) To Love and Be Wise by Josephine Tey

26) Waiting for Straighters by Tommy Angelo

27) American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America by Colin Woodard

28) Townie by Andre Dubus III

29) Every Hand Revealed by Gus Hansen

30) The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet by Becky Chambers

31) Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie

32) Do Not Resuscitate by Nicholas Ponticello 

33) The Biggest Game in Town by Al Alvarez

34) The Cipher by Kathe Koja

35) Bad Boy Brawly Brown by Walter Mosely

36) Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World by Anand Giridharadas

37) "H" is For Homicide by Sue Grafton

38) The Perfect Nanny by Leila Slimani

39) Strategies for Beating Small Stakes Poker Tournaments by Jonathan Little

40) Soccer Systems and Strategies by Jens Bangsbo and Birger Peitersen

41) The Full Tilt Poker Strategy Guide edited by Michael Craig

42) Orphans of the Sky by Robert A. Heinlein

43) The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters

44) Tightrope: Americans Reaching For Hope by Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn

45) The Mysterious Affair at Styles by Agatha Christie

46) The Peripheral by William Gibson

47) Set My Heart To Five by Simon Stephenson

48) The Inner Game of Tennis by W. Timothy Gallwey

49) A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine

50) Why We're Polarized by Ezra Klein

51) Deacon King Kong by James McBride

52) Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked by Adam Alter

53) Agency by William Gibson

54) The Fifth Season by J.K. Jemisin  

Partying Like It's 2020

 

I can't really complain about this New Year's Eve . . . I got the kids to play darts with me while we listened to Beck and "The Chronic" and I drank beer . . . while it's not the Pub, it was pub-like . . . but we're about to consume some homemade ravioli so I think this is going to be an early night.

2020 Winds Down . . .

2020 is winding down in typical form:

1) I wanted to heat up my leftover half-burrito last night and when I opened the aluminum foil I found the roll to be empty-- one of the children finished the foil and then put the box back-- and since foil is required to heat up a burrito ( I wasn't going to risk it in our brand new air-fryer) I had to go to the store and it was busy;

2) though I've only got eighty pages left, I'm not sure sure I'm going to finish my 54th book (2020 was a good year for reading books) because I might abandon it . . . it's a fantasy novel by J.K. Jemisin called The Fifth Season and the subtitle is "Every Age Must Come to An End" and it won the Hugo Award in 2016 so I thought it would be a fitting end to this weird and stunted year but it's a bit too apocalyptic and cruel and depressing . . . though it's set in an alternate universe of fissures and tsunamis and volcanoes and an oppressed group of "orogenes," people with the ability to sense and manipulate the wild and restless thermal and kinetic energy that is par for the course in this world-- they can quiet these disasters . . . or set them off-- now that I'm summarizing, I realize it is a pretty great book-- just painful-- and I will probably finish it because of the last kick in the balls from 2020;

3) it is raining and it is going to rain and it will continue raining until well into the New Year.

It's Never To Late to Listen to Wonder

While I was hiking with the dog this morning (hiking with the dog, online chess, drinking beer, and indoor tennis are my go-to activities during this pandemic winter break) I learned something: 

I have not listened to nearly enough Stevie Wonder

and I learned this from an excellent podcast . . . Lost Notes:1980;

the host is poet and essayist Hanif Abdurraqib and in each episode, he takes a deep dive into something musical; the Stevie Wonder piece is excellent and the story of "Louie Louie" is mind-boggling-- I had no idea.

Does Dave Possess Agency?

Agency is book two of William Gibson's "Jackpot" trilogy and while it's not as difficult a read as the first (The Peripheral) it is still unnerving because nobody is where or when they seem; the jackpot is only a prize for those who survived this ironically named ecopolitical apocalypse in the near future-- those who made it to the other side of the pandemics and massive climate change and political fallout enjoy a world recovering: low population, greater technology, and some methods of reversing the damage humanity has done; there is also massive quantum computing and through this "server" those rich and powerful enough can send information backward and forward through time-- so it's a time travel story, but even more complicated than Primer . . . no one is where and when they seem-- powerful folks in the future start new "stubs" when they contact and meddle with the past, which they do in drones, with AI, and in various networks-- the perspectives shift rapidly-- you could be in 2136, occupying a drone in 2017-- you could be in 2017, embodying a peripheral in 2136-- and you could be relaying information back and forth, changing timelines in the past and future as you relay information and technology . . . you might be a government agency doing this, a rogue agency, you might be a corrupt plutocrat from "the klept," or even disembodied AI with agency . . . I've read the entire William Gibson ouvre and I trust him implicitly as an author, that's why I hung in with these two books-- and while there aren't giant epiphanic revelations at the end, you get the hang of the way things work (in the same time frame as the characters, often) and I'm interested in how he finishes this subtle exploration of free will and determinism turned on its head.

Xmas 2020: The Weird and the Mundane

On Christmas Eve, we met Catherine's brother and her niece (and her niece's boyfriend and their dog) down at the Asbury Park Dog Beach-- while the weather was warm in Highland Park, it was a different story at the shore and the boys and I were underdressed . . . you might notice I'm the one wearing sandals) and while that get-together had the usual pandemic weirdness about it, Christmas morning felt just like always . . . and I know that this year we're lucky to have it that way and for that, I am very grateful.

