Hello, Brother.

www.ashtongoggans.tumblr.com

2010-02-10T07:00:00.000-08:00

I have crossed over to the dark side: TUMBLR. I'm told it is the more literary of blogging hosts. So, there you go: www.ashtongoggans.tumblr.com

Jesus, please tell your people to stop talking.

2009-11-22T14:05:00.001-08:00

I've been getting frustrated again. I've had more idle time lately. I have been writing. I have. But I've also been getting lost on the Interwebs, watching interviews of Sarah Palin and her fans, usually regarding the publication of her new book "Going Rogue."

I am not joking when I say that Sarah Palin is nothing to be laughed at. She is not a joke. She should be taken seriously. I'm not saying that she has anything to say that is valuable, or that she deserves to be listened to. I guess what I'm saying is: Don't underestimate the ignorance of the American people.

I found this email exchange while poking around on the n+1 website the other day. It was from just before the 2004 election. (Do you remember that? Kerry vs. Bush. That was a rough time. I'm glad I was still straight edge then; had I drank, it wouldn't have been pretty.)

Here's my favorite part:

I can see in that mosaic of red, blue, light red, light blue, and gray a solution to the prospect of 50-50 decisions resolved in the courts every four years: Dissolve the Union.

No more electoral college; no more red, blue, swing; no more U.S.A. I don't mean to sound alarmist but this thing isn't working. I propose 7 new states carved from the existing Republic. They can maintain a loose alliance, though without the obligation to support each other in foreign entanglements. Global dominance can now be ceded to the EU—it hasn't gone that well for us anyway. The borders of our new states should be porous. After age 18 adults have the option of crossing the border to pursue their happiness as their political and cultural leanings compel them (how it is right now more or less, minus a failed experiment called the federal government). So, the new states:

Red Sox Nation
Composite states: Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Iowa, Maine, Maryland (including Washington, D.C.), Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, Wisconsin
Capital: Boston
Form of government: Social democracy
First head of state: Howard Dean
Sox fans enjoy state-provided healthcare, free higher education, the option of gay marriage, abortion on demand, without apology, and continue to serve as the world's leading providers of financial and media services. Budget caps are imposed on the Yankees of New York. The sanest of the new states (despite its sometimes shrill executive), Sox Nation boasts no standing armed forces of its own but controls the former American nuclear arsenal by remote control. Also, Pedro still throws pitches at people's heads.

Nirvanistan
Composite states: California, Hawaii, Oregon, Washington
Capital: Seattle
Form of government: Narco-syndicalism
First head of state: Arnold Schwartzenegger
Free of the burdens of national political ambitions, Arnold legalizes marijuana, and the cash crop revitalizes Pacifica's economy, as the new dealers synergize with Silicon Alley to sell their grass globally.

CRINGE (Christian Republic in God's Embrace)
Composite states: Alabama, Arkansas, Indiana, and all those other currently red ones in the South and the middle, plus Alaska.
Capital: Austin
Form of government: Democratic theocracy (everybody votes for God)
First head of state: God, as told to George W. Bush
We been praying a lot and working hard. Just us folks down here, believe in God, and don't have sex if we ain't married. Laying off the booze, dried out the whole Republic. Damn that moonshine. Devil's concoction. Overturned that Dred Scott decision, we did. Got ourselves a culture of life and an ownership society in these parts. How can you have a culture or a society anyway if nobody's alive and nobody owns nothin'? Got ourselves a damn big Army too. It's very lethal. Gonna do some drillin' in Alaska. No harm done, just a little pinch. Need some more jobs. Workin' on that. Real hard. Amen. (Sponsored by the people of Saudi Arabia.)

Florida
Composite state: Florida
Capital: Tallahassee
Form of government: Gerontocracy
First head of state: Bob Graham
Populated by retirees from Sox Nation and CRINGE, Florida is a welfare state offering a free medicinal prescription drug benefit subsidized by its neighbors to the North.

SWEAT (Southwestern Esteemed Aged Territory)
Composite states: Arizona, New Mexico
Capital: Phoenix
Form of government: Straighttalkocracy
First head of state: John McCain
Much like Florida, but with more of a cowboy aesthetic. And free drugs.

Nevada
Composite state: Nevada
Capital: Las Vegas
Form of government: Casino
First head of state: Donald Trump
Gambling, hookers.

—Christian Lorentzen

You can read the exchange here: http://www.nplusonemag.com/emails-what-if-union-crumbles

Christian Lorentzen is a senior editor at Harper's and a "bearded, second-rate hipster". He's quite funny.

I need an instrument.

2009-11-18T19:20:00.000-08:00

To make a measurement.

I watched Instrument, the Fugazi documentary, the other night while Elle and her Mom looked at bridesmaid dresses and flower arrangements. It made me cringe at moments, watching Ian grab kids and escort them off stage for spitting or starting fights. It also made me proud. As small as punk always was for me, it was always split down the middle at shows: people who wanted to have fun and for everyone around them to have fun and then peop;e who were there to work out demons, to shove people around, and celebrate their inadequacies as human beings with the crowd. I was of the former camp.

Anyhow, the video is pretty amazing and made me want to get back in a van and drive again. Any takers? I can scream, shot, and play tambourine,

Cry.

2009-11-18T19:16:00.000-08:00

I know of only a few times when my Dad has cried other than for a movie like Forest Gump, or Dead Poet's Society, or, most recently I'm told, Up. But he's told me about how he cried when Lennon was shot. And I've seen him cry when this song comes on. Lennon was something unique for his generation, and rightfully so, I think. I know of no other figure like him. Perhaps Thoreau. Yeah, that might work.

The Lord Taketh Away

2009-11-10T05:06:00.000-08:00

For some reason I make the mistake (maybe it isn't a mistake--maybe it is stupidity--my Dad says that a mistake is something you make once, maybe twice, but after that it is just stupid) of trying to reason with some kids I grew up with back in Florida who have become wildly evangelical with their Christianity. I feel like I owe it to someone--I don't know who, maybe other kids back home that have not fallen for their nonsense--to make the case for rational thought, science, common goddamn sense, etc. Anyhow, it rarely seems to work and I end up in long comment threads on Facebook trying to understand how someone can possibly think the types of things they do. I am an Atheist. I believe that the creation of the universe was not done by any of the deities that are found in religious texts. I do not believe in Gods. Spirituality, the soul, these things are of interest to me, but on a scientific level. Other than that, I make no assertions about the universe. I am not a Nihilist, a fascist, a Nazi, a barbarian, or any of the other things I have been called by these kids, called them simply for not believing that the Bible, in all its infinite wisdom about burning witches, stoning to death prostitute daughters of priests, the keeping of slaves, etc, to be a very moral book. Moral in the sense that it does more good than harm,not moral in the sense that it follows the customs of an archaic text, which is a distinction worth making. For them Morality is what God wants us to do. For me it is what society would benefit from most, what would cause the least amount of suffering, pain, death, etc.

For believing that, I am a nihilist. My morals are said to have no compass. Who invented the compass anyway? The Arabs, I think.

Anyhow, I read this in the November issue of Harper's. One of the kids said that "Ideas have consequences." I agree. Here is an example.

The lord taketh away

From the trial of Carl Worthington of Oregon City, Oregon, who was charged with manslaughter after his fifteen-month-old daughter Ava died last March of bronchial pneumonia and a blood infection that could have been cured with antibiotics. Instead of seeking medical treatment, Worthington and his wife, Raylene, with family and other members of the Followers of Christ, prayed and conducted faith-healing rituals. In July, Worthington was found guilty of criminal mistreatment, a misdemeanor, and sentenced to sixty days in jail. Greg Horner was the prosecutor.

greg horner: Let’s start with your beliefs about the use of modern medicine. You don’t believe in modern medicine. Isn’t that correct?

carl worthington: I don’t know that I’d say that I don’t believe in it. I don’t put my faith in it, would be a better term.

horner: You don’t use modern medicine as a means of addressing illness. Is that correct?

worthington: Right. If I can anoint someone with olive oil and he starts feeling better, then there’s no need to use medicine.

horner: Well, it’s a little bit more than that, though, isn’t it? It’s not whether they get better or not. It’s just that you don’t believe in using modern medicine.

worthington: It has to do a lot with how they do. If I never seemed to get better, then why would I do it? I would probably use modern medicine myself. I’ve never felt that I’ve needed it. It wasn’t because somebody forced this on me. It’s because I seen it for myself, as I was growing up. When I was anointed, I felt better, so that trained me to have faith in it.

horner: Has your position changed as a result of what happened to your daughter?

worthington: No, it’s still the same.

horner: So the fact that you did not get your daughter to a hospital Saturday night, and she died a day later, has not changed your position on modern medicine?

worthington: Well, it hasn’t changed the way I feel. I’ve seen nothing here that’s proved to me that it would have been any different had we taken her in. When a doctor can’t do nothing for you, you usually put it in God’s hands anyways, so that’s where I’d had it the whole time.

horner: Even in retrospect, even knowing the outcome, you wouldn’t change how you handled her medical condition?

worthington: There’s nothing they’ve done to prove that they could have cured her. What I got was a maybe yeah, maybe no. They wasn’t sure.

horner: You acknowledge, then, that, gosh, maybe if I’d taken her in, she’d be alive today?

worthington: I don’t believe so, no.

horner: Well, that’s what you said about what the doctors would say. But for you, it was more important to follow your faith. Isn’t that right?

worthington: My point is that if the medicine hadn’t worked, the doctor would tell you to put your faith in God anyway. They’d say there’s nothing more we can do for you. That’s where my faith and trust was, so it sounds like there’s a good chance that’s where I would have ended up anyway.

horner: Getting back to the question about whether or not you were willing to ignore the medical likelihood, that had your child been taken in Saturday night, she would have survived—you were willing to take the chance that that wouldn’t happen. Is that right?

worthington: What chance are we talking about here?

horner: The chance of Ava dying.

worthington: When?

horner: Saturday night.

worthington: Saturday night? I didn’t think she was doing that bad Saturday night. She started off like she was coming down with a cold. I mean, does everyone take their kids in every time they have a cold?

horner: No, they don’t. But they do take their child in when they’ve got a huge growth on their neck, and they’re choking, and having difficulty breathing, and the father thinks that there’s a possibility they’re going to die!

worthington: I don’t recall her ever choking. There was a moment after she hadn’t slept all night when I was worried that she was getting weak, and then I saw her take her bottle and hoist it up with one arm by herself, and she showed me she was strong.

horner: So you see her lift up a bottle with one hand, and that’s enough for you to say, Okay, I’m willing to take my chances with prayer?

worthington: Well, it was an improvement. And we wanted to see a bigger improvement. We did see that bigger improvement that evening, after we’d laid hands on her again.

horner: Had she declined, you would have been on the phone to 911 and got that child to the hospital? Is that what you’re saying?

worthington: That’s an impossible question to answer. It’s possible that someone could lose their faith if they’re not getting the results they want. But why would you take them to a doctor if they’re getting better?

horner: You take them to a doctor because if you don’t, the bacteria and the pneumonia kills them. Does that make sense to you?

worthington: Say it again.

horner: You said, “Why would you take a child into the doctor?” The answer is, you take them in because they die from bacteria, pneumonia and swelling. Does that make sense?

worthington: I didn’t know she had a pneumonia, I didn’t know any of that.

horner: Why was it that you didn’t know that?

worthington: I’m not a doctor, I guess.

2009-11-06T07:16:00.000-08:00

I got to see Kid Dynamite right before they broke up. It was a strange time in hardcore, I think. I was new to the scene, about 13 years old. I was really into Minor Threat and GB. All the bands then were kinda sludgy and heavy, and weren't really into just playing fast music and having fun. It was time to be serious. But I was young and wildly idealistic and wanted to have fun with my friends at shows. Kid Dynamite came into my life and kind of ruined hardcore for me. I saw them and nothing was ever the same. Because like two months after they came to St.Petersburg they broke up. No band ever cam close to em again, i don't think. Maybe the first times I saw Stretch Arm Strong or Bane, or even the first American Nightmare or Hope Conspiracy tours, but those were a little more heavy handed and not as much of a party. Here was their last show, a reunion they did for a friend with cancer, I believe. I wasn't there; i was in Australia.

I said, but I'm tirred! I been walkin all day, try'n to find a job.

2009-11-06T07:10:00.000-08:00

I worked as a carpenter and framer for several years. I worked for a few friends of mine, one of them being Rick Lang, who passed away about 5 years ago now. He was a good man, and one I'll always miss. When this song came on he always starting tapping his big work boots, and would inevitably end up singing to us and dancing. Those were good days.

2009-11-05T07:56:00.001-08:00

Back from Florida. What a trip. More later.

For now, enjoy this video. I don't care how bad I get made fun of for loving this song. I love it.

Blistered

2009-10-27T13:32:00.000-07:00

I had the pleasure of seeing Strife just after they "sold out." They were amazing. They ended with this song "Blistered"

and threw the mic right into my hands for the last breakdown. I remember holding it up with some sweaty, screaming kid growling into the microphone "Look into the sky!!! I can see the ashes falling! Look into the skyyyyyyyy! I can see it all coming dooown!"

That was a good night. I remember walking out of State Theater and seeing Boomhower in the back, smiling at me. "Saw you grab the mic there, dude," he said. "That was a good fucking show."

2009-10-27T13:09:00.000-07:00

So much for one a day!

I bought The Get Up Kid's Four Minute Mile and Save The Day's Stay What You Are the summer between my junior and senior years of High School. I was driving a green Toyota Tacoma with a big, clunky topper on the back, in which I had constructed a platform bed and a surfboard storage area, all in hopes of driving around, sleeping in the back of my truck, listening to music and staring out at the ocean at dawn and at dusk by myself. It had been a weird summer, and I was really getting a knack for running away from things. I decided to graduate early; I had the credits I needed; what was the point of staying? So, I told the school what I was doing, they said "sure." They didn't seem to care at all, but they did keep me from being included in the Mr Venice contest because technically I had graduated and they "couldn't control what I would do on stage." I had wanted to play this song by Saves The Day:

But, I got denied, and probably for the better as I had a pretty terrible voice, even for covering whiny ass Saves The Day.

So, I graduated and moved to California. I drove out west with Tim Croft and my Dad, caravaning with my green truck and Tim's white bronco--Janessa, he called it, if memory serves me correctly. It was a good trip. I listened to Four Minute Mile and Stay What You are A LOT, and really still love both those albums and miss that period of music. Here's one of the Get Up Kids newer songs, an album that I HATED when it came out, but one I have learned to really enjoy.

2009-10-23T17:33:00.000-07:00

I'm going to start posting favorite songs/videos. One a day. A retrospective of sorts!

2009-10-22T06:49:00.001-07:00

I meant to post this yesterday.

Elliot Smith was introduced to me right before I moved to California, when I was 17. I didn't listen to the albums much on my drive west. I was burning to see the pacific, to move, to surf everyday, and find something out about, well, something.

California is a different story, but I will tell you that I listened to either/or and the self titled album in rotation with The Get Up Kids Four Minute Mile the whole ride home, driving through the south, following the first real arctic blast of that winter, sleeping in my truck, covered in boardbags and wetsuits to stay warm.

One of my favorite songs, covered by Smith.

2009-10-07T16:40:00.000-07:00

I'm sure I'm late to get around to posting this. It's probably old news, but for some it might not be.

Since moving to New York I have become kind of a gearhead when it comes to bikes, though a very slow-to-learn one. I have gone through 5 bikes in less than two years now, swapping and selling them, getting hit by cars on them, giving them to Jack only to have them stolen hours later, etc. Possessing the personality that I do, it's hard for me to ever feel finalized in my bike quiver. Currently I own my Holy Grail bike--a Waterford built Schwinn Paramount track bike with a full Suntour Superbe Pro group, with the exception of the wheels which are Mavic Open Pro's laced to Phil Wood hubs--a more proper city track bike wheel, I think. I have been slowly tweaking the most current project, which I am almost ready to abandon and leave as be, a Kona Paddy Wagon, built up like a porteur bike, specifically designe, not for delivering papers, but for hunting/gathering at Trader Joe's on Monday AM's.

Anyhow, what I wanted to post was about some kids I know through a gulp bike forum. I have met some really great guys on there, many who I met in real life and later realized were on the forum. One of them was Lucas, who I have become really close with, though he talks to me like he was my girlfriend and I the negligent boyfriend.

So, they did a write up in the New York Times about of a thing that Lucas and Devotion's friend John Prolly has organized in Williamsburg each Thursday evening called Peel Sessions. I've been to a few and enjoyed hanging out talking shit, drinking a beer or two and watching kids get silly on tweaked out track bikes.

Full article here

2009-10-07T08:43:00.001-07:00

Several people who I haven't seen in a while have asked, when I've told them I'm getting married, if Elle was pregnant.

Well.......

No.

She is not.

In fact, she is really goddamn skinny now, the results of going to the gym to run 5+miles EVERY MORNING at 615!

I, on the other hand, am only a little skinnier, having dropped below 200 for the first time since the fated Christmas trip to Florida where I did absolutely nothing but eat and sleep on the couch with Lemon and Kiwi on top of me. I'm getting slim, trim, and back on it. But fuck if I'm getting up that early for it! I can write that early, but not run.

2009-10-06T04:00:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I feel like History is going to crush me.

2009-10-04T17:26:00.000-07:00

It's beginning to feel like Fall here in NYC. I'm pumped. I built up a Kona Paddy Wagon with some slightly more burly all-weather tires, put some Pasela touring tires on Elle's bike, and am working on getting a 5-rail Cetma rack for the Wagon so I can haul around my bag without sweaty-back. We've been really enjoying our morning rides down to Tribeca from out apartment on 20th and 1st. It takes the edge offf a bit. I end up not punching windows or slapping rear-view mirrors as much when its nice out; pleasant weather has a calming effect on me that i never realized until moving to NYC. The seasons really change my disposition, writing, and worldview.

We're heading to Rhodes Island on Friday evening or early Saturday morning to pay my dear friends, the Attias family, a visit. We are hoping to poke around Providence, look at Brown and RISD, meet their new Frenchie, Lola, and generally enjoy the company of some of the gentlest people I know.

Dehumanized

2009-10-03T19:34:00.000-07:00

There's a really wonderful piece in the September issue of Harper's Magazine written by Mark Slouka,about the effects of an economically driven educational system, the current fate of democracy, etc. It's a great piece to give to someone when they ask, "What are you going to do with a degree in __________(insert any of the humanities here: Literature, Philosophy, History, Etc.)."

http://www.harpers.org/archive/2009/09/0082640

here's some clips:

Rain does not follow the plow. Political freedom, whatever the market evangelists may tell us, is not an automatic by-product of a growing economy; democratic institutions do not spring up, like flowers at the feet of the magi, in the tire tracks of commerce. They just don’t. They’re a different species. They require a different kind of tending.

The case for the humanities is not hard to make, though it can be difficult—to such an extent have we been marginalized, so long have we acceded to that marginalization—not to sound either defensive or naive. The humanities, done right, are the crucible within which our evolving notions of what it means to be fully human are put to the test; they teach us, incrementally, endlessly, not what to do but how to be. ......

They are thus, inescapably, political. Why? Because they complicate our vision, pull our most cherished notions out by the roots, flay our pieties. Because they grow uncertainty. Because they expand the reach of our understanding (and therefore our compassion), even as they force us to draw and redraw the borders of tolerance. Because out of all this work of self-building might emerge an individual capable of humility in the face of complexity; an individual formed through questioning and therefore unlikely to cede that right; an individual resistant to coercion, to manipulation and demagoguery in all their forms. The humanities, in short, are a superb delivery mechanism for what we might call democratic values. There is no better that I am aware of.

2009-10-01T14:07:00.001-07:00

For me, this shot summed up the SDRE show on Saturday

Do you remember CD clubs?

2009-10-01T06:31:00.000-07:00

I do.

My Dad let us join one when we were like 9 or 10. It was one of those deals where you bought one CD for full price (16.99!!) and then got 11 CD's for a penny each. For Christmas that year my Mom had been given a 5 disk CD changer, and one CD: Tracy Chapman. Whenever I hear that "He's Got a Fast Car" song, I feel like I am 9 again, being woken up for school, or eating Honey Bunches of Oats with Jack, looking at 1+ year old Kayla learning to walk, my Dad drinking coffee and filing his briefcase with bills and invoices for Beliken, his clothing company. Mom would try to cut bananas into our cereal. I just recently, as in, like, yesterday, began to tolerate bananas.

Anyhow, I remember a few of the CD's we ordered. We each got to pick three, I think, but I don't remember who ordered what. Here's a list from foggy memory:
Shaquille O'Neal: Shaq Diesel
Crash Test Dummies: God Shuffled His Feet
Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers: Greatest Hits
Soul Asylum: Grave Dancer's Union
Montell Jordan: This is How We Do it
Pearl Jam: Ten
Gin Blossoms: New Miserable Experience

The last album was my Dad's jam. We listened to that album a thousand times if we listened to it once. I remember many an afternoon out in the shed, putting the drywall on what would eventually become the Rompin Room, singing along:

"Things you said and did to me
Seemed to come so easily
The love I thought Id won you give for free
Whispers at the bus stop
I heard about nights out in the school yard
I found out about you"

Recently, my friend Futureman hooked me up with an invitation to an "exclusive" torrent site for DLing music. It was like being 9 again, flipping through the BMG catalog, circling the pictures of the album covers I wanted, making a list of fifteen albums and laboring over the final cuts, except I didn't have to make any cuts-; I can download whatever the fuck I want! The anxiety is short-lived now( it took WEEKS to get the CD's from BMG; it only takes about 45 seconds to DL an album from the site), but I still get excited about new music the same way I did back then.

I haven't been home to see my pops in 6 months now, and have been missing him and my sis terribly lately. The first album I snatched from the site--can you guess? Gin Blossoms discography. And damn have I been listening to it, blasting it when the ladies aren't home, drowning out the little girl that lives next door's singing lesson, playing air guitar in the living room, thinking of my Pops.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7WaJt02sTE

Will you carry me across the sea...

2009-09-29T09:47:00.000-07:00

I honestly don't remember the first time I heard Sunny Day Real Estate's "Diary." It must have been ten or more years ago, in High School. I assume I was in my 4Runner, or in Juice Box's Jeep. I don't remember. So, I can't say how long it has been since I have wanted to see them live, but it has been a while.

I got to see them Sunday night. They were amazing, in the most un-bastardized, literal sense of that word.

Elle and I went and ran into Terrence of the Lafayette Luftwaffe. Terrence got to see them in their heyday, on their tour supporting "How it Feels to be Something On." We both pine for that period of music. We both still listen to Superdrag, SDRE, Samiam, and other bands from the early-nineties, before the word "Emo" was ruined, coopted and stripped of any meaning. It is a word that does not mean anything anymore, and certainly one that a band like SDRE does not recognize.

I'm sure one day I will get around to writing a long-form essay about my love affair with this time period of music, about the aesthetics of vulnerability, etc. But right now I want to tell you that SDRE played an incredible show. The crowd (which consisted of a disproportionate number of tall, chubby, black-shirted sad men, so many that is was very difficult for Elle to see no matter where we were in the crowd) erupted at the first notes of each song, a choir singing in unison to each chorus.

