Seth Kupchick's Blog: Bet on the Beaten, page 13

Bipolar Baseball

I haven't written about the M's for awhile and when I did it was a crazy poem from the stadium, on Wednesday afternoon, a hot blistering day, that saw the Rangers destroy them on a Grand Salami, 13-4. I was an inning late and when I walked up those great stairs into the field of action, the first play I saw was a shot that had the M's right fielder running back to catch a fly, but it went off his mit as he hit the wall, with two runs scoring, and that kind of said it all. It was a wild game that hearkened to all that is great and timeless about baseball, because the whole thing had a surreal end of summer feel to it, like the clowns had ransacked the park, and taken the field, unbeknownst to the fans. In the great timelessness of baseball they were due to lose a game or two, since those are the odds in a 162 game season, where you play a series of games with every team you see, increasing the difficulty of winning, since they are bound to get the best of you one of the three games, or so the oddsmakers say. It was a throw away game, but in dramatic style, and I really felt all reason leave the ball park in a way that's hard to recreate.

The Mariner's have given us an exciting season, and nothing is going to take that away, not even if they fold in the third and final act of the season, on the bottom of their pants. Yes, it would be a let down, but it wouldn't be like fading away in late July, or early August, or June like the 2013 Mariners, one of the most frustrating teams in history, losing more games 1-0, or 2-1, than I've ever seen. I know there are a little of those M's in these guys and they have threatened to fold a couple of times this year, as would be expected, considering no one expected anything of them, except that they had acquired Robinson Cano, but the 2014 bunch have so far exceeded expectations, I'm not sure the fans know what to expect. There was a banner in the stadium that read 'Revive '95,' and there is magic in the air, but you don't want to be a fool about it, given the Mariner's mediocre franchise history, but how foolish is it to simply ask for a repeat of a season that saw the M's win a play off game and then go on to beat the Yankees, in one of their two great moments as a franchise? It's not asking much considering most teams have a World Series victory or two under their belt, or at least some appearances in the Fall Classic, but not the M's, and yet they hold the distinction of having the most wins in a season ever, but then folded in the third act, a really dramatic death, that they haven't come back from until this season, not that this feels like that at all. In 2001, they were playing so over their heads for most of the season, they swept the city away on some kind of bipolar high, but then 9-11 happened, and the Nation was completely taken away from baseball, and yet focused on it like a laser to renew national pride, not to mention W. owned the Rangers, and saw America through the lens of the national pastime. The M's responded by spiraling into one of the biggest third act collapses in Major League History, and going to the dark side of a bipolar low exactly at the wrong time, with the spotlight on them, that I'm sure came slowly. The M's squeaked by the Indians in the first round, and were then destroyed in five games by the Yankees, with almost no memorable moments, from any of the games, a fold extraordinaire. The Yankees went onto win the world series and gave America one of its only post 9-11 highlights, with W. throwing a strike down the middle in Yankees stadium, the house that Ruth built.

The Mariners might finally be getting over that 'swan song,' and if they did fall apart this year, on the cusp of the third act, it would feel very different. Excluding the terrorist attacks of 9-11, they had the weight of expectation come September because how could you have the best record in the history of baseball and not win the World Series? It was a baffling question to most people outside of Seattle, but here I think it made complete sense, because the sports teams here have a real bipolar mood swing that guides their seasons, and the fans have come to mistrust the highs, and fear the lows, like someone that is bipolar. I'm not sure if this Mariners squad is bipolar or not, but if they are it's not on as dramatic a level as the 2001 squad, and thus the reference to '95, that was still their most exciting season, and makes the highlight reel, more than any moments from 2001, believe it or not. That remarkable record breaking season was a tidal wave that tore through the city, but couldn't be summed up in snippets or sound bites, like those '95 Mariners hugging each other in victory, celebrating a moment, rather than beautiful pages of prose like the 2001 bunch, without an 'umph.'

In a previous essay, I compared the baseball season to a three act play: April and May the first act; June, July, and August, the second act; and September and October the third and final act. By that calculation, the season is entering it's third act in a day or two, or is already there, but either way the third act is either just beginning, or the second act is ending, and the Mariners are thick in the hunt, with no reason to really think they'll fold, because they've been hot, but maybe that's the bipolar fear, that they got too hot in August, when the fans were ready to kiss the season goodbye, and call it a better one than they expected, because they shouldn't expect too much (Revive '95!). The M's just can't fade at this point, but they can go on a losing streak and have a miserable third act, missing the playoffs entirely, but I don't think the fans will let them forget it, and it will go down in Mariner lore not just as another disappointing season, but a really frustrating one, that begged you to dream, even when you asked the M's kindly to let you go back to sleep, and then woke you up a couple of times, only to get you excited, and then give you nothing in the end. It would not devastate the fans like the 2001 season, because I actually think the M's have had a great run and completely lived up to my fantasies of them as a mid Eighties Mets, before their World Series triumphs, when little was expected, and they made baseball fun. These M's make baseball fun too and I think they will until the end, and that they'll rise to the dramatic possibilities of a strong third act, leaving a brand on the minds of the fans for years to come, a stamp of integrity.

Grand Salami'd (a day at the park)

GRAND SALAMI’D
(A Day at the Park)


Error in the field,
Error in the mind.

“Kill the environmentalists,”
Say’s a fan,
Believing in tradition,
And everything will be fine,
But if you excuse a poet for ignorance,
A civilization declines.

How do you go on?
10 to 1, bottom of the Fifth,
Where do you live?
What do you say,
When you’ve already lost?
What does a home run matter,
Or a great poem,
Or a bullet proof vest.
So pray, pretend, fantasize,
A victory would be a miracle.

There’s nothing to lose,
Once you’ve lost,
Nothing to be,
No game going on,
No interior light flashing,
No skylight lying,
No pretend life to punctuate,
I’ve been playing a game.

A single –
A penny in the fountain
A double a dime,
A triple,
An insurance agent –
Excitement means nothing,
Life lessons already learned.

Pure peace at the park,
Until the baby screams,
Or the drunk loses his mind,
And shows he’s a racist;
Peace at the park until
Richard Nixon
Cries and commits the sins of a Nation;
Peace at the park,
For the BBQ man,
Determined to destroy;
Peace at the park,
For the baseball fan,
Lost in joy,
Looking at the city paralyzed,
The M’s behind the foul poles,
Beaten up, beyond cheering for,
Though people try.

I’m me alone in the stands,
Tricking death,
By not thinking about it,
Tricking the game,
Thinking the Mariners can win,
Cheering a 2 run double,
That changes little,
Hoping for another, another, and another…
A dream within a dream.

Summer is fading,
The second act closing,
The dog day’s nearing the end,
The family man fooling no one,
Spending his time with self,
Rooting for a lover,
In the void of course Moon,
The little league coach in all of us.

The right fielder turns a shoulder
To the wall,
The centerfielder an eye,
To the center of a smile,
The fielder’s coming alive,
Catching flies,
Stymied by countenance,
Covered in cryptic lies,
Swallowed by organs,
Devouring the sky.
Bambino with his baby
Belting out,
‘The new era disappearing,
Before the old one began.’

Final inning death,
Home run defeat,
Statistics, stance,
Temporary excitement,
Bonding glue,
Purposeful projection,
Ready stance,
Struck out,
The home run nullified.

Trash piling up,
Putrid pubescence,
Hung like laundry,
Or meat in a locker,
Cold and frigid,
Forever hunched,
Waiting assignment,
Green or red,
Final out,
Final strike,
Final bellow,
Lost lock.

