Seth Kupchick's Blog: Bet on the Beaten, page 8

The Martian in three acts

I saw a movie yesterday called The Martian, and in my opinion it had NO discernible second act. The conceit was an astronaut gets left on Mars and must survive, and I'm not sure much else happened. There were a couple of minor subplots that were part of the 2nd act: one had to do with an internal debate at NASA about whether to save the surviving astronaut, but it was minor, and another about the guilt/obligation of his fellow crew members to go back to save him, but again so minor you'd never for an instant say that's what "The Martian" was about. I think what would've made the movie interesting, or one for the ages, would be if the astronaut a) either didn't want to leave Mars, and had decided he could survive there, because of his disillusionment with the earth, or b) if he went crazy, and you weren't sure if he wanted to survive there, or die, or something like that. It would've made the movie psychologically interesting, rather than a very dull plot driven exercise, that looked good visually. Astronaut gets stuck on Mars, learns how to survive, contacts Houston, gets miraculously saved, the end.

I suppose the 2nd act is the psychological drama, that the conceit spurs on. I would've loved to see the astronaut fight NASA, either because he wanted to be left alone, or he learned that they left him there to die and was struggling with his disillusionment, and think that would've made it a truly interesting story, the meat of the conceit. The 1st and 3rd act would've been the same, he would've been left on Mars forced to survive (the conceit), and then he'd be saved (wrapping up the conceit), or not, but the middle of the story would be completely different. There really was no story to speak of, no relationship that the astronaut had either with aliens, the crew that ditched him, or mission control in Houston, just nothing to substantiate the conceit. I really seriously couldn't tell you what the movie was about save the bleedingly obvious that could be summed up in a word or two. Aside from artistic flourishes, the Martian was no more than a run of the mill police report, and those don't exist in three acts. They state the facts, and leave nothing to the imagination. It's the detective who looks for motives, or something interesting going on beneath a simple accounting of the facts, or the beginning and the end, that makes a story. You could almost say the second act is the internal detective work of a story.

astrological meditation on rulership, and the firing of Mariner skipper Lloyd McClendon

In astrology, a planet in its rulership is is the ruler of sign, meaning it must call the shots. They say this is like a President, or someone in power, calling the shots for a Country, but it's also more than this, or less, and it gets confusing to understand. Yesterday, Lloyd McClendon was fired as the manager for the Seattle Mariners, and got me thinking what a manager did, and how this related to a planet in its rulership. First off, a manager manages.... he makes the batting order for each game, and calls players up or down from the minor leagues, but he's not responsible for the big trades the front office makes, which would be another rung of rulership, I'd imagine. The General Manager is responsible for the actual roster, and the owner is responsible for hiring the GM, so maybe the GM and the manager are co-rulers, something that doesn't happen in astrology, except when the moderns ascribe the generationals (Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto), but the GM fires the manager, so in a way he does the dirty work for the owner. But the GM really doesn't run the team, or get them in shape for the season. He's not hands on like the manager, who is literally overseeing the team day after day, so I'd have to give the manager the ultimate responsibility over a team, like a planet in its rulership.

I first learned that a planet in its rulership was like the owner of a restaurant and that the workers along with the manager were like planets in a house, with the ruler either overseeing them daily (a planet in its rulership), seeing them from an aspect, and out of the corner of his eye, or not seeing them at all (aversion). In this framework a baseball manager would be akin to the players, or planets in a house, and would have nothing to do with rulership. A manager is just another hired hand unless he's in league with the GM and is consulted for every major decision the team makes, otherwise it's his responsibility to manage the team: he makes the lineup, or the schedule; the on the field decisions, or the events that may or may not occur during a shift; and generally makes sure his players are well rested and able to do their job, but there's little else he does. The manager is the hands on ruler of a team, like a restaurant manager, but his actions can go for review to the ownership, and the face of this in the restaurant world is the money man, or owner, while in the baseball world it's the GM who is the next closest to the owner. I'm sure some managers have an exalted status where they not only take care of the daily operations of the team, but they are also responsible for the big decisions, but Lloyd McClendon was not one of these managers, and I'd dare say the Mariners have not had someone like this since Lou Pinniela, if even then. Many managers are almost like journeymen players and are gone in a year or two without anyone remembering they ever existed, and Lloyd McClendon was one of these.

Clearly, Lloyd McClendon did not do his job this season. The Mariners were just terrible at the fundamentals of the game, and though the manager isn't actually on the diamond making plays, I'd say his first and primary responsibility is to make sure the players are living up to their minimum potential, which would be to make sure they hit, field, and run the bases well. He can't make them hit in the clutch, or overperform, but he can make sure they are doing what we all expect of a major league player, but the Mariners lacked this early on, and that's always a sign of a poorly coached team. Their heads weren't in the game.

Astrologically, I'm not sure where this leaves me, adn it might be part of the problem with metaphors, or why they are so hard to get to stick. A local restaurant is a much easier situation to analyze because more than likely it has one owner, or maybe a couple, who hires a manager to oversee the daily operations of the restaurant, while the owner would be busy running his own life. I'd imagine the less established a restaurant the dicier this proposition would be, but once it was up and running it would be easy to imagine the owner taking his leave, and leaving the restaurant to the manager and the workers. If you have a strong manager, this may be easily done, but managers move on and they are likely to stray from the owners perogatives unless they are paid very well, or are friends with the owner, both exceptional circumstances. The astrological idea of a planet ruling a house in a horoscope is that if that planet cannot see that house, or is averse to it, then the management of the house would be left seriously in question, and one would wonder if the significations of the house would ever bear fruit. A great example of this would be a chart with the 7th house unoccupied by planets, and the ruler averse it. A transit may awaken things for the 7th house, but transits are temporary, and more likely than not marriage may not be in the cards for this chart, or at least not one that worked well. The ruler would be rejecting the house, and with no planets occupying the house the success of its daily affairs would be seriously in question. Even if planets were in the 7th house, they'd be without the resources or aid to successfully manage their affairs if the ruler of the house was rejecting them, or averse the house, but if it could see it then at least the planets would have the help of the owner.