It was a good show and one I will not forget soon.

Here's some clips.

2009-09-25T13:17:00.000-07:00

It's starting to feel like fall here in New York. The leaves have already begun to look singed at the edges and the air feels lighter today. These are the days for bike rides, for sunset sessions and offshore winds. For coffee on the boardwalk. The beginnings and ends of the day auburn and rusted, crisp and clear.

This is my last semester as an undergraduate student. I have been in New York for almost two years. I feel like I have been here forever, yet at the same time like I have just arrived.

I spend a lot of time browsing graduate schools in the afternoons, waiting for 4:45 to roll around so i can pedal downtown to pick up Elle from work. It makes me hopeful, yet empties me. Where to go now, what to study, what to do. MFA in creative writing, try to get a book deal? PhD in American Studies, teach college, write essays on the bowels of American popular culture? Who knows which way the wind blows.

I do know that in <9 months I am getting married to a girl who everyday surprises me with he fits of beauty, her moments of grace and humor, her empathy. Other than that, well, I'll figure it out. I'm not worried about it. Not worried at all.

2009-09-24T04:56:00.001-07:00

I realized that I never put a decent shot of MY bike up, and, since I will inevitably be putting a picture of Jack's bike I just finished with Devotion, I figure I might as well. My baby:

2009-09-15T07:44:00.000-07:00

I built Elle a bike. I'm very proud of how it came out.

2009-09-08T05:35:00.000-07:00

We went skateboarding yesterday. Elle and Noelle hung out and chewed gum while Vava and I shredded. I haven't skated in a while--not counting trips to the grocery school on my zip zinger. It was a good feeling, still being able to pull a few tricks out of my bag for Vava.

Here are some pictures Elle took:

News. A little late.

2009-08-24T12:10:00.000-07:00

I asked Elle to marry me.

She said yes.

I have been thinking about asking her for a long time. That sentence makes it seem casual kind of, which I promise you it was not.

I decided I was going to do it before we went to Nova Scotia, one night lying next to her as she slept with her eyes half-open. I started looking for rings. Over the next couple weeks I spent hours walking around the city looking at rings that felt empty, cold, diamonds that sparkled wildly yet felt distant, fake, soulless. I talked to my Mom, something I have started to do a little more often lately, about rings. She mentioned the ring her and my dad got married with, that she had saved it and would love for me to have it.

My Dad got a pretty bum deal in my opinion. There are obviously two sides to their story, but the one I have witnessed wasn't very fair to him. He worshiped my Mom. When they got divorced I got an email from one of her friends wondering how I was dealing with everything. She was a good friend of my Mom's from childhood, and knew my Dad and her from the beginning. Your Dad always adored your Mom, she said. Put her on a pedestal, but she never took it well, being worshiped.

He gave her that ring and they were married in the backyard of the house where, one year later, I was born. The story since then isn't all bad news. Not even close. I mean there are three of us now, and the earlier part of our childhoods were spent in the company of two parents who loved each other and us very much.

Anyhow, anyone who knows me knows how close my Dad and I are. Pete says it is incestual. My Dad is my best friend. And I feel like I share the same idealism about my relationship with Elle that he had for my Mom. I worship her. She is the most beautiful person I have ever known, the most amazing, rational girl I have ever met. She takes care of me, knows how I am feeling--sometimes before I do--, and is always, always there for me. When I fall down--literally--she picks me up. And I think she feels the same way about me. And that blows my mind. We never get sick of each other. Ever.

SO, I had the ring my Dad gave my Mom refinished, turning it into white gold, and the diamonds made to sparkle like it did when my Dad gave it to her 26 years ago. I wanted that ring to mean what it did to my Dad, and for it to be received the way it should have been. I wanted to redeem it, and in doing that, redeem my Dad. I hope this doesn't sound cruel. It isn't. My Dad had his heart broken. He risked it all, time and time again, and got burned. Elle knows this, knows how it weighs upon me, and understand me better because of it.

I think she also realizes how much it means for me to want to get married, knowing what happened with my parents. If Elle wasn't who she is, and we weren't who we are together, I would have gladly ended up living in a rooming house with Pete, Jack, and probably Lucas and Larry, for the rest of my life. Elle has forced me to reconsider and retract many statements I have made about the nature of women, the nature of committed relationships, etc. etc. She has made a liar out of me, in many ways.

So, I asked her to marry me.

Two Saturdays ago I was supposed to go looking for apts during the day. I was going to ask her that night. Her birthday was Sunday and we were supposed to go to dinner with her parents. Saturday night was my chance. It would surprise her and be a birthday present to remember.

I made reservations at a cuban restaurant in DUMBO, and we had plans to ride over the Brooklyn Bridge on the way back, something Elle had never done. I would ask her there, the city behind us twinkling.

But, Elle decided that since it was such a nice day that we could ride bikes around Brooklyn and look at the apratments together. I thought that would be fine. We could come back in the afternoon, get cleaned up, and head out for dinner.

So we rode bikes around for 6 hours, got home, and were exhausted. She suggested we order food instead of going out. No, I said, lets go out. It will be fine. She was exhausted though, so I didn't have much of a choice.

We ordered wings.

I was freaking out. I called Kayla, told her the situation as I ran through the grocery store to get stuff to make a salad. She said it would be fine. I thought maybe I should wait. Another time, i thought. Wait for the perfect moment.

But I had been working myself up to this point for over a month now.

I lit candles, put the wings on plates instead of eating out of the styrofoam, and asked her to marry me about 15 minutes into our meal. I was sick to my stomach and Elle could tell something was up.

I got down on my knee and she offered to stand up (she was sitting criss-cross-apple sauce). I don't know what to do, she said. Do you put it on my finger? I say yes, do you put it on my finger?

Then we hugged and kissed a lot, jumped up and down and tried to figure out what to do about telling people.

Now you know. I'm engaged to the most beautiful girl. The girl of my dreams, as if I had created her myself, to my own specifications and liking. She is mine, or will be officially sometime in June (we think).

I'm a lucky, lucky young man.

2009-08-10T19:17:00.000-07:00

Bear was a good pup. She always welcomed me loudly when I cam home late from hardcore shows, or when I snuck in from the Rompin Room for some Oreo's and milk. Usually Dad would wake up from the door opening or from bear barking and join me. We would sit, the dogs sitting under the table or in the dining room, and dunk our cookies together, talking of life, love, hate, politics, religion (or lack thereof), etc. Even as she got older, and her seizures began to strip her of her vitality, she was such a loving and faithful pup. As her mind went, her love stayed put. My Mom was crucial in taking care of her, and always knew just how to calm the poor lady down. Last year her brother, Wolf, died. I wasn't there to see him off. But it was a rough time for me, being alone in NYC, feeling alienated from everyone I loved and cared for, and hearing my Dad tell the story of Bear wandering around the backyard, digging and sniffing, trying to find her brother out there in the backyard somewhere, trying to dig him up and bring him back.
She tolerated my pup Lemon's harassment, as long as Lemon didn't take her chair from her. She will be missed.

You Are Not A Stranger Here

2009-07-29T18:28:00.000-07:00

So my friend Cornelius Blackpool suggested a collection of short stories to me. "It's called 'You Are Not A Stranger Here' by Adam Haslett," he said. "It's fucking awesome."

Blackpool has always seemed a damn smart guy, having majored in Literature and went on to work in the Hedge Fund world.

Anyhow, Elle bought me the book from the Strand last week. I finished the book i three days of subway rides. Besides the ones where Elle and I meet on the back of the train on our ways home from work, they were the best subway rides of my life.

Haslett graduated from the Iowa Writer's Workshop, and from Yale Law School. It's the only thing he has ever published, and it was a finalist for the Pulitzer and the National Book Award. And for good reason, too. His stories are definitely MFA fiction, but the best kind. Critics have called the stories Checkhovian. I guess that's fair.

Here is the first story from the collection:

"Notes For My Biographer"

Two things to get straight from the beginning: I hate doctors and have never joined a support group in my life. At seventy-three, I'm not about to change. The mental-health establishment can go screw itself on a barren hilltop in the rain before I touch their snake oil or listen to the visionless chatter of men half my age. I have shot Germans in the fields of Normandy, filed twenty-six patents, married three women, survived them all, and am currently the subject of an investigation by the IRS, which has about as much chance of collecting from me as Shylock did of getting his pound of flesh. Bureaucracies have trouble thinking clearly. I, on the other hand, am perfectly lucid.

You can read the rest here:

www.all-story.com/issues.cgi?action=show_story&story_id=46

2009-07-25T17:18:00.000-07:00

I never posted a picture of my head:

5 staples and 4 interior stitches. I've been getting headaches lately, but was told it's fine on Thursday at the ER. I have Post-Concussion Disorder. They said the headaches would go away eventually.

2009-07-22T06:05:00.000-07:00

So, we've been surfing a lot lately. Jon, Dale, Lucas, Pete and I have been on a bender. Elle has been coming and bodysurfing with us, too. Summer is amazing when you are young, in love, and have good friends around you.

2009-07-11T11:29:00.000-07:00

These are Lucas' pictures of the Schwinn Paramount I purchased off him. I will take pictures of the frame built with my stuff soon:

I bought it of Lucas for a great deal and then built it up with Ezra. He helped me lace up some Phil Wood HF track hubs to Open Pro's and got me some Sugino 75's and a Nitto 65 post. I have nt gotten a chance to load the pictures I took of it yet. It hauls ass, and will probably be a contributor to my ultimate demise.

2009-07-07T04:52:00.000-07:00

I got a new bike, a new log, a new spot for the summer, and nothing to show for it on this blog. I'm working on it. Stay chuuunneed.

2009-07-04T19:37:00.001-07:00

Mark Greif is one of the smartest men I have ever met. He has been my teacher and life-coach at the New School for the last year. In that short time he has introduced new ideas, confirmed old ones, and dismantled and obliterated others. He is the editor or a personal favorite magazine of mine, n+1, and a writer who consistently weaves philosophy, literary criticism, pop-references, and sociology throughout his work, and in his daily lectures/discussions. He recently published an essay titled "What You"ve Done To My World" in an anthology titled Heavy Rotation. the Anthology consists of writers articulating something about a particular album that changed their life. Mark chose Fugazi.

Last fall we came to class to find that Mark had cued up the projector and had several YouTube videos of Fugazi, Bikini Kill, etc. ready for us to watch. We sat and intellectualized Punk for the rest of class, mark becoming flush when he found himself "falling into the 'nostalgia trap'" when discussing his younger years.

"What You've Done To My World"
By Mark Greif
Minor Threat didn't last long as a band. It was, though, as the music writers say, "influential." Meanwhile, its young singer, Ian MacKaye, moved through several short-lived bands until he formed another stable group, which added a second, lesser known but highly emotional young singer, Guy Picciotto, from the even shorter-lived (but "influential") band Rites of Spring. This was, as it turned out, a piling together of two geniuses on the Lennon/McCartney model—with a new rhythm section of comparable genius. They called their band Fugazi.

It chagrins me to be writing about Fugazi, since no one is less qualified than I am to do it. I wasn't there in D.C. when they started, I didn't see them on their first tour or their second, and I always had the profound and pleasurable sense that their music at least partly excluded me, because it was so tightly bound up with the post-hardcore and straight-edge world, a subculture I had nothing to do with. They were not commercial, they didn't offer themselves to the world through radio or TV, they didn't connect to anything else I knew or that felt natural to me. In fact, in addition to being a band, Fugazi was a kind of phenomenon known to many people who didn't care for them musically: an anticommercial, ultramoral, somewhat puritanical outfit that toured constantly, often playing in such unconventional places as church basements and college rec halls; that insisted on an all-ages admissions to shows so that fans under eighteen or twenty-one could attend; that held down ticket charges as low as five dollars, rather than raking in the money.

read the rest here:

http://nplusonemag.com/what-youve-done-my-world

There's more to life than surfing

2009-06-30T15:50:00.000-07:00

I used to believe that. That statement is a large part of why I live in New York. After I gave up trying to be a pro-surfer, after I gave up trying to conceal myself within the surf industry, after I allowed myself to grow as a human being, I felt like I had to let something go, to shed a skin, molt, in order to fit new things in. Surfing was my life--exclusively--until I was 15, when I made room in my schedule for hardcore bands. Even then though, surfing drove my decisions, it controlled me. As I got older and the world didn't end up being as wonderful as I hoped it would be, I resented surfing for not preparing me for the real world. I blamed it for me not having healthy relationships, for me not having a true high school experience, for me not writing novels when I was fresh out of high school, before all the cynicism left me paralyzed and desperate.

I posted something a few weeks ago about leaving nothing behind, about burning everything in your tracks, leaving no trace. Surfing was one of the things that I burned. I have not allowed myself to honestly enjoy surfing like I did when I was 17 for a long time now, and I want to. I want to go surfing and not carry any of the egotistical, competitive baggage with me.

Pete and I surfed the other day at Rockaway. Elle st on the beach and watched, even came out and took one in on her belly fr a bit. Even playing around in the Rockaway slop, Pete surfing in cut-off jeans, our backs pasty and covered with a layer of winter-skin, it still felt like we were trying to prove something. I knew that Pete and I were by far the best surfers in the water. We usually are. That's something the 18 year-old Pete adn Ashton hoped for, something we strove to be. But, it doesn't make Pete or I happy anymore. Pete talked about how when he surfs with our friends from NY, who don't surf as well as us but who enjoy surfing so much that it is contagious and pleasant to be around--they are like grommets, but thirty-years old and have wives or kids, etc.--because he feels weird surfing aggressively when they are around, like it will kill their enthusiasm.

I ate this for lunch/breakfast. It was good.

Anyhow, what I am getting at is this:
I want to have fun when i paddle out again. And I plan on doing it more often.

Elle and I have discussed our plans for December, after I graduate. We still don't know what to do, but there is talk of going somewhere I can surf more often. There's also talk of China. And New Zealand. And Australia. There's talk.

I always dreamed of being with someone who at the very least considered my ridiculous idealism(sustainable NZ ranch with dozens of dogs, Nova Scotia cottage, Australian point surf via Vespa's, European stays, houseboats, sailboats, etc.). To be with someone who actually suggests ridiculous ideas like Elle does is quite wonderful.

And, you should see how good looking she is in a helmet on her bike. Hot damn!

2009-06-29T05:37:00.000-07:00

I've surfed three times in the last 10 days. It feels good, being back in the water. I'm slowly getting it back. Pete and I have been getting some fun ones at Rockaway. Pete has been blasting the fins off the back on his new whip. Elle even took a few to the shore on Saturday. The water's warm, we're staying in a loft in SoHo for the next two months, my new log is perfect, my girlfriend still wants me around all the time, my bike will be built by the weekend, and life is very very good. I am a lucky young man.

2009-06-23T08:03:00.001-07:00

As if I didn't miss home already, what with Kayla, Jack, Pops, and Little Girl being there together for the summer, the surf being fun at North Jetty, and me trning 25 without them, Jack sent me these today:

Happy Father's Day, Dad.

2009-06-21T10:24:00.000-07:00

It would, and presumably will, take years for me to pen how much love I have for my dad. Mark Goggans is a father like no other. He was a natural. I'm sure he would tell you how hard raising the three of us little hellions was, but it never seemed to faze him, or, at least, he never let his stress show. He taught us and every one of our friends how to surf. he coached our baseball teams. He turned off the TV. He gave us books and lit fires under our asses. My dad stands above all other people to me. I love him with al my heart and miss him dearly, though I know he thinks of me everyday when he wakes up to my dog licking his face, or comes home to my dog's poop on his bed. I love you dad.

Elle is sleeping

2009-06-21T08:54:00.000-07:00

So I thought I would write a little something.

I had a pretty lovely birthday. Jon, Pete and I drove out to Long Beach and surfed just west of Lido with Dutchie, China Ty, and FM Borroughs. Dubstar even made it out towards the end. The waves were decent sized, glassy, and super consistent. We surfed for almost four hours, sharing waves, dropping in on each other, listening to Franco regulate (excerpted conversation: Franco: Alright, lets spread out a bit. We're getting a little too clustered together. Pete: We're the only people out, Franco), and watching Ty and Dutchie give their childhood stomping grounds a going over.

We headed back to BK after stopping for coffee and a fritter at Star(five)bucks, and a bagel place. Bless got a ticket for "almost hitting a kid" while blowing past a stopped schoolbus (strangely, the bus was stopped in the left lane of a divided road, like in the middle, and the kids were getting out to cross the median, and, according to most state laws, you only have to stop for a school bus traveling the opposite direction if there is no median or divider, thus making it seem like a literal death trap for the bus to be dropping kids off in the median), but the guy let him off for a seatbelt violation.

I got home and rode to DNA to pick up Elle and ride our bikes back to her house for some R&R. We ate some hummus and crackers and cheese, and took a nap for an hour. We decided to meet everyone at Mollusk 'round closing time for beers on the deck and then headed to Fiore on Grand street for some fettilini al fruti de mare. Ben and JT came and represented SRQ. Pete pedaled his skinny ass over. Jon and Monia came and brought me Lance Arstrong's book and a bar of decadent Godiva. Jesso and Ilan came followed by Amanda S. Franco had to take a shower and comb his pomp and met us a little later at Fiore for a glass of White and a big slab of steak.

It was really a great day, mellow as it was. It was the first birthday I have not spent either out of the country or with family in a long time.

Jack sent me a video of Lemon swimming into the middle of the intracoastal, chasing a tennis ball with a caption that read : Happy birthday dickhead.

Jack is lucky, getting to lay around the romping room with Little Girl all day, getting lifted with my dad around the BBQ grill or the fire pit, helping my sis bake shit in the kitchen. I miss them quite a lot. Lemon has apparently maxed out at 32 pounds, which is almost twice the size she was when we were so blessed with her arrival into our lives almost a year ago. Little Girl is big now. When she jumps on the bed in the mornings it will hurt. As well as having very little comprehension of Other People's Space, she has very little understanding of her own physical presence and strength.

So, that's all for now.

2009-06-18T13:59:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow is my birthday. I have existed on this earth for 25 years. My lifetime is at the very best 1/4 of the way over. And that's fine, I guess. You can't live forever.

I have been doing too much thinking lately. Mainly about the past, about my past, and have come across a lot of strange forgotten things. When I was younger I was all about hardcore bands and read each band's lyric sheets in full. I always loved the Don't Look Back attitude that hardcore seemed to deliver.

But, I don't listen to hardcore anymore, not really. And I constantly look back.

But thinking about my past these last couple weeks I have discovered something about myself that I am not sure I'm proud of:

I burn everything in my tracks--not just bridges, everything. I change my mind, set a match, turn and go. Until recently, I never really looked back at all.

Anyone who knows me well will also atest to my unwavering devotion to Ernest Hemingway. I think "Snows of Kilimanjaro" is one of his best stories, which makes it one of the best stories of all time, if you ask me.

In the story, Harry is dying from gang green. Death sits at his feet and breathes upon his neck. His lady is with him, trying to make him comfortable while the wait for the medical plane to arrive. He resents her, resents the people he has known, the life he has led. He is determined to ruin everything he can before he dies, to take all the good with him:

"Is it absolutely necessary to kill of everything you left behind? I mean do you have to take away everything? Do you have to kill your horse, and your wife and burn your saddle and armor?" she asks.....

"Do you think its fun to do this? I don't know why I'm doing it. It's trying to kill to keep yourself alive, I imagine...............I don't like to leave anything," the man said." I don't like to leave things behind."

Does anyone else feel this way? I know every girl I have ever gone on a date with, or dated for a long period of time-- actually, pretty much every girl I've ever known-- would recognize the sentiments in me. And I don't know why I do it, really.

I used to consider myself a misanthrope of sorts, justifying my actions by call ing them intellectual rebellion. To quote Shai Hulud:

"I am the wayward son of man, my fathers have darkened what was the warmest
heart the world would have ever known, relish in what you have created.

deprived of life a formless shadow deprived of life
set your body ablaze!"

So, what i am getting at is that I want to break this habit. I want to move on, to stop being so angry at the world. It is going to kill me, the anger.

2009-06-14T14:43:00.000-07:00

The rehearsal dinner was held at Greg and Janina's house, just south of them a ways. Their house was too perfect for words, and was tucked away in a little bay, overlooking these beautiful little islands and points. Ezra made a big bucket of decadent pulled pork and we all sat and ate and drank and watched the sun set. As darkness fell (it didn't get dark until almost 2200 hrs), Greg made a fire out back on the water and we all sat around and talked or stared silently at the profound beauty that is rural, coastal Nova Scotia at dusk. Someone grabbed a guitar from inside and Glen Hansard--of "Once" fame--and their friend Sam Amadon played a bunch of songs. It was really quite lovely.

Elle and I headed back to where we were staying at the Lighthouse Motel in pleasantville and tried to wrap our heads around the beauty that we had been a part of that day. it was a good day, I'll leave it at that.

The wedding was at this tiny fisherman's church on an outer LaHave island, tucked away down a gravel road, and overlooking another one of the picture-perfect bays. The church has stained glass in all the windows of lighthouses and was built in memory of several fisherman and locals who drowned at sea. The building looks like the skeleton of a boat's hull from the inside and smelled of rich pine. The afternoon light draped over the 30 or so of their close friends and family. The pictures will do the event justice more than words, but I will transcribe something that I said to Ez and Hill during the service.

"I have spent a good part of my life afraid that themost important moments of my life, the most sincere emotions, were cliche and sentimental, ripe for parody, afraid of being called naive for believing in things like love and beauty. But as I have gotten to know Hil and Ez, the life they have made for themselves, the people that surround them, and th love they share, i can't help but feel that it is genuine.

Their love is nothing to roll your eyes at.

And that makes me happy. Like soul-deep happy"

I thought I was going to throw up when I sat down.

Anyway, the wedding was incredibly beautiful and I couldn;t imagine a more appropriate way of celebrating two of my favorite people in this world's wedding. It was incredible. Glen played an Al Green song before they gave their vows, Sam played a song of his appropriately titled "Wedding Dress" as they walked down the isle together. Their vows were traditional Celtic vows, which as with everythng else, were perfect.

the photos that follow were taken by Elle on her pop's Pentax.

2009-06-14T05:29:00.000-07:00

Last week Elle and I flew north for the Caldwell-Nanney union in the LaHave Islands of Nova Scotia.

We flew into Halifax on Thursday and arrived early in the afternoon, rented a car, and drove three hours south-west(I think) across the peninsula (make sure you don't call it an "island"; people there are very quick to correct you and apparently very proud of being "connected to the rest of Canada" and when correcting you usually make some sort of comment about how "Americans know nothing about Canada," though a young friend of Ezra's who lives there, when we told him this story, said, "shit, it's pretty much a fucking island") to the Bay of Fundy.

The Bay of Fundy claims to have the most extreme tidal shifts in the world. A combination of bottom contours, currents, and a Viking curse or something, causes the tides to fluxuate tremendously, leaving boats that once were sitting pretty in 20 feet of water high and dry at low-tide.