The Summer Sun,
Shining on everyone.

"Sex, Lies, and Videotape," through the ages.

I watched this movie last night for probably at least the tenth time, but I might have seen it more like twenty times thanks to cable. It wasn't my favorite movie of all time, and yet it's one of those that I've never been able to get out of my mind, and haunts me to this day,so that I'm inclined to think it's on my top 100 list, not that I write these things out. I saw it in Westwood Village when it came out on a sort of date, and the theater was packed, and I still remember the excitement in the crowd that we were seeing something really new, kind of like how I felt watching "Risky Business," and it was a very exciting feeling. I'd just gone through my Sixties European art house phase, where I watched a lot of the greats from the French and Italian, and was pretty haughty towards any movie, claiming to speak for a new generation, and that's sort of how I went into "Sex, Lies, and Videotape." It's not that I wanted to hate it, like I do some movies, and I think a feeling every movie fan knows, but I didn't really want to think it was the best ever because that had already been done. I really thought that 'pop art,' and maybe even the classics, had defined my world so much, that it was impossible to say anything new, or to say it better than it had already been said. I didn't love "Sex, Lies, and Videotape," but in a way it wouldn't have gone against my ideals to without question, but I was haunted by it, and had to acknowledge it was an interesting movie, even though the jack ass in me probably wanted to laugh it off, but James Spader was just too tortured and weird, watching those videotapes of women talking about their sex life, that you had to wonder if they were art, or just pornography, or something even worse. (It was a great moral question in the late Eighties, and came to a head in a Supreme Court case against the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe for using an NEA grant to show Jesus having gay sex, lighting up the Christian conservatives.) I especially liked the dialogue in the beginning when James Spader talks about how he doesn't want an apartment because that would be too many keys and he'd prefer to live out of his car, a real Gen X sensibility, that I'm not sure had ever been articulated so well, or so easily, the artistic apathy of a new generation. It was a great night at the movies and thankfully my vague date and I were friends and could get past how uncomfortable all that talk about female masturbation made me.

I watched it again last night and mostly questioned the third act of the movie, not that it could be any different, or that I'd really want Steven Soderbergh, to go back in a time machine, and re-shoot the movie, to spec., because I don't know what I'd tell him to do, or what he should've done differently. The third act is basically Andie MacDowell turning the camera on James Spader, who up until that point is either an artist, or a pervert, or both, and no one can really decide, including himself, though there is a sense that he really is an artist on some kind of very personal quest, but it's like the art has gotten the best of him, and blended with life. He's a very shy character, and Andie MacDowell gets him to confess about his sex life, which might not have been the most interesting thing to do, considering he admitted he was impotent early on, but it comes out that he had a 'true love' about 9 years earlier that he never got over, and feminism has given him the pervy power to delve into women's minds, wanting to expose their deepest fears to a sensitive male. Graham's interviews free everyone in the movie to move on with their life and end their unsatisfying relationships, because the art is so free, controversial, and edgy, that it must have been more liberating than going to psychoanalysis, because Andie MacDowell's character does that too, and her shrink is never able to elicit the emotion from her, that Spader is from his interviewees, or at least the ones we're shown, because he has hundreds of tapes, and in his words 'some women take three minutes, some six hours.' He's something of an artist and a shrink, with almost shaman like powers, and there's no doubt he's truly suffering for his art, though it's a kind of sweet ecstasy, considering most men would dream of having his power, or as the lawyer puts it (Graham's old friend, and Andie MacDowell's husband), "I'd understand it better if he was having sex with the women."

The 'videotape' frees everyone but what's unclear at the end of the movie is if Spader is going to go on as an artist, but maybe that really doesn't matter. It's no doubt that we are supposed to think that he has finished his project, because he has jumped the line from voyeur to a paricipant in life, by starting a sexual relationship with Andie MacDowell, who leaves her husband for him. We're supposed to think that the tapes were a kind of therapy for Spader, and maybe the 'art' of the movie was Soderbergh having the vision to show us, the audience, the artist within Graham, because I'm not sure the fictional character on the screen conceived of himself as an artist to the extent that he was ready to take his 'videotapes' to a gallery, or a museum, thus fulfilling their destiny as art. He was really more of a therapist, with a specific mission to cure himself and others, a real holy man, but writing this feels almost crazy, because I'm not sure I've ever seen a more perverted character on the screen, or that America had, or not one so comforting; sure, there was Norman Bates from "Psycho," peeping on Janet Leigh in the shower, but he was really creepy from the word 'go,' and not freeing anyone. Spader has real 'Gen X' charm in this definitive early Sundance movie, before that festival had been sold down the river of bad art.

So, what's my critique? I'm really not sure except that the movie had something of a happy ending that I don't think made the most sense, nor was it your traditional happy ending, so it wasn't so bad, but I'm not sure that Spader and Andie MacDowell, would have really ended up together, with the hope of a future together, and I'm not sure why Soderbergh ended this masterpiece that way, but it might have diminished it a little, a strange thing to say about a seminal movie, but it might be the reason people don't seem to talk about it today, and its influence has been forgotten, or maybe it will ressurect generations down the line, as the most important movie of an era, but here's my guess. The ending can definitely be read as one of those classic endings from a Fifties melodrama or adult comedy where psychoanalysis is sort of heralded as a new cure that was going to make humanity better; there were handfuls of movies ending with a shrink curing someone, and making them able to live and love again, free of fear, or whatever mental complex was holding them back; the viewer watched a break through, no matter how unlikely it may have seemed at the beginning, and these films were almost like propaganda flicks for the psychiatry industry, though they may have just been mirroring a greater hope of the day, or both. I'd say "Sex, Lies, and Videotape," fits into this classic narrative except it's updated, because I'm not sure Spader really sees himself as an artist, but more as a shrink, and even has an oath of confidentiality regarding the tapes. Sure, he's an inveterate liar, but he's trying to cure that, and he claims he won't show the tapes to anyone, and he never does, I don't think, nor is there a sense that he has an agenda up his sleeve. He's really a healer in this movie looking for his own salvation through healing others, and sacrifices his life and sanity, an expectation I'm sure people have of the best shrinks, even though they are cloaked under the guise of a doctor, with diplomas. Spader was clearly an artist with a video camera, or if not that, an interviewer, collecting data, but he's also the ultimate shrink looking to free himself and his pain through another and achieves this at the end, to the detriment of his art, or the end of the project, depending on your point of view. I'm not sure the movie is so rosy that you are lead to believe they will make it as a couple, because the idea that they even become a couple is not what one takes away from "Sex," and maybe that's the critique. It's almost a formulaic predictable ending, strangely told, to an otherwise completely original work of art.

Would I change it? No, I wouldn't, though it would have been more realistic to have Spader kind of freak out when the camera was pointed at him and maybe reacted a little more violently. Soderbergh captures this a little bit, but the violence comes more from Andie MacDowell, and the transformation that Spader goes through on the camera just isn't compelling enough, the therapy session not deep enough, even if it's plausible. He should've really broken down crying with the camera on him, a really tortured soul, but this didn't happen. Nor did he do a shitty interview and tell Andie MacDowell to fuck off, which I think would have probably happened in real life, if you are to suspend disbelief, and believe in the movie, and I think you are able to do this. I don't think they would've ended up together, though they may have had sex, but I just don't think Spader would be cured so easily, nor do I think he wanted to be cured. I wouldn't have made him such a perfect shrink at the end, though you could have shown him getting something from being interviewed, but he would've snapped, and maybe driven out of the town in a sad rage, packing up his videotapes, the art not freeing him. He could've even murdered her, or done something very Norman Bates, but that might not have been good, because I think part of the beauty of the film is how ambiguous and likeable Graham is, how relatable. No, the end was perfect, and it may just be the writing that wasn't quite up to snuff, but the screenplay was so on for over 2/3 of the movie this would be a weird criticism.