The situation has a few quick variables:

1. The ruler of a house either sees it or doesn't.

2. The house is either occupied by planets or not.

3. The ruler sees an occupied house, or doesn't see an occupied house.

4. The ruler sees an unoccupied house, or doesn't.

I'd imagine a house in astrology that's unoccupied with the ruler averse it would have a very hard time fulfilling the significations of the house in a way that would be satisfactory to the native.

A house that's occupied with planets, but whose ruler can't see it, might see partial success in realizing the signifcations of the house, but there also might be a feeling of anarchy there. It would be like a restaurant that was up and running but largely ignored, and open to mischief, either from the planets occupying it, or transits from other planets. It wouldn't be getting the necessary care from the ruler.

A house that is occupied with planets and whose ruler can also see it is a part of life that's firing on all fours for the native. More than likely, he will topically live out the significations of the house, whether they be for career, home, travel, or marriage, but the degree of success will have to do with the essential nature of the planets involved.

A house whose ruler can see it, but is unoccupied may be the trickiest situation to fathom. I'd imagine the house is well looked after but there is not much action there. For example, if the 10th house of career was unoccupied, but the ruler could see it and was essentially in good shape, there might some real hope for a career to bear fruit, but there also may be the hint of this more than the reality... a little success here, a little success there, but hard to sustain.

The day the Democrats died

I love Bernie Sanders but boy is the Democratic Primary boring. I was brought up in the '80 election when my hero Teddy Kennedy took on Jimmy Carter, the peanut farmer from Georgia, and attempted to unseat an incumbent. It was a bold move by Kennedy, who'd seen both of his brothers assassinated during Presidential runs, but Teddy's time was in the '72 campaign against Nixon. Unfortunately, Kennedy couldn't get over the nightmarishly bad publicity from Chappaquiddick, when he let a girl die after running their car off a bridge, probably both drunk and about to screw. It verified the idea in the national consciousness that the Kennedy's were cursed, and right after Chappaquiddick, Joseph, the patriarch, who'd succumbed to the status of an idiot after a stroke, died. Kennedy lost to Carter but I wanted him to win, because I was in love with his brothers, like most of the Country. I wasn't mad at Carter for defeating Kennedy because he was clearly a man whose time had come and gone, with the whole Country about to forget the Kennedy/Nixon polarity, and were ready to focus on Bush/Clinton, a much less compelling dynamic. I never thought about it before but you could argue that Ted Kennedy all but unhinged the left wing of the Democratic Party with his run against Carter, now one of the most famous liberals of all time. From the perspective of 2015, it seems almost ludicrous that Carter could be attacked from the left, but that's what Teddy was trying to do, and I'm not sure it helped either candidate. Carter went onto lose to Reagan in a landslide, and Teddy disappeared for awhile, before resurrecting his career as one of the great U.S. senators.

Astrology lesson to me and you: the ascendant transposed to the thema mundi

The ascendant is the exact time we are born, and all 12 signs rise through the day, so it's possible we can be any of them, regardless of the day we were born. The Sun is the easiest marker to identify in a chart because the sign it's in is easily discovered if you know your birthday. The ascendant is trickier because you have to know the time of day you were born, and most people don't know this, nor can it be looked up in an ephemeris like the planets, but this is more than %99 of the world knows. Everyone knows their Sun sign, and some know their Moon sign, but not many. The great Hellenist astrologer Vettius Valens said that the Sun, Moon, and ascendant, are one's all," but the Sun and maybe the Moon are all that most people about their essential placements, and have no idea these planets are placed in the horoscope depending on the time of day you were born, your ascendant.

In astrology, there is something called the natural chart and the thema mundi, and they are both blueprints. The natural chart is used by modern astrologers with the ascendant in Aries, and the thema mundi used by the Hellenists, with the ascendant in Cancer, and Aries in the 10th house. The Hellenists didn't think of the signs as character types like we've been taught to, and took the chart more as literature, but the only literary analysis that exists in modern astrology is thinking of the signs independent of the chart, and the way they make up the human race. The Hellenists were more inclined to look at the chart as a literary map, but not to see outside of it into archetypal thinking that was psychologically based. A chart is literature to a Hellenist with events waiting to unfold like we were in a movie. It's a psychological text to a modern, with a series of complexes to solve, and has no literary value.

My first step in unraveling the mystery of identity was to be clear that we are our ascendant, the time of day we're born. A friend called the ascendant the hallmark of the accidental, or the outcome of our life, and we are our outcome, with our essential nature lurking in the background, so we are our ascendant, the most private part of a chart. I took the ascendant and thinking of it as a modern personality superimposed it onto the thema mundi, mixing and blending traditions.

Aries rising = Ambitious
Taurus rising = Good natured
Gemini rising = Undone
Cancer rising = Alive
Leo rising = Money
Virgo rising = Brotherly
Libra rising = Domestic
Scorpio rising = Married
Sagittarius rising = Reckless
Capricorn rising = Oppositional
Aquarius rising = Shady
Pisces rising = Philosophical

Now I'm going to play the same game with the natural chart, or the one the moderns use as a blueprint for the meaning of astrology.