We had reservations at the Thistle Down Bed and Breakfast and were pleased to find it actually on the Bay and as pretty as the pictures made it seem. The B&B was owned by a guy named Mel whose eyes never fully opened and whose dry sense of humor and creepiness combined to cause a slight case of paranoia in Elle and I when we found the room furnished with a stuffed white teddy bear which I quickly examined for a camera or other recording device.

We spent a day and a half there eating scallops (in everything!--scallops in our omellettes even), relaxing, and driving around the area. We hiked to Balancing Rock, drove out the the furthest part of the peninsula, took a bunch of ferry's, and checked out some lighthouses.

On Elle's request I had been growing a beard for the two months prior to this. It had gotten a little grizzly and she seemed to have changed her mind about it (when we first started dating I had a beard but shaved it very soon after we became serious--very soon, as in ON our first real date, which is another story entirely--and she wanted me to grow it again). I brought ONE disposable razor with me to shave the thing off my face. It took 45 minutes of hacking at my poor, sensitive face to remove the bulk of it. I left this:

We left Saturday mronig and drove back across the island to the LaHave Islands for Ezra and Hillary's rehearsal dinner in Petite Riviere. It took two hours of driving through empty pin tree-lined roads to get to the coast and another half-hour weaving along the most beautiful rocky coastal roads before we found the island.

Hillary and Ezra have been telling me about Nova Scotia since I met them. They spend a good amount of their summers there and are always eager to share it with their friends. They decided the wedding was the perfect way to share such a special part of their lives with their closest friends and family. Seeing where and how they live up there was incredible.

I will follow with a post on the wedding, which I am still trying to do justice, and a bunch of photos.

Summer: A (tentative) schedule

2009-06-01T17:49:00.000-07:00

Summer is here. School is finally and thankfully over. I got good grades, chopped a few years off my life not sleeping and sweating cliches. It was a rough semester, but a good one. I'm ready for a change.

Elle invited me down to her parents in CT for a long weekend. I was psyched on getting out of the city, being done with the semester, hanging out with Elle and seeing her home town, etc. We left Thursday afternoon from Grand Central. It was my first time their, strangely. It is really quite a beautiful place, though I think the clock should be bigger. I had a strange feeling sitting there watching people walk by, scuttling to and from obligations, that I didn't have the faintest clue what made any of these people feel joy. As a writer, someone interested or obligated to understand others inner-feelings, this is an issue. But sitting there, watching these stiff, cold people file past each other, I felt very alone. This is not the point of the story, though. The last thought is one that requires more than a quick blog post to dive in to.

Elle, her mom, and I got in to CT around 5ish and drove to where she grew up, stopping to meet her dad on the way for a steak dinner at Chute Gate.

Their home is truly beautiful, in the way only authentic New England homes can be. Crisp edges and trims, effortless landscaping, surrounded by lush green grass and foliage.

We were there to hang out with her BFF's Cara and Meg. Meg has been in Australia for a while finishing teaching school and living with her well-traveled BF, Brett, who is a class act. We basically layed low, went to Meg's BBQ at her nascar-watching family's, pillaged Salvation Army and Goodwill, and were treated like royalty by her mom and dad. It was a good weekend.

Elle, her mom, and I got back this morning and went to our respective jobs for the day. I came home and moved Nolan into our apt., and gave him a pretty fantastic haircut. Him and I ate pizza and are about to head over to Reggie's for his going-away-for-the-summer-to-teach-Shakespeare-to-children party.

Thursday, Elle and I head to Nova Scotia to take part in the Nanney-Caldwell wedding. We're staying on the Bay of Fundy for two evenings, then in the LaHave Islands for two, then somewhere else, possibly Lunenberg?, the last night. It is going to be quite a good time, staying in bed and breakfasts and enjoying the company of good friends in a new place. I'm pretty psyched, and couldn't be more excited about it being Elle and I's first real trip together!

Having just finished school, just finished all academic requirements for the next three months, I have set myself a goal to read a shit-ton. Shit-ton.

In the last 5 days I read:
Consider the Lobster
Oblivion, both by David Foster Wallace
The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
The Name of The World by Denis Johnson

So, I am planning a 3-month binge, reading with the following books:
in no order:
Infinite Jest (again)
The Corrections
White Noise
Invisible Man (again)
Rabbit, Run
Rabbit, Redux
Rabbit is Rich
Rabbit at Rest
American Pastoral
(maybe) Against the Day
The Girl With Curious Hair

I'll keep you updated.

For Jarod

2009-04-21T14:50:00.001-07:00

I made mom drive us to Wal-mart. I made her. It was Saturday morning and Jarod rode his bike from his house down the street to eat breakfast with us. We were in the kitchen when he opened the door. “Hey Jarod,” Jack said, as we both looked at him simultaneously. “Don’t call me Jarod,” he said. “Call me Mike.” He was wearing pajamas, but not any pajamas—Michael Jordan pajamas. We flew off our seats to touch the fabric—a soft, supple, cheap polyester. It was an exact replica of the Bull’s 1992 away jerseys. We had watched every game. We knew how many points Jordan had averaged; how many rebounds Horace Grant had, how many assists Scottie Pippen had. We had to have the pajamas and mom knew that we would never shut up until we had them. Had it been anything else, we could have been talked down.
That night we watched Michael and the rest of the Bulls in the playoffs. They won. Mom made us popcorn with parmesan cheese and black pepper sprinkled on it while Dad rolled his own cigarettes in the alcove next to the television before sitting on the couch to watch with us. We sat on the floor, as close to the television as we could get before dad made us scoot back. Our jaws hung loose and limp as we watched Mike glide to the rim for another dunk.
The next morning we woke up early. We pulled the little trampoline to the back yard and set it down just in front of the basketball hoop. We took turns running towards the hoop, jumping and bouncing off the trampoline, skyward to the hoop, practicing our “Air Jordan” technique—legs scissored, left hand slightly extended behind us, right hand palming the miniature ball, arm fully extended. We slammed the balls with all the force in our tiny bodies.
We wore the pajamas everyday. Teachers complained to our parents about our state of dress. But when we wore them, we were Mike. He was us.

2009-04-13T05:42:00.000-07:00

Ashton Goggans

RFW: Writing About The Popular Arts

9 April 2009

I wanted to write about something that I don't like liking. Here you go.

Half A Person

I have never known how to talk with people about Morrissey. And you’d be surprised how often he comes up in conversation. Actually, maybe you wouldn’t. The conversations usually go one of two ways: the person hates Morrissey, calls the fan an idiot or something slightly more derogatory, and the conversation ends at that. Or the person loves Morrissey, is thrilled to share the fondness with someone new—they share stories (when they first heard the Smiths, if they had seen Morrissey perform, or how badly they wish they’d seen the Smiths). These conversations are largely fruitless; no new insight is shared; we learn nothing substantial. But Morrissey is a very unique specimen in popular music and most certainly a jumping off point for many larger issues of contemporary culture. He poses questions that few listeners presumably consider. What do we consider masculine today? What is a performer’s image’s relation to his art? How does Morrissey transcend class, national, age, and political boundaries? Is he a modern figure? Post-Modern? Why him?

Let me preface that when I refer to Morrissey’s music I am referring to him as both the singer of the Smiths and as solo artist. Distinctions are to be made, certainly, but for this examination will not be. By all intensive purposes, Morrissey is the same person he was twenty-five years ago—a little fatter, a little grey around the ears, but still the same. I will also disregard his politics, both American and English, and his extreme veganism. (He won’t play shows where meat is served backstage. His tour help is required to eat entirely vegetarian, usually vegan, to the extent that all flights are booked for employees and vegetarian meals specified for their in-flight meal.)

He presents himself as the shell of, what in a different time would have been, a virile, beast of a man. He is striking: hair swooped back and over, broad, full shoulders and the strong, distinguished chin. Despite his best efforts, he is not fragile looking. He is not the creation of record company marketing; he is his own product, one more literary than rock and roll.

In this way he is transparent. This transparency does not turn people off. Rather it allows them to embrace him as their own. Everyone gets sad, and Morrissey is the sad people’s man.

Morrissey is a conscious amalgam of popular myth and archetype. He is the product of all modernity: Ernest Hemingway’s Nick Adams and Jake Barnes, the doomed youth of the contemporary Byronic Hero—Elvis, Buddy Holly, James Dean, John Lennon, and John F. Kennedy—, and the ironic wit and flamboyance of Oscar Wilde. He knows from the books he has read what a broken man should be like, a man who carries the weight of modernity on his shoulders, a man without faith.

The autobiography in his lyrics is Kafka-esque; he is the hunger artist, a man so beautiful and perfect that there must be something bigger keeping him from finding the love he needs, the love he has always wanted but never found, the sustenance he burns for. In a world of sexual deviance as masculine exhibition and female exhibition as orthodox gentility, Morrissey’s asexuality leaves him stranded, an island in a sea of nothingness. He is an echo: I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each./I do not think that they will sing to me.

Or maybe he is just that narcissistic.

Whatever it is, fans devour this persona. During live performances Morrissey is known to dispose of several sweat-soaked shirts, to tear them from his body and fling them to the fawning crowd. Both men and women clamor over each other, ripping the garments to shreds. They bring flowers for their beloved Adonis. It is now customary for attendees to rush the stage, dodge security, and embrace their sad, mournful icon. He sings:

Sing me to sleep

I don’t want to wake up

On my own anymore…

I really want to go

There is another world

There is a better world

Well, there must be.

Don’t be sad, they plead. We love you. It is a spectacle; a crowd of adoring fans begging their idol to cheer up, to please know he is beautiful and loveable. It’s sad, really. Viewing the scene played out, one is left unsure of who is being ironic, who really believes the words their crooner delivers, and who just came to enjoy some music.

His music is not nearly as unique as his persona and it is important to mention. Robert Smith of the Cure, Ian Curtis of Joy Division, even Bono of U2 are somehow representative of their respective bands. They fit. But in all reality Morrissey sings like a lounge singer--a soulful, deep croon— but that of a lounge singer nonetheless. Now that I think of it, he kind of looks like one, too.

Despite the transparency and overt irony, Morrissey’s popularity increases proportionately to literacy. Bookish men adore him; they see themselves in him, hoping to be embraced for their impotence as he is. Yet largely they are not. It is no accident that indie-rock darlings have embraced him as pater familias. Morrissey is part of a broader shift in masculinity, a willing undermining of the role of men in society. It can be seen in the characters played by John Cusack and Zach Braff, in romantic comedies where mix-tapes make everything ok, where novelty songs are shared like Shakespeare’s Sonnets or Keats’ “Ode to Melancholy” was in generations past.

For modern men it is not the love of a female that we desire, but their recognition of our sensitivity, of the deep pool of feelings just below the surface. Yet is not sadness that men immerse themselves in, not sorrow they breathe deeply, but irony—corrosive, pointless irony. They aren’t feeling or saying anything. I get the feeling that neither is Morrissey.

2009-02-23T20:09:00.000-08:00

Micheal Walzer is a professor emeritus at Princeton and the editor Dissent Magazine, a wonderfully articulate publication of the left. Get into it. Subscribe to Dissent, n+1 or Debate and get educated.

2009-02-22T16:26:00.001-08:00

The Colbert ReportMon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

The Word - Mad Men

Colbert Report Full Episodes
Funny Political News

Christian Bale Parody
Joke of the Day

I'm working.....

2009-02-01T19:55:00.000-08:00

....on stuff. I'll let you know when it materializes. It's rectangular, loose-leafed and rhymes with "Fiction." Also, I am digging classes like a jamofo. Good start to the semester.

Pad Thai, Pit Bulls, New Bikes and Good People

2009-01-23T18:08:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I headed up to Harlem to pay Ezra a long overdue visit. He said to come around lunch time, which usually means he has something up his sleeve. I brought my Fuji up so he could give me some pointers on how to care for my poorly maintained bicycle. When I got there he was doing ome final adjustments on Hillary's new getter/back-to-school/business-class bike. While lunch cooked we wall went outside to see how Hil's new bike rode. Ezra builds what are arguably the most aesthetically beautiful custom bikes out there. Minimalism and functionality all the way. We all took a spin on it and agreed it was smooth as silk. Ezra wanted to make sure that the grocery rack was going to be bombproof so he decided that Hil should probably sit on it and they both take it for a spin.

As expected, it held.

We spent the rest of the afternoon eating Pad Thai (the man can cook as well as he can weld), playing with Putney Sue, cleaning the shop and talking around the dinner table while Hil made cookies.

It was a good day

2009-01-21T14:32:00.000-08:00

It has been quite cold here in the North. The temperature has been below freezing for over two weeks now. It has snowed 6 times. I think the boots I bought last year are finally broken in. I have also learned the importance of long underwear.

I have been working a ton, hoping to make some confetti before school starts so that I am not completely worn thin for rent money. So Elle and I have been eating in. Baking in, too. And going to open bars.

Dil-Bt came up. Good seeing the man himself in the 'Hood.

2009-01-14T13:31:00.001-08:00

I used to be very optimistc, angry, and outspoken. I had what I thought were formed ideals. They oscillated wildly around the idea of "compassion" or "unity." I used to believe Rousseau's idea that humans were inherently "Noble Beasts." Nowadays I am kind of an asshole. I think people are terrible. Maybe I have been mislead. Maybe I have finally seen things clearly. I don't know. But, those ideas had a soundtrack and I do know that the music I used to listen to had something to it. It was beautiful and angry and loud. The shows we went to were smoky and small and a lot of times they got canceled or bands never showed up or their vans flipped. Punk rock was still alive. And maybe it still is today.

Here is a quick tribute to my generation's hardcore and punk rock scene.

Good Riddance

The New Good Riddance band Only Crime

Ignite

Strife

Kid Dynamite

Bane

I was searching for Stretch Arm Strong clip for this post and cme upon a show that I attended. If you look close I am up front, getting the mic shoved in my face and singing along. I was 17. Steve Boomhower and I drove over to Melbourne in my Toyota pickup. We surfed all morning and then met the Stretch Arm Strong guys before the show. I was pretty good friends with the guitarist, David at the time. He surfed and was super jealous of our session. Seeing this blew my mind.

Our Band Could Be Your Life

2009-01-12T13:53:00.000-08:00

"People you can build dreams with."

Lemons Grow Better in the Florida Sun

2009-01-12T07:48:00.000-08:00

Yep, sadly we decided Lemon would be better off at my pop's and sis' in FL for the semester. I am taking a billion credits and hoping to do an internship with a few prospective magazines. I didn't think Lemon would get the attention she needs and at time might deserve. Kayla said she (Lem) was sad after we left, that she (Lemon) would run out to the rompin room and jump on our beds and whine and whine. Yesterday I talked to her (Kay) and she said she (Lem) was fine and I could hear her (Lem) in the background growling as she played tug-of-war with Kay and her new tennis-ball-rope-combo.

No Title

2009-01-10T17:38:00.000-08:00

It is snowing in New York. I am sick, or getting sick. I don't feel good, that's what I'm getting at. Lately it is hard for me to save face and carry on as the optimistic, jovial person I think people see me as. Maybe it is a funk. Lately I have been seeing things really clear, though. I have been reading a lot. I've been thinking about D F Wallace too. He used to have a quote pinned to his wall--from Kafka, I think--that said: The Disease Was Life Itself. That thought kinda shook me up.

Back in BK

2009-01-09T20:31:00.000-08:00

We are home. We left Thursday around 8, drove to Virginia, slept and ate lunch at my Grandmas and then drove the rest of the way. We got stoned and Pete and I both stood on the edge of madness for several hours, monitoring the beats of our hearts and trying to quiet our brains. Life is big and strange and empty. We just drove most of the eastern coast of this great nation and for the most part all I remember are gas stations, billboards for porcelain dolls or South of the Border, and a whole shit-ton of McDonalds. Road trips like this remind me why I love reading On The Road over and over again. That book is all motion and fire and real human discussion with the narrator. It would be hard to do that now without ignoring the fact that as you drive anywhere in this great land you are constantly being shouted at from billboards, taunted by the suggestions presented as necessary purchases. When you make a mental point to notice how often we are presented with opportunities to spend money, how often we are told by advertisements what will make us feel better at that moment, the reality of it is scary and dark and menacing. The landscape of America is one giant advertisement for fucking cheeseburgers.

Surf Reports

2009-01-08T05:34:00.000-08:00

1: There's waves. It looks fun
2: It's flat, go back to sleep.
3: It's small but it looks super fun for a longboard
4: Dude, it's flat.

Fuuuucccckkkk!

1 year.

2009-01-07T09:03:00.000-08:00

I have lived in New York for one year now. That is the longest I have ever been away from Nokomis. In October of 2007 I was dating a girl from Canada and planning on going to Flagler in St. Augustine. Then Larry Mayo invited me to New York for a long weekend. I spent a little over 24 hours in the City, staying at Lars' loft in SoHo, and knew that I had to move there. I got back, applied to every good school in the City and waited. I was still writing for the Sarasota Herald then, making decent money and enjoying the title of "journalist." My acceptance letter came while I was covering a holiday concert at a retirement home in Venice. I broke up with the girl, lost most of my friends and talked my brother into driving me up. That was a year ago.

Since then I feel like I have changed in a million ways. But, after coming home and spending time here again, I feel very much like the same person. This is good and bad. I am still gregarious, though not to the same level I used to be. I still try to please everyone, though not as much, I hope. But, I feel like a little more of an asshole now. And that's good.
In the next year I will graduate from College and apply to graduate school. I will spend the summer somewhere quiet and bright or cold and dark with Elle and try to write something worth enclosing in the applications to several Ivy League schools.

I guess the point of this ramble is to say that we all have the ability to move on. The only thing that holds us down is us, our fears and uncertainties. I have always preached the virtue of remaining uncomfortable, of always moving forward and not settling down, but have rarely practiced it. New York was my step in that direction and it has been a very affirming experience.

If you are unhappy where you are, pick up and leave. Break up with your boyfriend or girlfriend. Blow off your credit card debts. Take out a student loan or sell all the shit you really don't need. Get on a plane. Move somewhere that you have never been where nobody knows you. Start over. We only have one life, but within that life are a million chances to turn it around.

In the words of GB:

Yesterday you were on my back just to get my time.
I guess it's not as precious as it seems.
Because I found the time for hangin out and talkin on the phone.
What should i expect, now that my time is free and you're nowhere to be found.
Next time i'll try, for the first time in my life.
It won't pass me by.
Procrastinate it can wait, i put it off. let's start today my room's a mess and i can't get dressed.
I gotta be out by eight o'clock.
Deep inside i know the answer.
Well there's no time like the present and i'd like to hang out but who doesn't.
I've made enough mistakes for this lifetime.
Now i'm here to make amends.
Next time i'll try, for the first time in my life.
It won't pass me by.
Procrastinate it can wait, i put it off. start!

That's a Good Point!

2009-01-06T14:41:00.000-08:00

Dialogue of the Day:
Ashton: Want to go to Goodwill?
Pete: Jesus Christ, I just want to go home. I've been sitting in the fucking car all day. You guys take forever. Fucking picking out a stupid dog toy for twenty-fucking minutes!
Jack: You gotta sit somewhere.
Pete: I'd rather sit in the fucking electric chair.
Jack: What?
Pete: Electric chair
Jack: I don't get your point
Pete: Electric chair. That's the fucking point.

A Holiday In The Sun

2009-01-05T05:33:00.001-08:00

Besides my Pops and Sis, the friends we have been breaking it down with, and the water, I will miss this place:

Publix Top Ten:

1. Publix Subs
(Sub-List: Top 3 Publix Subs)
-----1.Chicken Tenders with Sweet Baby Ray's BBQ Sauce and Cheddar Cheese
-----2.Honey Glazed Ham with Swiss on Sunflower bread.
-----3.Cuban Sub with Cheddar
2. Fried Chicken (mixed bucket)
3. Southern Style Potato Salad
4. Tons of affordable Organic Produce
5. Publix "Greenwise" Organic Products (Napkins, Milk, Eggs, Oatmeal)
6. The old men that work there (sometimes the old women, too, but they can be bitchy)
7. The 14 year old kids that work there (Pete, Jarod and I did our time there and Justin, the second generation, was the employee of the month).
8. Apple Fritters/Croissant Donuts (the first is for Pete, the second me).
9. Pops'n'Sis knowing every single person that works there and every person shopping.
10. The fact that they know the place so well but never eat anything except Amy's meals and Morningstar Farms products. Oh, and Macaroni and Cheese. But it's organic!

Hunger Artists

2009-01-04T09:06:00.001-08:00

Our visit home is coming to an end. The departure date is still up for debate, but we all have to be back by Saturday and we are expected to stop by our Grandmother's in Virginia on the way up. We are banking on getting some waves on Tuesday and Wednesday, so Wednesday night is looking like the time to leave.

It has been a good trip. As much as Pete, Jack and I will complain about the terrifying reality we were faced with, coming in contact with people from our not-so-distant past, we have gotten a lot out of this trip. Winston and Cavin hung out with us and it is always a good time when the five of us are together. I have known Winston since I was 7 or 8. He is a great dude and well on his way to being Lemon's veterinarian. Cavin has been working on video stuff here, mainly stuff for his younger brother, Tayler "Termite". His work is really fucking good. He has a vimeo profile that I don't know how to link to, but check it out: Cavin Brothers or color blind media.

Winston just called from the road. He's heading back to Auburn. We agreed that hanging out the last week or so has been the best winter brek we can remember. He swears he is coming up to The City to visit. God help his parent's if Winston gets the idea to move up there.

Here is a quick wrap-up of our break:

1. Christmas was rad.
2. Elle came and met the fam, went swimming, and flew back to NY. I will not elaborate as it will only make me lonelier.
3. New Years eve we got wasted and broke most of downtown Sarasota's lawn decorations.
4. Skated every park within 50 miles, with the exception of the Sarasota park. Winston thought he broke all of the bones in his body at some point.
5. Got drunk at the Old Venice Pub and felt warm, knowing we could leave and never have to come back to this place.
6. Got stoned and laughed well into the night on several evenings. My Dad said he had never been happier than lying in bed listening to us giggling in the backroom, playing guitar and singing, making fun of each other and playing with the pup.
7. Sat with Kayla and talked with my Grandparents for hours.
8. Went to a hardcore show in Venice, felt old, talked with Boomhower about feeling old, saw Seth Levan--my old roommate I haven't seen in at least 3 years--and felt older, saw my sister's generation and understood why she feels such solitude and loneliness here. Paul and Zach's band Aim at The Kid played and impressed the shit out of me. They publish a small zine in Orlando, rock out, and generally make me feel that everything that comes out of Venice is not necessarily terrible, sometimes it is very good.

We are all hoping for surf now. Today Pete and I are skating again, trying to get it out of our systems as we know how very cold it will be when we get back and neither of us are very good at ice skating.

It is sunny and warm. Today will be a good day.

Peace.