The sad happy clown that tickled our intelligence, James Thurber

The Middle-aged Man on the Flying Trapeze by James Thurber

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I read "Middle Age Man on the Flying Trapeze," at 29 years old, on the brink of manhood and middle age, and I adored every story. I'd been reading a lot of the heavyweights up until this time - Dostoevsky on the Russian front, Jean Genet on the French front, Joyce and Beckett on the Irish front, though both had exiled to Paris - but I started lowering my expectations of myself as a reader, perhaps intuiting the future of my fiction, because I'm not sure I have a big novel in me, or as I used to say 'big books, big belly's.' I'm more of a sketch writer at heart, and Thurber is a master of the form, and to emphasize it he's also one of the great 'doodlers' of the 20th century, maybe the greatest that didn't have the pretense to call himself an Artist (capital A),' just a doodler, nothing more. Yet he defined the iconic "New Yorker" cartoons based on abstract humor that pre-dated 'The Far Side' by a good thirty of forty years, and I'm sure a good argument could be made that Thurber is really best remembered as a drawer, not a writer, or a humorist at best. His prose almost lacks style, though it has a lot of substance, voice, and vision, but just not a new literary style like Gertrude Stein writing, "A rose is a rose is a rose," but Thurber's drawings, say 'Thurber.' I'm sure he's been copied by millions of 'doodlers' including John Lennon and me.

Most of the stories in this collection are pretty light like in all of Thurber's collections, but he was one of the most deceptive light-hearted writers of all time, because almost all of his stories are imbued with a real dark humor, or love of life, that cuts to the soul, as effectively as a romantic poet, even if the conceit of the stories is relatively mundane, and why they are more like sketches than actual stories, because very little happens, nor do I remember suspenseful endings. Two stories really stand out in this book and taught me that you could tell as much in a few pages as you could in a novel, and that a story could be like a song, filling the reader's mind with impressions for years to come, even if it lacked the moral depths implied in a novel, and maybe why I write novellas, or long stories, told quickly. I never really wanted to be a moralist with a point of view, just an observer of life in all of its emotional highs and lows like Thurber - a great comic clown, with a dark underbelly, that secretly drove America mad, with his insightful 'humorous' tales delving into the human soul, albeit whimsically, making us not afraid to look, even while he was rearranging our thoughts about life. He was a truly important artist to me for a year of my life, making me see the world anew, and when he wrote his longer story 'My Years with Ross,' to the great cardinal seminal editor of the "New Yorker," it was a memoir, seen through another man's eyes, a great point of view, but still a sketch, just a very long one, reordering the years.

I can't find my copy of "The Middle Age Man" right now, but it's in my head forever and especially 'One is a Wanderer,' about a lonely man living in a flea bag motel after work on a typical day with nothing to do but kill time in post war America, living on the fringe, without the delights of a suburban wife tickling his fancy, an almost early kind of "Midnight Cowboy," if that's possible; though it's more like a Bukowski story of a wannabe writer in the Forties ambling into the big city for a little adventure, but finding only loneliness and the bottle to get him through the night, an incredible sketch. The other story was about his best friend that was the great 'unknown genius' of his times, and just a warm touching thought response to a great but maddening individual that changed Thurber forever, a mild mannered man by comparison, but I can't remember the title, and it's driving me crazy.* What struck me most was that in six or seven pages Thurber managed to write a story as good as the tome that my mentor was working on for half his life that was also about his best friend, a great unknown genius of the world, and a character type that every artistic/creative group of friends must have, or at least a version of it, and everyone always thinks that their undiscovered genius is the greatest of all, and the most worthy of posthumous praise. It's a hilarious, sad, and unforgettable story of an idle zeitgeist, one of the great themes of art.

*I'd lent the book to a friend and he reminded me that the title was "Something to Say."



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The Blue Angels over Seattle

The Blue Angels are doing their annual fly-over of Seattle, that sort of defines the city in a weird way. I grew up in L.A. and I don't remember anything like this happening, with such bravado, even though there were lots of helicopters in the sky, but that feels more like surveillance, than actual war. The Blue Angels fly very low like they are doing a bombing run, in packs of three, and it is very ballet like and magical, if you can divorce your mind from the sound, how much they cost, what they symbolize, and then there's that deafening 'sonic' sound, that just kind of paralyzes me with fear, like I'm about to be killed. In 1996, I didn't understand why the citizens of the city would want to do this to themselves and I'm not sure I'm any clearer on it today, except that the sound does kind of jar you into a consciousness, like a crazy orgasm, that rocks the world, and for all I know it drives the citizenry onto the autumn, like a Super Bowl victory, even if it hurts.

The Blue Angels woke me up today at about 10 a.m., and they scared my cat, and I was pissed off, screaming at the military industrial complex, for creating this bravado, or cheer, for war. I couldn't believe tax dollars were going to this pure pageantry, when people are starving in the street, or can't find a place to live, or can't afford surgery for when they are sick, but these are intellectual thoughts, and that's where the Blue Angels over Seattle, really kind of rip the city apart. They expose the anti-militaristic WTO side of the city, against the locals that made the economy by working at Boeing in a bygone era, the great blue collar Seattle industry, that has been supplanted by the Tech boom, Microsoft, and Amazon Village, but still has a presence both in the past of the city, and the present, or in the words of William Faulkner, "The past is never dead. It's not even past."

The Angels bring out a lot in people. The first two most obvious reactions are they either love them, or hate them, without much intellect involved. The people who love them have aesthetics on their side, at least visually, because if you can plug up your ears, or get a formula one kind of thrill out of the Angels ripping through the speed of sound, they are fantastic to watch, like crazy dancers. The pilots are the best of the best, I guess, or so I've been told, and they put on a show for the people, and if you don't consider any of the political issues, it's hard to deny that what they can do is kind of amazing, a real life video game, and thankfully no one is bombed. I'm not so unartistic that I haven't appreciated their arabesque moves so high above me, and have had moments of a horrific sort of excitement, at seeing them fly right over my apartment building, but it's the kind of excitement you have to brace yourself for, like a roller coaster ride.

"The Sun, Moon, and Ascendant, are one's all."

In astrology, 'the Sun, Moon, and Ascendant,' are one's all, according to Vettius Valens, the great surviving Hellenistic astrologer, but it's an axiom that lives to this day, but one of the hardest to fathom. In the west, we are taught that the Sun is 'who we are,' the Moon is 'how we feel,' and the ascendant is 'how we appear,' but these ideas are slippery if they are not grounded in a deeper kind of rule, and it took me many years to learn that the Sun represented the 'Spirit,' the Moon 'the body,' and the Ascendant... I'm not sure that was ever divvied out like the keywords are for the planets, because the ascendant is not a planet, but the point in the horoscope indicating the exact time that you were born, not a planet at all, but the consteallation rising in the East at your birth, and therefore the mystical 'you.' I think part of the reason that Vettius Valens thought the 'Sun, Moon, and Ascendant,' were one's all, was that you needed to know the exact degrees of these three points to accurately ascertain the Lot of Fortune and the Lot of Spirit, that become the framework for much of Hellenistic astrology, but the moderns weren't thinking that way at all, and yet I'd say they hold to the same maxim, without even considering the Lots. The moderns were famous for calling the Ascendant a 'mask' that we wore for the world, and therefore not our true self, and I'm pretty sure this idea stemmed from not only 20th century psychology, but living in the land of luxury post-Vietnam, where we had a tendency to disassociate how we 'appeared' at work, or to the public, to how we really were deep down, and I guess this makes sense, since I am one of those fortunate Americans that could make a living driving pizzas, and disassociate my job from 'me.' At the same time, I'd argue that how we appear is how we are, at least to a degree, or at least it can't be separated from who we are, because we are what we appear to be, and conform to people's expectations of us. Separating your Ascendant from your Sun and Moon (Spirit and Body), or thinking of it as a mask that you can just rip off, exposing your true self, seems kind of disingenuous, because we become our mask over time, and the Ascendant really is how other people see us, and more than that, how we present ourselves to other people, aside from our body, which we don't control much, or our Spirit that shines through our body, or upon it like the light on the Moon's surface.