Coastal Elite Intellectual Liberal Xmas Snow Creatures

Highland Park is the most liberal town in Middlesex County-- and Middlesex County is a pretty liberal place in itself . . . so we're talking very liberal; Highland Park is walking distance to Rutgers College Avenue Campus, so we have a lot of professors living in town, including two on our block-- the lady across the street teaches computer science classes and she built a snow creature she calls Gnome Chomsky . . . which made me chuckle, and then we had a long discussion about linguistics, universal grammar, and radical politics . . . and then I complimented the snowman that the British mom (one of two moms) and her son were building down at the end of the block and she corrected me and said, "Snow-woman . . . we're making the Venus of Willendorf . . . see the big jugs?" and upon further inspection I did notice the big jugs, so we had a discussion about ancient fertility objects and I recommended the novel Deacon King Kong because the Venus of Willendorf plays a prominent role in my favorite novel of 2020 . . . and that's why we live in Highland Park.

I Give Up: Here's a Bunch of Random Stuff From "Why We're Polarized"

I highly recommend Ezra Klein's new book Why We're Polarized for both liberals and conservatives-- and it should be the last thing you read that mentions national politics for a long while; warning, this post is going to be epically long-- because I dog-eared so many pages in the book and then used the Google Doc "voice-typing" tool to input all the information into the computer and while it was pretty fun to read aloud and watch the text scroll, the post is a total mess; you're not going to get accurate quotations, as I didn't take my time, but I'm going to boil down Klein's words into a sort of plagiaristic of Dave/Ezra Klein that is perfectly fitting for this ridiculous blog medium; while Klein is a self-avowed liberal (and usually a vegan . . . but not when he travels) who co-founded Vox and is a regular on the podcast The Weeds, this book is not a liberal paean . . . it's an explanation and the take-away is this: stop following national politics like it's more than a football match or a soap opera and-- if you truly want to enact political change-- start worrying about your hometown and the things going on in the state in which you live-- Jersey pride!-- these are the things you can actually influence; anyway . . . here is some stuff from the book, partly paraphrased, partly with Klein's wording, and partly insane rambling;

1) America used to be full of ticket splitters-- and you knew plenty of ticket splitters-- so you didn't identify too heavily with either party;

2) policy was a mixed bag . . .  Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush signed legislation raising taxes for instance that would be unthinkable in today's Republican Party-- almost every elected Republican official has signed a pledge promising to never raise taxes under any circumstances; Bush also sign the Americans with Disabilities Act into law and oversaw a cap-and-trade program to reduce the pollutants behind acid rain; Reagan signed an Immigration Reform Bill the today's Democrats venerate and today's Republicans denounce; Reagan supported amnesty for illegal immigrants; President Bill Clinton' stance on illegal immigrants was much akin to Donald Trump's position; Clinton launched his administration with a budget designed to reduce the deficit and an all-out effort to pass the North American Free Trade Agreement NAFTA . . . he famously ran against the left-wing of his own party flying back to Arkansas to preside over the execution of a brain-damaged inmate and publicly denounced the rapper Sister Souljah; in 1965 a Democratic president created a massive single-payer healthcare system for the nation's elderly-- but as liberal as Medicare was in both conception and execution-- it still received 70 Republican votes in the house as well as 13 Republican votes in the Senate; Obamacare, by contrast, was modeled off Mitt Romney's reforms in Massachusetts and built atop many Republican ideas relied on private insurance for the bulk of its coverage expansion and it ended up sacrificing its public option but the legislation didn't receive a single Republican vote in either the house or the Senate;1982 Senator Joe Biden voted for a constitutional amendment that would let States overturn Roe v Wade, etc. etc.

3) Policy and ticket splitting is no more . . . it's ALL identity politics on both sides-- and we're going to have to get used to and live with it . . . or maybe not because you probably don't live near people from the other party: House Democrats now represent 78% of all Whole Foods locations but only 27% of Cracker Barrels . . . it's easy to overstate the direct role partisanship is playing in these decisions, and while it's true that Democrats prefer to live among Democrats and Republicans like living among Republicans, people are still people . . . they look at schools and housing prices and crime rates and similar quality of life questions . . . BUT the big decision they make-- or their parents have made-- is whether to live in an urban or rural area . . . and as the parties become more racially, religiously, and ideologically sorted into geographically different areas the signals that tell us a place is our kind of place heightens our political divisions . . . most Republicans (65%) said they would rather live in a community where houses are larger and farther apart and where schools and shopping are not nearby, while a majority of Democrats (61%) prefer smaller houses within walking distance of schools and shopping; that's a preference that seems non-political on it's face but adds to the stacking of identities; 

4) psychology doesn't predict political opinions among people who don't pay much attention to politics, but it's a powerful predictor of political opinions among those who are politically engaged; unengaged citizens vote logically-- they look at what a candidate's policy will do for them or their community, while politically engaged people vote using identity and emotion . . . that's damn crazy and why the best way to think about the presidential election is to ignore it for 3.99 years and then take a quick look at each candidate's platform and decide which platform is better for you;

5) it's a mistake to imagine our bank accounts are the only reasonable drivers of political action-- as we become more political we become more interested in politics as a means of self-expression and group identity; it's not that citizens are unable to recognize their interests, it's that material concerns are often irrelevant to the individual's goals when forming a policy opinion; 

6) politicians are not equally responsive to all their constituents-- they're most concerned about the most engaged people who will vote for them  and volunteer for them and donate to them and the way to make more of that kind of voter isn't just a focus on how great you are-- you need to focus on how bad the other side is; nothing brings a group together like a common enemy . . . remove the fury and fear of a real opponent and watch the enthusiasm drain from your supporters; 

