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.”
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;
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).
Things For Which to Be Thankful
Due to the pandemic, Thanksgiving felt pretty weird this year, but I still have a hell of a lot to be thankful for . . . sorry, I have a hell of a lot for which to be thankful; here's an incomplete list:
1) Winston Churchill's retort when criticized for ending a sentence with a preposition:"This is the type of errant pedantry up with which I will not put"
2) the fact that my family was able to get together at all . . . it was just ten of us, which leads me to the next thing I'm thankful for;
3) this amazing COVID-19 Event Risk Assessment Planning Tool . . . apparently there was an 18% chance of someone having COVID at our Thanksgiving get-together, which seems like a reasonable risk . . . so pull out this Risk Assessment Tool and you'll be the life of the party!
4) the amazing weather . . . this might be due to global warming, but most of us might be dead long before that's much of a problem, so whatever;
5) the dog beach at Asbury Park . . . my wife and I took the dog there today-- this was contingent on the absurd late November weather;
6) the fact that my kids love to play tennis-- we're getting a lot of outdoor play before the (costly) indoor winter season begins;
7) the fact that our ping-pong table is still in the driveway-- we've been playing every day, crossing our fingers that this weather lasts, and my son Ian is actually getting good enough to beat me (occasionally)
8) the fact that we've stepped up our ping-pong game to real paddles (Pro Spin Carbon)
9) this astoundingly funky Jimmy McGriff album "Groove Grease," which is excellent writing music and has a racy cover;
10) Jersey craft breweries, such as Cypress and Beach Haus;
11) the fact that my wife has taken up tennis-- I get a lot of exercise when I play with her . . .
12) the fact that I can do my job from home right now, without wearing a mask-- while remote teaching is kind of sad and occasionally gives me eyestrain and vertigo, it's a hell of a lot easier than hybrid;
13) a bunch of other stuff, but there's a Zoom happy hour with my fraternity brothers starting in 30 seconds, which I am also thankful for . . . sorry, for which I am thankful.
Happy Weirdsgiving?
Happy Weirdsgiving . . . may your stuffing and gravy contain very little COVID . . . or perhaps this will be a true American Thanksgiving and the native population will be decimated by disease, in the same way that the Native Americans-- through many a Thanksgiving-- suffered from smallpox, tuberculosis, measles and influenza.
The Wailing is an Awesome Movie
The Wailing-- an epic 2016 Korean horror film-- is a cross between The Exorcist and The Naked Gun . . . and the imagery and cinematography, which is astounding and beautiful, is somewhere between Deliverance and Apocalypse Now . . . the movie features angels and demons and all of us bumbling idiots in between, there are shapeshifters and possession, zombies and infection, ghosts and senseless violence . . . but all of these tired tropes are given new life . . . the film is streaming on Amazon Prime, watch it before it vanishes.
A Memory Called Empire
A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine is big-brained sci-fi and it will take a little while to understand what's going on (I didn't realize there is a glossary of terms in the back of the novel . . . the existence of which often indicates the kiss-of-death for comprehension and readability, but I managed to figure things out without referring to it and I'm an idiot) but I recommend giving it a shot . . . it asks this question:
--how do you preserve your culture and memory when you are on the verge of being subsumed and appropriated by a gigantic galactic empire?
and the mining station Lsel has an answer: proprietary technology that fuses the memories of past people with present citizens, in the form of a neurological implant and a grueling physical and mental process that allows the voices of the past to coexist in the same body as the present person; diplomacy is at the heart of the novel, but there's plenty of action, violence, insurrection, and politics as well; the author is also a Byzantine scholar and the book won the Hugo award . . . it ain't an easy read, but I will probably read the next in the series as well-- and I hope the next book I read is a little easier on my brain (just as writing a blog is a much easier way to preserve memory and culture in a world being subsumed and appropriated by algorithmically polarized social media).