Astrologically, the Ascendant is not one of the seven planets like the Sun and Moon, the luminaries, and the unbridled leaders of anyone's chart, especially if you consider a chart from a Hellenistic perspective, and divide it into the day and night, depending on whether the Sun was below the horizon line, or above it at the time of birth. The Sun and Moon rule the signs Leo and Cancer, and are therefore active in the chart, making aspects to the other planets, and the other five aspects are making planets to them, but either way they have an essential nature and an accidental one, because they can be in any 12 houses in the chart, unlike the Ascendant degree, that is always in the 1st house associated with the east. The Ascendant has only an accidental nature and though the planets apply, separate, or are averse to it, it is simply being and you'd never say the Ascendant was opposing the Sun, you'd say the Sun was opposing the Ascendant. It is the self at the simplest point without the noise or the traffic of the drama of the horoscope really affecting it, as it's just a point, without any sect affiliation, or planetary attributes, let alone the ruler of a sign, that make up the 12 houses of the horoscope. The Ascendant degree is being in its purest form, and is therefore anything but a mask, but the raw essence that we put forth defining us, with our more subtle nature coming out in the play of the planets in the chart, and their natures, though this play is dramatically changed by the Ascendant and how the planets relate to it, not how IT relates to the planets, since it really doesn't do anything but exist on its own terms, receiving but not giving. You can 'progress' the Ascendant, a modern timing technique, but I'm not sure you can do much more with it except fear the transits from the malefics - Saturn and Mars - or rejoice at the transits from the benefics - Venus and Jupiter. It is plainly and simply the self that all negotiations must surrender to in the play of the chart, and by play I mean both as a game and a piece of drama. I don't know what it's like to simply be without any consciousness but if such a place is possible through meditation than it would be how I see the Ascendant in astrology as a place of pure being, the time of our birth.

So, when we shake someone's hand are we meeting their Ascendant, or their Sun, or their Moon? This is a question modern astrologers ponder endlessly looking at the chart from the perspective of character development, and it's difficult to answer. I'm tempted to say you are meeting all three, their spirit, body, and accidental self, that simply is, beyond intent, and maybe you are. But it's someone's body you are first coming into contact with, so maybe you are meeting the sign the Moon was in at birth when you shake their hand, and look into their eyes, but they say the eyes are the window to the soul, so the expression in them must be their spirit, symbolized by the Sun, shining through them, their indomitable spirit that defies the body, and its gestures. The deeper goals of the life, must be contained within the Ascendant degree, and the dreams of the individual, because the Sun and Moon must run through it to achieve much, and yet we're not meeting someone's deepest dreams when we shake their hand, unless they are such a profound character that their 'vision' is somehow audible at once, but this is rare. We're seeing their body and maybe their spirit, so it must be the Moon that we are meeting, and the Moon that we actually put forth as a first impression, that either attracts or repels people.

Something Unusual, Something Strange

'In a land far far away,' before the internet really existed, I used to hang out in bookstores a lot looking for the right book for me. I had a belief that it would just pop out at me, as if by magic, or if that's too strong a word, that a book would choose me, like a pet, and to this day I kind of look at books, movies, and paintings like that, thinking that some higher hand of fate was at work, when I saw a book on a carousel, that caught my eye. Sure, I've been turned onto things by friends and strangers that I wouldn't have otherwise known about, but more often than not, these 'picks,' usually turn out to be 'underwhelming,' and make me wish I could just find a book on a street corner and call it mine. Unfortunately, there aren't many bookstores left to go to in Seattle, and that's really saying something, since this city prides itself on its literacy, and like everyone else I've just kind of retreated to the internet in the hopes of finding some magic dust on line, or communicating through the randomness of strangers and old friends on FB, but it's just not the same thing as loitering in a book shop. There still is a Barnes & Noble in downtown Seattle, and I guess there will always be at least one bookstore left for the truly devout, or the lazy, or those just not good enough at working a computer, or too poor to own one, but they are already becoming as ubiquitous as TV's, and that will be over in a generation, or a millisecond, take your pick. I think the 'spirit' of going to a bookstore, or working at one (I worked at Book Soup in L.A., and thought it was the best job I'd ever had, a hard one to get), has already been killed by those thoughts that swirl in the air above us and sort of define society, the viruses of the era.

I never thought I'd say this but I was actually surprised to find myself going to a bookstore the other day. I only went because I was meeting my girlfriend at work, with half an hour to kill, and even then I wondered if I'd be able to do it, or if I'd grow bored, and find nothing to read. I took the elevator downstairs and saw the 'new fiction' shelf but nothing really popped out at me, only increasing my alienation with the publishing world, not to mention most of the 'New Fiction' felt very old. Then one popped out at me called 'The Opposite of Loneliness,' by a young collegiate looking woman with her photo on the cover, and it's so rare to see this kind of thing, I immediately perked up. Sure, I was skeptical, and the title kind of threw me right off the bat, because I study a lot of astrology, and the idea of 'opposition' is a very pertinent one that takes a lot of thought, but I let it go, knowing it was my own 'hang-up.' Besides, the title must have been good because it caught my eye and one thing titles and advertising have in common is that they want to get into your subconscious, whether your conscious mind knows it or not.

I picked a copy off the display table and took it to the coffee shop area, run by Starbucks, where they let any ol' Tom, Dick, or Harry, sit and read, a perk. It's funny that I should say that because in my more idealistic days I would have ranted against Barnes & Noble for selling out to Starbucks, the corporate cup o' Joe, with the corporate book, but in 2014 you take what you can get. I had a couple of quick thoughts before reading it and one was that 'The Opposite of Loneliness,' was a work of 'creative nonfiction,' a genre I blogged about in the last six months, and that I think has taken over collegiate writing courses throughout the U.S. thus dating me. The influence of the 'New Journalism' of the Sixites hadn't really spread to academia yet, or not entirely, even though Hunter S. Thompson was quite popular, but the literary heroes when I studied creative writing (can you study creative writing?) were Raymond Carver, Don DeLillo (ugh!), and a kind of postmodern Boomer minimalist school of fiction, but not 'creative nonfiction,' that blurs the line between an essay and art. I certainly wasn't liberated enough to write 'creative nonfiction' in my early Twenties, wanting to be the next F. Scott Fitzgerald, or Hemingway. I liked Jack Kerouac a lot, but I'm not sure his autobiographical writing wasn't more of a Catholic confessional in the guise of fiction, with all of the regular trappings, than 'creative nonfiction,' that really relies on the idea of an essay, in a way that the Beats just didn't. In my opinion, Joan Didion is really the spiritual Godmother of the creative non-fictionalist, because she wrote these sort of lyrical beautiful pieces in the late Sixties that were informed by fiction and poetry, but were neither, veering more towards an essay, but a very self reflective one that somehow situated her in her times as much as anything.

