Making friends. It’s what I do.Today I wrote a post on YoungPhillyPolitics.com about the NARAL vs. Focus On the Family Brouhaha over the Superbowl. Everyone in this story is dumb. Here’s an excerpt, but you should really read the full post (the first sentence of the last paragraph, I have to say, I am really proud of):
Focus on the Family has raised the money to run a pro-life ad featuring some pigskin tossing mouthbreather during the Superbowl. My reaction: yawn. But I’m alone in this. The annual media fubar that is the NFL championship wouldn’t be complete without some ad getting cut and much of the political community going wiggy about it. The difference this year seems to be that the economy is crap and most commercial outfits can’t afford the pricetag of an ad in the biggest television event of the year, so CBS seems to have lowered its standards for controversy.The network has accepted the pro-life ad. I say: GOOD. As far as I’m concerned, there should only be two standards that networks apply to selling their ads: 1) is there still a spot left and 2) do you have the money. I think it’s fantastic that issue ads are going up. Maybe some thinking will get done. I doubt it, but maybe. It’s less offensive than the usual fare, more on that in a paragraph, tho.
I was a freshman in high school and one of only two people that young on the first overnight debate tournament of the year. The Varsity team decided that if I was going to be debating with them this quickly, I needed an initiation. This is the story of what happened.
I did this story last week at the first First Person Arts story slam at L’Etage for 2010. I was the guest storyteller and I had a 24 Hour flu. I barely knew what I was saying.
I was tooling about the web tonight, doing a bit of research for a project I’m working on, and stumbled on this site, Girl Drive. The site promotes a book by two young women, one of whom, Emma Bee Bernstein, is pictured above. The book is a survey of what women their age want out of the world these days and the story of how they investigated it.I don’t know about you, but when I come on a site like this, the first thing I click is the “about,” page. I want to see who is behind it. I skimmed the two women’s biographies only to be completely jarred by this:
Emma Bee Bernstein died in Venice, Italy, in December 2008 at the age of 23. A.I.R. Gallery has named one of its yearly Emerging Artist’s Fellowship Program Awards in honor of Emma. … I know this piece of info might be a bit shocking to those visiting Girldrive for the first time. I would encourage you to read the words of people who loved her if you are curious or confused. —Nona
A casual perusal of the on-line memorials left behind shows that this young woman did not waste the few years she was allotted, but… Dear God. 23.Friends, you’ve no idea what this world has in store for you: don’t wait and don’t waste it.
NPR is running a story series called “My Guilty Pleasure,” in which big time authors write about a book they love to read that doesn’t really square with their authorial reputation. Man, I just found one of these for myself: the absolutely amazing Have a Nice Day, by Mick Foley, his mind blowing account of his unlikely ascent to professional wrestling super-stardom.
The only book I’ve seen listed on here so far that sounds like it might have something like the outsider cred of a Mick Foley’s masterpiece is the most recent offering, which I caught on the radio, driving home from the Lehigh Valley. Charles Bock’s pick of The Dirt by Motley Crue sounds like it might stand up alongside Foley’s paean to pain.
When Foley’s book came out it shot to the top of the bestseller list and stayed there for some time. No one really saw that coming. Vince McMahon, genius that he is (and he really is), had the idea one day that maybe if his most famous wrestlers wrote autobiographies people would buy them and that would make the WWF even more famous.
Books? By wrestlers? What?
Even more ingenious, he picked Mankind (at that time, the character name of Mick Foley), to be the first recruit. Why? Who knows. The guy was known for raging around like a savage, doing nutbar promos and taking more pain than anyone else in the business. He did not, however, come off as an intellectual. Yet Vince picked him and Foley responded with intense enthusiasm. In fact, he insisted on writing it without a ghost writer. He said he could do it himself.
I had long drifted away from professional wrestling as a real interest by the time Mankind captured the imagination of WWF fans worldwide. In middle school, I’d been really into it, but by the time Raw is War was sweeping TV ratings, I’d moved on to debate and theater and my jobs and failing to win over girls. Still, I saw this book and had a feeling about it. I’d never really stopped liking wrestling, but I couldn’t fit it in anymore. I knew wrestling reflected something special about America. One of our underground artforms that will never get accolades from the academies and is better off for it. I remember reading a review of the book by a serious reviewer, maybe in The Washington Post, but I’m not sure. He said, basically: look, I know no one is going to believe me, but this is an impressive book and a compelling read. Mick Foley is an amazing character.
It took me over ten years, but I knew I’d read the book one day. I have now. It’s 700+ pages flew right by.