Aries rising = Alive
Taurus rising = Money
Gemini rising = Brotherly
Cancer rising = Domestic
Leo rising = Married
Virgo rising = Reckless
Libra rising = Oppositional
Scorpio rising = Shady
Sagittarius rising = Philosophical
Capricorn rising = Ambitious
Aquarius rising = Good natured
Pisces rising = Undone

One of the bigger quandaries a student (me) has learning the thema mundi after years of modern thinking is that he tries to superimpose the meanings of the signs onto the thema mundi so that "Sagittarius" as an archetype is no longer on the cusp of the 9th house of travel, philosophy, and God, but the 6th house of bad fortune, service, and accidents. It's a bit unnerving for a modern to think of a freewheeling Sagittarian burdened with the personality of a timid Virgo.

I'm mostly into superimposing the ascendant onto the thema mundi but I'm not so pure as not to get fucked up by an assignation, or two. I still have a hard time seeing Scorpio ascendants as fun, since I was taught to think there was nothing fun about the sign Scorpio... deeply darkly romantic, but not fun. Fun fits Leo as the ruler of the 5th house much better, but I'd also say that 'money' is just as valuable an assignation to me. I was taught that the 5th house was about fun sex, and the 8th house about serious sex, so think of the 5th house as a Fleetwood Mac song, and the 8th house as black magic. The Hellenists didn't think of sex as having anything to do with the 8th house, except that it was associated with death, or the release after an orgasm. The 5th house is topically related to children in both systems, and would therefore be more directly related to sex, with Mars ruling the house in the thema mundi, and Venus in its joy, the lovers of the zodiac. In the natural chart the Sun rules the 5th house and I'm not sure what that planet has to do with sex.

The key is to remember that you are your ascendant, and to say it like a mantra. You may think you are a Virgo because your Sun is in Virgo, but if you were born at around 10 am you are probably a Libra rising, and this is the secret to your personality. It will literally make you a Libra, with the planets subservient agents to the greater plan of the Libra. If you superimpose the Lot of Fortune, one of the key points in a chart for the Hellenists, configured by counting the degrees between the Sun and the Moon (the father and mother), and counting from the ascendant (you), to find how you'll be remembered, or how you'll be known, your Fortune.

A Stardust Memory

Some artists have a way of creeping into your personal life, and Woody is one of those to me. My Dad was from Brooklyn around the same time of Woody Allen, and my Mom always used to think he acted exactly like Woody Allen. "Your Dad is just like Woody Allen and you're just like your Dad," she said, and considering he left her when she was pregnant for another woman, he became the root of all her suffering, and this wasn't a good comparison. At the same time, Woody Allen was a cultural zeitgeist in the late '70's and like everyone she liked some of his movies, but what she did was make Woody Allen larger than life to me, in a way that a movie screen can only dream. I became Woody, Woody became me, I was my Dad, my Dad was me, I wasn't my Mom, my Mom wasn't me, and my Dad wasn't around to defend himself. The problem of being a child in a divorce with a bitter Mother is that you take on the sins of the Father, and if you're childhood isn't happy you'll romanticize the missing parent. It didn't hurt that my Dad was a charming funny womanizer who resembled me more temperamentally, but to say I was my Dad would be as true as saying I was my Mom. No child is their parent though we come from there, though we end up somewhere very different.

I don't have a clear relationship to Woody Allen's movies, even though I was stigmatized by them through my parents. The first one I remember seeing on the big screen was "A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy," when it came out. My parents (not my Dad, he's pretty cheap), used to give me $10 or $15 to spend the day in Westwood, and this would incorporate a taco or two, some video games, and maybe a matinee. I saw "Midsummer" in a matinee and I remember coming out of the theater and feeling like I'd just seen a really good flick, and felt adult. Woody was intellectual and that I liked the movie at all meant I was in a secret club, like people liking the same book, and I was happy, but he wasn't my guy, or my director. Shit, I was just a kid, and I don't think I'd started having favorite directors, or screenwriters, until I went to college, so I was free of all the useless criticism that has come to define my generation. But I can tell you straight out that "Baby It's You," "The Outsiders," "Valley Girl," "This is Spinal Tap," "Poltergeist," or dozens more meant way more to me than a Woody Allen movie has ever meant, and I'm sure Woody would understand.

The first and only Woody Allen movie I really called my own was "Stardust Memories," and it may be the only one I'll ever call my own. I'm sure due to my childhood and my nature I was obsessed by the 'mid-life crisis' when I was a kid, a term that I'm sure the Boomers made up to describe what they felt after the '60's, when they lost all meaning in their life, and tried to fill it up with an endless pursuit of junk food and money, creature comforts. The only story I tried writing in high school was about a group of middle aged men coming together for a sort of men's club reunion that of course would turn into a cathartic dramatic blood bath over some lost secret between friends, but the story never got far enough for me to get there. I don't think I was the only troubled Gen X adolescent to obsess on a mid life crisis, and we have our parents to thank for that, the divorce generation, who we got to intimately watch going through a mid-life crisis without any of the grace of their parents, the WW II generation. Of course, we weren't going through a mid-life crisis as teenagers, since we were, well.... teenagers.... but we were absorbing the crisis head-on. There were several 'men's club' type movies on Z channel that I found strangely compelling, though I wouldn't talk about them with friends at school, since they weren't made for us. "Shoot the Moon," was one of my very favorites, and in second place would probably be "Stardust Memories." I really got that movie since it was Woody's homage to 8 1/2, my Dad's favorite movie, that I'd yet to see.

I'm not sure I have much to say about "Stardust" and that may be for the best. I'm so sick of classifying and categorizing Woody Allen's movies, I can't even begin to tell you, but that's what happens when an artist infiltrates your life, and turns it upside down. I already wrote a long blog doing this and I doubt there is much reason to try again. "Stardust Memories" was Woody Allen's most misunderstood movie at the time, and I'm sure this is partly why I liked it. It was one of the only times in his storied career that the critics turned against him, and wanted the funny Woody, or at least a Woody who wasn't down on being funny, and that was funny. The critics wanted a dramedy like Woody had started to give them with "Annie Hall" and "Manhattan" but he didn't have that in him and was all but telling the critics and audience in the movie, that he didnt' have that in him, and no one likes being told they can't order a dish at a restaurant they used to like. The public wanted a younger Woody and that was done forever.