The subheading to "The Opposite of Loneliness," was 'stories and essay's,' and this combined with a young woman on the cover that looked like she could be in Lena Dunham's TV show, "Girls," (Dunham made a movie called "Creative Nonfiction"), lead me to believe that I had stumbled upon a new literary sensation lighting it up in Williamsburg,and that I was a contemporary reader, for once. The first essay story was the title piece and it was about Marina Keegan ending her time at Yale and looking forward to a new life, but not with any hope for the future, but rather a tinge of sadness that she'd never feel that part of anything again, and it was a very moving piece, that sent shivers down my spine. I related to every word she wrote and that odd dual anxiety that college gives of both thinking that your life is going to take off, and that you've seen better days all at the same time; a feeling of being one with your peers, like you must get in the military in your late teens or early twenties, without any family, or any real definition. It is an unusually loaded emotional time for everyone, because it's like you know that what you're in for is going to change you forever, but you don't know how, and though you're told not to fear it, the poet inside of you realizes that life is only going to thin out and get lonelier from there, as your peers define themselves through family and work, losing the incipient dream of the undergraduate excited by every new major that flashes before them. It was a beautiful piece of writing and I went onto the next piece that was more of a story than an essay, but a very personal one, that I would have been far too shy to write at 22, though I shouldn't have been, and while it didn't have the immediate punch of the opening essay, it was good clear writing about a guy she was dating at Yale that had unexpectedly died, a weird kind of macabre love story, about her competing for his love with his more steady girl.

I looked at my cell phone and saw that it was almost time to leave to meet Jenny, but I didn't want to put the book down, and did my best to memorize the author's name, not having a pen on me, even though my father, an ad man, always told me to carry a pen to jot down ideas. I was going to look up Marina Keegan when I got home and put a hold on her book at the library, because I really thought that the Gods wanted me to read her, and had put me in Barnes & Noble at that exact moment to make a new discovery, and it has been so long since I've made a new discovery in letters that really blew me over, that I should really pay attention, especially since I have become something of a 'creative nonfictionalist' myself (I know the spelling is wrong). I glanced at the back of the book to see what writers had jumped on the Marina Keegan bandwagon, and started reading Harold Bloom say how much he liked the story, and that glimpses of talent could be seen, making it all the sadder that Marina Keegan had died, leaving us only this book. "It can't be," I thought, especially since she was so young on the cover, and the stories were full of 'texts' and computer talk that placed it very much in the present, not to mention she graduated Yale and was all but cajoling her peers to take the bull by the horns and do what they could to change the world, or make their imprint on it. It was doubly weird because I was also reading a story of hers about a boy in college dying, a rare event, only to learn she actually died, a year or so after. I wasn't sure what to think about the 'Boomer' critics on the back hedging on the quality of her work since I found it hard to believe that they'd ever send shivers down my spine like she did, looking forward to the future, but holding onto the past, even if I read it in only twenty minutes. I felt like I'd discovered a significant artist and lost her all in a flash.

The 'Subliminable Catastrophic Success' of George W. Bush

A friend of mine once said that if they had made George W. Bush the commissioner of baseball, that he would've never felt the need to be President and that may be true, considering baseball was his true love, and the pitch he threw out at the World Series right after 9-11, a strike, was maybe his best moment as President, along with him on the bullhorn the day of 9-11, or soon after, because time blurs events. The W. years seem like a million years ago and what's stranger is that they are the 'Bush' years, eclipsing those of his father in every way, even if 'Pappy' was one of those moderate Republicans from the WW II era, an Eisenhower guy, that maintained the moral order created by the Holocaust, by serving in the war, a decorated hero, like my Grandfather, a great man. His son, W., was a scoundrel, a black-heart, and had none of his Father's old fashioned grace, but had way more drama in him than his Father could ever imagine, and maybe this was the distinguishing characteristic between the Boomers and their parents; the parents humble heroics in WWII were so great, that the younger generation had to compensate by outdoing them domestically, and rising to the heights of the social order, or the political world, becoming much more dramatic (if less humble) than their parents could ever imagine. That's how I see W. compared to Pappy Bush, his Father, much more dramatic, but less competent.

I'm not really sure when the W. years began, but I think it goes in 3 big movements if it were a movie, or a play. The first act would be the campaign itself for the Presidency, after Clinton's spill (no pun intended) with Lewinsky, and the shit hole that put the Democratic Party in, circa 2000. W. was a joke from the very beginning, and I doubt if Clinton hadn't gone down so ignobly, his candidacy would ever caught fire, but W. wasn't running against Clinton, the most gifted politician of his era, but his Veep Al Gore, a good man (I guess, or at least he was against Global Warming), but a God-awful boring politician, that should have had no problem getting elected, but fudged the campaign, playing it too safe, not seeing Clinton's help, angry at him for Lewinsky, and ultimately losing Tennessee his home state, because Karl Rove, the architect, or someone in the W. dynasty, realized that the way to sell W. was as a recovering alcoholic that had discovered Jesus, an AA guy. It sounds insane but in the political climate of the late Nineties with the Republicans impeaching Clinton in the House, it worked... no blow jobs, no booze. George W. Bush was Sinclair Lewis's "Elmer Gantry" to me running on Christian compassion.

I will probably never see a more bizarre election than the one in 2000, one for the books, or the referees, in modern parlance, when it appeared that W. won, but suddenly the vote was in question, and the outcome uncertain, throwing both candidates into a tizzy. Stupidly, Gore conceded before he realized that the vote count in Florida was in question, and then took back the concession, and losing the impression of a victor, that W. never stopped promoting to the press, even as the Gore team won legal battles. I was watching it in my apartment and Jenny was in the shower, and when she came out I told her that they took back the winner, and it was the strangest thing I ever saw, and she was blown away, because political history was happening right before our eyes, and the campaign dragged out for weeks. It ended with one of the worst rulings by the Supreme Court ever, when it voted 5-4 along political lines to dismiss a ruling by the Florida State Supreme Court, ordering Floridians to STOP counting the vote, and I can't think of a more undemocratic ruling than this. The most telling thing about it from a judicial historical perspective was that the Court said that the ruling shouldn't be considered as any kind of precedence, and was a 'one-off.' Wow, the biggest ruling the Court made in my life time was a 'one-off.' I think that discredited the Court more than any ruling I can think of, and the Justices are now largely seen as 9 politicians in robes instead of wise men and women.

W. came into the Presidency and instead of ruling from the middle of the political spectrum like most (idiotic) pundits predicted, he went far to the right with 9-11 as cover, happening only 9 months into his Presidency, or thereabouts, which had become a national embarrassment internationally, and a horror domestically, and held up in the courts. I really thought the Supreme Court giving the Presidency to W. was one of my lowest points as an every-man American political observer, but it was nothing compared to what happened after 9-11, and for better or worse, that day will define my political consciousness forever, and I'm a little ashamed by it, but jut give into it as a fact. I was 33 years old when the Saudis flew those planes into the Twin Towers, and my best friend, called me up to tell me about the event, and Jenny, my girlfriend, said "I'm going to kill whoever that was that called." Well, it was 'Seaside Johnny,' calling to tell me that the U.S. as we knew it was ending, and it really did feel that way, but it was six in the morning in Seattle, a sunny bright day, and I just wanted to sleep. I met Seaside Johnny that day and we went to a dock in Madrona looking out at Lake Washington, feeling historical time pass, at the edge of the city, and the same neighborhood that Kurt Cobain committed suicide, our spiritual brother. I went to work that night (a Tuesday), and it was very busy, with traffic going crazy, at a every stop, and the feeling that America was on the verge of ending, so people wanted pizza to comfort themselves. It was also the first time I realized that the whole pizza delivery business model could go under with a terrorist attack, because the business model seemed indefatigable to me before, and I felt like a moron.