The Holidays

2008-12-31T07:16:00.000-08:00

Jack, Pete and I are all back in Florida for a week or so. Gas prices are low so Pete and I drove with Lemon and got in the day before Christmas eve. Jack was shredding the pow pow in Vail and flew in on Christmas eve.
This is the first time I have been home in 10 months, which come to think of it, might be the longest I have ever been away. Leading up to the trip back I was pretty excited about it.
Spending time with Pops and Sis is something I miss terribly. The two of them are an anomaly. Their relationship is like no other father-daughter relationship I have ever known, in the most positive of ways. They laugh and cuss and piss each other off and take care of each other and protect one another. They are perfect.
Winston has been in town as well and has been kicking it at the rompin room with us since we got back. We have had some interesting nights so far.
The night we got it we went to the Old Venice Pub on the Island where my old friend Dan Macmillan tends to the bar. Dan is a bit older than me, say 10 years, I think. He was the first person besides my father that liked Jazz and Kerouac. He also listened to the Minutemen. A well rounded cat. When I was very very young, like 8, he was friends with a guy named Rusty Rustemeyer, a friend of my parents who lived in the rompin room for a while before it was the rompin room. When we met again almost a decade later, it freaked him out. "I smoked weed with your dad while you played basketball," he said. "You were a little kid."
So we went to the OVP. We thought we might run into some people from high school but that it wouldn't be a bi deal. We would have a few beers and get our homecoming started on the right foot. 40 minutes later Winston was pissing at the bottom of the stairs because he couldn't stand to wait in line in that chamber of broken dreams. It was a fucking wake-up call. I saw everyone I never thought I would see again once I moved up North. With a few exceptions, most notably Josh Sinibaldi, who was ostensibly my very first friend in this world, who is getting married to long-time swetheart Megan Archer in a week or so, it was terrible. People have graduated from college, gotten strung out on drugs, gone to rehab, had kids, bought houses in North Port (the worst place in the world)and for the most part are miserable, working for their parents or crashing in their old bedrooms. It is true what the say: You can't come home again.
So the next night we decided to just go with it, to smother ourselves with the ugliness of our roots, an exercise in deprivation. We played ping-pong and watched racist rednecks bob their heads above their Budweiser to Kanye West and 36 Mafia. Strange, sad Irony haunts these parts and it makes is disparaging.
But then their was Christmas. We woke up and I made a pretty reat breakfast that consisted of Jack's favorite: Biscuits an Gravy with scrambled eggs. Then we opened the presents that each of us were able to scrape together with our respective finances. For the last few years we have all become a rather engaged family, always finding new periodicals and books to share with each other. Christmas is a giving and taking of knowledge and right now the tree is surrounded with books ranging from "Obamanomics" to several issues of seminal literary magazines such as The Antioch Review, Tin House and The Paris Review. If you walked into our ouse, you would think we were much more high-brow than we really are.
BShort came over a little later and we embarked upon a culinary journey of Biblical proportions. We made a turkey, stuffing, green bean casserole, sweet potato mash, mashed taters and gravy, cranberry sauce and croissants. I have never cooked a turkey. I assumed that it would be a disaster but fun. Strangley, after the bird was cut and everyone had taken their first bite, we all agreed that it may very well have been the most delicious turkey we have ever tasted. And everything else was great, too.
Then Elle came to town. At that point in my home stay, I was ready to lose it. Elle's arrival was something I was looking forward too very much, a coming up for air as it were. I drove up to Tampa the day after Christmas to shoot photos of her and Amanda for Cakeface. Sequins and Boleros and Steak and Shake was involved.
The next night Jesso drove up from MIA to meet up for a DIY performance at Amanda's High School dance teachers house, in her garage. It was really neat, seeing something like that in a very upper middle-class neighborhood. It was the equivalent of a early-90's basement hardcore show and everyone seemed to enjoy their piece.

Elle came home with me that night, back to the rompin room to see what my existence was comprised of for most of the 23 3/4 years I was alive before we met. We spent a day and two nights at home with the family. We took Lemon to the dog beach. We ate sushi and saw a movie. We went on a Florida date. She felt the whit talcum of Siesta Beach between her toes. We had a very nice time. Then she flew home. I drove her to the airport Monday morning and left for New York. This blog is public domain and is supposed to be representative of the person i try to present myself as to people. Serving that function, it leaves little room for vulnerable statements. But, casting that aside, I must say that I miss Elle. I will not go into detail but know that it is not pretty. She is going to Mexico on the 4th which means that we will not see each other for another 2 weeks. Not good.
To round out the experience, Kayla had her last operation to rid her of kidney stones yesterday at All Children's Hospital in St. Petersburg. I will one day write about my experience there, when Kayla was born, and almost died from a heart defect. I will write about the Ronald McDonald house and about why people who oppose Universal Healthcare should be forced to sit and watch these families suffer. I will also write about the strange bottomless feeling you get in your stomach walking around there, looking at the ground in the parking lot and seeing the remains of abandoned pacifiers and toys. It is strange and tragic and at times beautiful. That hospital is a testament to Science's beauty and to the utter improbability of a benevolent God existing. No benevolent creator would allow such gentle souls to suffer pointlessly. No God would allow such things to happen to children.
But Kayla is fine now. She had a really rough day but she is ok. We are watching Gilmore Girls. That's what I will be doing a for a while now.

Happy New Year everyone. Lets make it a good one.

2008-12-27T07:30:00.000-08:00

Government by Contractor Is a Disgrace

Many jobs are best left to federal workers.

By THOMAS FRANK

Back in 1984, the conservative industrialist J. Peter Grace was telling whoever would listen why government was such a wasteful institution.

One reason, which he spelled out in a book chapter on privatization, was that "government-run enterprises lack the driving forces of marketplace competition, which promote tight, efficient operations. This bears repetition," he wrote, "because it is such a profound and important truth."

And repetition is what this truth got. Grace trumpeted it in the recommendations of his famous Grace Commission, set up by President Ronald Reagan to scrutinize government operations looking for ways to save money. It was repeated by leading figures of both political parties, repeated by everyone who understood the godlike omniscience of markets, repeated until its veracity was beyond question. Turn government operations over to the private sector and you get innovation, efficiency, flexibility.

What bears repetition today, however, is the tragic irony of it all. To think that our contractor welfare binge was once rationalized as part of an efficiency crusade. To think that it was supposed to make government smaller.

As the George W. Bush presidency grinds to its close, we can say with some finality that the opposite is closer to the truth. The MBA president came to Washington determined to enshrine the truths of "market-based" government. He gave federal agencies grades that were determined, in part, on how abjectly the outfits abased themselves before the doctrine of "competitive sourcing." And, as the world knows, he puffed federal spending to unprecedented levels without increasing the number of people directly employed by the government.

Instead the expansion went, largely, to private contractors, whose employees by 2005 outnumbered traditional civil servants by four to one, according to estimates by Paul Light of New York University. Consider that in just one category of the federal budget -- spending on intelligence -- apparently 70% now goes to private contractors, according to investigative reporter Tim Shorrock, author of "Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing."

Today contractors work alongside government employees all across Washington, often for much better pay. There are seminars you can attend where you will learn how to game the contracting system, reduce your competition, and maximize your haul from good ol' open-handed Uncle Sam. ("Why not become an insider and share in this huge pot of gold?" asks an email ad for one that I got yesterday.) There are even, as Danielle Brian of the Project on Government Oversight, a nonpartisan watchdog group in Washington, D.C., told me, "contractor employees -- lots of them -- whose sole responsibility is to dream up things the government needs to buy from them. The pathetic part is that often the government listens -- kind of like a kid watching a cereal commercial."

Some federal contracting, surely, is unobjectionable stuff. But over the past few years it has become almost impossible to open a newspaper and not read of some well-connected and obscenely compensated contractor foisting a colossal botch on the taxpayer. Contractors bungling the occupation of Iraq; contractors spinning the revolving door at the Department of Homeland Security; contractors reveling publicly in their good fortune after Hurricane Katrina.

At its grandest, government by contractor gives us episodes like the Coast Guard's Deepwater program, in which contractors were hired not only to build a new fleet for that service, but also to manage the entire construction process. One of the reasons for this inflated role, according to the New York Times, was the contractors' standing armies of lobbyists, who could persuade Congress to part with more money than the Coast Guard could ever get on its own. Then, with the billions secured, came the inevitable final chapter in 2006, with the contractors delivering radios that were not waterproof and ships that were not seaworthy.

Government by contractor also makes government less accountable to the public. Recall, for example, the insolent response of Erik Prince, CEO of Blackwater, when asked about his company's profits during his celebrated 2007 encounter with the House Oversight Committee: "We're a private company," quoth he, "and there's a key word there -- private."

So you and I don't get to know. We don't get to know about Blackwater's profits, we don't get to know about the effects all this has had on the traditional federal workforce, and we don't really get to know about what goes on elsewhere in the vast private industries to which we have entrusted the people's business.

President-elect Barack Obama, for his part, seems to be aware of the problems. He has promised to make public the amounts contractors spend on lobbying and to "reform," in general terms, the contracting system. But much more is required.

What Mr. Obama must give us is a Grace Commission in reverse, a massive investigation of the entire history of government by contractor. It is time for accountability on a grand scale, and only government has the power to deliver it. This is one job that cannot be contracted out.

Write to thomas@wsj.com

About Thomas Frank

Thomas Frank was born and raised in Kansas City. He graduated from Shawnee Mission East High School in Prairie Village, Kansas (1983), and from the University of Virginia (1987). He founded The Baffler magazine in 1988, and he edits it to this day. He has a PhD in American History (U. of Chicago 1994) and is the author of three books, all of them having to do with the cultural inversions of our times: The Conquest of Cool (1997), about the advertising industry; One Market Under God (2000) about the myths of the New Economy; and What's the Matter With Kansas? (2004) about the red-state mindset. His book about conservative governance, The Wrecking Crew, was published in 2008.

A survey.

2008-12-12T17:43:00.000-08:00

Elle thinks Lem looks like Kermit the frog. I say Gollum. What do you think?

Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this son [or sun] of York

2008-12-12T10:52:00.000-08:00

So I have not been updating this with any personal information for some time. I am sorry, though I doubt many have felt deprived. It has been a busy few months and these sorts of public endeavors, these masturbatory activities, have been (rightfully) the first to suffer neglect.

Here is what has been going down.

1.) Rhode Island

Jack and I took a weekend trip to Rhode Island last month. The family Attias was celebrating the 40th anniversary of den mother Nicole's presence on this planet. We piled Lemon in and spent the weekend playing in the crisp winter sun of RI. Nikki had a wonderful party where I partook in some puffs and ate myself into slumber. It was not pretty. Whoever brought the ribs, I offer my sincerest appologies. I could not help it.

2.) Thanksgiving

Jack and I returned to our humble little slab of gentrification for 24 hours, whereupon we left again for Virginia. Pops and sis flew up and met us at our Grandmother's house in the woods of Scottsville. To say that the time spent there, listening to my Grandmother tell stories of my father's adolescence, watching her, in turn, listen to my Father's telling of his debaucherous youth, alomst all of which was news to her, some 35 years later, was incredible. We watched Lemon chase, and get chased by, cows. We ate delicious food and enjoyed the warmth of Family without any drama, any fake smiles or disenginuity. It was truly something special.

3.) Brooklyn.

The winter has snuck up on us. I surfed yesterday and was quickly reminded of the comitment required to surf in New York during the winter. We have stopped riding bikes almost completely and I have begun to enjoy the subway again.

Jack and Cory celebrated their birthdays recently, 22 and 21 respectively. Though, if I may mention, no cake has been eaten. Anyone interested in providing cake for the wayward children of Brooklyn may do so. We can all use more cake.

4.) Writing, publishing and submissions.

I have been writing non-stop, it seems, both for class and not. I am enjoying it more now than ever, a welcomed change in attitude given the cost of tuition here at New School and my pursuance of a degree in Creative Writing.

We are getting good submissions for the next issue of Umbrage. It will be interesting to see how the magazine changes with the addition of so many new voices.

I have written a story that is not about young boys and debauchery that I like. You will see it soon, God willing.

5.) People.

I met someone new, just recently, who has made it all-too dificult to be misanthropic. I am thankful for this. Anger is consumptive and destructive and does nothing for my well-being, my art and for the household. I am happy, I think.

Good looking out.

AA GoogleSmacintosh

2008-12-09T20:54:00.001-08:00

Extremely Cloying & Incredibly False

Why the author of Everything Is Illuminated is a fraud and a hack

By Harry Siegel

Why do people wonder what's "OK" to make art about, as if creating art out of tragedy weren't an inherently good thing? Too many people are too suspicious of art. Too many people hate art. —Jonathan Safran Foer, on why he wrote a 9/11 book. Call me a hater, then.

It's bad form to call a living writer corrupt and debased, which is why I begged out of a review I'd been assigned of Jonathan Safran Foer's highly touted debut novel, Everything Is Illuminated. The book struck me as an admixture of shtick and sentiment, the most self-involved work about the Holocaust since Maus, with all the gravitas of Robin Williams' Jakob the Liar. I understand how a young man could write such a book, but not why he would have it published, and certainly not how it could be acclaimed as marking the arrival of a major new talent. (The $500,000 advance, and later nearly $1 million for the movie rights, and another $1 million for the follow-up, may have helped.)

There's a story I heard that a former student, a man in his 20s, bumped into Barbara Rose, the cruel and wise art critic and teacher, and began telling her how well things were going for himthat he had an agent now, successful shows under his belt, patrons, the whole nine yards. Rose shook her head and asked him, "How can someone so young be so unambitious?" and went on her way.

Having "read" Foer's latestif that's what one does to this cut-and-paste assemblage of words, pictures, blank pages and pages where the text runs together and becomes illegibleit's time for bad form.

Foer isn't just a bad author, he's a vile one.

Much has been made of the flipbook with which Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close ends, a series of pictures of a silhouette falling from the towers, rearranged so that as one turns or flips the pages, the figure ascends instead of falling. Some advice to our young author: Don't walk the streets naked and complain that no one takes you seriously, and certainly don't write a book culminating with a flipbook and then complain that your words aren't taken seriously.

To be fair, such neglect might be in Foer's best interests, since the book is an Oprah-etic paean to innocence and verbosity as embodied by Foer's latest saintly stand-in (there was a character named Jonathan Safran Foer in Everything Is Illuminated), nine-year-old Oskar Schell, who has a business card, speaks French, walks the city at odd hours by himself, writes letters to Stephen Hawking and other luminaries, knows more facts than any of the adults he speaks with, flirts with women, is a vegan, an atheist and otherwise equal parts unbelievable and unbearable. Foer, I should note, is a Jewish atheist, wrote letters to Susan Sontag when he was nine, and otherwise sounds like he'd make unbearable company, though perhaps not as much as the obnoxiously precocious, overeducated brat Schell. If Foer is beginning to sound like a minor Saul Bellow character (think the masturbating uncle in Mr. Sammler's Planet), he has only himself to blame.

The child compulsively invents. ("Another good thing would be if I could train my anus to talk when it farted" in the first paragraph, and so on for the next 200 pages.) Schell narrates much of the book, and Foer's proxy is fond of such figures of speech as "heavy boots" for depression (at least 15 times) and "VJs" for vaginas, alongside lengthier banal incantations such as, "I gave myself a bruise" and, worst of all, "zipping myself into the sleeping bag of myself."

The plot is a series of contrivances that free the nine-year-old Schell to walk the city by himself in a shaggy-dog quest for the meaning of a key his father, who died in the towers, left behind. This is mixed in with an epistolary saga involving Oskar's grandparents, a woman who serves as still another Foer stand-in and a man who can't write, but only speak, leaving the reader in a hall of mirrors reflecting nothing but Foers and stock characters who reflect back the wonderful-ness of the author.

Eventually, the Schnells' stories converge into one absurdly convenient superstory, saturated with meaning, from which we learn such lessons as, "You cannot protect yourself from sadness without also protecting yourself from happiness," "'I do not want to hurt you, he said' 'It hurts me when you do not want to hurt me,' I told him," and "I spent my life learning to feel less."

And those quotes are all from one, not unrepresentative page.

Most of all, we learn the search, not the treasure, is the thing, which readers may recognize from the pages of Robert Fulghum's classic of inspirational mush All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten.

Like many lovers of faux innocence, Foer seems to have a soft spot for incest. At one point, the grandmother recalls lying in bed with her sister in their youth, the two of them kissing, with tongue. "How could anything less deserve to be destroyed?" she, meaning Foer, asks us. This refrain is repeated near the book's end. Sisters kissing, young children walking city streets unaccompanied; it's a wonderful life for worldly nafs.

But bad people, presumably ones who hate art, like Bush and Bin Laden and Foer's critics, ruin it all. It's with the hope of redeeming ourselves from history, of returning to the wonderful mysteries of youth, where things are "extremely complicated" yet "incredibly simple" that the novel ends:

Finally, I found the pictures of the falling body.

Was it Dad?

Maybe.

Whoever it was, it was somebody.

I ripped the pages out of the book.

I reversed the pages, so the last one was first, and the first one was last.

When I flipped through them, it looked like the man was floating up through the sky.

And if I had more pictures he would have flown through a window, back into the building, and the smoke would've poured into the hole that the plane was about to come out of

We would have been safe.

And then the flipbook, which, like the other illustrations, serves no purpose but to remind us that this is an important book, and what a daring young author this Foer is, offering us authenticity, a favorite word of his. In an interview, he explained that "Jay-Z samples from Annieone of the least likely combinations imaginableand it changes music. What if novelists were as willing to borrow?" Yes. Jiggaman and "Hard Knock Life" are surely what the novel needs.

Foer is indeed a sampler, throwing in Sebald (the illustrations and Dresden), Borges (the grandparents divide their apartment into something and nothing), Calvino (a tale about the sixth borough that floated off, ripped off wholesale from Cosmicomics), Auster (in the whole city-of-symbols shtick), Night of the Hunter (the grandfather has Yes and No tattooed on his hands) and damn near every other author, technique, reference and symbol he can lay his hands on, as though referencing were the same as meaning.

And with the same easy spirit in which he pillages other authors' techniques, stripping them of their context and using them merely for show, he snatches 9/11 to invest his conceit with gravitas, thus crossing the line that separates the risible from the villainous. The book's themesthe sense of connection we all feel when the coffee or acid hits and everything is illuminated, the brain-gurble and twitch and self-pity we all know better than to write abouthave nothing to do with the attack on the towers, or with Dresden or Hiroshima, which Foer tosses in just to make sure we understand what a big and important book we're dealing with.

Having brought up these big ideas, Foer falls back on a catty pacifism that he doesn't quite admit towhy risk sales?but which shines through: "This is what death is like. It doesn't matter what uniforms the soldiers are wearing." This is Quakerism at its most debased, D.H. Lawrence's idea that we should let the Nazis wage war, tolerate them as a mother does an immature and violent child. Violence is bad, Foer says, let's not have it.

All of this brings to mind the infamous post-9/11 issue of The New Yorker, in which author after author reduced the attack to the horizon of their writerliness, epitomized by Adam Gopnick's comparing the smell to smoked mozzarella. I was at Ground Zero, so didn't hear about the issue for weeks or read it for months (or smell mozzarella at all), but I understood both why such words were vile and how writers curled into what they know. They felt that the world had become too large and ill-contained to do anything else.

Likewise the Voice, which came out with an issue on Sept. 12, which I did see, with a shot of a plane striking a tower and the headline "Bastards!" The paper was unable to stop the presses, and so inside was the usual rigmarole, save for an editor's note lamenting the forthcoming loss of our civil rights and descent into hate. They, too, retreated into what they knew best. Which I suppose is a good light in which to see the Voice's recent praise of Foer as "a new sort of literary warriorvirtuosic, visionary, ingenious, hilarious, heartbreaking."

Last week the Atlantic announced that from here on in, it would be publishing fiction only once a year, in a special issue. Once upon a time, Playboy supported a whole generation of worthwhile authors, from Shel Silverstein to Isaac Bashevis Singer and a host of talented goys, too. Before that, Sports Illustrated published Faulkner. Now, there's The New Yorker and the Paris Review and little else, and the consolidation of publishing houses has nearly wiped out the mid-list author, leaving young authors with just one chance to write that great book before they get dropped, and just a handful of editors deciding who gets that one shot at the brass ring. With the decreasing number of outlets for quality fiction, each season's "young stars" find themselves praised regardless of the quality of their workthere's a common readership for Lahiri and Eggers, even though she's brilliant and he's anything but.

The writers who make it get treated as symbols. Whitehead gets compared to Ellison, because they're both black; Lethem writes a book about race invisibility, but since he's a white boy, no one thinks to mention Ellison. In the same vein, Foer is supposed to be our new Philip Roth, though his fortune-cookie syllogisms and pointless illustrations and typographical tricks don't at all match up toor much resembleRoth even at his most inane. But Jews will be Jews, apparently.

Foer, squeezing his brass ring, doesn't have the excuse of having written the day or the week after the attack. In a calculated move, he threw in 9/11 to make things important, to get paid. Get that money son; Jay-Z would be proud. Why wait to have ideas worth writing when you can grab a big theme, throw in the kitchen sink, and wear your flip-flops all the way to the bank? How could someone so willfully young be so unambitious?

How to Turn The Titanic

2008-11-30T15:23:00.000-08:00

George Packer, from The New Yorker website.

November 25, 2008

Nothing to Fear

Mary Anne Berkery, a fellow Brooklynite, has a letter in the Times today expressing outrage at Obama’s Cabinet choices. “The reason most Americans supported an unknown, untested, thinly experienced Barack Obama as president was that they were desperate for real change,” Ms. Berkery writes.

His unequivocal mandate was to bring change. Instead, we watch as he appoints person after person from the Clinton political machine, creating a virtual third Clinton presidency—the very re-creation many of us had worked hard to prevent. Instead of taking the mantle of Franklin D. Roosevelt, he has taken the mantle of Bill Clinton. It is more than disappointing; it is dishonest.

Taking this interpretation even further, the Times’ David Sanger wrote on Saturday that the selections prove that “Mr. Obama is planning to govern from the center-right of his party.”

I know other people who share this idea and aren’t happy about it. But I think they, along with Mary Anne Berkery and David Sanger, are wrong. Start with the mantle of F.D.R. Who did Roosevelt place around him in his first Administration? The average age of his top eight Cabinet picks was sixty. They included two sitting senators, a governor, two Republicans, and the chairman of Woodrow Wilson’s 1916 reëlection campaign. The only Cabinet appointees who fit the description of “change agents” were Henry Wallace, age forty-four, a farm expert and newspaper publisher, at Agriculture, and Frances Perkins, age fifty, the New York State industrial commissioner and first-ever woman Cabinet member, at Labor. The others were chosen for reasons of political payback, regional and ideological balance, and experience. Even among his White House advisers, Roosevelt made sure that the Party’s various economic ideas were represented. And then he proceeded to change the country with the New Deal.

Obama’s picks should reassure Mary Anne Berkery. They don’t mean that he’s going to govern from the center-right of the Party, pace David Sanger. I think they mean he’s going to govern seriously, without the parochialism of Jimmy Carter or the chaos of Bill Clinton or the self-delusion of George W. Bush. An “unknown, untested, thinly experienced” President who has as ambitious a domestic program as Barack Obama needs advisers who know how to get things done in Washington. That he is not afraid to recognize this shows his tremendous self-confidence. Obama’s advisers won’t be setting his policies, they will be executing his policies. And since 2009 will be a lot more like 1933 than like 1993, Timothy Geithner and Lawrence Summers and Rahm Emmanuel and the rest (some known for their lack of personal délicatesse but not for their ideological rigidity) will not be reliving their Clinton years. They will not be pursuing deregulation and deficit reduction. They are smart enough to know that history will judge how they do during the Obama years, which will call for thinking and acting anew.