I grew into Woody Allen as a young adult when his movies became synonymous with quality and intellect, and pretty much liked them. I thought "Crimes and Misdemeanors" was great, "Hannah and her Sisters," a disappointment, and "The Purple Rose of Cairo," a real gem. I compared Woody Allen to Martin Scorsese, Coppola, Kubrick, and the other great filmmakers of the day, and got a real adult appreciation of his art, but I wasn't living for Woody Allen. I thought Scorsese's movies were way better, but Woody developed a real personal style in the '80's that may have been the peak of the dramedy. A lot of directors tried to imitate him, but few got the feel, though Josh Mills's rememberance of "A Little Romance" today reminded me of how popular Woody Allen's Americanizations of Trouffaut had become. I was young and must've thought my adult love for Woody Allen would go on forever, just like it did for all my other favorite directors, whose names I learned, and who also never seemed to let me down. But Woody let everyone down in ways that went so much further than a run of bad movies it would be hard to quantify. He left Mia Farrow for their adopted daughter in the early '90's and his face was splashed all over America as an amoral creep. Ironically or not, Woody's movies also started becoming awful during this time. I remember reading a Rolling Stone interview where he said the point of movies was to entertain, not to make people think, or to depress people, and that he wasn't going to be doing serious movies anymore. It was the exact opposite of how Sandy Bates thought in "Stardust Memories," and exactly the opposite of how I'd imagine Woody was thinking through the '80's, when he made a number of heavy moral dramas. I don't think a creative Woody Allen has emerged from his marriage to Sun-Yi, or maybe he was at the end of his greatness, but it's funny timing.

It's one thing to have an artist you admire slip into mediocrity, and another thing to have their personal life intrude on yours, and I'm afraid that's what Woody Allen has managed to do for a generation. His moral life became more complicated with allegations from Dylan Farrow of pedophilia, that seem pretty well substantiated to me, but I'm not a lawyer or a judge. Still, Woody is going to go down as one of the greatest pervs in Hollywood history, and that's not how he seemed through the '70's and '80's. He was the 'new man' Miranda July wrote about and every intellectual white woman's dream date. He was also that guy who couldn't stay true to anyone and who my Mom told me I was just like via my Father, so to have Woody's dubious moral behavior thrown into the mix right when I was starting adulthood was very confusing. I didn't defend him, I don't think, but I'm not sure I judged him harshly enough, since my morally dubious parents taught me to divorce the art from the artist, a wise aesthetic lesson, but not necessarily a wise spiritual one.

A Woody Allen movie is now a pre-packaged product, with the same credits rolling over the same Dixie time jazz everytime, making all and any criticism pretty pointless. The confusion Allen felt towards his audience in "Stardust" has become outright contempt and I really think Woody gets a perverse pleasure out of being a critic's darling and not even having to try to entertain people who pay hard earned money to see half baked movie after half baked movie crumble after the first bite, or the first act. Woody reminds me a lot of Bill Clinton during the intern blow job scandal, when rank and file Democrats ran to Bill Clinton's defense, because the Republicans desire to impeach him over it was unconstitutional and insane. Woody has put his fans in the same horrible position: either they defend a potential pedophile who also and unquestionably committed a form of incest by marrying his adopted daughter, or they defend him to the death, because they are Woody, and Woody is them. Clearly, I have no desire to defend the guy since I've already taken so much shit from my Mom for being like him that there is nothing to defend.

Channeling Kim Gordon, a free form book review

"Girl in a Band" was never as revelatory as Josh Wilker's "Bad News Bears in Breaking Training," but it really gave me a good day or two of reading when I needed it. I lay in bed with the light coming through the window, and let Gordon take me away to another time and place, L.A. in the Sixties. I was so pleased that this great artist who I had admired since my thirties was also a good writer, and while I wasn't completely surprised, it's not every day I have a real good literary experience, and that's never to be underestimated in the workings of the Gods. Gordon really wrote about an L.A. I saw through my Grandparents and Mom, and through time going by out the window, on our endlessly cinematic drives through the city. It was top notch poetry and a must for anyone who grew up in L.A. and has tried to explain the magical effect of the 'sprawl' in words.

Gordon first moved to New York City in 1980 and the writing was still beautiful and personal enough to keep the poetry going. New York became a kind of contrast to L.A., and I liked her descriptions of the City before meeting Thurston, her trip out in the art world, right before big business took over, and when Basquiat was new. She treated New York visually like she was able to do L.A. because she clearly loved it and it had really meant something to her, and I would've been happiest if "Girl in a Band," ended before Gordon ever got in a band. It's not that I'm wishing she wasn't in Sonic Youth, because I really like them, but she sure wasn't able to make good literature of her time in Sonic Youth, and I'm not sure how to make sense of this. I could say that the lucid flow of memory hadn't overwhelmed her yet, but it had. I could say the divorce with Thurston Moore was causing too many paniful memories to let her see the good of her time in the band, and that may be it more than anything. There's no doubt that Gordon wrote "Girl in a Band" out of some deep place of healing, and I respect her for that. Her band that all but defined her identity for 30 years or so ended with a thud, and I'm sure she feels lost, I really am. In this light, I can see that the California section was a way for Gordon to really get in touch with herself outside of Sonic Youth, Coco, her famous friends, or her marriage to Thurston Moore, a famous rock star himself, maybe more than her. The artistic victory is that the open wound of her divorce let Gordon write about her childhood with real grace. I didn't feel like I was at a therapy section in the least, which is what many peoples childhood memories can feel like if an author isn't careful (I'm guilty here). The writing on Califronia was very generous and generational, painting a picture of a Country at a particulart time and place, and is valuable way beyond whether or not Gordon ever became a rock star. Of course, she had to be who she became to write the way she did but an anonymous reader could delve into the first half of this book and be really impressed by a geo-political historical description of the East and West coast scenes.