I don't want to go into my feelings about 9-11 too much except that I wore a button 'questioning it' for awhile, and a Korean lady that owned a Teriyaki shop I would go to would give me dirty looks, but the political climate really was edgy in the U.S., and I felt on my guard, but everyone did. The W, administration created the department of Homeland Security, and I remember seeing him dong it on TV in a Fifties burger place in Pioneer Square, and thinking I'd gone back in time, somehow, like Marty McFly in "Back To the Future." The Fifties were happening all over again and the 'Terrorists' were the new communist's, and we were supposed to feel like we were called to a new destiny as a Nation, but we weren't. Honestly, I felt like the U.S. had 9-11 coming and that wasn't even a subversive thought considering my liberal arts education, but this was lost on the mainstream media. I felt too old for 9-11 but I was only 33, yet had been through a lifetime of political disillusionment. I had the stark realization in 1988 that the Reagan years just weren't ending anytime soon, and while that might sound like a glib reflection from the perspective of 2014, it was kind of shocking to me then, since I was raised in a very inspired kind of idealistic Boomer Sixties way, and was taught that Reagan's rule might be over very soon, and the liberals would come back into power, but by 1988 it was clear that may never happen again, and the Country was just going more right wing politically than I could have ever dreamed in the Seventies as a little kid, riding my first political wave after Nixon's resignation from office over Watergate. I still remember hearing on the radio from that time the possibility that the Republican Party could be over for my lifetime, but such predictions were about as far off as thinking World War I would be the war to end all wars. I really thought the U.S. was going to have some sort of economic collapse in the Nineties, or a rupture, and that all of the optimism about how the Nation had morally and economically survived the Vietnam conflict was just a bunch of crap, but that didn't happen as dramatically as I imagined, making me think it may never happen.

I didn't know what to expect from the W. years and as much as 9-11 may not have been the biggest shock to my system, thinking America was heading for a fall, you never know what it's going to look like until it happens, and I wasn't ready for the terrorist propaganda that took over the Nation. The Clinton years had been largely apolitical for me, and in the words of many contemporary historians I've often heard the Nineties described as a rather a-historical decade largely defined by the fall of communist Russia, and an end to the Cold War as I knew it growing up in the shadow of the Nuclear Bomb. It was a time America had no Superpower we were competing with for world domination and at least gave the illusion we had won the Cold War, making for boring politics, but W. was anything but boring. It's hard to remember from the perspective of 2014, deep into Obama's Presidency, that the days following 9-11 were unlike any I had ever seen before. I was psychologically prepared for some kind of fall for America, seeing us as losing some kind of moral high ground in the Nineties, slipping into a spiritual paralysis; I had also never actually lived, or experienced, Cold War politics, when the Cold War was hot, and just caught a kind of weird Eighties sequel brought to us by the Hollywood actor Ronald Reagan, who starred in the first Cold War, as a real warrior against communism. The Cold War was theoretically over in the Nineties, but atmospherically that's what W.'s first term in office felt like, and I hope to never live anything like it again. W. politicized 9-11 so much that he wanted every American to think a 'towelhead' was under his bed, ready to takeover the Nation, at a moment's notice, and that we had to be vigilant citizens because our new enemy was nothing we'd seen before, without a political ideology like the 'Reds' from the Fifties, but a religious one, and that he was going to suicide bomb us and change our way of life forever. At the same time, Bush told us to keep shopping, because I guess going to 'malls' was the way of life the Terrorists were going to change, and shopping was our pastime.

I studied the Cuban Revolution in college and thought that was going to be my time to take political action and that I had to be in shape to go to the mountains and fight a revolution, but my time never came, or so I thought, and I grew complacent in the Nineties, becoming an artist instead of a revolutionary. I wasn't really ready to take on a revolutionary cause in 2001, at 33 years old, and even if I was, I'm not sure what the cause would have been, so following W. became the cause. The historic way that he had stole the election in front of everyone's eyes followed quickly by 9-11, made me realize that I was finally living in a historical moment, and my response was to simply read the paper, and in hindsight that doesn't seem like much of a response, but at the time it felt like a big deal, because I had become so politically disillusioned, I hadn't done that in my adult life, even though I was taught and trained to be an informed member of the electorate. I cut out newspaper article after article (I didn't have a computer yet), amazed that I was living through history, but I had no idea how to respond, save to educate myself, and to stay on top of the news. I don't really have it in me to go into a blow by blow account of all the atrocities of the W. administration, but maybe I'll list a thing or two that I remember from an article I read sometime during the Bush years, that made a pretty cogent objective take for why W. was the worst President in the Nation's history.

1. He discredited belief in the representative system of government by at least giving the impression of stealing an election.

2. It was on his watch that America suffered one of its worst terrorist attacks in history.

3. W. blatantly lied us into the Iraq War with shifting rhetoric almost every day, and used this as a rationale to infringe on our privacy as citizens with an infamous piece of legislation called 'The Patriot Act,' that he passed through Congress on the heels of 9-11, but was apparently written up before the attacks... hmmm....

4. He was the first President to cut taxes in a time of war, creating unheard of debt, and robbing the Treasury like a drunken sailor.

5. W.'s garbling of the English language made us an international laughing stock, and a joke to ourselves.

I'm sure this list could go on forever in more and more minutiae, but in my mind that is the gist of it, but listing and living it were two separate things. I kept hoping that W. would be taken down by Congress in his first term for exceeding executive power, and lying us into Iraq. (One of the administration's huge judicial points was to extend 'executive power' in the name of 'national security,' because Cheney thought the President's powers had been diminished with the 'Imperial Presidency' of Nixon, and many (myself included) thought that Dick Cheney, the Veep, was the President in the W. years, but that's another blog). In fact, an impeachment proceeding against W. was never even written up in the House of Representatives because there was no one in the Congress willing to do it, especially since the opposition party was made up of Clintonistas, that had done their best in the Nineties to look and breathe like Republicans, taking their campaign money from similar corporate sources, and had no will in them at all to do the obvious and question the President. This all but made me give up on the Democrats as spineless, since the American system of governance derives its integrity from the three branches of government (congressional, judicial, and executive) keeping an eye on each other, but Congress dropped the ball, lacking any clear opposition to W., even though he was hardly that popular. Sure, there was a commission set up for investigating 9-11, and a commission for this, and a commission for that, but none of them amounted to much, and I had to be disillusioned for a second time in my political consciousness, and I didn't see this coming. I thought I'd been through the worst when I was campaigning to save the environment in 1988 and tried to convince an older woman in the suburbs of Boston that Pappy Bush was not the environmental candidate, and she told me he was, because 'Pappy was a WWII hero and he said so.' I thought it was one of the most ignorant things I ever heard and all but made me want to quit thinking I could save the world, so I never thought I was going to get that excited about bringing a President down, but the W. years changed that.