As for Hillary Clinton at State, I imagine she will be as hardworking, disciplined, and in command of her subject as she was in the Senate and during the campaign. My fear is not that she’ll be a bad team player for Obama, but that she will manage the department as badly as she managed her campaign. That’s a fear I can live with.

Posted by George Packer

In

Red Sex, Blue Sex

2008-10-30T17:32:00.000-07:00

Republican candidate for Vice-President, announced that her unwed seventeen-year-old daughter, Bristol, was pregnant, many liberals were shocked, not by the revelation but by the reaction to it. They expected the news to dismay the evangelical voters that John McCain was courting with his choice of Palin. Yet reports from the floor of the Republican Convention, in St. Paul, quoted dozens of delegates who seemed unfazed, or even buoyed, by the news. A delegate from Louisiana told CBS News, “Like so many other American families who are in the same situation, I think it’s great that she instilled in her daughter the values to have the child and not to sneak off someplace and have an abortion.” A Mississippi delegate claimed that “even though young children are making that decision to become pregnant, they’ve also decided to take responsibility for their actions and decided to follow up with that and get married and raise this child.” Palin’s family drama, delegates said, was similar to the experience of many socially conservative Christian families. As Marlys Popma, the head of evangelical outreach for the McCain campaign, told National Review, “There hasn’t been one evangelical family that hasn’t gone through some sort of situation.” In fact, it was Popma’s own “crisis pregnancy” that had brought her into the movement in the first place.

During the campaign, the media has largely respected calls to treat Bristol Palin’s pregnancy as a private matter. But the reactions to it have exposed a cultural rift that mirrors America’s dominant political divide. Social liberals in the country’s “blue states” tend to support sex education and are not particularly troubled by the idea that many teen-agers have sex before marriage, but would regard a teen-age daughter’s pregnancy as devastating news. And the social conservatives in “red states” generally advocate abstinence-only education and denounce sex before marriage, but are relatively unruffled if a teen-ager becomes pregnant, as long as she doesn’t choose to have an abortion.

A handful of social scientists and family-law scholars have recently begun looking closely at this split. Last year, Mark Regnerus, a sociologist at the University of Texas at Austin, published a startling book called “Forbidden Fruit: Sex and Religion in the Lives of American Teenagers,” and he is working on a follow-up that includes a section titled “Red Sex, Blue Sex.” His findings are drawn from a national survey that Regnerus and his colleagues conducted of some thirty-four hundred thirteen-to-seventeen-year-olds, and from a comprehensive government study of adolescent health known as Add Health. Regnerus argues that religion is a good indicator of attitudes toward sex, but a poor one of sexual behavior, and that this gap is especially wide among teen-agers who identify themselves as evangelical. The vast majority of white evangelical adolescents—seventy-four per cent—say that they believe in abstaining from sex before marriage. (Only half of mainline Protestants, and a quarter of Jews, say that they believe in abstinence.) Moreover, among the major religious groups, evangelical virgins are the least likely to anticipate that sex will be pleasurable, and the most likely to believe that having sex will cause their partners to lose respect for them. (Jews most often cite pleasure as a reason to have sex, and say that an unplanned pregnancy would be an embarrassment.) But, according to Add Health data, evangelical teen-agers are more sexually active than Mormons, mainline Protestants, and Jews. On average, white evangelical Protestants make their “sexual début”—to use the festive term of social-science researchers—shortly after turning sixteen. Among major religious groups, only black Protestants begin having sex earlier.

Another key difference in behavior, Regnerus reports, is that evangelical Protestant teen-agers are significantly less likely than other groups to use contraception. This could be because evangelicals are also among the most likely to believe that using contraception will send the message that they are looking for sex. It could also be because many evangelicals are steeped in the abstinence movement’s warnings that condoms won’t actually protect them from pregnancy or venereal disease. More provocatively, Regnerus found that only half of sexually active teen-agers who say that they seek guidance from God or the Scriptures when making a tough decision report using contraception every time. By contrast, sixty-nine per cent of sexually active youth who say that they most often follow the counsel of a parent or another trusted adult consistently use protection.

The gulf between sexual belief and sexual behavior becomes apparent, too, when you look at the outcomes of abstinence-pledge movements. Nationwide, according to a 2001 estimate, some two and a half million people have taken a pledge to remain celibate until marriage. Usually, they do so under the auspices of movements such as True Love Waits or the Silver Ring Thing. Sometimes, they make their vows at big rallies featuring Christian pop stars and laser light shows, or at purity balls, where girls in frothy dresses exchange rings with their fathers, who vow to help them remain virgins until the day they marry. More than half of those who take such pledges—which, unlike abstinence-only classes in public schools, are explicitly Christian—end up having sex before marriage, and not usually with their future spouse. The movement is not the complete washout its critics portray it as: pledgers delay sex eighteen months longer than non-pledgers, and have fewer partners. Yet, according to the sociologists Peter Bearman, of Columbia University, and Hannah Brückner, of Yale, communities with high rates of pledging also have high rates of S.T.D.s. This could be because more teens pledge in communities where they perceive more danger from sex (in which case the pledge is doing some good); or it could be because fewer people in these communities use condoms when they break the pledge.

Bearman and Brückner have also identified a peculiar dilemma: in some schools, if too many teens pledge, the effort basically collapses. Pledgers apparently gather strength from the sense that they are an embattled minority; once their numbers exceed thirty per cent, and proclaimed chastity becomes the norm, that special identity is lost. With such a fragile formula, it’s hard to imagine how educators can ever get it right: once the self-proclaimed virgin clique hits the thirty-one-per-cent mark, suddenly it’s Sodom and Gomorrah.

Religious belief apparently does make a potent difference in behavior for one group of evangelical teen-agers: those who score highest on measures of religiosity—such as how often they go to church, or how often they pray at home. But many Americans who identify themselves as evangelicals, and who hold socially conservative beliefs, aren’t deeply observant.

Even more important than religious conviction, Regnerus argues, is how “embedded” a teen-ager is in a network of friends, family, and institutions that reinforce his or her goal of delaying sex, and that offer a plausible alternative to America’s sexed-up consumer culture. A church, of course, isn’t the only way to provide a cohesive sense of community. Close-knit families make a difference. Teen-agers who live with both biological parents are more likely to be virgins than those who do not. And adolescents who say that their families understand them, pay attention to their concerns, and have fun with them are more likely to delay intercourse, regardless of religiosity.

A terrific 2005 documentary, “The Education of Shelby Knox,” tells the story of a teen-ager from a Southern Baptist family in Lubbock, Texas, who has taken a True Love Waits pledge. To the chagrin of her youth pastor, and many of her neighbors, Knox eventually becomes an activist for comprehensive sex education. At her high school, kids receive abstinence-only education, but, Knox says, “maybe twice a week I see a girl walking down the hall pregnant.” In the film, Knox seems successful at remaining chaste, but less because she took a pledge than because she has a fearlessly independent mind and the kind of parents who—despite their own conservative leanings—admire her outspokenness. Devout Republicans, her parents end up driving her around town to make speeches that would have curled their hair before their daughter started making them. Her mother even comes to take pride in Shelby’s efforts, because while abstinence pledges are lovely in the abstract, they don’t acknowledge “reality.”

Like other American teens, young evangelicals live in a world of Internet porn, celebrity sex scandals, and raunchy reality TV, and they have the same hormonal urges that their peers have. Yet they come from families and communities in which sexual life is supposed to be forestalled until the first night of a transcendent honeymoon. Regnerus writes, “In such an atmosphere, attitudes about sex may formally remain unchanged (and restrictive) while sexual activity becomes increasingly common. This clash of cultures and norms is felt most poignantly in the so-called Bible Belt.” Symbolic commitment to the institution of marriage remains strong there, and politically motivating—hence the drive to outlaw gay marriage—but the actual practice of it is scattershot.

Among blue-state social liberals, commitment to the institution of marriage tends to be unspoken or discreet, but marriage in practice typically works pretty well. Two family-law scholars, Naomi Cahn, of George Washington University, and June Carbone, of the University of Missouri at Kansas City, are writing a book on the subject, and they argue that “red families” and “blue families” are “living different lives, with different moral imperatives.” (They emphasize that the Republican-Democrat divide is less important than the higher concentration of “moral-values voters” in red states.) In 2004, the states with the highest divorce rates were Nevada, Arkansas, Wyoming, Idaho, and West Virginia (all red states in the 2004 election); those with the lowest were Illinois, Massachusetts, Iowa, Minnesota, and New Jersey. The highest teen-pregnancy rates were in Nevada, Arizona, Mississippi, New Mexico, and Texas (all red); the lowest were in North Dakota, Vermont, New Hampshire, Minnesota, and Maine (blue except for North Dakota). “The ‘blue states’ of the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic have lower teen birthrates, higher use of abortion, and lower percentages of teen births within marriage,” Cahn and Carbone observe. They also note that people start families earlier in red states—in part because they are more inclined to deal with an unplanned pregnancy by marrying rather than by seeking an abortion.

Of all variables, the age at marriage may be the pivotal difference between red and blue families. The five states with the lowest median age at marriage are Utah, Oklahoma, Idaho, Arkansas, and Kentucky, all red states, while those with the highest are all blue: Massachusetts, New York, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and New Jersey. The red-state model puts couples at greater risk for divorce; women who marry before their mid-twenties are significantly more likely to divorce than those who marry later. And younger couples are more likely to be contending with two of the biggest stressors on a marriage: financial struggles and the birth of a baby before, or soon after, the wedding.

There are, of course, plenty of exceptions to these rules—messily divorcing professional couples in Boston, high-school sweethearts who stay sweetly together in rural Idaho. Still, Cahn and Carbone conclude, “the paradigmatic red-state couple enters marriage not long after the woman becomes sexually active, has two children by her mid-twenties, and reaches the critical period of marriage at the high point in the life cycle for risk-taking and experimentation. The paradigmatic blue-state couple is more likely to experiment with multiple partners, postpone marriage until after they reach emotional and financial maturity, and have their children (if they have them at all) as their lives are stabilizing.”

Some of these differences in sexual behavior come down to class and education. Regnerus and Carbone and Cahn all see a new and distinct “middle-class morality” taking shape among economically and socially advantaged families who are not social conservatives. In Regnerus’s survey, the teen-agers who espouse this new morality are tolerant of premarital sex (and of contraception and abortion) but are themselves cautious about pursuing it. Regnerus writes, “They are interested in remaining free from the burden of teenage pregnancy and the sorrows and embarrassments of sexually transmitted diseases. They perceive a bright future for themselves, one with college, advanced degrees, a career, and a family. Simply put, too much seems at stake. Sexual intercourse is not worth the risks.” These are the kids who tend to score high on measures of “strategic orientation”—how analytical, methodical, and fact-seeking they are when making decisions. Because these teen-agers see abstinence as unrealistic, they are not opposed in principle to sex before marriage—just careful about it. Accordingly, they might delay intercourse in favor of oral sex, not because they cherish the idea of remaining “technical virgins” but because they assess it as a safer option. “Solidly middle- or upper-middle-class adolescents have considerable socioeconomic and educational expectations, courtesy of their parents and their communities’ lifestyles,” Regnerus writes. “They are happy with their direction, generally not rebellious, tend to get along with their parents, and have few moral qualms about expressing their nascent sexuality.” They might have loved Ellen Page in “Juno,” but in real life they’d see having a baby at the wrong time as a tragic derailment of their life plans. For this group, Regnerus says, unprotected sex has become “a moral issue like smoking or driving a car without a seatbelt. It’s not just unwise anymore; it’s wrong.”

Each of these models of sexual behavior has drawbacks—in the blue-state scheme, people may postpone child-bearing to the point where infertility becomes an issue. And delaying child-bearing is better suited to the more affluent, for whom it yields economic benefits, in the form of educational opportunities and career advancement. But Carbone and Cahn argue that the red-state model is clearly failing on its own terms—producing high rates of teen pregnancy, divorce, sexually transmitted disease, and other dysfunctional outcomes that social conservatives say they abhor. In “Forbidden Fruit,” Regnerus offers an “unscientific postscript,” in which he advises social conservatives that if they really want to maintain their commitment to chastity and to marriage, they’ll need to do more to help young couples stay married longer. As the Reverend Rick Marks, a Southern Baptist minister, recently pointed out in a Florida newspaper, “Evangelicals are fighting gay marriage, saying it will break down traditional marriage, when divorce has already broken it down.” Conservatives may need to start talking as much about saving marriages as they do about, say, saving oneself for marriage.

“Having to wait until age twenty-five or thirty to have sex is unreasonable,” Regnerus writes. He argues that religious organizations that advocate chastity should “work more creatively to support younger marriages. This is not the 1950s (for which I am glad), where one could bank on social norms, extended (and larger) families, and clear gender roles to negotiate and sustain early family formation.”

Evangelicals could start, perhaps, by trying to untangle the contradictory portrayals of sex that they offer to teen-agers. In the Shelby Knox documentary, a youth pastor, addressing an assembly of teens, defines intercourse as “what two dogs do out on the street corner—they just bump and grind awhile, boom boom boom.” Yet a typical evangelical text aimed at young people, “Every Young Woman’s Battle,” by Shannon Ethridge and Stephen Arterburn, portrays sex between two virgins as an ethereal communion of innocent souls: “physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual pleasure beyond description.” Neither is the most realistic or helpful view for a young person to take into marriage, as a few advocates of abstinence acknowledge. The savvy young Christian writer Lauren Winner, in her book “Real Sex: The Naked Truth About Chastity,” writes, “Rather than spending our unmarried years stewarding and disciplining our desires, we have become ashamed of them. We persuade ourselves that the desires themselves are horrible. This can have real consequences if we do get married.” Teenagers and single adults are “told over and over not to have sex, but no one ever encourages” them “to be bodily or sensual in some appropriate way”—getting to know and appreciate what their bodies can do through sports, especially for girls, or even thinking sensually about something like food. Winner goes on, “This doesn’t mean, of course, that if only the church sponsored more softball leagues, everyone would stay on the chaste straight and narrow. But it does mean that the church ought to cultivate ways of teaching Christians to live in their bodies well—so that unmarried folks can still be bodily people, even though they’re not having sex, and so that married people can give themselves to sex freely.”

Too often, though, evangelical literature directed at teen-agers forbids all forms of sexual behavior, even masturbation. “Every Young Woman’s Battle,” for example, tells teen-agers that “the momentary relief” of “self-gratification” can lead to “shame, low self-esteem, and fear of what others might think or that something is wrong with you.” And it won’t slake sexual desire: “Once you begin feeding baby monsters, their appetites grow bigger and they want MORE! It’s better not to feed such a monster in the first place.”

Shelby Knox, who spoke at a congressional hearing on sex education earlier this year, occupies a middle ground. She testified that it’s possible to “believe in abstinence in a religious sense,” but still understand that abstinence-only education is dangerous “for students who simply are not abstaining.” As Knox’s approach makes clear, you don’t need to break out the sex toys to teach sex ed—you can encourage teen-agers to postpone sex for all kinds of practical, emotional, and moral reasons. A new “abstinence-plus” curriculum, now growing in popularity, urges abstinence while providing accurate information about contraception and reproduction for those who have sex anyway. “Abstinence works,” Knox said at the hearing. “Abstinence-only-until-marriage does not.”

It might help, too, not to present virginity as the cornerstone of a virtuous life. In certain evangelical circles, the concept is so emphasized that a girl who regrets having been sexually active is encouraged to declare herself a “secondary” or “born-again” virgin. That’s not an idea, surely, that helps teen-agers postpone sex or have it responsibly.

The “pro-family” efforts of social conservatives—the campaigns against gay marriage and abortion—do nothing to instill the emotional discipline or the psychological smarts that forsaking all others often involves. Evangelicals are very good at articulating their sexual ideals, but they have little practical advice for their young followers. Social liberals, meanwhile, are not very good at articulating values on marriage and teen sexuality—indeed, they may feel that it’s unseemly or judgmental to do so. But in fact the new middle-class morality is squarely pro-family. Maybe these choices weren’t originally about values—maybe they were about maximizing education and careers—yet the result is a more stable family system. Not only do couples who marry later stay married longer; children born to older couples fare better on a variety of measures, including educational attainment, regardless of their parents’ economic circumstances. The new middle-class culture of intensive parenting has ridiculous aspects, but it’s pretty successful at turning out productive, emotionally resilient young adults. And its intensity may be one reason that teen-agers from close families see child-rearing as a project for which they’re not yet ready. For too long, the conventional wisdom has been that social conservatives are the upholders of family values, whereas liberals are the proponents of a polymorphous selfishness. This isn’t true, and, every once in a while, liberals might point that out.

Some evangelical Christians are starting to reckon with the failings of the preaching-and-pledging approach. In “The Education of Shelby Knox,” for example, Shelby’s father is uncomfortable, at first, with his daughter’s campaign. Lubbock, after all, is a town so conservative that its local youth pastor tells Shelby, “You ask me sometimes why I look at you a little funny. It’s because I hear you speak and I hear tolerance.” But as her father listens to her arguments he realizes that the no-tolerance ethic simply hasn’t worked in their deeply Christian community. Too many girls in town are having sex, and having babies that they can’t support. As Shelby’s father declares toward the end of the film, teen-age pregnancy “is a problem—a major, major problem that everybody’s just shoving under the rug.” ♦

2008-10-30T05:05:00.001-07:00

Like, Socialism

by Hendrik Hertzberg November 3, 2008

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Keywords: 2008 Election;; Obama, Barack (Sen.);; McCain, John (Sen.);; Socialism, Socialists;; Economy;; Politics;; Palin, Sarah (Gov.)

Sometimes, when a political campaign has run out of ideas and senses that the prize is slipping through its fingers, it rolls up a sleeve and plunges an arm, shoulder deep, right down to the bottom of the barrel. The problem for John McCain, Sarah Palin, and the Republican Party is that the bottom was scraped clean long before it dropped out. Back when the polls were nip and tuck and the leaves had not yet begun to turn, Barack Obama had already been accused of betraying the troops, wanting to teach kindergartners all about sex, favoring infanticide, and being a friend of terrorists and terrorism. What was left? The anticlimactic answer came as the long Presidential march of 2008 staggered toward its final week: Senator Obama is a socialist.

“This campaign in the next couple of weeks is about one thing,” Todd Akin, a Republican congressman from Missouri, told a McCain rally outside St. Louis. “It’s a referendum on socialism.” “With all due respect,” Senator George Voinovich, Republican of Ohio, said, “the man is a socialist.” At an airport rally in Roswell, New Mexico, a well-known landing spot for space aliens, Governor Palin warned against Obama’s tax proposals. “Friends,” she said, “now is no time to experiment with socialism.” And McCain, discussing those proposals, agreed that they sounded “a lot like socialism.” There hasn’t been so much talk of socialism in an American election since 1920, when Eugene Victor Debs, candidate of the Socialist Party, made his fifth run for President from a cell in the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary, where he was serving a ten-year sentence for opposing the First World War. (Debs got a million votes and was freed the following year by the new Republican President, Warren G. Harding, who immediately invited him to the White House for a friendly visit.)

As a buzzword, “socialism” had mostly good connotations in most of the world for most of the twentieth century. That’s why the Nazis called themselves national socialists. That’s why the Bolsheviks called their regime the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, obliging the socialist and social democratic parties of Europe (and America, for what it was worth) to make rescuing the “good name” of socialism one of their central missions. Socialists—one thinks of men like George Orwell, Willy Brandt, and Aneurin Bevan—were among Communism’s most passionate and effective enemies.

The United States is a special case. There is a whole shelf of books on the question of why socialism never became a real mass movement here. For decades, the word served mainly as a cudgel with which conservative Republicans beat liberal Democrats about the head. When Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan accused John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson of socialism for advocating guaranteed health care for the aged and the poor, the implication was that Medicare and Medicaid would presage a Soviet America. Now that Communism has been defunct for nearly twenty years, though, the cry of socialism no longer packs its old punch. “At least in Europe, the socialist leaders who so admire my opponent are upfront about their objectives,” McCain said the other day—thereby suggesting that the dystopia he abhors is not some North Korean-style totalitarian ant heap but, rather, the gentle social democracies across the Atlantic, where, in return for higher taxes and without any diminution of civil liberty, people buy themselves excellent public education, anxiety-free health care, and decent public transportation.

The Republican argument of the moment seems to be that the difference between capitalism and socialism corresponds to the difference between a top marginal income-tax rate of 35 per cent and a top marginal income-tax rate of 39.6 per cent. The latter is what it would be under Obama’s proposal, what it was under President Clinton, and, for that matter, what it will be after 2010 if President Bush’s tax cuts expire on schedule. Obama would use some of the added revenue to give a break to pretty much everybody who nets less than a quarter of a million dollars a year. The total tax burden on the private economy would be somewhat lighter than it is now—a bit of elementary Keynesianism that renders doubly untrue the Republican claim that Obama “will raise your taxes.”

On October 12th, in conversation with a voter forever to be known as Joe the Plumber, Obama gave one of his fullest summaries of his tax plan. After explaining how Joe could benefit from it, whether or not he achieves his dream of owning his own plumbing business, Obama added casually, “I think that when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody.” McCain and Palin have been quoting this remark ever since, offering it as prima-facie evidence of Obama’s unsuitability for office. Of course, all taxes are redistributive, in that they redistribute private resources for public purposes. But the federal income tax is (downwardly) redistributive as a matter of principle: however slightly, it softens the inequalities that are inevitable in a market economy, and it reflects the belief that the wealthy have a proportionately greater stake in the material aspects of the social order and, therefore, should give that order proportionately more material support. McCain himself probably shares this belief, and there was a time when he was willing to say so. During the 2000 campaign, on MSNBC’s “Hardball,” a young woman asked him why her father, a doctor, should be “penalized” by being “in a huge tax bracket.” McCain replied that “wealthy people can afford more” and that “the very wealthy, because they can afford tax lawyers and all kinds of loopholes, really don’t pay nearly as much as you think they do.” The exchange continued:

YOUNG WOMAN: Are we getting closer and closer to, like, socialism and stuff?. . .
MCCAIN: Here’s what I really believe: That when you reach a certain level of comfort, there’s nothing wrong with paying somewhat more.

For her part, Sarah Palin, who has lately taken to calling Obama “Barack the Wealth Spreader,” seems to be something of a suspect character herself. She is, at the very least, a fellow-traveller of what might be called socialism with an Alaskan face. The state that she governs has no income or sales tax. Instead, it imposes huge levies on the oil companies that lease its oil fields. The proceeds finance the government’s activities and enable it to issue a four-figure annual check to every man, woman, and child in the state. One of the reasons Palin has been a popular governor is that she added an extra twelve hundred dollars to this year’s check, bringing the per-person total to $3,269. A few weeks before she was nominated for Vice-President, she told a visiting journalist—Philip Gourevitch, of this magazine—that “we’re set up, unlike other states in the union, where it’s collectively Alaskans own the resources. So we share in the wealth when the development of these resources occurs.” Perhaps there is some meaningful distinction between spreading the wealth and sharing it (“collectively,” no less), but finding it would require the analytic skills of Karl the Marxist. ♦

2008-10-29T20:25:00.001-07:00

I am thinking of writing a novel from this.