The second half of "Girl in a Band" is the worst kind of pop trash I can imagine. The artist in me can forgive EVERY bad artist for doing what they do best, making bad art, and Gordon is no exception to the rule. The literary grace that ruled the first half of this book disappears entirely by the second half and is replaced by pithy memories and name dropping. The pithy memories are what they are and if a writer doesn 't have it in them to plumb the depths of an experience I can't really blame them much, except in the editing process, when everything can be cut, and other contributors to the book are supposed to have a voice. I know in the lone frontier western man vision of the artist, the artist knows best, but the reality is there are many people working on any given project, and that may have been the problem here. The second half of the book really feels like Gordon wrote it for the publisher's advance, and was a good girl, doing what was expected of her, but it makes for terrible reading. I actually became embarrased to read it at a certain point, and I'm a Sonic Youth fan, interested by their life. Unfortunately, Gordon started name dropping in the sections when she first came to New York, but at least I was able to look at it in the context of a young woman moving to the big city, and getting some real experience. I also had to acknowledge that Gordon met Koons, or Richard Prince, or whoever, and that she was clearly eminent. Fuck, it is Kim Gordon's memoir, and she's only the biggest Indie rock girl God of a generation, who also taught a generation of women to play bass!

I wish I had a good read on why Gordon wasn't able to write well about her Sonic Youth life, and a few answers are running through my head, so I'll try to jot them down, since I'll never know the answer. 1) Kim Gordon was going through a divorce when she wrote "Girl in a Band" and that was tainting her memories of Sonic Youth, since she was divorcing the lead guitarist, and co-star. 2) Gordon just wasn't having a very good time in the band once they started to make it in the late '80's. Her writing about the early Sonic Youth is by far her best, and I think she say's that a song on one of their first records was by far her favorite, so I guess there was nowhere to go but down for her. 3) Sonic Youth was work. Gordon doesn't exactly say this but without bitching about touring too much it becomes clear that the band became a job to her, and all of them. Do any of us really want to write about our work life? 4) I'm not sure if "Girl" meant to do this but I'm not so sure a famous person can ever write about their life so well. Sure, they can tell stories, or anecdotes, over coffee or beer, but to really dig deep and describe yourself lucidly with not only a private perception guiding you but a public one, would be very hard.

I have no doubt "Girl in a Band" will be most remembered for Gordon's chapter or two on breaking up with Thurston Moore. I realize this is the most salacious part of the book, and that the event was a pure open wound from which Gordon the literary stylist was allowed to emerge to write beautifully about California in the '60's, or New York in the early '80's, but without the hindrance of therapy. "Girl" starts with a brief description of Sonic Youth's last show and allusions to her breaking up with Thurston Moore, and then gently goes into California and Gordon's childhood with her life changing brother, Keller. I really think this mention of the divorce, and then the segue would've said MORE to the reader than anything Gordon was later to write about Thurston Moore, and that this would've been enough, but I'm coming at it from the perception of someone who thinks the book should've ended on page 124 instead of 232. If the divorce was simply mentioned, and then we were allowed a glimpse into Gordon's private life, I really think that would've made the best art.

So, what about the divorce? Gordon's writing throughout is very detached and remote, so it's hard to know what she thinks about anyone save her brother, or her parents, but even here it's from a distance. It's not surprising this is how Gordon writes since it is how she also appears in public, but it doesn't make for great character description, and not many people but Gordon and Keller really come alive in this book, so it's really a love song for Keller. I should probably end the review here because that was my truest sentence, but the male and artist in me can't help but hate how Gordon wrote about the divorce. I can see women out there just siding with Gordon for being hurt by another asshole who cheats on them, and I can't blame any woman for this, since men are pigs, and women are angels, but.... (here, here, Seth), every relationship is a two way street. Even if someone is to blame for a divorce, rarely are the lines so easily crossed that one party is all in the right, and the other all in the wrong, but that's how Gordon's assesment comes off. It's not that she blames Thurston for their marriage crumbling, but she doesn't blame herself, either, nor do we read about their marraige crumbling. Gordon makes a comment here or there about how she and Thurston channeled their marital energy into music, and didn't talk much about anything, but this again paints Thurston as an almost cliched typical male asshole, which he may be, until I read his memoir!

From a literary perspective, it's safe to say that Gordon sees very little reason to write about the famous as if they were real people, infusing them with almost no back story, and assuming the name alone will conjure up images in the readers mind, which is true, and a tactic that all biographies rely on, but.... the really good ones take the image you have of a famous person and try to dig beneath it, or distort it, or reshape it for the readers. In a pop art glam way, Gordon has no desire to do this to anyone in the public sphere, including her husband or band mates, and this is to the detriment of the memoir. The book is really a love song to L.A., New York, and Keller, with Gordon's artistic ambitions driving her on, but none of this has to do with her divorce, and yet she drags us into some salacious details at the end, that I'm sure had the publishers in New York licking their lips, and this pissed me off on several levels. The first is that it was bad art coming from a woman who can't stop talking about how all she cares about is art. Secondly, it felt completely unnecessary and unfair to Thurston Moore, even is she was hurt by him. I accept Kim Gordon wrote what she did for therapy, but therapy is not art..... sometimes it can be a conduit for art, or sometimes it can just destroy it, but in and of itself, it is not art. I couldn't help but think Gordon wrote these pieces for her publishers and for book sales, and that didn't make me respect her too much. "Girl in a Band" is not a portrait of marriage in the least, and that's what it would have taken to make a chapter or two on the other woman feel like anything more than gossip.