I didn't campaign against W. in 2004 but I was a vocal opponent, and probably the most political I've been in my adult life. I spent a lot of time trying to convince my coworkers not to vote him, because one of the interesting things I learned in W.'s first term was that an 'ahistorical,' 'apolitical' climate that existed in the Nineties gave everyone political cover, because politics just wasn't that interesting, and no one really had to show their true colors, because no one's back was against the wall, in the least. Clinton's move to the right by stealing Republican issues like cutting welfare, all but positioned the Country in some kind of illusory middle and for a temporary moment suspended in space, there existed the belief that we were one Country again, maybe like existed in the Fifties, when no one knew if Eisenhower was going to run as a Democrat or a Republican, but it was an illusion, because the Republicans in Congress weren't ready to play nice, and tried to take down the most watered down Democratic Party President in the 20th century, on perjury over a blow job, an almost remarkable occurrence, thus defining Clinton's Presidency as a constitutional fight over the meaning of an impeachable offense (not to mention the meaning of 'is'), but even this felt kind of silly, mostly focusing on a semen stain on a blue dress, or a cigar that Clinton used to sexually tease Lewinsky, or other tawdry details of the President's sex life. Hillary Clinton did warn of a 'vast right wing conspiracy' on the Today show, but these kinds of moments were few and far between in the Clinton years, and let's face it fighting over the President's right to have an affair in the oval office, wasn't exactly a noble cause for a young liberal, even if profound political and constitutional questions were at stake.

The wheels really came off in W.'s second term, and I think this is what most Americans remember circa 2014, assuming they remember anything at all regarding politics. In 2005, after Hurricane Katrina, W. was basically washed up in the polls, and there was no coming back for him in the court of public opinion. Sure, his party's defeat wasn't so certain until the Democrats took over Congress in 2006, and there was plenty of anxiety up until that point, but it was clear he had screwed the Republican Party, W.'s brand, for maybe twenty or thirty years, and that would seem to be holding true to the day, with the current split between the Bush era Republicans (now called 'moderates'), and the Tea Party, but that's another essay. More importantly, W.'s second term gave me a second political hope, barring impeachment, and that was the W. years had gone so off the handle, that an impeachment wasn't really necessary, since he sort of impeached himself. W. was so hated by 2007 that I think most Americans had already started distancing themselves from him and this gave an incredible feeling of unity to the Country that I hadn't felt since everyone loved Reagan, a real sense of purpose. It was also an illusory feeling because the electorate was under the assumption that if we just got W. out of the Oval Office, everything would be fine, but the truth was the Democratic Party enabled him, along with the Republicans, and that the American political system was so adrift in corruption, that W. wasn't so much a cause of America's diminishing stature both domestically and internationally, but rather a symptom of a greater political realignment that had occurred in the Reagan years, with the Democrats taking money from corporations, rather than labor unions, its traditional base, thus moving to the right, and offering little to no opposition. Sure, W. was a freakish candidate that really may have been a one in a million - an 'Elmer Gantry' preacher that had seen the light through AA, a kind of hick that didn't like travelling, but at the same time was a President's son that went to Yale - but none of these unique attributes in a candidate really made him a cause of anything, just the symptom that the forces of history ran through, and the W. years gave people the illusion that America would be righted if only he wasn't the President.

No one thinks about W. anymore, but I'm not sure that's for the best. He's in hiding now painting, though I doubt that's even true, since everything about the man was fabricated for political gain, including his ranch in Crawford, where he'd famously clear brush like a cowboy. It was bought for campaign photos, and a narrative, as W.'s camp David in Texas, but it was about as real as a stage set. Everything about W.'s Presidency felt fabricated, and I suppose that's a big difference between the W. years, and the Obama years, where nothing feels fabricated (even if it is), and if anything Obama is going to go down as the President who dampened expectations about America's hegemony in the world, something I'd almost like to congratulate him for, if he just weren't so wishy-washy about even that, and actually gave a Jimmy Carter like speech akin to his famously disastrous one about a 'spiritual malaise' that will be remembered as one of the more honest speeches a President ever gave, even if the political timing was terrible. I'm not sure what anyone expected of Obama, aside from the historic break through of electing a Black President, but it must have had to do with an almost F.D.R/Kennedy like call to austerity and service in the name of the Nation, but that hasn't happened, either. It was possible to imagine in W.'s second term that America might be united enough against its 'idiot' President to go through some radical change, but that might've been wishful thinking, guided by the assumption that the President had all the power in the Country, not Wall St., or some shadow group like the Bilderbergs, but even without imagining conspiracies like this, the opposition Party had already been drained of its life blood by the time Obama became President, and it's willingness to change anything fundamental in the Country was already done. I was one of those people that wanted to believe Obama was the next Kennedy, and would have the courage to strike a balance between what was left of the liberal wing of his Party, and the moderates, but he didn't do this, and made me feel like a fool pretty early on in his first term. Now the W. years seem like some long forgotten dream, that we don't know how to talk about as a Country, and have gone into denial that we could have ever elected someone that stupid, but I'm afraid 'denial' isn't the right answer to our problems.

I don't follow the news lately or the politics behind the events that shape our lives, and I can't believe I'm the only one, that was lit like a firecracker in the W. years, only to sink back into a sort of depressed slumber when anything newsworthy comes up. I almost have to shock myself into recognition to even care more, and again I can't believe this is good for the Nation, because I can't believe I'm the only one. I have my excuses like, 'I want to focus on art more,' or less interestingly, 'I want to have a good time, and the news is depressing,' but neither of these points of view are very good, and I'm sure that's why our Country is slipping into some kind of hole, because the body politic is the reflection of the government, or so I was taught. The W. years burnt everyone out and I'm not sure I can blame him for that, because one of the unintended consequences of the W. Presidency, was it made for good drama, but maybe that was the goal all along, by whatever secret group helped get W. elected - anger everyone about politics, get them involved, make them think they can change things by nominating someone as unlikely as Barack Obama (a black man, with a terrorist's name), and then sucker punch the electorate by having him be very little different than W., or if that's unfair, crippled by a 'do nothing' Congress making him all but ineffectual. I'm not sure this really happened and like a friend of mine once wrote when thinking of politics, 'the simplest answer is usually the best,' but if that is so then the politics of Barack Obama were intended to bore everyone as an antidote to the melodramatic unbelievable Bush years, or as they dubbed him in the 2008 Democratic primary against Hillary 'No Drama Obama.' But what works in a campaign doesn't necessarily work as a leader, and I can't believe boring politics makes for a healthy public discourse, no matter how intelligent the President. To be fair, I'm not sure what Obama could have done, and like everyone said when he was elected, 'he's got a lot on his plate,' both internationally and domestically, which is both a blessing and a curse, but in the case of this President a curse, because he won't be remembered for much, save being the first Black man elected President, a big deal, but an event that ended on election night November 4, 2008, making for a real let down, because he was only President-elect at his peak. I'm writing this blog in an attempt to get more interested in politics and the events that shape them, although it's a slippery slope, and I'm sure at times politics shape the events in the news, but either way time marches on and Lord knows there's plenty of news everyday we're on the earth, but it's hard to care about politics if you think the system is rigged, or your Country has seen better days, or the President doesn't have power, and that whoever you vote for is the same person, regardless of Party, with a little tweak here, or a little tweak there. I'm the living embodiment of Gen X apathy raised to be a political idealist but finding nothing to believe in, like a man speaking a dead language that no one understands.