By the time Mick Foley was finished filling composition books by hand with his memories, he had a book some 50,000 words longer than the publisher wanted, cliche ridden, totally self-serving and frankly one of the most intriguing books I’ve ever read. It falls squarely in the folk art tradition: someone who really doesn’t have a history with a form but leaps into it one day with such honesty and enthusiasm and realness that you just can’t help but get swept along.
And it’s hard not to be swept along by Foley’s story. Here’s a guy who figured three things out early: 1) he loved getting a reaction from people, 2) people reacted to blood and pain and 3) he could handle a lot of bleeding and a lot of pain. Natural conclusion: pursue professional wrestling. So he did. His is the story of the long slog. Paying dues upon dues upon dues until at last, at long last, he gets the big payoff at the end and the recognition he deserves as truly one of the greatest that wrestling has ever seen or will see again.
Let me close with one paragraph from Chapter 18:
Busting an eyebrow is the little known and little exercised act of creating a gash over the eybrow by punching downward with the point of the knuckles. When done correctly, it is as effective at creating realism as anything in the business. When done incorrectly, by stressing force over technique, it does nothing but raise welts. There were only a few people whom I trusted to bust me open, and Harley was one of them. Oddly, even though I have the reputation for being a Hardcore Legend, I was surprisingly inept when it came to eyebrow busting. One night in ECW in 1997, I tried to open up Tommy Dreamer, and I was failing miserably. After I bounced punches off his nose, cheek, and forehead, he looked at me and asked painfully, “Please stop hitting me.”
I like this song. I really like this song. I’ve liked it ever since I bought an XTC tribute CD in college, even though I had never heard of the alt rock legends. I bought it because the CD had covers by both Sarah MacLachlan and They Might Be Giants on it. I really liked those two in those days. I had crazy love for those two. Sarah MacLachlan, in fact, did the cover of “Dear God.” I was crazy about the song. I must have listened to her version 500 times before a friend finally played me the original. You can hear it above. It’s great. Catchy. Passionate. Genuinely emotive. I get totally into it every time.It’s just that I also think it’s stupid.Look, believe in God or don’t. That’s not for me to judge. I will tell you that I do, but that’s not really my point. There are a lot of reasons for not believing in God that I can accept. The fact that there’s just no evidence. The fact that it all sounds sort of fairy tale’ish. The conflicting myths. The incongruous ways His adherents behave in this world. The way miracles just don’t seem to happen anymore. I can see a certain logic in all those reasons.
Except the one espoused in XTC’s “Dear God.” This one: I can’t believe in a God that would permit a world with this much misery.
I know where it comes from. It isn’t really an opinion. It’s an emotion. It’s a reaction. It’s a manifestation of anger. I have empathy for it. I have compassion for those so moved, but I can’t take it seriously as an intellectual position. In fact, when otherwise intelligent and compelling personalities, such as the fellows behind XTC, invest time and energy in making this particular case, I lose respect for them.
If you’re crying in a field of dead bodies and cursing God for this madness he’s permitted: fine. Have your fit.
But if you’re going to sit down and put pen to paper, think about it, and say: you know what? There’s lots of homeless people. I can’t buy this God thing. Well, I’m probably going to have to make fun of you. I don’t see how you could have possibly thought that one through to what it really means. What kind of world would you have had Him create for us?
If there were not misery in the world, then we certainly would not have free will. If there were no tragedy, there would be no point in living.
I hope you can see where I’m going with this, because it’s important. If you’re a person of faith, the view that a kind and loving God could never permit this madness in this world is seductive. But it’s also dangerous.
Let me try to explain: do you know any rich kids? The offspring of the rich?
A lot of people I know have never met that many rich people. It’s too bad. Rich people, especially the young ones, are instructive here. Look, I’m not crazy about the rich, in general, but your average rich kid isn’t so bad. Usually he’s got a bit too much entitlement and is generally naive, but he’s probably not evil. He probably wouldn’t even really know how to go about evil. Evil is tricky (trust me, I know from evil). He may have grown up with some patriarch who’s perpetuated awful, awful things to protect their wealth, but the young ones are usually blissfully sheltered from it. They don’t recognize their privilege because they’ve never known any other kind of life.
It’s not malicious.
It’s just, well, kind of simple. They have been protected from knowing any better. Do you want to be like that? Do you want to be naive?
Because that’s what XTC is asking God for above. I can’t buy you exist because if you did you would have protected me. Bad things wouldn’t happen to good people. My dad wouldn’t have left. Girls would go out with me. I wouldn’t be wearing this bizarre coat.