Of Podcasts and Analogies
Joe Rogan is the Bruce Springsteen of podcasting; he's indefatigable and manages to be both a dude and a pro-- a weird combination of everyman and talent . . . here are some recent episodes I recommend:
1) #1566 Nicholad Christakis . . . required pandemic listening-- this enlightened me to the fact that pandemics are nothing new-- throughout history, they have been the norm-- and while this current one could be far worse, it's also not going away any time soon;
2) #1555 Alex Jones and Tim Dillon . . . Rogan does a great job fact-checking and slowing down Alex Jones-- he often sounds like a high school teacher, chastising Jones for talking over him and not connecting the dots . . . but he does it in a pleasant way and allows Jones to actually get across what he's all about, uncovering corruption-- some of which may be based on fact-- and linking this corruption into wild insane global conspiracies that sound utterly insane when you put them under a microscope;
3) #1550 Wesley Hunt . . . Hunt is a black Republican that ran (and lost) in Texas's 7th Congressional District; he's a veteran of the Iraq war and former AH-64D Apache Longbow helicopter pilot and he's a great reminder that there are plenty of reasonable Republicans out there-- who are interested in promoting business and creating jobs but still understand environmental externalities-- and have no interest in promoting QAnon;
4) #1554 Kanye West . . . this one takes a while to get going, but it eventually becomes Kanye's beautiful religious twisted fantasy . . . he mentions "God" quite often;
meanwhile, if Joe Rogan is the Boss of Podcasting, Sam Harris is some kind of demanding and complex jazz-- Ornette Coleman-- or perhaps prog rock . . . Harris is the Steely Dan or the Mars Volta of podcasting . . . intellectual, sincere, a little too earnest, and very smart . . . his new one, Republic of Lies, has some excellent logic and analogies about Trump's fight to dismiss the election results:
-- he likens Trump's move to use the courts to challenge the election results to a soccer player late in the game who flops in the penalty box, hoping to be awarded a penalty kick by a clueless referee . . . and he makes the point that the soccer player is acting in bad faith-- he knows he hasn't been fouled but he's going ahead with the ploy anyway-- and the other players on the team and the coaches also know the player hasn't been fouled, but they've got to go along with it as well . . . so Trump is writhing around on the ground in fake pain and everyone on his side is in on the ruse . . . Harris contrasts this with the many liberals who think there is systemic racism everywhere in America-- while he doesn't think this is true (and neither do I, listen to his reasoned take on this) he understands that the liberal who believe this truly believe it . . . they're not faking it and there's more at stake than a game . . . democracy is at stake;
--Harris points out that all this "deception" was all done in plain sight: Trump began setting up the fraudulent claim that mail-in ballots are corrupt early, he tried to defund the post office so they couldn't deal with the ballots, he made no attempt to get the states to begin counting mail-in ballots early, and then he claimed that the results on election night should stand . . . wow;
--and finally, if the Democrats engineered massive systemic voter fraud, they would have also won the House and Senate races . . . he's willing to give Trump voters a "mulligan" and I see his point-- there's no reason no harbor animosity-- the real blame right now lies with the right-wing media demagogues-- who have jumped on the presidential bandwagon-- and all the folks on Trump's team (especially Rudy Giuliani) who are going along with this particularly egregious and high-stakes "flop" in the penalty box of American democracy.
9/11 and the Pandemic
The current Covid pandemic and 9/11 are probably going to loom large in my lifetime-- the significant events that will leave their mark on my consciousness-- and I feel the same about both of them:
1) I've experienced both events from an unusual perspective . . . I was teaching in Damascus when the planes hit the towers, and I am coaching and teaching through this pandemic;
2) I feel like both events are common occurrences that Americans haven't normally dealt with . . . pandemics have been the norm throughout history, and most developing countries (including Syria) still deal with deadly infectious diseases on a daily basis-- malaria, typhoid, yellow fever river blindness, chikungunya, etc-- and many countries outside the US cope with plenty of terrorism . . . so the pandemic and terrorism were both events where we joined the rest of the world . . . I wish my looming significant event was Woodstock but that's not how it's going down.
Home Computer Advantage
A bonus of doing school from my home-bunker is that when I use my iMac, I don't have to remember to click the dreaded "share computer audio" button when I share my screen and want to play a video clip . . . for some reason, Apple computers do this automatically (I don't know why they wouldn't).
First Day of School All Over Again
It was the first day of school all over again today . . . the first day COVID caused remote school-- and I had first day jitters-- I was holed up in my study/music studio/junk room, which has a survivalist-bunker vibe (because of the cardboard boxes, the tools, the do-it-yourself-shelving, and all the cans of dog food) and Microsoft Teams wasn't playing all that nicely with my iMac . . . but I got it together and delivered the goods-- including an especially appropriate lesson on conspiracy theories (unshaven and poorly lit, I looked the part)) and while I missed my colleagues and the spaciousness of my classroom, I enjoyed fast internet, hot coffee, mask-free teaching, frequent snacking, walking the dog on my free period, no commute, time to sleep until the late late hour of 6:30 AM, and a sense of empathy with the majority of my students-- who have been virtual since day one . . . we'll see what I think of this whole endeavor when January rolls around.
Heeeere's David!
Winter is coming, it's getting dark before 5 PM, the pandemic is worsening, and my school has gone all remote so I'll be teaching at home until January 11th-- and my children are also doing school virtually as well-- so we'll all be home . . . for a while . . . I'm getting a Shining vibe about this winter (and I can't even think of an alternative winter-vibe that is fitting . . . Fargo? Dumb and Dumber?)
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