7) it turns out that there's only a weak relationship between how much a person identifies as a conservative or liberal and how conservative or liberal views actually are; one reason policy is not the driver of political disagreement is most people don't have very strong views about policy: it's the rare hobbyist who thinks so often about cybersecurity and who should lead the Federal Reserve-- but all of us are experts on our own identities;

8) Bill Clinton had the same "draconian" stance as Trump on immigration;

9) one study shows that Democrats and Republicans cared more about the political party of a student vying for a scholarship than the student's GPA  . . . partisanship simply trumped academic excellence;

10) another study found that Democrats and Republicans performed better at math when the math skills helped them find an answer that boosted their ideology-- say gun control for liberals-- and the better the person was at math, the dumber they got when getting the problem wrong would NOT bolster their ideology . . . yikes;

11) it's become common to mock students demanding safe spaces, but if you look carefully at the collisions in American politics right now, then you find that everyone is demanding safe spaces-- the fear is not that the government is regulating speech, but that protesters are chilling speech, the Twitter mob rules the land looking for an errant word or a misfired joke . . . in our eagerness to discount our opponents as easily triggered snowflakes, we've lost sight of the animating impulse behind much of the politics and indeed much of life: the desire to feel safe, to know you can say what you want without fear;

12) Klein summarizes the first half of the book thusly: the human mind is exquisitely tuned to group affiliation and group difference; it takes almost nothing for us to form a group identity, and once that happens, we naturally assume ourselves in competition with other groups; the deeper our commitment to our group becomes, the more determined we make sure our group wins . . . making matters worse, winning is positional, not material; we often prefer outcomes that are worse for everyone so long as they maximize our groups advantage over other groups . . . the parties used to be scrambled both ideologically and demographically in ways that curbed their power, but these ideological mixed parties were an unstable equilibrium reflecting America's peculiar and often abhorrent racial politics; the success of the Civil Rights Movement and its alliance with national Democratic party broke that equilibrium and destroyed the Dixiecrat wing of the Democratic party and triggered an era of party sorting; ideological Democrat now means liberal and Republican now means conservative in a way that wasn't true in 1955; partisanship is in part a rational response to the rising party difference-- if the two sides hated and feared each other less 50 years ago, well that makes sense they were more similar 50 years ago, but that's sorting has also been demographic today the parties are sharply split across racial, religious, geographic, cultural and psychological lines . . . there are many many powerful identities lurking in that list and they are fusing together and stacking atop one another so a conflict or a threat that activates one, activates all of the characteristics and since these mega-identities stretch across so many aspects of our society they're constantly being activated in an era of profound powerful social change; a majority of infants born today in America are non-white and the fastest-growing religious identity is "no religious identity at all"; women makeup the majorities on college campuses; foreign-born groups are rising in population and rising in power and they want their needs reflected in the politics and culture; other groups feel themselves losing power want to protect the status and privileges they've in the past when America was "great" and this conflict is sorting itself neatly into two parties; Obama's presidency was an example of the younger more diverse Coalition taking power and  Trump's presidency represented the older whiter Coalition taking it back;

13) an Essential Truth Klein has learned: almost no one is forced to follow politics-- there is some lobbyist in government affairs who need to stay on the cutting edge of legislative and regulatory developments to do their job, but most people who follow politics do it as a hobby in the way they follow a sport or a band; political journalism has to compete with literally everything else for retention; Rachel Maddow is a war with reruns of The Big Bang Theory; Fox competes with Xbox; time spent reading this book is time not spent listening to the podcast Serial;

14) misperceptions were high among everyone, but they were particularly exaggerated when people were asked to describe the other party; Democrats believe 44% of Republicans earn over $250,000 a year-- it's actually 2%; Republicans believed that 38% of Democrats were either gay, lesbian, or bisexual-- the correct answer is about 6%; Democrats believe that more than four out of every 10 Republicans are seniors-- in truth seniors make out about 20% of the GOP; Republicans believe that 46% of Democrats are black and 44% belong to a union and reality about 24% of Democrats are African American and less than 11% belong to a union; what was telling about these results is that the more interested in politics people were, the more political media they consumed, then the more mistaken they were about the other party . . . it makes sense if you think about the incentives driving media outlets . . . the old line on local reporting was if it bleeds it leads, but for political reporting the principal is if it outrages it leads-- and outrage is deeply connected to identity;

15) people have far more power to influence their mayor, state senator, or governor than they have to influence the national discussion; people should be involved in local politics and be most engaged in the tangible states of the politics nearest to their experience . . . of course you're likely to donate to defeat the politician who serves as the villain in the political dramas you watch rather than some local legislator whose name you can't remember . . . of course the stakes of national politics with their titanic clashes of good vs. evil, the storylines omnipresent on social media and television, dominate consciousness . . . but it's counterproductive;

16) people in America used to identify with their state more than the country-- but this has changed-- and it would have confounded the Founders . . . at the core of this newfound nationalization is an inversion of the founders most self-evident assumption: that we will identify more deeply with our home state and with our country . . . a guy named Hopkins proved this with a text analysis of digitized books-- state identity came up WAY more than national identity until recently. . . so I'm bringing that back: I'm Jersey strong and Jersey proud and Bruce and Bon Jovi and all that shit and the rest of the country can do what it wants;

17) America's political system is unusual in that it permits a divided government and is full of tools minorities can use to obstruct governance; imagine that you work in an office where your boss who you think is a jerk needs your help to finish his projects, but if you help him he keeps his job and maybe even get the promotion and if you refuse to help him, you become his boss and he may get fired; now add in a deep dose of disagreement. . . you hate his projects and believe them to be bad for the company and even the world and a bunch of colleagues who also hate your boss will be mad at you if you help him--  that's basically American politics right now, bipartisan cooperation is often necessary for governance but the rationale for the minority party is to stonewall; it's a hell of a way to run a railroad, but this was our structure during much of American History because one party was usually dominant enough to make cooperation worth it for the minority;

18) famous political pundits Ornstein and Mann mince no words in explaining that while both parties partake in bipartisanship, the Republicans have gone off the rails, to summarize their words: today's Republican Party is an insurgent outlier; it has become ideological extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition, all the declaring war on the government. . . . The Democratic party, while no Paragon of civic virtue, is more ideological centered and diverse, protective of the government's role as it developed over the course of the last century, open to incremental changes in policy fashion through bargaining with Republicans, and less disposed to or adept at take-no-prisoners conflict between the parties . . . 