Imagine a whole world in which nothing bad ever happened. Where we were all able to have fun, play about, do our thing, but just before we ever really had a chance to hurt ourselves, something would intervene. We’d be saved. Get to the edge of that cliff and the angels would come from below and catch us and put us back to safety. Or, even worse, somehow we’d live in a world without cliffs. Without risk.
Is that a world we’d want to live in?
OK, fine, you say, the risk makes sense, but what about all the cruelty. What about the fact that God has put us in a world where people starve. Why did God not, you ask, give us enough to eat?
This one is a little trickier, but let me turn it back on you. Did God really not give us enough to eat? Or is the food just not making it to the hungry people?
Talk amongst yourselves. Use scratch paper if you want. I’ll wait.
Okay.
Now, if the answer you came back with is: actually, there is enough — but it’s not all in the right places, I’m going to have to agree with you. I’ll never forget when I first met this chick from Spain years ago. I volunteered to drive her on her first trip to an American supermarket (one of the Woodman’s locations in Madison). “Have you ever been to a big grocery store?” I asked her. “Oh yeah, sure,” she said. “Hmm,” I said.
When we got there, the ice cream aisle alone was more than she’d ever seen.
A whole aisle.
For ice cream.
A great man once said: I think you hear me knocking and I think I’m coming in.
And, if you said, no, there’s not enough, then maybe you’ve got something. Then again, the question is, was there always too little? There must have been enough at some point, right? At one point there was only a few hundred thousand people in the world. Now the world has something like 6 billion people in it. So even if there’s too little now, there must have been some period from when 100,000 humans grew to six billion humans in which, there was, in fact, enough. Right.
But there have always been hungry people.
Funny.
OK, so, then, our friends at XTC and my other brothers and sisters on the Left (this tends to be a favorite Lefty reason for atheism), come back and say: fine, there’s enough, and people are hoarding. God should intervene.
Well, but that brings us back to the world without cliffs. That brings us back to the world without free will.
Because, in fact, it certainly is not true that there is one person, or even a band of them out there, explicitly plotting to keep people hungry. There aren’t. Nobody makes a profit on starving people. Starving people, do not, by definition, generate a lot of income for anyone, because they are starving because they don’t have money.
So who’s hoarding?
I don’t have a clear answer, but I’m willing to bet, if you’re reading this, that you aren’t one of the starving people. I’m willing to bet, in fact, that not only do you have enough, but, in fact, if you wanted, in less than twenty minutes you could be standing in front of an aisle — yes, a whole aisle — filled with ice cream.
You live in bounty.
So are you hoarding?
A little historical aside here: Amartya Sen won the Nobel Prize for proving that famines are pretty much never caused by real shortages. They are caused, he found, by hoarding. It isn’t that there’s not enough. It’s that people believe there isn’t enough, start hoarding and then there really isn’t enough in the places where the people who need it can get to it. I think he’s right, only: I think he’s right for the whole world. For all of history. There has always been a famine and there has always been hoarding.
I have. You need. You can’t pay what I want, so I won’t give. That’s hoarding.
I believe in God. A kind and loving God. A God who loved us so much that he set us free. He set us free to live here, in bounty, even though he knew that with free will we would inevitably steal from each other. Even though he knows that each of us who steals loses a piece of his own humanity, his one real treasure in this life. Even though he knows, in fact, that each time someone steals, someone else’s heart breaks.
I believe in a God so kind and so loving that he was willing to set us free in a world in which he knew we would, over time, devise a system so corrupt and unfair that even the best of us might live a life of bounty and never quite be able to enumerate all the ways in which she is complicity in the robbery of her nature. A world that would so effectively distribute guilt that we’d never quite know where virtue ended and sin began.
I believe in a God so kind and loving that he was willing to set us free even though he knew we’d hurt ourselves. For no good reason at all. In a world full of cliffs. Cliffs from which we’d sometimes jump from and rise from the water in that exhilaration you can only feel when you’ve genuinely taken a risk, but, also, cliffs from which we’d sometimes just fall.
He could stop it. He could stop all the badness, but then what would we be but God’s naive rich kids?
I think XTC made a great song here. One of the things I really love about art is that I can both be impressed by it, awed by it, and find its message flawed — even flimsy. Some of my favorite political songs are like this. Ani has a gun control anthem called “To the Teeth” that absolutely gets my blood pumping every time. Oh, and by the way, I think guns are neat.