the end of the tour, the end of the book

I'm going to spoiler alert my review for "The End of the Tour," which is pretty ironic, since there's almost no story. The conceit of the film is that a young ambition journalist/novelist pitches Rolling Stone to write a piece about David Foster Wallace, who had just published "Infinite Jest." "We haven't done a piece on a writer in forever," he says, or so I paraphrase, and the rest of the movie is the interview, at the reclusive home of Wallace somewhere in middle America. I'm not really sure how to describe the movie becuase it's not really a buddy picture, nor is it a love story, nor is it really a traditional interview by any stretch of the imagination, even though Lipsky (Eisenberg) carries around a miniature tape recorder, but the movie doesn't even really go into this. Wallace (Segel) is both guarded and open, constantly questioning the process that he has signed up for, while Lipsky is both unprepared and innocent. Nor would I say the movie turns into a who is interviewing who switcheroo, though it plays at this, just like it plays at these two being friends, though nothing could be farther from the truth. "You're going to go back to New York and shape this into whatever you want," Wallace says, and he's right, since the truth can be manipulated to appear however a journalist wants to present it, but we're not sure this part of the movie even happens, so there's no deceit, or jealous backstabbing. We learn early on that Lipsky is jealous of Wallace's talent, and hasn't even read "Infinite Jest" (making him like most of the audience, or literary types in America!) To be honest, I have no idea what the movie was really about save a great acting performance by Segel, a good one by Eisenberg, pretty footage, and an homage to a unique recluse. They do take a trip to Minnesota for a reading and I really got carried away with it here, unconsciously thinking the script was building to some challenge, especially since Wallace gets mad at Lipsky for hitting on his ex-girlfriend, but that was about as much of a climax as "The End of the Tour" is going to give you. There's no kicker at the end, no epiphanies, no big revelations, and while I appreciate the movie for staying true to its zen like meditation of a Midwest snow drenched winter, the unconscious viewer in me was striving for some three act structure.

"The End of the Tour" ends with Lipsky giving an emotional reading about his Lost Weekend with Wallace, eating junk food instead of drinking. It makes sense that Lipsky would feel personally touched by Wallace offing himself since we only meet so many people when we're alive, but they aren't close in the movie, nor do we even get the sense that Lipsky is changed by the interview. I learned a day or two after seeing "The End of the Tour" that Lipsky's interview with Wallace never got published in Rolling Stone, and I'm going to guess that Lipsky wasn't able to shape it or turn it into an homage, or a tell-all. There is one scene where Lipsky is on the phone with his editor, and he's being asked to dig up some real dirt on Wallace, but he fails at this too. We learn that Wallace wasn't a junkie, and that he's a recovering alcoholic, fighting depression.

"The End of the Tour," doesn't tell us that the interview wasn't published, and this seems disingenuous to me. If anything, the movie ends heroically for Lipsky, but it doesn't feel this way, nor does it give us much of a chance to really grapple with this troubled/failed writer. Lipsky is too jealous of Wallace to give a good interview, but not nearly talented enough to really go one on one with Wallace. Sure, Wallace doesn't make a good interview easy, but he talked plenty, and there was certainly something a decent journalist could have taken from three days with one of America's best novelists, but watching the movie you just know that Lipsky won't be able to do what Wallace accuses him of doing.

"Don't forget, you agreed to do the interview," Lipsky admonishes Wallace once or twice, and this is true, but for some reason I didn't blame Wallace for this. He wasn't Salinger after the success of "Catcher in the Rye," and in a very human way Wallace was obviously trying to connect with the world, since he was a professor and a published author. Sure, he was a weird recluse, but even weird recluses sometimes have a social side, so the real enigma here is Lipsky. He was a young ambitious New Yorker looking for a break, but apparently blew it with the Wallace article, at least in the short run, and was only redeemed by Wallace's suicide, or else his 'memoir' about his lost weekend over junk food would be forgotten. Clearly, Lipsky wasn't able to gain the trust of his subject, marking him a bad interviewer right off the bat, and it feels almost sycophantic at the end when he reads about Wallace from his memoir, but that's not the desired result from the filmmakers. I know there are lots of good movies that have bad cheesy endings, but watching Wallace dance in a church social seemed like an abdication of the entire movie, and in no way shed any light on Lipsky's weasel like nature (true to Eisenberg's roles). If the audience had been told the interview had amounted to nothing it would have been more satisfying for the viewer. We would've known that we watched an interview that never saw the light of day, and like a debate we would've seen the winners and losers of the strange verbal sparring match between Wallace and Lipsky. We would've known Wallace won, or lost, depending on your point of view, because Lipsky was either too nice a guy to paint Wallace as an asshole, or too selfish a guy to paint him as a genius, leaving the audience hung to dry. Instead, we get Lipsky as a nice enough guy, with some character flaws, and Wallace as a beautiful soul. It's a subtle movie and there is a lot of enjoyment in "The End of the Tour," a movie about a failed interview between two writers at very different points in their career.