19) crucially the Democratic party isn't just more diverse in terms of its members, it's also more diverse in its trusted information sources and 2014 the Pew Research Center conducted a survey measuring trust in different media sources, giving respondents 36 different outlets to consider and asking them to rate their trust in each; liberals trusted a wide variety of media outlets ranging from center-right to left: ABC, Al Jazeera, BBC, Bloomberg, CBS, CNN, The Colbert Report, The Daily Show, The Economist, The Ed Schultz Show, Google News, The Guardian, The Huffington Post, Mother Jones, MSNBC, NBC,  The New Yorker, The New York Times, NPR, PBS, Politico, Slate, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and Yahoo . . . conservatives only trusted a handful of sources: Fox News, Breitbart, The Wall Street Journal, The Blaze, The Drudge Report, the Sean Hannity show, The Glenn Beck program, and The Rush Limbaugh Show.


20) Democrats are often derided for playing identity politics, but that is not in truth a difference between the parties . . . Republicans have built their coalition on identity politics as well, but the difference between the parties is at the Democratic candidates are forced to appeal to many more identities and more skeptical voters than Republicans do successful National Democrats construct broad Coalition and that's a practice a cut against the incentives of pure polarisation what national Republicans have learned to do its construct deep coalitions relying on more demographically and ideologically homogeneous voters . . . Republicans, instead of winning power by winning the votes of most voters they win the power by winning the votes of most places

21) Republicans appeal to voters significantly to the right of the median voter but it's forced them into a dependence on an Electra that feels its power slipping away and demands a response the portion it to its fears this is the way in which the parties are not structurally symmetrical and that's why they have not responded to a polarizing are in the same ways Democrats simply can't win running the kinds of campaigns and deploying the kinds of tactics that succeed for Republicans Democrats can move to the left and they are but they can't abandon the center in December 2018 well into the Trump era Gallup as Democrats and Republicans whether they wanted to see their party become more liberal or conservative or more moderate by a margin of 57 to 37% Republicans wanted their party to become more conservative by a margin of 54 to 41% Democrats wanted their party to become more moderate

22) the relevant factor I'm urging you to pay attention to his identity what identity is that article or Twitter thing or video invoking what identities making you defensive what does it feel like when you get pushed back into an identity can you notice it when it happens you log on to Twitter nine times a day can you take a couple of breasts at the end and ask yourself how differently you feel from before you logged on the ID here has become more aware of the ways that politicians and media manipulate us. There are reams of research showing the reaction to political commentary and information we don't like his physical. Are breathing speeds up, are pupils naira, our heart beats faster. Trying to be aware of how politics makes us feel, what happens when our identities are activated, threatened, or otherwise inflamed, is it necessary first step to gaining some control of the process. That is not to say we should become afraid of our identities being inflamed or strong emotion being Force for its to say we should be mindful enough of what's happening to make decisions about whether we're pleased with the situation sometimes it's worth being angry sometimes it's not we don't take the time to know which is which we lose control over our relationship with politics and become the unwitting instrument of others

24) For all our problems we have been a worse and uglier country at almost every other point in our history you do not need to go back to the country's early years when new arrivals from your drove out and murdered indigenous peoples brought over millions of enslaved Africans and wrote laws making women second-class citizens to see it just a few decades ago political assassinations were routine in 1963 President John F Kennedy was murdered on the streets of Dallas in 1965 Malcolm X was shot to death in a crowded New York City Ballroom in 1968 Martin Luther King Jr was killed as was Robert F Kennedy in 1975 Lynette Squeaky Fromme standing about an arm's length from President Gerald Ford aims her gun and fired the bullets fail to discharge Harvey Milk the pioneering gay San Francisco city Supervisor was killed in 1978 President Ronald Reagan was shot in 1981 the bull shattered rivet punctured alone for much of the twentieth century the right to vote was for African Americans no right at all lynchings were common Freedom Writers were brutally beaten across the American South police had to escort young African-American children into schools as jeering crowd shouted racial epithets and threatened to attack violence broke out at the 1968 Democratic National Convention urban riots ripped across the country crime was Rising the United States launched an illegal secret bombing campaigning campaigning in Cambodia National Guard members fired on and killed student protesters at Kent State Richard Nixon Road a backlash to the Civil Rights Movement into the White House launched an Espionage campaign against his political opponents provoked a constitutional crisis and became the first American President to resign from office by impeachment proceedings this is not a counterintuitive take on American history by the way among experts that is closer to the consensus the varieties of democracy project

25) American democracy was far less Democratic and far less liberal and far less decent than today; Trump's most intemperate outbursts pale before the opinions that were mainstream in recent history and the institutions of American politics today are a vast improvement on the regimes that ruled well within living memory . . . if we can do a bit better tomorrow we will be doing much much better than we have ever done before.