The song, “Dear God,” is really from the gut. That’s what’s so good about it. That’s why I’m so impressed by the way they asked their question, even if I don’t think it’s a very interesting question: can you believe in a God that creates a world filled with suffering, starvation, cruelty and violence. Of course I do. A world without them, that’s the world that wouldn’t make sense.
It was worse than this by the time I was done. This was a couple hours into the winter storm, and it was still going the whole time I was out there. When I took up running, a buddy of mine advised me that I should make a point of running in bad weather. Running in bad weather, he said, is one of the easiest ways to feel like a bad-ass. It’s a great point, but it’s a little easier said than done. Each time you see some awful weather out there, you have to decide to go face it. You have to put your running clothes on and walk out that door and do it.
Today I did it. I had run in the snow once before, but I had never run with snow accumulating on the ground.By the time I got out there, the snow was still coming, but plenty had already accumulated.
I have been meaning to write about running on here for a while. Here’s the thing: I was never a runner before this summer. In fact, just the opposite. I would not run. Sure, I’d play sports that involved running and etc, but you could not convince me to go out and go for a run, at least not regularly. Over the last couple years or so, I had started playing around with running as a way of fitting in workouts a little more, but they were really run-walks. Good workouts, because I’d work in sprints and jumps and such, but it wasn’t “running,” you know?
Then all of the sudden, this summer, I took up running pretty seriously. It wasn’t planned. One day (in fact, the day I happened to pass a frequent visitor to this site on Girard Avenue), I went out for a run walk and it became very nearly a full on run, much to my surprise. Since then, I get in at least one 6 miler about every week. Usually a couple more runs of 4 or 5 miles each week as well. Nothing huge, but that’s the point. Running is the single easiest hard workout to slip into your life. You just put the shoes on and go, you know? I don’t want to be a marathoner. I want to be someone who can go on vacation with a pair of trainers in his bag and know that he’ll be able to fit in the odd workout even if the hotel doesn’t have a gym. I never would have guessed that this would be something I could do one day.
My point is this: you can do more than you think. You can even surprise yourself.
That’s my positive, go you, spin. Here’s my other thought: I’m not nearly as committed to the arts as I like to think I am. Whenever I do something like I did today — some crazy athletic endeavor that leads people to tell me I’m a little bit crazy — I have to confront the fact that in a given year I am far more likely to apply that crazy discipline to more athletic activities than I am to artistic activity. The irony here is that I’m a pretty crappy athlete. Even if I take on some challenges, my stats are never impressive. Even if I get a lot better at something, I know I’ll never really be a contender at any sport. I’m never the ringer on the field or the fastest runner in the race or the strongest climber on the bike. Still, the hardest things I do in a given year are always related to sports or fitness.
My big artistic achievements are rare and getting more rare. Yet, I’m a much better artist than I am an athlete (in fact, I think I’m only an athlete in the most generous sense of that word).
I thought about this a lot as I did this run. I guarantee you that I was the only runner out there in North Philadelphia today. Maybe there were some more down in Center City, but not up here. I was an unusual sight on the street today. I’m glad I did this run without my iPod. I would have missed the old guy saying, “Boy, where’s your pants?” (I run in shorts, always) and the younger guy who said, “You’re the champ! I don’t know what you’re doing, but I hope you win!” When no one was yelling at me, though, I was thinking. And only a few people had anything to say to me. I had to ask myself why I was able to convince myself to pull this strange little athletic feat, yet most nights I go to bed without writing a word of fiction or without drawing one line.
“Know thyself,” Socrates or the oracle or somebody said. But how? One method, try to quantify your own decisions. Don’t look to your heart. Look to what you actually do when you have choices to make. As I rocked my way through Philadelphia’s growing blanket of snow this morning, I confronted the fact that an objective analysis of my decisions revealed a greater commitment to fitness than it did to the creative life that I have always been, in words anyway, more committed to.
I’ve got to say it again: I’m better at writing stories than I am at running. There’s just never any chance that I’m going to be a great runner, but I might be a good writer if I focus. There’s a chance, anyway.
Perhaps the last call out I got on my run was the most instructive. Maybe it was my morning’s little message from God. It came at the start of the last mile. The last mile was the worst part of this run. It was harder than all four miles before it. I was headed back to my place, up 6th Street. The wind was in my face, snowflakes were getting in my eyes. Hardly anyone on 6th had shoveled their sidewalks so far, and the snow seemed appreciably deeper here than it had been anywhere else. I was getting a little tired, too. Not bad, but struggling a bit. I stumbled and slid more. I worried more about the curbs I couldn’t see for the drifts.