Sketches

for

And Here We Have Them

Fountain Park is on the southwest corner of the intersection of Neponset street and Venice Avenue. The fountain in the middle, the one we named it for, has a pixie dancing or standing on one foot spitting a continuous stream skyward, filling a small, ever-overflowing cup. The pool the cup overflows into has lights that change colors. We spent most nights sitting on the benches that lined the fountain's perimeter, the lights casting tones of pink and blue and green across our faces. Sometimes we smashed the lights with golf clubs or our fists and it was dark. There are trees strategically placed through the park so that cops can see from one side to the other without stepping from their squad cars. In the winter, Christmas lights tangled with the branches and moss. For some of us, they were the only thing that set the holidays apart from the rest of the year. During the years we spent at Fountain Park, we never saw anyone put the lights up or take them down. They appeared with the first winter storms and were gone shortly after the New Year.

Futureman and Handsome Jack were brothers and the park's keepers. Their Aryan faces and statuesque physiques gave the group an authority. Their parents had abandoned them when Futureman was 17 and Handsome Jack was 16. They had been homeless for two years; that was how they started hanging out at the park— bathing in the fountain and sleeping in the shadowed corners. They were there from the beginning.

If you spent any amount of time there, they gave you a nickname. Sprinkles was a fag, self proclaimed and proud of it. We were cool with it. Mad Dog Palmer didn't drink—never had—but when people were drunk around him he broke everything in sight. Sandman could fall asleep anywhere. Many nights we left him curled up and trembling on the park bench asleep. When Sandman's parents had asked him where he slept when he didn't come home he told them, "HJ and Futureman's house."

Juice Box was half black but his biological father had died of a cocaine overdose when he was 4 and he was raised by his mother's new husband, a white catholic man who broke his Megadeath tapes and wouldn't let him watch horror movies. There were always Juicy-Juices in their refrigerator. Mercitron was Juice Box's best friend. He worked at the humane society but didn't talk about that much. He was named after the machine Dr. Kevorkian used. For Christmas one year, Juice Box made Mercitron a shirt that said: My Best Friend is Half-Nigger, and insisted he wear it. So Mercitron made Juice Box a shirt that said: Half as Black and Just as Stupit (sic). Stink Finger had dreadlocked Juice Box's hair one time and his hands had smelled like dirt for a month afterwards. They had given names, but those given were not representative of who they were, or so we all felt.

The closest I got to a nickname was Mundy because I was normal by their standards. My parents were still together and by all accounts they seemed to care about me. I was friends with people outside of our group, too, football players and surfers and girls. I was seen as gregarious and that hurt. There were a bunch of others that came and went but the ones that mattered were always around for the good stuff.

It was summer and I had just turned 15, just lost my virginity to a twenty-year old cashier from the grocery store in a lifeguard stand. I was full of anger that had no roots—just dull, blunt convictions, unstructured ideals. The world was undressing before me, spreading its legs and begging me to take advantage of it.

I was working at the coffee shop across the street from The Park, Grinders—a little kitschy place owned by a coke-head from Colorado named Kristine. I was closing up solo one night and heard what sounded like people wrestling on the roof. I was and am still not one to pursue possibly threatening situations, so I just minded my own business and locked the door, ready to get home. I saw someone standing in the middle of the intersection—a shadow under the sepia street-lamp— holding a tennis racquet like a bat, screaming at the roof to “fucking shoot it already!” I looked to the roof just in time to see who I would come to know as Handsome Jack and Mad Dog holding their arms straight forward, stiff, as Mad Dog cocked the water-balloon launcher back. In an instant the launcher snapped, the ball made a sort of sick thud and the kid in the intersection staggered three steps back and crumpled, like his bones had been pulled out, in the middle of the road.

The ball rolled a few feet away from me. I picked it up and went to see if the kid was alright. It was Sprinkles. Before I could get to him, the kids from the roof had already scrambled from the building, laughing violently, and were trying to pick him up. He woke up, confused and wobbly, stood up and said, “I’m going home.”

I got off work one night and they were all standing around holding golf clubs with a bag full of tennis balls. Mercitron had taken the balls from the humane society. Most animals that entered through the door of the humane society were euthanized. Kittens and puppies, some that had not opened their eyes yet, dissolved from the inside out by a blue liquid. He had worked there for years and watched the balls pile up, apparently donated by local country clubs. The balls, used once, were unworthy of the no-doubt stellar level of play the senile World War vets were capable of. The tennis players surely felt like good Samaritans in their white tennis skirts and polo shirts. Unfortunately, Mercitron said, the dogs would kill each other if you threw a ball into the pack.
The boys were hitting the balls into traffic. None of them had ever golfed, but they were doing a pretty good job. Lined up in the middle of the intersection, they would wait for the light down the block to turn green and all hit in unison. The sound of tires screeching meant a direct hit and sent the group diving behind the benches, falling over each other, laughing.
A little later on, after we had gotten bored and put the tennis balls away, one of the local cops came by on a tip that kids had been hitting golf balls at cars.
"You boys wouldn't know anything about that would you?" he asked.
"They were tennis balls," Juice Box said. "And no, I have no idea what you're talking about."
After the cop drove off we dumped the remaining balls into the middle of the intersection and watched cars run them over, sending them flying all over the streets. The gutters were littered with barely-used tennis balls for weeks.

It must have been the end of winter when I bought the second water-balloon launcher because the Christmas lights had been taken down. The first one broke while we were trying to shoot a bowling ball at an abandoned car. So I bought a new one. We shot oranges and rocks and the stale, left over muffins that Kristine's let me take home with me. Handsome Jack found a dead bird and shot it at an ambulance as it streaked by. Futureman got the idea that he wanted to feel what it was like to get shot with it. So we bought water balloons. Actually, Mad Dog stole them. They seemed safe enough. We filled a balloon up half way (accuracy and the object's size were inversely related) and Futureman walked down the street about fifty yards. I wasn't very good at shooting the damn thing so I sat on the bench and watched. Handsome Jack and Stink Finger held the handles out while Juice Box aimed and shot it. The balloon was red. I couldn't tell you the color of the building across the street, but oh! that ruby balloon, sailing through the air, tumbling over itself, distorted by the momentum, moving just slow enough for Futureman to realize that he did not want anything to do with it. He tried to jump out of the way but it caught him in the thigh with enough force to send his legs out from underneath him, his entire body horizontal. He landed on his side and was laughing and crying when we got to him. His thigh had a bruise that looked like the aurora borealis, all purple and green.

Futureman, Sprinkles and I were sitting on the bench running out of things to talk about. Futureman stood up without saying anything and left. We figured he was going to find Handsome Jack and make him buy some food. However, twenty-minutes later he showed back up and sat down. He didn't say anything, just sat back down, no explanation. I didn't really care until he pulled something out of his pocket and started tapping it on the bottom of the bench, tap tap tap. I asked him about a girl he had talked into sleeping with him earlier that week. Sprinkles laughed and said it never happened. Futureman took the small object that he had been taunting us with, tap tap tap, which turned out to be a hunting knife, and stabbed Sprinkles in the thigh. Sprinkles didn't scream or yell—he hardly moved—and then blood started to soak through his pants. He asked Futureman to borrow his knife. Futureman obliged, knowing Sprinkles wouldn't try to stab him back. Sprinkles cut the bottom of his pants off and tied it around his thigh. Then he got up and said "I'm going home."

6.

The fireworks stand usually only showed up for business the week before the 4th of July but that year it just stayed there. Most of the group was over 18 and could sign the safety waiver themselves. The few of us who were not had to have our parents come down and sign it with us. I don't remember exactly what the waiver said, something about using them exclusively for warning and emergency flares or for herding cows. After he got to know us and realized that we were using them as weapons, he started giving us tips. We came in, one at a time usually, not wanting give away our supply list to the others, and he would tell us what the guy before us bought, making us think we had an edge on the crew, not realizing that he was selling us all the same stuff.
"You’re going to have to do better than that," he would say. "I forget his name, the big blonde kid. He got a fuck-load of Saturn Missiles and Roman Candles. Be careful, you boys are in for it." So the arms race escalated and that made life good for everyone: he stayed in business and we set the block surrounding the park on fire.

Once, we were sitting on the benches, pretending to exist somewhere outside the world that surrounded us, talking about 80's action movies probably, or existentialism, or the nature of specific superheroes sexual encounters—I honestly don’t remember. Handsome jack was smoking a cigarette and pulled a bottle rocket out of his pocket. He broke the stem in half and stuck it in his mouth alongside the cigarette. The fuse sparked and snaked towards his lips, sending us all diving from the bench. He didn't even flinch as the rocket shot from his lips and burst inches from his lap.

Incidents like this were commonplace and hell always broke loose afterwards. Cars got burned. Our fingers turned gunpowder grey. We bought novelty butane lighters that looked like guns and spent the majority of our time making small cannons to shoot bottle rockets out of, decorating them with slogans like "death from above" and "show no mercy." The conflicts were not exclusive to the park. They happened in our homes, at school and, once, in the grocery store. We did this for two years and during that time we rarely slept well or took a shit in peace, knowing damn well that someone was bound to slip a firecracker under our pillow or a handful of bottle rockets or Black Cats under the bathroom door.
We were talking politics. Handsome Jack was lighting a cigarette with an entire book of matches.
"People are too dumb to be free," he said.
"You think?" I asked. "Wait, what do you mean?"
"People are too dumb to be free. What do you mean, 'what do I mean?'" He threw the matches down onto the brick where a group of weeds were crawling through the cracks, setting them on fire. The rest of the group had been playing dice on the next bench over and stopped to watch the sprouts burn.
"I guess you're right." I said.
"I'm always right." He exhaled the drag he had taken, pulled a bottle rocket out of his pocket and threw it into the burning weeds. The whole group scattered, running to their cars for cover and ammunition.
That night the cops showed up again. When they did, we were spilt on both sides of the road, shooting roman candles at each other—a sort of irresponsibly beautiful Civil War reenactment. I don't remember exactly who was there. I know Juice Box and Sandman were there. Handsome Jack and Futureman, for sure. Some other hangers-on’s were around, as well. So the cops make us stand up against the cars and ask us a bunch of questions like: "do you have any 'street names', or, 'are you affiliated with any gangs?'." Juice Box just started listing shit off: " I go by: T-Bone, Juice Box, Bone Henge, Terrence of LeBonia, T-Bot, RoBot, Race Trader, Half Breed. Do you want me to keep going?" Somewhere in the interrogation Sandman convinced the cops that we were rival gangs. I think he called the two gangs "The Locusts" and "Heaven's Devils," or something cliché like that. Eventually they gave up and wrote us warnings. Come to think of it, we never really got tickets for anything. Juice Box got one, kind of.
7.

Juice Box would tell us that he was half-black but that his dad was a nigger. His dad had beaten his mom, abused him and died of a cocaine overdose before Juice Box was old enough to really know him. It didn't seem to affect him. In fact, the only times it was brought up was in joke form. And it was effective.

One night a homeless man walked up to the group. Juice Box was playing guitar and Handsome Jack was singing, making up shit as he went along, and we were all dying. The man was drunk and filthy. He asked for money and, when no one gave him any, he called us niggers. He said, "this whole fucking town" was "nothing but niggers." Still singing, Juice Box laid him out with the guitar, catching him above the eye with it. The man dropped. Just slumped down and stayed there. We ran to our cars and left. It was the first time I had ever been really scared. It was serious and we knew it. None of us went to the park for a couple of weeks at least. We never saw him before that night and we never saw him again.
8.

So, about Juice Box's ticket. There was a parade down Venice Avenue one night that went right by the park. The streets were flooded with white hair and beach chairs. The smell, a mix of aging flesh and artificial florals, was overwhelming. Juice Box was standing on the sidewalk kicking around a hacky-sack and a cop on a bike came by and told him to get out of the way. Juice Box just stood there, staring. Again, the cop told him to move. Nothing.
"If you don't get out of the way I am gong to write you a ticket," the cop said.
"For what?" Juice Box asked, balancing the hacky-sack on his knee.
"Blocking pedestrian traffic."
"Really? You can do that.?"
"I will be back in a minute and if you haven't moved I'll be forced to write you a ticket."
"For blocking pedestrian traffic? Wait…..you're on a bike. You're not a pedestrian." The cop smiled and pulled out his pad. Juice Box walked up to and then behind him, looking over his shoulder as he wrote the ticket.
"What's your name, son?"
"Juice Box Lebonia," he whispered in the cops ear.
"Can I see some ID?"
"You now I am not going to pay this, right?" he said, handing the cop his license.
"What you do with it is your business." he said, handing him the thin pink and yellow copy of the carbon paper.
"I guess that's true." He took the paper from the man's hand and tore it in half, then in half again, dropping the pieces at the officer's feet. He threw the hacky-sack in the air and continued juggling.
9.

But sometimes the cops were not all bad. One time Sandman locked his keys in his car and we convinced him that the cops were required to help you get into your car. He called bullshit, but eventually he flagged down a cop who was patrolling the area. It was a woman cop and she seemed quite taken with Sandman's flowing blonde hair and bronzed skin. She told him that one of the other officers on duty was a wiz at B and E, so she called in a request. Minutes later there were four cop cars surrounding Sandman's car, all with their lights on. The officers stood around giving Sandman tips on how to get in, offering little tools that they had in their patrol cars. Sandman thought it was hilarious. We were all sitting on the benches, across the street in the park.
"Hey Juice Box!" Sandman yelled. The cops all turned their attention in the direction where Sandman was yelling. "You're half black. You should have been in and out of this motherfucker already!"
"You're right, man. But I would have just thrown a brick through it."
10.

Another time, early winter, I remember, we were playing hackysack in the middle of the intersection in front of the park. The season's first cold front was passing through and the town was silent, save the wind. A cop showed up, lights showering the block in blue and red as the autumn ended above us, the temperature dropping as the wind screamed through the empty streets. He got out of the car and walked towards the group who pretended he was not there.
"Pass me the rock," he said.
We let it fall at our feet, as confused, dumb silence buried us. He stepped into the circle, picked up the hacky-sack and began juggling it deftly with his boots. Everyone stared blankly as the small uniformed man kicked the sack to Mercitron who twitched out of his trance and volleyed it back.
"You got skills, copper," Juice Box said.
"Word," he responded. A few minutes later another squad car passed us and he pretended to be reprimanding us, pointing his finger and shouting.

At times, looking back, it seems High School never happened. I wasn't a part of it. I was at the Park and that's all I remember when I think of those years. I graduated High School in 2002, a semester early, hoping to move to California. The night before I left, I stopped by the Park to see everyone and say goodbye. Most were in attendance: Juice Box, Handsome Jack and Futureman, Mercitron, Stinkfinger and Mad Dog. Sprinkles had moved by then, with his mom, I think, to Key West. It made sense, really. We had all recently taken a group field trip to Wal-Mart in hopes of finding a uniform that the group could wear, something identifying, obvious, something flamboyant. We had settled on black-vinyl (women's) vests and spray painted "Park Posse" on the backs in safety orange. We were all wearing the vests and Juice Box was trying to get hit by a car on his bicycle. He ended up running into a station wagon that had come to a stop at the intersection, sending him sailing over the handlebars into a Pete Rose-slide across the hood. The woman driving panicked and sped off, the mulatto daredevil still laid across the front, trying to jump off the hurtling grocery-getter. I walked over to him, lying on the side of the road laughing. I kicked him lightly in the back and extended my hand to help him up. He slapped it and smiled. I looked back at everyone sitting on the bench, smiling our way, burning under the sodium arc lamp.

The End Of An Era

2008-10-23T22:43:00.001-07:00

by George Packer

Step back a moment from the robocalls and the Biden gaffes and the Valentino jacket to take in the history being made as we watch. I don’t mean the likelihood of a black American President, though that’s mind-bending enough. I’m referring to the complete collapse of the four-decade project that brought conservatism to power in America.

The conservative movement was driven by the single unifying idea that government is the problem, not the solution. It attained and kept power through the highly successful political strategy of dividing the country into the hard-working, America-loving, God-fearing majority and the minority of élitist liberals who wanted to tell the majority what to do. What’s happened to that idea and that strategy over the past few weeks?

When Obama told an Ohio plumber on camera that his tax plan would take some money from the rich and give some back to the middle- and working-class, the McCain-Palin campaign got very excited—they finally had the key to turning the race around. Since then, the Republicans have been talking about Joe, socialism, and spreading the wealth around at every turn. Did Obama begin to sink in the polls, as pundits predicted? Was Dick Morris finally going to get something about this election right? No, Obama rose—and even on taxes he’s preferred over McCain. Like Democrats running against Herbert Hoover well into the 1970s, the Republican campaign still thinks it’s 1980. But it turns out that in 2008 voters can actually imagine worse things than tax rates on upper incomes returning to their Clinton-era level.

What about Republican strategy, which still wakes Democrats up in the middle of the night—the devastating invocation of Bill Ayers, terrorists, real Americans, small-town values, Hollywood, and (on the fringes of the McCain-Palin campaign and Fox News) the spectre of a Muslim President destroying the country from within? Even right-wing commentators have been begging the campaign to drop this line of attack—not because they disapprove, but because it isn’t working. If anything, it’s dragging McCain’s numbers down and driving moderate Republicans and Independents toward Obama. A Republican congresswoman from Minnesota deployed the strategy at its most unvarnished on national television, and the Party has had to desert her. Who can blame Michele Bachmann for being dumbfounded? It was always O.K. when it was successful.

As for Palin, the incarnation of red-meat, know-nothing Christian nationalism, she turns out to be McCain’s single biggest mistake. The Republican Party’s immediate post-election future will be a bloody struggle over Palinism. It’s already started at National Review online, where the growing hysteria of the posts signals that the roof is falling in on conservatism. Everything that worked for forty years has suddenly not just stopped working, it has become self-defeating. Republican candidates, strategists, and pundits are like witchdoctors who keep repeating the old incantations over and over, their voices rising in furious shock, to no effect. That’s the sound of an era ending.

Posted by George Packer

In

"Salvation" by Langston Hughes

2008-10-20T20:55:00.000-07:00

This piece is from Hughes memoir "The Big Sea"

"Salvation"

By Langston Huges

I was saved from sin when I was going on thirteen. But not really saved. It happened like this. There was a big revival at my Auntie Reed's church. Every night for weeks there had been much preaching, singing, praying, and shouting, and some very hardened sinners had been brought to Christ, and the membership of the church had grown by leaps and bounds. Then just before the revival ended, they held a special meeting for children, "to bring the young lambs to the fold." My aunt spoke of it for days ahead. That night I was escorted to the front row and placed on the mourners' bench with all the other young sinners, who had not yet been brought to Jesus.

My aunt told me that when you were saved you saw a light, and something happened to you inside! And Jesus came into your life! And God was with you from then on! She said you could see and hear and feel Jesus in your soul. I believed her. I had heard a great many old people say the same thing and it seemed to me they ought to know. So I sat there calmly in the hot, crowded church, waiting for Jesus to come to me.

The preacher preached a wonderful rhythmical sermon, all moans and shouts and lonely cries and dire pictures of hell, and then he sang a song about the ninety and nine safe in the fold, but one little lamb was left out in the cold. Then he said: "Won't you come? Won't you come to Jesus? Young lambs, won't you come?" And he held out his arms to all us young sinners there on the mourners' bench. And the little girls cried. And some of them jumped up and went to Jesus right away. But most of us just sat there.

A great many old people came and knelt around us and prayed, old women with jet-black faces and braided hair, old men with work-gnarled hands. And the church sang a song about the lower lights are burning, some poor sinners to be saved. And the whole building rocked with prayer and song.

Still I kept waiting to see Jesus.

Finally all the young people had gone to the altar and were saved, but one boy and me. He was a rounder's son named Westley. Westley and I were surrounded by sisters and deacons praying. It was very hot in the church, and getting late now. Finally Westley said to me in a whisper: "God damn! I'm tired o' sitting here. Let's get up and be saved." So he got up and was saved.

Then I was left all alone on the mourners' bench. My aunt came and knelt at my knees and cried, while prayers and song swirled all around me in the little church. The whole congregation prayed for me alone, in a mighty wail of moans and voices. And I kept waiting serenely for Jesus, waiting, waiting - but he didn't come. I wanted to see him, but nothing happened to me. Nothing! I wanted something to happen to me, but nothing happened.

I heard the songs and the minister saying: "Why don't you come? My dear child, why don't you come to Jesus? Jesus is waiting for you. He wants you. Why don't you come? Sister Reed, what is this child's name?"

"Langston," my aunt sobbed.

"Langston, why don't you come? Why don't you come and be saved? Oh, Lamb of God! Why don't you come?"

Now it was really getting late. I began to be ashamed of myself, holding everything up so long. I began to wonder what God thought about Westley, who certainly hadn't seen Jesus either, but who was now sitting proudly on the platform, swinging his knickerbockered legs and grinning down at me, surrounded by deacons and old women on their knees praying. God had not struck Westley dead for taking his name in vain or for lying in the temple. So I decided that maybe to save further trouble, I'd better lie, too, and say that Jesus had come, and get up and be saved.

So I got up.

Suddenly the whole room broke into a sea of shouting, as they saw me rise. Waves of rejoicing swept the place. Women leaped in the air. My aunt threw her arms around me. The minister took me by the hand and led me to the platform.

When things quieted down, in a hushed silence, punctuated by a few ecstatic "Amens," all the new young lambs were blessed in the name of God. Then joyous singing filled the room.

That night, for the first time in my life but one for I was a big boy twelve years old - I cried. I cried, in bed alone, and couldn't stop. I buried my head under the quilts, but my aunt heard me. She woke up and told my uncle I was crying because the Holy Ghost had come into my life, and because I had seen Jesus. But I was really crying because I couldn't bear to tell her that I had lied, that I had deceived everybody in the church, that I hadn't seen Jesus, and that now I didn't believe there was a Jesus anymore, since he didn't come to help me.

Sometimes we show our true colors.

2008-10-20T13:04:00.001-07:00

America the beautiful, in all its glory.

More politics.

2008-10-16T08:00:00.000-07:00

I am sure that many of you caught the final debate last night. I am also sure that, hopefully, you were as blown away by Obama's eloquence and equally by McCain's lack thereof. It is interesting seeing McCain's anger overshadow his deceitful tact and manipulation of language. Here is a wonderful peice by James Woods on the politics of language.