Dave Cancels Canker Sores (Canker Sore Cancels Dave)

Today's sentence is canceled, due to a festering canker sore under my tongue. 

The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked

Adam Alter's book Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked doesn't offer up any big surprises-- it just slowly overwhelms you with the details until you have to agree-- many, many people have behavioral addictions centered around technology and digital connectedness; and the big problem is because addiction is not as character-based as you might think, and much more dependent on the environment-- and we can't escape the bottomless and ubiquitous environment of the internet-- we're going to need to be creative with solutions; while I try to put up the good fight-- I stay off social media-- aside from two blogs-- and I check my email once a day (I was astounded at how many times workers check their email on average . . . 36 times an hour?) but I've adopted some wearable tech-- a FitBit-- and this book helped me understand that one of those gadgets can lead you down some weird roads-- people get really obsessive about their step-counts and their runnign streaks-- so I'm trying to have some days, usually after tennis or running, where I try to keep my steps as LOW as possible-- really rest my feet and legs-- there's no reason to ALWAYS get 12,000 steps-- some days are for stretching or lifting or resting-- and while I'm not a gamer, I got fairly obsessed with low-stakes online poker at the start of the pandemic-- so I removed all those programs from the computer and gave that up-- it's not worth the time-- and now I'm playing a couple games of online chess each day (but only if my kids won't play) and this is a result of Netflix and "The Queen's Gambit" and I'm being very careful not to bingewatch shows-- you have to break the cycle of the cliffhanger by watching the first five minutes of the next episode and then stopping . . . and while these are first-world problems and it's the rare sort who develops a full-blown life-threatenign World of Warcraft addiction, I am hooked on the NYT Mini Crossword-- it's the crack of crosswords and there's no way I'll ever give it up . . . anyway, Alter points our that we've become far too goal oriented, there's too many ways ot keep score, and we've got to be constantly vigilant about this stuff eating up our time-- and the only way to replace one habit is to find another, when the cue happens and you usually play Candy Crush, you've got to have something else-- a ten minute yoga video or something . . . but enough of this: online chess is calling me (I'm also annoyed that my job is now on a screen, so that when I get done with my job, i have little motivation to record music or write my blog-- because it's just more screens . . . but I've set up my physical loop pedal and analog amplifier again, so that I can get back on the guitar and do some layers of sound, without getting back on a screen . . . again, first world problems but that doesn't mean you can't solve them).

Dave (Barely) Beats an Old Man: Charlie Kaufman Doesn't

Yesterday in the indoor tennis league I played Barry, and my scouting report was that he was a good player, but "a grinder, who could hit a winner with his forehand" but did not have a big serve-- this was a perfect match-up for me and I played quite well at the start-- I went up 9 games to 2-- and then Barry informed me that he was going to be 65 years old soon-- 65!-- and this really impressed me; Barry was fit and moved around the court well and had a full head of hair . . . I would have thought he was in his late 50s-- and for a moment I thought that I'd better take it easy on him-- so I switched rackets (with no success) and tried some shots I normally don't hit,  but then he started lobbing the ball instead of feeding me overheads at the net and he came storming back and won the next five games in a row . . . this was both inspirational and promising-- makes me wonder if I'll be able to play competitive tennis for the next fifteen years . . . I sure hope so (and if you want the opposite of this inspirational and promising sentence, watch Charlie Kaufman's new movie-- it's on Netflix-- "I'm Thinking of Ending Things" . . . it's pretty much the most depressing thing about aging and decay I've ever seen-- and I teach Hamlet-- the film attacks the platitude "age is just a number" with unnerving logic, detail shrouded by memory, and wild perspective shifts . . . I really can't recommend it, though I kind of liked it-- unlike my friend Stacey-- but if you do watch, you might want to read an explanation when you're about halfway through . . . it helps).

Meta Worlds Collide!

In the new season of the super-excellent sci-fi series The Expanse, Amos Burton-- who is one tough motherfucker-- finally returns home to Earth (after a long absence) and to his home town of Baltimore . . . his foster-mom Lydia-- who taught him to survive and thrive-- has died; Baltimore is a futuristic version of the same city that is the protagonist of The Wire-- seedy and criminal and impoverished and drug-ridden-- and the kids and I were looking for some signal that the two great shows had some intersectionality; when Amos arrives at his foster-mom's apartment, he is greeted by his foster mom's lover, Charles-- and after some brief conflict, they begin to reminisce . . . but the best thing about Charles is that he is played by Frankie Faison, who played Ervin H. Burrell, the Police Commissioner on The Wire . . . quite a meta-coincidence (or done purposefully by central casting?)

School Is Virtual, But Snow Is Real (and so is cash)

The boys played hooky from virtual school today so they could earn some scratch shoveling snow-- they amassed sixteen jobs (with the help of my wife's Facebook account) so they had to enlist some help-- and while they are out moving from job to job they picked up a couple of extra projects . . . including the school superintendent's driveway-- apparently he didn't give them too much flak for skipping school (I called them in sick . . . cough cough . . . hopefully no one will connect the dots). 

The Avalanches on a Snow Day!

I am giving the new Avalanches album (We Will Always Love You) all the stars that are available: it's smooth and groovy and it's snowing and part of the reason I might be enjoying the new music so much is that I opened and starting drinking the bottle of wine on the counter-- why wouldn't I?-- and it is a very delicious wine . . . but it turns out that this wine was not intended for me . . . it is some expensive kosher wine intended as a Chanukah gift for our neighbors . . . and while my wife called me "exhausting to live with" she finally admitted that there was no way in hell that I could have known that wine wasn't intended for me (unless I read the label and noticed it was kosher and from Israel or saw the gift bag lying next to the bottle) and I reminded that I HAD told her to buy some wine-- you've got to drink some wine when it's snowing-- and so I figured that everything was just coming together for Dave . . . the wine was on the counter, The Avalanches released a new album, and it was snowing . . . so why wouldn't I start drinking?