Oh, those hapless Neptunean M's

I'm not sure what my blog on Goodreads amounts to but it has been an experiment in social engineering if nothing else, and I've tried to reach out to you, my friends, with parts of me that I think you'd like (or at least like more than other parts.) I've been reading through my blogs and I really do like writing about the Mariners, but it's easy. I've been a sports fan my whole life and the only thing the men in my family could talk about with some ease was sports. I also drive pizzas, and listen to just about every Mariner game that I can, even though my feelings towards the club are ambiguous. I'm not from Seattle so I'm not a die hard fan and yet there is something to the Mariner bum that I like, and they really are a team for bums, with almost no history, a real anomaly in baseball, a sport gauged on history and statistics, since it's so slow the announcers end up storytelling through most games like guys going fishing, and when something bites, or the game gets good, they shut up and announce. I've become closer to the M's announcers this year than I ever have in the past because the Mariners are so bad and Rick Rizzs, the voice of the M's since Dave Neihaus died has brought a grand majestic touch. Rizzs is at the end of his career and will never be remembered as one of the great announcers, but he's very good like a triple A star, but defers to Neihaus, the grand master who has sculptures in the park. (Niehaus was famous for coining 'Grandma, you better get out the mustard and rye bread, we've got ourselves a grand salami," whenever a Mariner hit a grand slam home run).

I was right about the M's sucking this year and I saw it pretty early on, and I'll give myself credit for this, but the problem with predictions is that if you're right no one cares and if you're wrong no one will let you forget it, so fuck you to everyone, I was right and it wasn't easy. This team was awful in April and every night I had to hear how this was an aberration and they were going to come around any second, a sentiment buoyed by Nelson Cruz's astonishingly strong first two months, that the rest of the club squandered, but back then there was the belief Cruz would win the triple crown, the home run crown, or something magnificent, but he's almost become a non factor here in the dog days of July, which makes me really fear August. The M's were just swept by the Diamondbacks on the week of the trading deadline, with no news from the Mariners camp, unlike last year, when they were making a play for the pennant. The front office went dead, but so did the announcers, and no one would point out the obvious, that the Mariners had died again, a difficult achievement in a sport that has 162 games and a few wild cards since the Nineties, making almost every organization mathematically in the hunt for a pennant well into August, even at only a few games over %.500. It wasn't like this in the "Big Hair and Plastic Grass" era when I was growing up, and only the winners of the four divisions went to the playoffs and there were no wild cards, a better purer era. But the M's are so bad that they have all but taken themselves out of the playoff hunt with months to go... wow....

I'm not sure why but the political pundit in me realizes that in spite of the Mariners dismal play they are an exciting team to follow, and that's why I wrote about the bombast. Hell, only a couple of days ago they turned a freaky triple play that hadn't happened since 1955, and early in the year Cano was tagged out at home because he decided to walk home after a walk even though the bases WEREN'T loaded, maybe the most boneheaded play I'd ever heard of in my life, and then laughed about it in the post game interview (shame on Cano!). The 2015 M's really aren't an ordinary team and I'd say the bombast started when they were predicted to go the World Series (Serious), and expectations were high, a rarity for the M's, who've never gone to the series, and only had a couple of good years, with a few better than average ones (last year), but this is nothing to be proud of, and why the M's might be the real "Bums" or "Clowns" of baseball, except that the fan base is very white, family oriented, and mellow, so maybe that's the problem, the fans don't reflect the mediocrity of the team, and there's dissonance. An M's game should be a rowdy celebration in losing, since that's almost all that this team has ever done, and yet everyone clings to the few good seasons they had, but that's cool. They are remembering a glorified past like we all do looking back at our life. I'm sorry, was that too heavy?

This is really an obituary for the 2015 M's, who have no hope left, but lots of games to squander. They have plenty of chances to lose, and more than enough time for a freaky play or two that no one has ever seen, for good or bad. I really think the club should go back to their original uniforms with the astrological symbol for Neptune on their caps, it would make more sense, and that's how the modern fan dresses, in spite of the team's official logo. I think I'm going to crack a beer and make myself a turkey sandwich like Oscar Madison from the "Odd Couple," probably the best sports writer of all time, though I never read a piece, since Madison was fictional and none existed. Oscar Madison was messy like me and he was played by Walter Matthau in the movie, who went onto manage the "Bad News Bears." Oscar Madison was a Mets fan and I was too, the new bums of Brooklyn, even though they played in Queens near Forest Lawn and the U.S. Open, where McEnroe raged.

8/4 Well, the M's are doing what they do best. Now that they are ten games under %.500, and 12 1/2 games out of first place in one of the worst divisions in baseball, they decide to play some inspiring ball and win a few games. This team can't play with the chips down. They've got to play losing ball when nothing is on the line before they start winning, and it's the same every season, tried and true as Mariner blue!

8/17 I've got to admit it, I love this team. As a defense mechanism, I rooted against them early in the year, like everyone always does, because the M's have never been to the world series, and may never make it. I'd say the odds are against it, considering they had the best record of any major league team ever in 2001, and still couldn't win the Fall Classic. I love the Mariners now more than ever since they have next to no chance of winning the pennant, but who can deny these guys are exciting. Almost every game is crazy baseball for a fan, but unfortunately the M's keep coming out on the losing end, but they aren't boring. They somehow made tonight's game against the Rangers seem epic even though they were 7 games under %500.00, and all but out of contention. Fernando Rodney came in for the bottom of the 9th, and you knew the M's were going to lose. Rodney is worthy of an essay, or a great rap song, because he's a great Mariner figure, who weasled his way into the All Star Game last year, but no one was sure how, including Rodney. He must be from one of the Caribbean islands, and has real style, shooting an arrow to the sky when he saves a game, like a real Sagittarian, and statistically had a good year in 2014. but he made the true fan nervous. Well, he failed epically tonight and walked in the winning run, after hitting a batter with runners on first and second, and one out. Every game is do or die for the Mariners in mid August because the only way they can make it to the post-season (boy, do I hate those words), would be for the M's to win every series, and hope that their competition went on a losing streak, but they damned that idea tonight.