Verbage

The Republican war on words.

by James Woods Oct, 13th

Related Links: “After America,” by Ian Buruma; “On the Bus,” by Ryan Lizza; “The Conciliator,” by Larissa MacFarquhar

Keywords: Republicans;; Words;; Republican Party;; Language;; Obama, Barack (Sen.);; Wordsmiths;; 2008 Election

In recent elections, the Republican hate word has been “liberal,” or “Massachusetts,” or “Gore.” In this election, it has increasingly been “words.” Barack Obama has been denounced again and again as a privileged wordsmith, a man of mere words who has “authored” two books (to use Sarah Palin’s verb), and done little else. The leathery extremist Phyllis Schlafly had this to say, at the Republican Convention, about Palin: “I like her because she’s a woman who’s worked with her hands, which Barack Obama never did, he was just an élitist who worked with words.” The fresher-faced extremist Rick Santorum, a former Republican senator, called Obama “just a person of words,” adding, “Words are everything to him.” The once bipartisan campaign adviser Dick Morris and his wife and co-writer, Eileen McGann, argue that the McCain camp, in true Rovian fashion, is “using the Democrat’s articulateness against him” (along with his education, his popularity, his intelligence, his wife—pretty much everything but his height, though it may come to that). John McCain’s threatened cancellation of the first Presidential debate was the ultimate defiance, by action, of words; sure enough, afterward conservatives manfully disdained Barack Obama’s “book knowledge.” To have seen the mountains of Waziristan with one’s own eyes—that is everything.

Doesn’t this reflect a deep suspicion of language itself? It’s as if Republican practitioners saw words the way Captain Ahab saw “all visible objects”—as “pasteboard masks,” concealing acts and deeds and things—and, like Ahab, were bent on striking through those masks. The Melvillean atmosphere may not be accidental, since, beyond the familiar American anti-intellectualism—to work with words is not to work at all—there’s a residual Puritanism. The letter killeth, as St. Paul has it, but the spirit giveth life. (In that first debate, McCain twice charged his opponent with the misdeed of “parsing words.”) In this vision, there is something Pharisaical about words. They confuse, they corrupt; they get in the way of Jesus.

But we all need words, and both campaigns wrestle every day over them. Words are up for grabs: just follow the lipstick traces. For days, the McCain camp accused Obama of likening Governor Palin to a pig, because he likened a retooled political message to a pig with lipstick. Eventually, McCain (who had previously described Senator Hillary Clinton’s health-care plan as a pig with lipstick) was forced to fudge. No, he conceded, Senator Obama had not called Governor Palin a pig, “but I know he chooses his words carefully, and it was the wrong thing to say.” This was instructive, not least because it sounded like implicit praise: maybe I don’t choose my words very carefully, but he does, so he should have chosen them more carefully.

Meanwhile, the campaign that claims to loathe “just words” has proved expert at their manipulation, from reversals of policy to the outright lies of some of its attack ads (“comprehensive sex education”) and the subtle racial innuendo of a phrase like “how disrespectful” (used to accuse Obama of making uppity attacks on Palin). Karl Rove—along with predecessors like Lee Atwater and protégés like Steve Schmidt—long ago showed the Republicans that language is slippery, fluid, a river into which you can dump anything at all as long as your opponent is the one downstream. And, to be fair, those who affect to despise words have been more skillful than their opponents not just at amoral manipulation but at the creation of what Orwell called “a fresh, vivid, home-made turn of speech.” Pit bulls and lipstick stuck for good reason.

Or take McCain’s slogan “The Original Maverick,” now attached to many of the campaign’s ads. It cynically stipulates that politics is just merchandise, by sounding as close to a logo or a brand name as possible. But it also understands that consumers trust brands that sound like “quality.” Thus “Original,” which has the reassuring solidity of something like “Serving Americans of discernment since 1851,” or, indeed, “Levi’s 501: Original Jeans.” In such formulations, “Original” means eccentric, strange, unusual, and also first, best, belatedly copied by others. Better still, the phrase sounds like the tagline from a movie poster; not for nothing has McCain taken to announcing that “change is coming soon, to a district near you.”

If Obama is the letter (words, fancy diplomas, “authored” books), then the latest representative of the spirit is Sarah Palin. Literary theorists used to say that their most abstruse prose was “writing the difficulty”—that the sentences were tortuous because there was no briskly commonsensical way of representing a complex issue. Sarah Palin, alas, talks the difficulty. She may claim, as she did in last Thursday’s Vice-Presidential debate, that “Americans are cravin’ that straight talk,” but they are sure not going to get it from the Governor—not with her peculiar habit of speaking only half a sentence and then moving on to another for spoliation, that strange, ghostly drifting through the haziest phrases, as if she were cruelly condemned to search endlessly for her linguistic home: “I do take issue with some of the principle there with that redistribution of wealth principle that seems to be espoused by you.” And words do matter, after all: it matters that our Vice-Presidential candidate says, as she did to Gwen Ifill, that “nuclear weaponry, of course, would be the be-all-end-all of just too many people in too many parts of our planet.”

Hearing her being interviewed by Sean Hannity, on Fox News, almost made one wish for a Republican victory in November, so that her bizarre locutions might be available a bit longer to delve into. At times, even Hannity looked taken aback; his eyes, slightly too close to each other, like the headlamps on an Army jeep, went blank, as if registering the abyss we are teetering above. Or perhaps he just couldn’t follow. The most revealing moment happened earlier, when she was asked about Obama’s attack on McCain’s claim that the fundamentals of the economy are sound. “Well,” Palin said, “it was an unfair attack on the verbage that Senator McCain chose to use, because the fundamentals, as he was having to explain afterwards, he means our workforce, he means the ingenuity of the American people. And of course that is strong, and that is the foundation of our economy. So that was an unfair attack there, again, based on verbage that John McCain used.” This is certainly doing rather than mere talking, and what is being done is the coinage of “verbage.” It would be hard to find a better example of the Republican disdain for words than that remarkable term, so close to garbage, so far from language. ♦

Sam Harris discusses the disater that is Sarah Palin

2008-09-22T19:58:00.001-07:00

Harris is the author of two amazing books, The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation, both which extrapolate the true evil that is religous influence on politics, morality and science, among other things. I highly recommend them to anyone concerned with the future of humanity, or who enjoys destroying the feeble-minded arguments of Christians, Jews, Muslims and republicans.

This Newsweek piece is sure to turn some heads:

When Atheists Attack

A noted provocateur rips Sarah Palin—and defends elitism.

Sam Harris

NEWSWEEK

From the magazine issue dated Sep 29, 2008

Let me confess that I was genuinely unnerved by Sarah Palin's performance at the Republican convention. Given her audience and the needs of the moment, I believe Governor Palin's speech was the most effective political communication I have ever witnessed. Here, finally, was a performer who—being maternal, wounded, righteous and sexy—could stride past the frontal cortex of every American and plant a three-inch heel directly on that limbic circuit that ceaselessly intones "God and country." If anyone could make Christian theocracy smell like apple pie, Sarah Palin could.

Then came Palin's first television interview with Charles Gibson. I was relieved to discover, as many were, that Palin's luster can be much diminished by the absence of a teleprompter. Still, the problem she poses to our political process is now much bigger than she is. Her fans seem inclined to forgive her any indiscretion short of cannibalism. However badly she may stumble during the remaining weeks of this campaign, her supporters will focus their outrage upon the journalist who caused her to break stride, upon the camera operator who happened to capture her fall, upon the television network that broadcast the good lady's misfortune—and, above all, upon the "liberal elites" with their highfalutin assumption that, in the 21st century, only a reasonably well-educated person should be given command of our nuclear arsenal.

The point to be lamented is not that Sarah Palin comes from outside Washington, or that she has glimpsed so little of the earth's surface (she didn't have a passport until last year), or that she's never met a foreign head of state. The point is that she comes to us, seeking the second most important job in the world, without any intellectual training relevant to the challenges and responsibilities that await her. There is nothing to suggest that she even sees a role for careful analysis or a deep understanding of world events when it comes to deciding the fate of a nation. In her interview with Gibson, Palin managed to turn a joke about seeing Russia from her window into a straight-faced claim that Alaska's geographical proximity to Russia gave her some essential foreign-policy experience. Palin may be a perfectly wonderful person, a loving mother and a great American success story—but she is a beauty queen/sports reporter who stumbled into small-town politics, and who is now on the verge of stumbling into, or upon, world history.

The problem, as far as our political process is concerned, is that half the electorate revels in Palin's lack of intellectual qualifications. When it comes to politics, there is a mad love of mediocrity in this country. "They think they're better than you!" is the refrain that (highly competent and cynical) Republican strategists have set loose among the crowd, and the crowd has grown drunk on it once again. "Sarah Palin is an ordinary person!" Yes, all too ordinary.

We have all now witnessed apparently sentient human beings, once provoked by a reporter's microphone, saying things like, "I'm voting for Sarah because she's a mom. She knows what it's like to be a mom." Such sentiments suggest an uncanny (and, one fears, especially American) detachment from the real problems of today. The next administration must immediately confront issues like nuclear proliferation, ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (and covert wars elsewhere), global climate change, a convulsing economy, Russian belligerence, the rise of China, emerging epidemics, Islamism on a hundred fronts, a defunct United Nations, the deterioration of American schools, failures of energy, infrastructure and Internet security … the list is long, and Sarah Palin does not seem competent even to rank these items in order of importance, much less address any one of them.

Palin's most conspicuous gaffe in her interview with Gibson has been widely discussed. The truth is, I didn't much care that she did not know the meaning of the phrase "Bush doctrine." And I am quite sure that her supporters didn't care, either. Most people view such an ambush as a journalistic gimmick. What I do care about are all the other things Palin is guaranteed not to know—or will be glossing only under the frenzied tutelage of John McCain's advisers. What doesn't she know about financial markets, Islam, the history of the Middle East, the cold war, modern weapons systems, medical research, environmental science or emerging technology? Her relative ignorance is guaranteed on these fronts and most others, not because she was put on the spot, or got nervous, or just happened to miss the newspaper on any given morning. Sarah Palin's ignorance is guaranteed because of how she has spent the past 44 years on earth.

I care even more about the many things Palin thinks she knows but doesn't: like her conviction that the Biblical God consciously directs world events. Needless to say, she shares this belief with mil-lions of Americans—but we shouldn't be eager to give these people our nuclear codes, either. There is no question that if President McCain chokes on a spare rib and Palin becomes the first woman president, she and her supporters will believe that God, in all his majesty and wisdom, has brought it to pass. Why would God give Sarah Palin a job she isn't ready for? He wouldn't. Everything happens for a reason. Palin seems perfectly willing to stake the welfare of our country—even the welfare of our species—as collateral in her own personal journey of faith. Of course, McCain has made the same unconscionable wager on his personal journey to the White House.

In speaking before her church about her son going to war in Iraq, Palin urged the congregation to pray "that our national leaders are sending them out on a task that is from God; that's what we have to make sure we are praying for, that there is a plan, and that plan is God's plan." When asked about these remarks in her interview with Gibson, Palin successfully dodged the issue of her religious beliefs by claiming that she had been merely echoing the words of Abraham Lincoln. The New York Times later dubbed her response "absurd." It was worse than absurd; it was a lie calculated to conceal the true character of her religious infatuations. Every detail that has emerged about Palin's life in Alaska suggests that she is as devout and literal-minded in her Christian dogmatism as any man or woman in the land. Given her long affiliation with the Assemblies of God church, Palin very likely believes that Biblical prophecy is an infallible guide to future events and that we are living in the "end times." Which is to say she very likely thinks that human history will soon unravel in a foreordained cataclysm of war and bad weather. Undoubtedly Palin believes that this will be a good thing—as all true Christians will be lifted bodily into the sky to make merry with Jesus, while all nonbelievers, Jews, Methodists and other rabble will be punished for eternity in a lake of fire. Like many Pentecostals, Palin may even imagine that she and her fellow parishioners enjoy the power of prophecy themselves. Otherwise, what could she have meant when declaring to her congregation that "God's going to tell you what is going on, and what is going to go on, and you guys are going to have that within you"?

You can learn something about a person by the company she keeps. In the churches where Palin has worshiped for decades, parishioners enjoy "baptism in the Holy Spirit," "miraculous healings" and "the gift of tongues." Invariably, they offer astonishingly irrational accounts of this behavior and of its significance for the entire cosmos. Palin's spiritual colleagues describe themselves as part of "the final generation," engaged in "spiritual warfare" to purge the earth of "demonic strongholds." Palin has spent her entire adult life immersed in this apocalyptic hysteria. Ask yourself: Is it a good idea to place the most powerful military on earth at her disposal? Do we actually want our leaders thinking about the fulfillment of Biblical prophecy when it comes time to say to the Iranians, or to the North Koreans, or to the Pakistanis, or to the Russians or to the Chinese: "All options remain on the table"?

It is easy to see what many people, women especially, admire about Sarah Palin. Here is a mother of five who can see the bright side of having a child with Down syndrome and still find the time and energy to govern the state of Alaska. But we cannot ignore the fact that Palin's impressive family further testifies to her dogmatic religious beliefs. Many writers have noted the many shades of conservative hypocrisy on view here: when Jamie Lynn Spears gets pregnant, it is considered a symptom of liberal decadence and the breakdown of family values; in the case of one of Palin's daughters, however, teen pregnancy gets reinterpreted as a sign of immaculate, small-town fecundity. And just imagine if, instead of the Palins, the Obama family had a pregnant, underage daughter on display at their convention, flanked by her black boyfriend who "intends" to marry her. Who among conservatives would have resisted the temptation to speak of "the dysfunction in the black community"?

Teen pregnancy is a misfortune, plain and simple. At best, it represents bad luck (both for the mother and for the child); at worst, as in the Palins' case, it is a symptom of religious dogmatism. Governor Palin opposes sex education in schools on religious grounds. She has also fought vigorously for a "parental consent law" in the state of Alaska, seeking full parental dominion over the reproductive decisions of minors. We know, therefore, that Palin believes that she should be the one to decide whether her daughter carries her baby to term. Based on her stated position, we know that she would deny her daughter an abortion even if she had been raped. One can be forgiven for doubting whether Bristol Palin had all the advantages of 21st-century family planning—or, indeed, of the 21st century.

We have endured eight years of an administration that seemed touched by religious ideology. Bush's claim to Bob Woodward that he consulted a "higher Father" before going to war in Iraq got many of us sitting upright, before our attention wandered again to less ethereal signs of his incompetence. For all my concern about Bush's religious beliefs, and about his merely average grasp of terrestrial reality, I have never once thought that he was an over-the-brink, Rapture-ready extremist. Palin seems as though she might be the real McCoy. With the McCain team leading her around like a pet pony between now and Election Day, she can be expected to conceal her religious extremism until it is too late to do anything about it. Her supporters know that while she cannot afford to "talk the talk" between now and Nov. 4, if elected, she can be trusted to "walk the walk" until the Day of Judgment.

What is so unnerving about the candidacy of Sarah Palin is the degree to which she represents—and her supporters celebrate—the joyful marriage of confidence and ignorance. Watching her deny to Gibson that she had ever harbored the slightest doubt about her readiness to take command of the world's only superpower, one got the feeling that Palin would gladly assume any responsibility on earth:

"Governor Palin, are you ready at this moment to perform surgery on this child's brain?"

"Of course, Charlie. I have several boys of my own, and I'm an avid hunter."

"But governor, this is neurosurgery, and you have no training as a surgeon of any kind."

"That's just the point, Charlie. The American people want change in how we make medical decisions in this country. And when faced with a challenge, you cannot blink."

The prospects of a Palin administration are far more frightening, in fact, than those of a Palin Institute for Pediatric Neurosurgery. Ask yourself: how has "elitism" become a bad word in American politics? There is simply no other walk of life in which extraordinary talent and rigorous training are denigrated. We want elite pilots to fly our planes, elite troops to undertake our most critical missions, elite athletes to represent us in competition and elite scientists to devote the most productive years of their lives to curing our diseases. And yet, when it comes time to vest people with even greater responsibilities, we consider it a virtue to shun any and all standards of excellence. When it comes to choosing the people whose thoughts and actions will decide the fates of millions, then we suddenly want someone just like us, someone fit to have a beer with, someone down-to-earth—in fact, almost anyone, provided that he or she doesn't seem too intelligent or well educated.

I believe that with the nomination of Sarah Palin for the vice presidency, the silliness of our politics has finally put our nation at risk. The world is growing more complex—and dangerous—with each passing hour, and our position within it growing more precarious. Should she become president, Palin seems capable of enacting policies so detached from the common interests of humanity, and from empirical reality, as to unite the entire world against us. When asked why she is qualified to shoulder more responsibility than any person has held in human history, Palin cites her refusal to hesitate. "You can't blink," she told Gibson repeatedly, as though this were a primordial truth of wise governance. Let us hope that a President Palin would blink, again and again, while more thoughtful people decide the fate of civilization.

Harris is a founder of The Reason Project and author of The New York Times best sellers “The End of Faith” and “Letter to a Christian Nation.” His Web site is samharris.org.

Consider the Lobster

2008-09-14T19:25:00.001-07:00

The news of David Foster Wallace's suicide struck a nerve. Wallace was the most talented, perhaps the only talented writer to come out of the last 15 years. His fiction, humor-filled essays and non-fiction are exhausting, humbling, achingly funny and written so precisely that it forces me to reevaluate my minimal talents as a writer. I recently decided to take on the Everest size leviathan that is Infinite Jest. So far, it is amazing. My friend Brian called him a "sentence artist" and that is certainly the case.

Here is a piece he did recently for the New Yorkertitled "Good People". It is written with such intimacy.

Good People

by David Foster Wallace

They were up on a picnic table at that park by the lake, by the edge of the lake, with part of a downed tree in the shallows half hidden by the bank. Lane A. Dean, Jr., and his girlfriend, both in bluejeans and button-up shirts. They sat up on the table’s top portion and had their shoes on the bench part that people sat on to picnic or fellowship together in carefree times. They’d gone to different high schools but the same junior college, where they had met in campus ministries. It was springtime, and the park’s grass was very green and the air suffused with honeysuckle and lilacs both, which was almost too much. There were bees, and the angle of the sun made the water of the shallows look dark. There had been more storms that week, with some downed trees and the sound of chainsaws all up and down his parents’ street. Their postures on the picnic table were both the same forward kind with their shoulders rounded and elbows on their knees. In this position the girl rocked slightly and once put her face in her hands, but she was not crying. Lane was very still and immobile and looking past the bank at the downed tree in the shallows and its ball of exposed roots going all directions and the tree’s cloud of branches all half in the water. The only other individual nearby was a dozen spaced tables away, by himself, standing upright. Looking at the torn-up hole in the ground there where the tree had gone over. It was still early yet and all the shadows wheeling right and shortening. The girl wore a thin old checked cotton shirt with pearl-colored snaps with the long sleeves down and always smelled very good and clean, like someone you could trust and care about even if you weren’t in love. Lane Dean had liked the smell of her right away. His mother called her down to earth and liked her, thought she was good people, you could tell—she made this evident in little ways. The shallows lapped from different directions at the tree as if almost teething on it. Sometimes when alone and thinking or struggling to turn a matter over to Jesus Christ in prayer, he would find himself putting his fist in his palm and turning it slightly as if still playing and pounding his glove to stay sharp and alert in center. He did not do this now; it would be cruel and indecent to do this now. The older individual stood beside his picnic table—he was at it but not sitting—and looked also out of place in a suit coat or jacket and the kind of men’s hat Lane’s grandfather wore in photos as a young insurance man. He appeared to be looking across the lake. If he moved, Lane didn’t see it. He looked more like a picture than a man. There were not any ducks in view.

One thing Lane Dean did was reassure her again that he’d go with her and be there with her. It was one of the few safe or decent things he could really say. The second time he said it again now she shook her head and laughed in an unhappy way that was more just air out her nose. Her real laugh was different. Where he’d be was the waiting room, she said. That he’d be thinking about her and feeling bad for her, she knew, but he couldn’t be in there with her. This was so obviously true that he felt like a ninny that he’d kept on about it and now knew what she had thought every time he went and said it—it hadn’t brought her comfort or eased the burden at all. The worse he felt, the stiller he sat. The whole thing felt balanced on a knife or wire; if he moved to put his arm up or touch her the whole thing could tip over. He hated himself for sitting so frozen. He could almost visualize himself tiptoeing past something explosive. A big stupid-looking tiptoe, like in a cartoon. The whole last black week had been this way and it was wrong. He knew it was wrong, knew something was required of him that was not this terrible frozen care and caution, but he pretended to himself he did not know what it was that was required. He pretended it had no name. He pretended that not saying aloud what he knew to be right and true was for her sake, was for the sake of her needs and feelings. He also worked dock and routing at UPS, on top of school, but had traded to get the day off after they’d decided together. Two days before, he had awakened very early and tried to pray but could not. He was freezing more and more solid, he felt like, but he had not thought of his father or the blank frozenness of his father, even in church, which had once filled him with such pity. This was the truth. Lane Dean, Jr., felt sun on one arm as he pictured in his mind an image of himself on a train, waving mechanically to something that got smaller and smaller as the train pulled away. His father and his mother’s father had the same birthday, a Cancer. Sheri’s hair was colored an almost corn blond, very clean, the skin through her central part pink in the sunlight. They’d sat here long enough that only their right side was shaded now. He could look at her head, but not at her. Different parts of him felt unconnected to each other. She was smarter than him and they both knew it. It wasn’t just school—Lane Dean was in accounting and business and did all right; he was hanging in there. She was a year older, twenty, but it was also more—she had always seemed to Lane to be on good terms with her life in a way that age could not account for. His mother had put it that she knew what it is she wanted, which was nursing and not an easy program at Peoria Junior College, and plus she worked hostessing at the Embers and had bought her own car. She was serious in a way Lane liked. She had a cousin that died when she was thirteen, fourteen, that she’d loved and been close with. She only talked about it that once. He liked her smell and her downy arms and the way she exclaimed when something made her laugh. He had liked just being with her and talking to her. She was serious in her faith and values in a way that Lane had liked and now, sitting here with her on the table, found himself afraid of. This was an awful thing. He was starting to believe that he might not be serious in his faith. He might be somewhat of a hypocrite, like the Assyrians in Isaiah, which would be a far graver sin than the appointment—he had decided he believed this. He was desperate to be good people, to still be able to feel he was good. He rarely before now had thought of damnation and Hell—that part of it didn’t speak to his spirit—and in worship services he more just tuned himself out and tolerated Hell when it came up, the same way you tolerate the job you’ve got to have to save up for what it is you want. Her tennis shoes had little things doodled on them from sitting in her class lectures. She stayed looking down like that. Little notes or reading assignments in Bic in her neat round hand on the rubber elements around the sneaker’s rim. Lane A. Dean, looking now at her inclined head’s side’s barrettes in the shape of blue ladybugs. The appointment was for afternoon, but when the doorbell had rung so early and his mother’d called to him up the stairs, he had known, and a terrible kind of blankness had commenced falling through him.