I was on the sidewalk, passing in front of a house. A young black guy was leaning out the door of his house, talking to a friend who was getting his car swept clear of snow and ready to go somewhere. He looked at me running past his stoop and said, “You need to get yourself a bookbag and put some weights in it.” In other words, I see you’re trying hard, son, but we both know you could try harder.
I met Leslie Stein years and years ago at the Small Press Expo. This is a video Etsy did about her to entice more people into buying her stuff. I think it is worth sharing because you can see a little bit of her working on her construction paper graphic novel, which is really interesting. These pages take her 20 hours each! That’s enormous dedication.
That’s King Wenclas for you. Strangely, he’s the only person who’s ever able to hold my interest on this whole question of how to revive the arts in America.Are the arts dead? Or, are they, at least, fairly moribund? Or are they more vibrant than ever?I tend to think the arts are pretty boring right now, in the main, and that the people are bored. The evidence is against me. More people are artmaking now than ever before. More art is getting sold than ever before. There is more kinds or art than ever before. There’s more ways to get attention than ever before.But there is no compass.
My friend George was invited by The Economist to write about this problem on their blog, Intelligent Life. Check it out. In short, George argues that culture has become a currency. You have to show a certain familiarity to be deemed worthy, but that’s where it stops. There’s an unwritten reading list out their in the collective memory of each class, and all one has to do is show the capacity to grasp the odd reference to a certain cultural artifact to prove one’s worthiness. In George’s words:
But there is a difference between cultivating the intellect and developing an appreciation for high culture. And by high culture, I don’t mean just the polite décor of the Louvre, but also outdoor murals, Ukrainian folksongs–really any human expression that provokes thought. Cultural acumen is not merely a matter of looking at and listening to prescribed pieces of art or music, or force-feeding yourself a menu of great books. No matter how many museum turnstiles we pass through, if we value our exchange with art only as a means to impress others, we mistake the chaff for the wheat.
Very well.What I mean by saying that there is no compass is that there is no sense of something really compelling out there. There’s nothing to aspire to (other than money and renown and legacy, but that’s really nothing at all — society will always give money to someone to be the notable artist of the day — that doesn’t mean they’ve anything special to offer).
But what the fuck do you do about it?
I recently finished a book by Matthew Josephson called Life Among the Surrealists. The young dadaists and surrealists had been bored to restlessness by the creations of the old ways of writing. Do you know that at the time they were working people believed that long and laborious exposition was really good for a book?It does go to show that the arts really do progress.
Anyway — I’m digressing. What Josephson illuminates is that though the Dadaists pushed the boundaries of society and forced their art into public view with activism, they mainly concerned themselves with writing and artmaking for internal consumption. That is, their famous magazines and journals were really only read by other Dadaist and Surrealists or otherwise Avant-Garde writers. The Avant-Garde was, in effect, its own audience.Until, one day, much later, it wasn’t anymore.Isn’t that interesting? Today we don’t really have an identifiable avant-garde, and we certainly don’t have any large and coherent cadre of writers whose members concern themselves as much with other members creations as their own.
So here’s why I find Karl “King” Wenclas interesting. He has a following. A reluctant following. He’s been de-throned from the Underground Literary Alliance, and I can’t help but think that’s a good thing. He seems better as a free agent. And he’s the only person who seems to be really seriously asking how the underground can work together.
But really he’s asking a more interesting question: how can we find a new way of writing that will really grab people again. Will there be another avant-garde? That will really stand out. Surrealism was a collective effort. It was a bunch of writers buying into an idea, and trying out their vision of that idea. It was an amoeba-like collaboration.Artists and writers don’t seem to collaborate that well anymore. We’re all putting our work out there, but it’s so individualistic. It’s not often that you see a group of creators, like the guys at Fort Thunder, whose work seems to blend into each other. Even then, they’d resist the notion of trying to define it. Of trying to articulate some unifying vision.I think we should. An interesting idea that’s starting to appeal to me, and one Wenclas is already playing around with, is using closed on-line spaces. Spaces where only a limited community can see what’s on offer and be part of it. A community that can really involve each other until it evolves into something coherent it can show the world.
Something that folks can really recognize and presents itself in a way that really explodes off the page.Is it possible? I don’t know.Is it worth looking for? Definitely.I find a lot of stuff I like but I seldom find anything that blows me away anymore. Am I looking in the wrong places? Am I just getting old? Or is everyone really just recycling old tricks?And if that is the case: what can be done about it? Take up arms, yes. Of course, but we need to form a phalanx too.