Celebrity Sighting (Pandemic School Style)

Ian and I were on the way home from playing tennis today and we stopped at Wawa for snacks and the cashier said, "Mr Pellicane?" and I looked down and quickly read the girl's name-tag and realized it was one of my virtual students-- a senior named Jolie-- and I had never met her in person before, so it was kind of like a celebrity sighting, as I only knew her from the screen . . . we were both very excited to actually meet ( and she was a lot shorter in person).

Nostalgia For Aneurysms Past

It's nice to know that though my kids are getting older-- they're fifteen and sixteen now-- they can still bring me back to when they were little tots: it was time for me to drive them to tennis last night and-- just like when they were young-- they weren't a bit prepared; Alex hadn't put his shoes on yet, Ian hadn't filled his water bottle, they had no idea where the rackets were . . . and-- just like back when they were toddling tykes-- I lost my shit, nearly burst a blood vessel in my skull, ranted and raved, and told them that they were spoiled ingrates with no appreciation for the fine things-- such as a ride to go play indoor tennis-- that they are provided on a daily basis . . . it's good to know we can all get back to that reminiscent place from years past (how do you sit there on the couch, playing on your phone when it's nearly time to go, wearing socks?)

Dave Defeats Bud!

This morning, I notched my first victory in the Saturday indoor tennis league; I came from behind to defeat a heavy-hitting, big-serving guy named Bud . . . I learned a few things: I stopped trying to hit his serve back and instead just put the racket in the way and let the ball's momentum do the work; I switched to my lighter Yonex racket because I wasn't getting my heavy Wilson Blade back quickly enough to deal with his harder shots; and I started serving hard to his backhand because if you gave Bud a meatball, he hammered a winner . . . I also tried to subscribe to Bud's mantra: if you're going to double fault, do it like a man.

Pandemic Pub Night: Sleepy Dan Delivers

Sleepy Dan did a fabulous job hosting pandemic pub night at his house last night; we sat around an efficient, miniature smoke-free, phone-controlled Biolite fire pit, he provided materials to make s'mores, and he launched a giant sky lantern that flew over the Raritan and high above New Brunswick.

For the Record: Remember These Dumplings, as They Are Tasty

A wee little South Korean leprechaun told me to try O'Food Pork and Vegetable dumplings . . . and if you believe that, then I've another proposition for you (and you're a little bit old to be believin' in leprechauns) but truth be told, it was my son Ian, who thought they looked good and grabbed them when we were at H-Mart and I've posted them here so that I remember to get them next time (as there are a plethora of dumplings at H-Mart . . . oh yes, a plethora).

Deacon King Kong: Read It!

Deacon King Kong is the 51st book I read this year-- 2020 was good for something-- and it is the best piece of fiction I've run into in a long while; I'm not going to write a long review-- just read the thing-- but I will post up my Kindle notes . . . my favorite sentences from this fever dream that's exploded from James McBride's brain-- a fictionalized account of the Brooklyn housing project in which he grew up . . . the year is 1969 and it's all going down in this book, which is about urban decay and revitalization, baseball, drugs, race, language and tall tales . . . it is so much fun, even when it gets dark-- and there's some romance and a mystery to keep the plot cooking . . . the book begins with Sportcoat-- the old drunk church deacon, walking up to a young heroin dealer (who he coached as a child) and shooting him in the ear . . . but really the book begins with the mystery of the free cheese:

“Look who’s talking. The cheese thief!” That last crack stung him. For years, the New York City Housing Authority, a Highlight hotbed of grift, graft, games, payola bums, deadbeat dads, payoff racketeers, and old-time political appointees who lorded over the Cause Houses and every other one of New York’s forty-five housing projects with arrogant inefficiency, had inexplicably belched forth a phenomenal gem of a gift to the Cause Houses: free cheese. 

and then there's some backstory on Sportcoat:

When he was slapped to life back in Possum Point, South Carolina, seventy-one years before, the midwife who delivered him watched in horror as a bird flew through an open window and fluttered over the baby’s head, then flew out again, a bad sign. She announced, “He’s gonna be an idiot,” 

At age three, when a young local pastor came by to bless the baby, the child barfed green matter all over the pastor’s clean white shirt. The pastor announced, “He’s got the devil’s understanding,” and departed for Chicago, where he quit the gospel Highlight and became a blues singer named Tampa Red and recorded the monster hit song “Devil’s Understanding,” before dying in anonymity flat broke and crawling into history, immortalized in music studies and rock-and-roll college courses the world over, idolized by white writers and music intellectuals for his classic blues hit that was the bedrock of the forty-million-dollar Gospel Stam Music Publishing empire, from which neither he nor Sportcoat ever received a dime. 

At age five, Baby Sportcoat crawled to a mirror and spit at his reflection, a call sign to the devil, and as a result didn’t grow back teeth until he was nine. 