He told her that he did not know what to do. That he knew if he was the salesman of it and forced it upon her that was awful and wrong. But he was trying to understand—they’d prayed on it and talked it through from every different angle. Lane said how sorry she knew he was, and that if he was wrong in believing they’d truly decided together when they decided to make the appointment she should please tell him, because he thought he knew how she must have felt as it got closer and closer and how she must be so scared, but that what he couldn’t tell was if it was more than that. He was totally still except for moving his mouth, it felt like. She did not reply. That if they needed to pray on it more and talk it through, then he was here, he was ready, he said. The appointment could get moved back; if she just said the word they could call and push it back to take more time to be sure in the decision. It was still so early in it—they both knew that, he said. This was true, that he felt this way, and yet he also knew he was also trying to say things that would get her to open up and say enough back that he could see her and read her heart and know what to say to get her to go through with it. He knew this without admitting to himself that this was what he wanted, for it would make him a hypocrite and liar. He knew, in some locked-up little part of him, why it was that he’d gone to no one to open up and seek their life counsel, not Pastor Steve or the prayer partners at campus ministries, not his UPS friends or the spiritual counselling available through his parents’ old church. But he did not know why Sheri herself had not gone to Pastor Steve—he could not read her heart. She was blank and hidden. He so fervently wished it never happened. He felt like he knew now why it was a true sin and not just a leftover rule from past society. He felt like he had been brought low by it and humbled and now did believe that the rules were there for a reason. That the rules were concerned with him personally, as an individual. He promised God he had learned his lesson. But what if that, too, was a hollow promise, from a hypocrite who repented only after, who promised submission but really only wanted a reprieve? He might not even know his own heart or be able to read and know himself. He kept thinking also of 1 Timothy and the hypocrite therein who disputeth over words. He felt a terrible inner resistance but could not feel what it was that it resisted. This was the truth. All the different angles and ways they had come at the decision together did not ever include it—the word—for had he once said it, avowed that he did love her, loved Sheri Fisher, then it all would have been transformed. It would not be a different stance or angle, but a difference in the very thing they were praying and deciding on together. Sometimes they had prayed together over the phone, in a kind of half code in case anybody accidentally picked up the extension. She continued to sit as if thinking, in the pose of thinking, like that one statue. They were right up next to each other on the table. He was looking over past her at the tree in the water. But he could not say he did: it was not true.

But neither did he ever open up and tell her straight out he did not love her. This might be his lie by omission. This might be the frozen resistance—were he to look right at her and tell her he didn’t, she would keep the appointment and go. He knew this. Something in him, though, some terrible weakness or lack of values, could not tell her. It felt like a muscle he did not have. He didn’t know why; he just could not do it, or even pray to do it. She believed he was good, serious in his values. Part of him seemed willing to more or less just about lie to someone with that kind of faith and trust, and what did that make him? How could such a type of individual even pray? What it really felt like was a taste of the reality of what might be meant by Hell. Lane Dean had never believed in Hell as a lake of fire or a loving God consigning folks to a burning lake of fire—he knew in his heart this was not true. What he believed in was a living God of compassion and love and the possibility of a personal relationship with Jesus Christ through whom this love was enacted in human time. But sitting here beside this girl as unknown to him now as outer space, waiting for whatever she might say to unfreeze him, now he felt like he could see the edge or outline of what a real vision of Hell might be. It was of two great and terrible armies within himself, opposed and facing each other, silent. There would be battle but no victor. Or never a battle—the armies would stay like that, motionless, looking across at each other, and seeing therein something so different and alien from themselves that they could not understand, could not hear each other’s speech as even words or read anything from what their face looked like, frozen like that, opposed and uncomprehending, for all human time. Two-hearted, a hypocrite to yourself either way.

When he moved his head, a part of the lake further out flashed with sun—the water up close wasn’t black now, and you could see into the shallows and see that all the water was moving but gently, this way and that—and in this same way he besought to return to himself as Sheri moved her leg and started to turn beside him. He could see the man in the suit and gray hat standing motionless now at the lake’s rim, holding something under one arm and looking across at the opposite side where a row of little forms on camp chairs sat in a way that meant they had lines in the water for crappie—which mostly only your blacks from the East Side ever did—and the little white shape at the row’s end a Styrofoam creel. In his moment or time at the lake now just to come, Lane Dean first felt he could take this all in whole: everything seemed distinctly lit, for the circle of the pin oak’s shade had rotated off all the way, and they sat now in sun with their shadow a two-headed thing in the grass before them. He was looking or gazing again at where the downed tree’s branches seemed to all bend so sharply just under the shallows’ surface when he was given to know that through all this frozen silence he’d despised he had, in truth, been praying, or some little part of his heart he could not hear had, for he was answered now with a type of vision, what he would later call within his own mind a vision or moment of grace. He was not a hypocrite, just broken and split off like all men. Later on, he believed that what happened was he’d had a moment of almost seeing them both as Jesus saw them—as blind but groping, wanting to please God despite their inborn fallen nature. For in that same given moment he saw, quick as light, into Sheri’s heart, and was made to know what would occur here as she finished turning to him and the man in the hat watched the fishing and the downed elm shed cells into the water. This down-to-earth girl that smelled good and wanted to be a nurse would take and hold one of his hands in both of hers to unfreeze him and make him look at her, and she would say that she cannot do it. That she is sorry she did not know this sooner, that she hadn’t meant to lie—she agreed because she’d wanted to believe that she could, but she cannot. That she will carry this and have it; she has to. With her gaze clear and steady. That all night last night she prayed and searched inside herself and decided this is what love commands of her. That Lane should please please sweetie let her finish. That listen—this is her own decision and obliges him to nothing. That she knows he does not love her, not that way, has known it all this time, and that it’s all right. That it is as it is and it’s all right. She will carry this, and have it, and love it and make no claim on Lane except his good wishes and respecting what she has to do. That she releases him, all claim, and hopes he finishes up at P.J.C. and does so good in his life and has all joy and good things. Her voice will be clear and steady, and she will be lying, for Lane has been given to read her heart. To see through her. One of the opposite side’s blacks raises his arm in what may be greeting, or waving off a bee. There is a mower cutting grass someplace off behind them. It will be a terrible, last-ditch gamble born out of the desperation in Sheri Fisher’s soul, the knowledge that she can neither do this thing today nor carry a child alone and shame her family. Her values blocked the way either way, Lane could see, and she has no other options or choice—this lie is not a sin. Galatians 4:16, Have I then become your enemy? She is gambling that he is good. There on the table, neither frozen nor yet moving, Lane Dean, Jr., sees all this, and is moved with pity, and also with something more, something without any name he knows, that is given to him in the form of a question that never once in all the long week’s thinking and division had even so much as occurred—why is he so sure he doesn’t love her? Why is one kind of love any different? What if he has no earthly idea what love is? What would even Jesus do? For it was just now he felt her two small strong soft hands on his, to turn him. What if he was just afraid, if the truth was no more than this, and if what to pray for was not even love but simple courage, to meet both her eyes as she says it and trust his heart?♦

Breezy weekend, all points East.

2008-09-04T20:11:00.001-07:00

This weekend I will be breaking in my 6'10 Mayo Mid-Life Crisis. Hard body in the shorey all hurricane season.

The youngest Goggans shows us up!

2008-09-03T19:42:00.000-07:00

My sister has been a busy little bee in Florida. It seems every time I talk to her she has something fantastic up her sleeve. She is going to shows, meeting curators from famous art galleries, starting school newspapers, getting involved in debates and political campaigns or just chilling hard with my pops at the homefront. Here is the youngest of the Goggans squad with the two other legs of the aptly coined "tri-pod" chilling with Joe Biden in SRQ. She is a mover and a shaker. She has her eyes set on the five boroughs Jack and I call home and I know she will get here on her own accord. And when she does, damn NYC, watch out!

Updates.

2008-08-21T13:24:00.000-07:00

Our time has gladly come to an end at this bug infested bundle of toothpicks that our landlord "Mr. Schwartz" calls a home. We are moving! Juicy Terror got a pad in the dirty 'Wick, while Jack, Pete, my man Corey Uhl, Lemon Rimbaud and I found a ground floor, luxury apt. on Bedford and Myrtle, just a short walk from our pad here. We sign the lease and get the keys on Friday and you can certainly bet we will be there very shortly after that.

School starts next tuesday for all of us. I am certain that all of us are happy to see it as all of us have been feeling less and less like the productive youngsters we came here to be.

Unfortunately (I guess), I will be missing the first week of school. I am heading to the Dominican Republic to work on a film with Jeremy Dean and the New York Surf Film Festival. We shoot two days in NYC and then are in DR from Wednesday till Saturday. Hopefully I will be able to break in two of my fresh Larry Mayo hand-shaped sleds.

On another note, Juicy and I just destroyed some of these delectable morsels:

Welcome to the Family!

2008-08-14T05:53:00.000-07:00

eSeveral variables have led to me being unable to update this blog. One of them is a new addition to the Goggans clan. World, meet Lemon Rimbaud Goggans. Lemon, meet the world.

Vote The Environment

2008-08-08T21:16:00.000-07:00

Patagonia sent my friend Scott Robinson and I to Camden, New Jersey to spread some consciousness at Jack Johnson's show. Patagonia is running a campaing called "Vote The Environment". We are registering voters and encouraging them to research the candidates voting records on environmental issues.

Jack came out and chatted with us for a bit. He was rocking a T. Moe Sprout shirt and seemed as down to earth as his agents might hope.

Camera is broken

2008-07-18T15:56:00.001-07:00

sorry for the lack of updates. My camera got stepped on by thine own foot.

I used to be really cool.

2008-06-26T18:02:00.000-07:00

I used to be a hardcore kid, in ever sense. Straight Edge, vegetarian, empathetic, the whole deal. My friends in Stretch Arm Strong made a video when I was 18 in New Jersey and invited me up. Some bros and I drove up and rocked out in Newark, the shittiest place on earth. Check out my dance moves.

Hudson River Skate Park and Painting the Subway red

2008-06-26T06:39:00.000-07:00

Jarod, being the grand-motivator, got us out of the house yesterday and over to the West Side Bike Highway to check out the Hudson River Skatepark. As I was waiting for the G-train, eating my KFC like a rabid animal, I leaned on one of the columns only to find myself stuck to it. I thought it was gum, and in my panic to get on the approaching train threw my bag over my shoulder and hopped on, only to notcie the red paint covering my arm, bag and shirt moments later.

It felt great to skate again. Jarod was ripping. A guy, whose name I never caught, was also giving the place a going over.

Run For The Fallen

2008-06-24T18:56:00.001-07:00

My friend Grant "Hank" Zubritski is taking part in a protest of sorts this week. He is leaving tomorrow for Arizona where he will run for the next week, taking part in the "Run For The Fallen". One mile is to be run for every american life lost in the Iraq war. The route stretches from San Diego, California all the way to Arlington National Cemetery in Arlington, Virginia. Good luck Grant. Have a cosmic run, we are behind you.

http://www.runforthefallen.org/

http://blog.runforthefallen.org/

ONE MILE FOR EVERY SERVICE MEMBER KILLED
IN OPERATION IRAQI FREEDOM.

Beginning Flag Day, June 14, 2008, a dedicated team of runners will run across America from Fort Irwin, CA to Arlington National Cemetery, one mile for every Soldier, Sailor, Airmen, and Marine killed in Operation Iraqi Freedom. For ten weeks, team members will mark each mile with an American flag and signcard in an apolitical reflection of remembrance of each service member.

New recruit.

2008-06-23T21:46:00.000-07:00

I have known Jarod Ruzkowski for my entire conscious life. My family moved into the neighborhood when I was 3 and Jarod was the first kid I met. We have been friends ever since. After High School we each went separate ways, me to California to be a professional surfer, Jarod, a Christian at the time, headed to Orlando to pursue an education at Fullsail in TV production. As different of paths as we have taken, they have both led us to very similar conclusions about the nature of the universe, leftist politics and beer. Jarod is an incredibly intelligent, soft-spoken, angry young man and I was overjoyed to hear that he was moving to New York. He has been cruising in from Astoria to ride bikes, skate and share brews with us. Lady's and gent's , I give you J-Rad Ruskinator the 1st.

Have You Seen Him?

2008-06-23T19:20:00.000-07:00

I smell Hard Body.

Sorry, son, you'll have to speek into the microphone.

2008-06-19T14:26:00.000-07:00

So, I have been a bit MIA lately. Explanation: I got super busy with work, writing on my new typewriter and playing Halo3 after Dukes and Sis left. Then I got sick. Really sick. Strep throat--again. Went to the hospital--again. Spent four days sweating, hallucinating in my bed, with a high fever and sea urchins in my throat. Here are some pics of late.

Our Dad is a truly enlightened cat. Our anchor, he is always there with one line of cutting wisdom when we need it. He is a father, in a truly traditional sense. He taught us to think on our feet. He sharpened our teeth.

Siblings.
I recommended going to the Olive Garden in Times Square. I thought it would be priced according to the rest of the Universe's OG's and that seeing the madness that is TS might entertain the visitors. No dice. Price food and terrible service. The lack of view was free of charge.

Pops and Sis are remarkable together.
And they were off, back to the land of sand and honey.
For those of you who have wondered "what magical debauchery has A Goggans been up to lately?" here is your answer: Dying.

From the depths

2008-06-18T13:46:00.000-07:00

comes a breath. Sickness, flat-spells and the holy-rolling preacher down the street can't keep us down: http://magicseaweed.com/Rockaway-Beach-Surf-Report/384/

Obama's Chicago Boys

2008-06-15T04:44:00.001-07:00

Jack dug up this recent article by Naomi Klein, author of the utterly necessary book, the Shock Doctrine. From the Common Dreams website. Check it out

Obama’s Chicago Boys

by Naomi Klein

Barack Obama waited just three days after Hillary Clinton pulled out of the race to declare, on CNBC, “Look. I am a pro-growth, free-market guy. I love the market.”

Demonstrating that this is no mere spring fling, he has appointed 37-year-old Jason Furman to head his economic policy team. Furman is one of Wal-Mart’s most prominent defenders, anointing the company a “progressive success story.” On the campaign trail, Obama blasted Clinton for sitting on the Wal-Mart board and pledged, “I won’t shop there.” For Furman, however, it’s Wal-Mart’s critics who are the real threat: the “efforts to get Wal-Mart to raise its wages and benefits” are creating “collateral damage” that is “way too enormous and damaging to working people and the economy more broadly for me to sit by idly and sing ‘Kum-Ba-Ya’ in the interests of progressive harmony.” Obama’s love of markets and his desire for “change” are not inherently incompatible. “The market has gotten out of balance,” he says, and it most certainly has. Many trace this profound imbalance back to the ideas of Milton Friedman, who launched a counterrevolution against the New Deal from his perch at the University of Chicago economics department. And here there are more problems, because Obama–who taught law at the University of Chicago for a decade–is thoroughly embedded in the mind-set known as the Chicago School.

He chose as his chief economic adviser Austan Goolsbee, a University of Chicago economist on the left side of a spectrum that stops at the center-right. Goolsbee, unlike his more Friedmanite colleagues, sees inequality as a problem. His primary solution, however, is more education–a line you can also get from Alan Greenspan. In their hometown, Goolsbee has been eager to link Obama to the Chicago School. “If you look at his platform, at his advisers, at his temperament, the guy’s got a healthy respect for markets,” he told Chicago magazine. “It’s in the ethos of the [University of Chicago], which is something different from saying he is laissez-faire.”

Another of Obama’s Chicago fans is 39-year-old billionaire Kenneth Griffin, CEO of the hedge fund Citadel Investment Group. Griffin, who gave the maximum allowable donation to Obama, is something of a poster boy for an unbalanced economy. He got married at Versailles and had the after-party at Marie Antoinette’s vacation spot (Cirque du Soleil performed)–and he is one of the staunchest opponents of closing the hedge-fund tax loophole. While Obama talks about toughening trade rules with China, Griffin has been bending the few barriers that do exist. Despite sanctions prohibiting the sale of police equipment to China, Citadel has been pouring money into controversial China-based security companies that are putting the local population under unprecedented levels of surveillance.

Now is the time to worry about Obama’s Chicago Boys and their commitment to fending off serious attempts at regulation. It was in the two and a half months between winning the 1992 election and being sworn into office that Bill Clinton did a U-turn on the economy. He had campaigned promising to revise NAFTA, adding labor and environmental provisions and to invest in social programs. But two weeks before his inauguration, he met with then-Goldman Sachs chief Robert Rubin, who convinced him of the urgency of embracing austerity and more liberalization. Rubin told PBS, “President Clinton actually made the decision before he stepped into the Oval Office, during the transition, on what was a dramatic change in economic policy.”

Furman, a leading disciple of Rubin, was chosen to head the Brookings Institution’s Hamilton Project, the think tank Rubin helped found to argue for reforming, rather than abandoning, the free-trade agenda. Add to that Goolsbee’s February meeting with Canadian consulate officials, who left with the distinct impression that they had been instructed not to take Obama’s anti-NAFTA campaigning seriously, and there is every reason for concern about a replay of 1993.

The irony is that there is absolutely no reason for this backsliding. The movement launched by Friedman, introduced by Ronald Reagan and entrenched under Clinton, faces a profound legitimacy crisis around the world. Nowhere is this more evident than at the University of Chicago itself. In mid-May, when university president Robert Zimmer announced the creation of a $200 million Milton Friedman Institute, an economic research center devoted to continuing and augmenting the Friedman legacy, a controversy erupted. More than 100 faculty members signed a letter of protest. “The effects of the neoliberal global order that has been put in place in recent decades, strongly buttressed by the Chicago School of Economics, have by no means been unequivocally positive,” the letter states. “Many would argue that they have been negative for much of the world’s population.”

When Friedman died in 2006, such bold critiques of his legacy were largely absent. The adoring memorials spoke only of grand achievement, with one of the more prominent appreciations appearing in the New York Times–written by Austan Goolsbee. Yet now, just two years later, Friedman’s name is seen as a liability even at his own alma mater. So why has Obama chosen this moment, when all illusions of a consensus have dropped away, to go Chicago retro?

The news is not all bad. Furman claims he will be drawing on the expertise of two Keynesian economists: Jared Bernstein of the Economic Policy Institute and James Galbraith, son of Friedman’s nemesis John Kenneth Galbraith. Our “current economic crisis,” Obama recently said, did not come from nowhere. It is “the logical conclusion of a tired and misguided philosophy that has dominated Washington for far too long.”

True enough. But before Obama can purge Washington of the scourge of Friedmanism, he has some ideological housecleaning of his own to do.

Naomi Klein is the author of many books, including her most recent, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.Visit Naomi’s website at www.naomiklein.org, or to learn more about her new book, visit www.shockdoctrine.com .

2008-06-09T04:04:00.000-07:00

MoMA and Museum of Natural History

2008-06-09T03:53:00.001-07:00

With Kayla and Dukes in town we decided to visit MoMA and The Museum of Natural History (separate days), two things we should have done a long time ago.

MoMA was free for everyone save Dukes which seemed to set the mood for the visit. Everyone was enthralled, having seen the works of Picasso, Van Gogh, Rothko and others our entire lives in our Parent's books. If you have never been, you must go; it is surely worth it.

Mollusk Madness: A Weekly Event

2008-06-08T06:01:00.001-07:00

Andy Davis, Jeff Canham and my long lost friend Tyler Warren were in town for a little art shindig/ ando and friends tour and stopped by Mollusk for a BBQ meet and greet. Here are some shots:

If you are a girl in New York, and you don't watch your drinks when you are out, this will be the last face you see:

Jon Bless Bon Voyage, Goggans clan aloha

2008-06-07T18:56:00.001-07:00

Bless took off for Brazil on Thursday as Kayla and Dad arrived from Florida. We sent JB off with a micro surf sesh before his 9:25 flight out. Franco, Terrence, Singles and Pete all gave in and paddled out into the less than pleasant conditions. Bless took off on the A-train and we threw seaweed at eachother for a bit and headed back to BK to meet Pops and Sis.

Really? You're gonna get wet for this?

At this moment, as Singles and Bless trudge to the water, FM Cynial was running like a cartoon monkey to the "peak" on the right. I reall missed a good picture op.

"This is an 8th avenue bound L-train"
What a stylish bunch.

Pete was psyched on the walk, constantly asking "why are we stopping?".

ROPE

2008-06-05T16:31:00.000-07:00

Dutchstar Mike melted vinyl and screened some 80's surf jams last night in our hood. His lovely lady, Miss Heidi, came prepared with brown-bag reese's catering. Watched a whole lot of neon and thigh slash across the screen.

Why Jack and I are here, why we care.

2008-06-04T17:00:00.000-07:00

Last night, Jack and I went to a panel discussion concerning the war crimes committed during the Iraqi conflict, particularly with respect to Blackwater mercenaries and other sub-contracted shadow armies operating in Iraq. On the panel was Jeremy Scahill, Seymour Hersh, Chris Hedges and Laylai Al Arani. The discourse proved as inspiring as it was disheartening and scary. Here are some clips concerning the issue.

2008-06-02T22:05:00.000-07:00

What do y'all know 'bout this?

(poached from SW&G)

Second times a charm

2008-06-02T07:32:00.000-07:00

The Lafayette Luftwaffe got down and dirty multiple mission style. Terrence, Bless, Pumpkin Eater, Devotion and I all loaded in Terrence's girlfriend's Cherokee and headed to Gilgo. We were greeted with some swell and even more wind. After a few frustrating laps, some "chemical crumb cake" from the Gilgo Beach Inn and a failed Baja Fresh mission, we headed back to the burg for some Taco Chulo and a walk to the Brooklyn Flea.

The Lafayette Luftwaffe:

Around 2:00, Bless and I got texts from Francisco M Borroughs, more familiarly known as FM Cynical. Cynical was feeling a little optimistic about the afternoon tide push and wanted to head back east for another round. Jack The Ripper (aka Cactus Jack, my brother), Pumpkin Eater and Terror chose to eat their respective pastramis on Rye at home and to not pile in. Bless, Cynical and I were rewarded heavily for our efforts as the wind slacked and the surf built. Chest high fun bump was had by all. The Medal of Honor went to Francisco for his first wave and subsequent ear to ear grin. The kid got down. Bless and I performed a double cutback for the eager onlookers. Good times had by all.

Post-session, we headed to Clams' Casino to drop off Bless' board which had been damaged by a particularly attractive young Asian woman.

Look at this guy.

Bones via Clams
Bless blessing
This dog was fucking huge. A malamute, his name was "Loverboy" and he was fucking amazing.

I got home to headquarters and fell face first into my bed. It was a good day.

Why I enjoy smart people..

2008-06-02T05:32:00.000-07:00

Jon Stewart on "Crossfire" during the 2004 elections. A sound argument made by an utterly funny and infinitely intelligent man.

More pics of Curren at Mollusk

2008-05-30T10:26:00.001-07:00

http://snapwater.smugmug.com/gallery/5056380_224m8#304133926_VQo7f

The Search Continues...

2008-05-30T08:11:00.000-07:00

The last two days have been interesting. Wednesday night, Bubbie Gentile had his work in the "Cut/Break" event at the SoHo Grand. Richard Kenvin and Joe Curren had their work there, as well as two other filmmakers and one other photographer. I didn't get any shots from the event. Sorry.

The next night Mollusk hosted Joe Curren for a book signing.

Blaine getting her hands on some meat.

Delish.
Did I mention that Tom Fucking Curren showed up?
Yeah. He played for about an hour while we all sat, entranced, watching surf movies. Truly surreal evening