I hate Trey Parker and Matt Stone

I realize that if you find Trey Parker and Matt Stone's offensive gross out humor funny, or their cartooning somehow visually compelling, than I guess there's nothing a critic can say to stop this feeling, and I respect that. I'm sure there's tons of funny movies that I liked and people hated and like a coworker said (is that PC?), 'some people just like chocolate, and some like vanilla,' (I don't think he was even aware of the pun, and it's racial 'South Parkesque' overtones, even though he loves the show.) Let me also say that I hate the liberal PC deconstruction of the English language as much as Trey Parker and Matt Stone, I'm sure, and think that the Boomers are just pathetic to think that they could give up on the actual change required for a more equal society by masking it in an overly careful, overly preened language, that only took whatever street thug poetry existed in our polyglot called 'American,' our unique tongue, free of the King of England. I miss how people used to talk in the movies when women were girls, servers were waiters, flight attendants were stewardesses, African Americans were Blacks, etc. (I was taught that 'Black,' was a liberated word as in the 'Black power movement,' and James Brown singing "Say it loud, I'm black and I'm proud.") The changes have done nothing to make our society better in the least, only masking the real racial/gender problems that we face, so here's to Trey Parker and Matt Stone for jumping on the Gen X Anti-PC bandwagon, and I guess leading us into the blinding Sun; but political correctness became such a joke in our culture because of the failed revolution of the Sixties when political consciousness was at a peak in the wake of the Nazi atrocities in World War II, and the hope that the world would never go down such an awful path again. Sure, the boomers sold out and started driving BMW's (beautifully lampooned by Sarah Silverman in 'Why do Jews drive German cars'), but that doesn't mean the original impulse of their failed revolution for a more moral America was wrong in the least.

I know it's a Gen X bummer that we only got to catch the end of this dream so we've reveled in its failure as a kind of reaction against our parents and that's only natural. It's the well spring of punk, grunge, and lots of great sitcoms that dismantle the PC language much better than Trey Parker or Matt Stone ever did ("The Office," "30 Rock," "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia," to name a few) but at the bottom of these shows there is a sense that a wounded tortured liberal FDR/Kennedy inspired soul, is lying beneath the surface of the writing, and mocking contemporary liberal culture as a sort of reaction against the Democratic Party that the Clinton's best represent, and that did little for core Democratic Party beliefs, but offered a lot of PC lip service as some kind of substitute, in the hopes that neutralizing the language would make for a more equal America, a ludicrous lazy idea. The problem with "South Park" and reactionary PC humor in general is that it's only funny if you see it as a reaction against the 'sell-out' of your culture, through some pretty wishy washy leftover ideas from the Sixties, missing the spark of revolution. It sort of relies on a 'wink-wink' with it's generally liberal arts educated audience that went through college and had to struggle with the PC language in term papers, and introductory courses on everything from race relations, to economics, and on this 'wink-wink' level it is funny.... maybe even "South Park," gets a point or two for this (God, does it pain me to say that), but if you take the 'wink-wink' out of this humor, I'm afraid something very dangerous can happen very quickly. Let's face it 'anti-PC' humor revels in making fun of minorities of every stripe (the real accidental victims of the PC takeover of the language), and it gives incredible cover to real racists, misogynists, anti-semites, and bigots. Less egregiously, or more, depending on your point of view, this new form of comedy gives a sort of window to let bigots have their say in the public discourse, and this might've started with Rush Limbaugh's 'Fem Nazi's,' that made a point, but I doubt anyone from Oakwood would be caught dead saying they were a fan of his, and I'd say Trey Parker and Matt Stone, aren't that far off from him, save they aren't LITERALLY propagandizing for a political party.

Clearly, these two 'nihilists,' of a sort of remedial sort, were clever enough to pass the laugh test and trick people (my friends) into thinking that because they make fun of EVERYONE that somehow they are free of criticism, existing on a kind of island of their own, but that's bullshit. Sure, their comedy is reactionary, just like Sarah Silverman's, but beneath the reaction I see a couple of right wing guys that figured out a great way to make fun of liberals of every stripe, without taking any political heat for it. I get the idea that the religious right probably hates them, but they don't like anything that doesn't adhere to a pretty strict and consistent message, so they weren't really trying to win them to their side anyway, and I'd argue that a lot of kids with Evangelical parents that voted Republican in the Nineties and 2000's, were big "South Park" fans thinking they were watching a very subversive show because they made fun of organized religion, and were probably very comfortable with "South Park," because they could flip the bird at their parents, while at the same time maintaining their core Republican beliefs of a 'White America' that they were probably too young to realize they had inculcated in them, killing two birds with one (Matt) Stone. I guess it's easy for me to go off on these two because I don't think they present a very complicated picture for a critic, or at least not this one, because I just don't think they are comically talented. I'm sure we could make arguments that the timing of the show was perfect, but once you get past that and their luck, neither Parker or Stone are as interesting to think about as, say, that schmuck Larry David, or Woody Allen, who I've lost all respect for, or many others, whose comic gift is just kind of unquestionable, even if their politics bug the shit out of me, or I hate what their movies or shows are about. There are some comics like athletes that you just have to concede are great, even if you hate them on a personal level, just like you have to do with some politicians; I'd say Reagan and Clinton are perfect examples of this to me, two men that I find just detestable regarding policy, but have to admit they had real political chops, and were just likable, like that guy at a party that you want to punch in the face if he just wasn't so damn charming, but I don't get this from the guys behind "South Park" in the least, and don't see anything particularly brilliant about them, save that they had perfect timing. They are no funnier than a couple of kids telling fart jokes, and not even joking on the 'fart joke,' just letting it rip, and going for laughs.

A season to remember, the Mariner's rubber band year

The roller coaster season just goes on. I was ready to give up on the M's if they didn't fare so well in this home stand, and they've started out shaky, but today the bats came out, after an error on the Braves second baseman, gave them a little luck last night, and Felix another victory, on an awesome season, and I'm not even a huge fan, but you just have to sort of admire how consistent he is every time he goes out there on the mound. He usually gives up a run or two in the first few innings, and then there's nothing else, but by nothing, I mean nothing, barely a decent hit ball. The M's won today and hope is alive again in Seattle because I am the M's 12th man with a couple of other guys from work. All it would take is one push, and they could be right at the point in the race to do that, hanging with a few contenders neck and neck, and then just bursting out, off to the races, because the only thing holding them back is their hitting, and yet they've shown flashes of brilliance this year. They had a flash last year during a lightning storm in early August that was put out quickly, but not this season and that has sort of defined the happy go lucky manic depression of the M's.

I think they have a burst in them, but we'll see how far it goes. Either way, it's amazing that they are lighting the asses of the city up again, after almost fading from sight entirely a week ago, but such is the never ending season, that must be really waited out, to see what transpires. It's important to remember that the Mariners are competing with a handful of A.L. teams for the wild card spot, because the Anaheim Angels have all but sown up the first seed, since they are one of the best teams in baseball, and competing with the A's, the best team, for a division title. I'm not going to prognosticate so that everyone can point their finger at me and tell me that I'm wrong, but I think the M's have one more run in them before the season is out, and there is time for them to rebound from their post all-star skid and regain their footing - a skid that started with a 16 inning loss to the Angels in Southern California that was hard to explain if you weren't listening. I wrote that the M's may have lost the battle but won the war in that marathon session, but thought I'd live to retract those words, given their mediocre hitting after the all star break, but hopefully, the Great Mariner in the sky will right this ship, and they'll have the wind at their back towards the end, even if they don't get that coveted 2nd wild card spot, that the league has made up for grabs to any competitive team, that gets hot at the right time of the season, the clutch time. Unlike a perfect work of art, even the best baseball season is bound to sag somewhere along the way, given that great teams lose upwards of 80 games, and we may have just had that moment where it was best to go out and get some popcorn, or garlic fries, with sauerkraut and mustard, and come back for the finale. We'll see, but at least the roller coaster ride was worth paying for this season, unlike last year's bust by June.