Sportcoat was a walking genius, a human disaster, a sod, a medical miracle, and the greatest baseball umpire that the Cause Houses had ever seen, in addition to serving as coach and founder of the All-Cause Boys Baseball Team. 

and then-- in contrast to old school Sportcoat-- you've got the corrupted youth:

you've got the Clemens was the New Breed of colored in the Cause. Deems wasn’t some poor colored boy from down south or Puerto Rico or Barbados who arrived in New York with empty pockets and a Bible and a dream. He wasn’t humbled by a life of slinging cotton in North Carolina, or hauling sugarcane in San Juan. None of the old ways meant a penny to him. He was a child of Cause, young, smart, and making money hand over fist slinging dope at a level never before seen in the Cause Houses. 

and the requisite Italian mobsters . . . this is Brooklyn in the late '60s:

Everything you are, everything you will be in this cruel world, depends on your word. A man who cannot keep his word, Guido said, is worthless. 

and various kind of crime:

“A warrant ain’t nothing, Sausage,” Sportcoat said. “The police gives ’em out all over. Rufus over at the Watch Houses got a warrant on him too. Back in South Carolina.”  

“He does?” Sausage brightened immediately. “For what?” 

“He stole a cat from the circus, except it wasn’t no cat. It got big, whatever it was, so he shot it.” 

Where’s the box?” “The church got plenty money.” “You mean the box in the church?” “No, honey. It’s in God’s hands. In the palm of His hand, actually.” “Where’s it at, woman?!” 

“You ought to trade your ears in for some bananas,” she said, irritated now. 

and superstition:

His wife put a nag on him, see, like Hettie done to you.” 

“How you know Hettie done it?” 

“It don’t matter who done it. You got to break it. Uncle Gus broke his by taking a churchyard snail and soaking it in vinegar for seven days. You could try that.” 

“That’s the Alabama way of breaking mojos,” Sportcoat said. “That’s old. In South Carolina, you put a fork under your pillow and some buckets water around your kitchen. That’ll drive any witch off.” 

“Naw,” Sausage said. “Roll a hound’s tooth in cornmeal and wear it about your neck.” 

“Naw. Walk up a hill with your hands behind your head.”  

“Stick your hand in a jar of maple syrup.” 

“Sprinkle seed corn and butter bean hulls outside the door.” 

“Step backward over a pole ten times.” 

“Swallow three pebbles . . .” 

They were off like that for several minutes, each topping the other with his list of ways to keep witches out, talking mojo as the modern life of the world’s greatest metropolis bustled about them. 

“Never turn your head to the side while a horse is passing . . .” 

“Drop a dead mouse on a red rag.” 

“Give your sweetheart an umbrella on a Thursday.” 

“Blow on a mirror and walk it around a tree ten times . . .” 

They had reached the remedy of putting a gas lamp in every window of every second house on the fourth Thursday of every month when the generator, as if on its own, roared up wildly, sputtered miserably, coughed, and died. 

and there's a shooter in the vein of The Wire's Brother Mouzone:

He wanted to say, “He’s a killer and I don’t want him near you.” But he had no idea what her reaction would be. He didn’t even know what Harold Dean looked like. He had no information other than an FBI report with no Highlight photo, only the vaguest description that he was a Negro who was “armed and extremely dangerous.” 

and a romance between an Irish cop and an African-American church sister:

“I’ll be happy,” he said, more to the ground than to her, “to come back and bring what news I can.” 

“I’ll be waiting,” Sister Gee said. But she might as well have been speaking to the wind. 

the dark side of the drugs: 

Men who made their girlfriends do horrible things, servicing four or five or eight men a night, who made their women do push-ups over piles of dogshit for a hit of heroin until, exhausted, the girls dropped into the shit so the men could get a laugh. 

and, finally, a clash of values that is epic and poetic:

"I’m in the last Octobers of life, boy. I ain’t got many more Aprils left. It’s a right end for an old drunk like me, and a right end for you too that you die as a good boy, strong and handsome and smart, like I remembers you. Best pitcher in the world. Boy who could pitch his way outta the shithole we all has to live in. Better to remember you that way than as the sewer you has become. That’s a good dream. That’s a dream an old drunk like me deserves at the end of his days. For I done wasted every penny I had in the ways of goodness so long ago, I can’t remember ’em no more.” 

He released Deems and flung him back against the bed so hard Deems’s head hit Highlight the headboard and he nearly passed out again. “Don’t ever come near me again,” Sportcoat said. “If you do, I’ll deaden you where you stand.”  

A Slow Developing Crisis . . .

 

All of our avocadoes ripened at once!

New Shit Saturday

Unusual stuff for a pandemic, but my family was doing all kinds of new shit today:

1) I played my first official league tennis match at the East Brunswick Racquet Club; I joined the winter league and I was a bit nervous about it-- I'm a scrappy player but there are some serious holes in my game (Andre Agassi said, "You're only as good as your second serve" and my feeling about that piece of advice is it's not very nice of him to say that) and my first match was against Scott-- a club regular known as one of the better players in this 4.0 league-- and when I saw his serves, first and second, I knew I was in for it-- they were both excellent; he could hit the T or pull it wide and didn't lose much pace with his second attempt and his groundstrokes were very accurate and angled-- I had never played anyone like this before-- but he wasn't big or fast and though I threw away the first four games-- I learned that the net is a LOT HIGHER indoors than the droopy things at our local park-- but I started chasing down everythign and hitting the ball deep to his backhand and getting to the net and I actually took the lead at one point, eight games to seven . . . and this guy was very complimentary-- he said he had never played anyone who could get to all his crazy angled shots (one sequence, I dove to my right, punched a net shot, hit the ground, rolled, got up, and won the point) and though he ended up winning the match nine games to eight (you play for 90 minutes, no sets just games) I'm happy that I gave him a run for his money . . . I think with some practice I could beat him but hopefully, next week's match will be a little less grueling (and I didn't drink all week, in training for this, but I'm going to enjoy a few well-earned beers today . . . you know, for working hard at the racquet club)

2) my older son Alex has been up in his room all day at a virtual Model UN convention . . . he's representing Israel and trying to deal with domestic terrorism . . . yikes . . . I think he does five hours of it on both Saturday and Sunday;

3) my younger son Ian is in the kitchen making homemade rice noodles (as a birthday gift, we are cooking for my wife for two weeks) and in order to do this the boys and I had to take a trip to H-Mart, the quality Asian market up the road, to get rice flour and tapioca starch and some other Asian stuff . . . the store was totally packed-- kind of crazy for a pandemic-- and we had to ask for a lot of help (a Hispanic lady took us to an old Asian lady, who was about to take us to the tapioca starch when a dude cut us and asked where the kimchi was-- and he was standing in the kimchi section!-- there was kimchi literally surrounding him . . . 270 degrees of kimchi . . . anyway, we got in and out with what we needed and the noodles are working out, it's quite a process;

4) my wife and her friend headed down to Kingston and she brought back goodies from the Amish market: cheeses, pretzel and pepperoni rolls, chicken breast, turkey bacon-- the best thing there-- and (of course) whoopie pies.

Dead Etc.

After insulting my Spotify Wrap-up, my friend Neal suggested that I listen to The Allman Brothers instead of the Grateful Dead, and since I'm open-minded and amenable, I renamed my "Dead" playlist "Dead, Etc" and added some Allman Brothers-- and put them on shuffle-- and I was enjoying the Southern style-rock until the guitar started wailing a bit too much-- so much so that it was shooting right through my brain, though I was in the other room, and I said to my wife, "That guitar is TOO high-pitched" and she said, "That's the tea-kettle, stupid."

Nothing Is More Fascinating Than Yourself

Both my older son and my friend Ann were super-excited yesterday and their enthusiasm proved infectious; they were pumped for the annual Spotify wrap-up, something I never experienced-- and while it sounds pretty banal, it's a visual summary of your listening habits over the year, it's actually full of surprises . . . earlier in the year, I fell in love with the Yo La Tengo album "I Can Feel the Heart Beating as One" and it ended up dominating my 23,000 minutes of listening . . . I generally listen to The Grateful Dead and Jimmy McGriff when I need to unwind, and 2020 required a lot of unwinding (the older I het, the more I like The Dead) and The Talking Heads and Tom Petty are mainstays-- I think I will listen to them until my own final wrap-up (as a bonus to this ode to saccharine self-reflection, here's one of the first videos I made to send a message to my Creative Writing class-- in the height of the pandemic . . . before all the Zoom and Microsoft Teams and such).

 

Great (Criminal) Minds Think Alike?

Yesterday, I found out that several Spotify users have plagiarized the name of my favorite playlist-- Tip Top Hip Hop-- and this made me feel both annoyed and vindicated; annoyed because when I ask Google to play it, sometimes it doesn't access my playlist, vindicated because my son Ian told me it was a stupid name, but imitation is the sincerest form of flattery so it's obviously NOT a stupid name . . . anyway, this led my son Alex and I to collaborate on an excellent Criminal Minds plot: folks are being murdered around the country and while there's no apparent connection, they are being killed with the same gun and the same M.O. and then Spencer figures it out, of course . . . all the people that have been brutally executed have playlists entitled "Tip Top Hip Hop" and the murderer wants to possess the one and only version of this playlist . . . which raises the question: do playlists live on when you head to the great-festival-seating-concert-in-the-sky?

Sad Sporting State of Affairs

This Sunday at 10 AM, which is normally the time I play pick-up soccer at the turf, but you know, the pandemic-- so I was rollerblading . . . and I saw my fellow soccer buddy Guillermo jogging and I waved hello but neither of us was happy . . . it's a sad state of affairs (but I'm excited to start playing in a tennis league next Saturday . . . so I'll get my competitive fix then).

The Queen's Gambit is a Classed-up Cheesy Sports Movie

I thoroughly enjoyed the Netflix mini-series "The Queen's Gambit," even as I recognized sports trope after sports trope; it's a Cinderella story and this scene pretty much summarizes the film:

the protagonist, an orphan named Beth, learns to play chess in the basement of the orphanage with her first mentor of many-- the janitor Mr. Shaibel-- so you get the Rocky-style gritty determinism and training, but, of course, Beth is an intuitive player-- her brain is so active she sees the pieces move on the ceiling . . . she has to resort to tranquilizers and alcohol to calm her busy mind . . . and she passes through many obstacles, suffers setbacks, and finally-- with a sequence of mentors (including the archetypal wise Black lady) she finally learns the Russians' secrets-- they are collaborative-- they study games together and everyone plays-- they advance in chess as a nation . . . but, in the nick of time, her scrappy American friends come to her aid and though she once suffered abysmal defeat, it seems that her brilliance-- which she could only summon with tranquilizers-- can also be bolstered by cooperation and friendship and coaching . . . it's a heartwarming feminist underdog tale that made me weep like I was watching "Hoosiers"-- the acting and imagery is first rate, and the color palette almost feels like "Madmen," it's just as much fun to look at the outfits as it is to root for Beth . . . the writers decided NOT to explain very much about chess at all, and this works-- if you know the game, you might think the speed of play is unrealistic (and it would be good to revisit Jim Belushi's SNL Chess Coach skit) but to watch people actually play chess is laborious, and as an added bonus, now my kids want to play some chess (I destroyed Alex last night, just crushed him right through the middle).