This team is just weird. They give up 22 runs to the Red Sox! Are you kidding me?!?! They win 10-8 the next day?! Then they lose in the bottom of the 9th to the Rangers, but they don't just lose. Rodney dramatically walks in the winning run.

Jenny and I went to a game early in the season, when Rodney was still shimmering from whatever magic he brought to the club in 2014. "Tune say's Rodney makes him nervous," I said to Jenny. "Whose Tune?" "He's a white rapper at my work who loves the M's like me, and Rodney makes him nervous. He makes everyone nervous." "Then why is everyone so excited that he's about to come in," asked Jenny. "He's dramatic," I said, artistically giving it up to Rodney, but art and victory aren't always the same, and Rodney sucks. The crazy thing is the M's loss tonight should make me less excited to see them in a week, but it actually makes me more excited. The M's and the Sox are going to play a fall classic, on the last day of Leo.

9/15 I was zonked out of my gord for my fall classic on the last day of summer after eating too many edibles. I couldn't tell an out from a hit for most of the game against the Sox, and was in absolute disbelief when anything happened. I held Jenny tightly for most of the game for emotional security, but came to at the end, when the M's lost in the 10th inning, due to horrible play indicative of one of the most disappointing seasons in Mariners history, and that's saying something, given the mediocrity of Mariners history. Jack Z was fired after the game and Fernando Rodney was released to the wind. Oh what a transparent defeat.

Headtripping on "Love and Mercy"

I can imagine a really bloated film critic two hundred years in the future when movies have become as precious and pointless as paintings are to most people saying that "Citizen Kane" was the first and only great bio-pic, and we all would've been better off as film fans if the genre stopped there. And this pompous film critic who looks a lot like Orson Welles to me in my mind may be right but that doesn't mean bio-pics should ever stop because they are about as fun as the movies get, but that would mean nothing to a future art historian looking for trends, and pivot points.

"Love and Mercy" was a great bio-pic, but this doesn't mean it was great movie, but so few are that can barely be called criticism. It stretched the genre in ways that I really didn't think possible in a post "Citizen Kane" world, by telling two stories in two separate times, and somehow the collage aspect worked perfectly to explain Brian Wilson's life, the pop genius who composed "Pet Sounds," became a Sixties icon, and then lost his mind to become another lost soul in the Eighties, with a shrink watching his every move. The time jump was done so creatively and the movie was so well acted in the both the Sixties and Eighties that I wanted to say it was a great work of art, but that wouldn't be doing "Love and Mercy" justice, or would imply that it somehow broke the conventions of biopic filmmaking, but it didn't. It stayed true to the genre, while subverting it, and that might be one of the highest points that Movies, with a capital M, can reach. "Love and Mercy" was high art with an afterschool special feel, a character study, with three strong characters and four strong performances, but several of the secondary characters, including the Beach Boys, were nothing more than cardboard cut outs, and given no individuality. I most respected how well they told Brian's story with music and images more than words, and yet Brian's uncanny sweet soft nervous rambling voice was perfectly captured by both Brian's, so that it was a really verbal movie, but it wasn't dialogue driven, but rather monologue driven. At the beginning of the film, the screen goes blank for a second, and we hear music from both speakers like it was the psychedelic Sixties all over again, and I'd say this set the tone for the whole movie. There was some great video collage work at the end to show Brian finally losing his mind, but the movie didn't go overboard on this, making it more a film than a movie, but used it effectively.

I'd argue that the biggest victory of "Love and Mercy" was that the filmmakers managed to make a story of Brian's life, thus eschewing one of the worst (best?) traits of the sweeping biopic, that tries to follow a great personality from cradle to grave, and somehow coming off as ridiculous. The best biopics usually feel more like movies with a story, and they do this by focusing on a clear segment of time in the subject's life. "Love and Mercy" did this but managed to also do what bad biopics do by covering a large span of time (twenty years), and this was a brilliant twist. They focused on two specific periods of time in Brian's life: the first when he was making "Pet Sounds," and the immediate aftermath when he lost his mind, and the second when Brian was a wayward soul in L.A. buying a cadillac, and meeting his future wife, free of the Sixties, or almost, even though he has a shrink following him. I'm not sure I liked one Brian more than the other, but Paul Dano may have a harder task because he had to show someone shifting from genius and control, to complete insecurity and despair, in a very short period of time, and I'd say his performance really elevated the movie, because I'm not sure you could've shown this in the script. John Cusack was also very good but he was playing one character with not much of an arc, but he also nailed Brian, and completed the portrait.

The personal review:

I was scared to see this movie because I knew the Wilsons as a kid and wondered what kind of psychic can of worms was going to be released. I'm not sure I worried if it was going to be good or bad, or if indeed it was going to be truthful, because I doubt any biopic is. I think if you are going for truth about someone's life you either need a really dry biography that's well researched, or an oral biography that gives the reader a patch work of impressions, and is a genre I like very much, but 'oral biographies' are not everyone's cup of tea. The movie is explicitly told from Melinda's point of view, and it rather innocently shows Melinda saving the lost genius, Brian Wilson, out of pure love. Granted, Elizabeth Banks turns in a very good performance as a SoCal gal selling Cadillacs, and to the movie's credit elevated what could have been a rather drab character into something archetypal, but that might've been more the acting than anything in the script. Melinda is pretty much a one dimensional character and the way they show her saving Brian is rather uncomplicated, but thankfully this really isn't the raison d'etre of "Love and Mercy," and if anything is kept in wraps until the end.

Critically, I do think the scene where Melinda and the Mexican maid, Gloria, find a huge glad bag of pills that the evil doctor Landry is unscrupulously giving Brian the worst in the movie and what may drop "Love and Mercy" down from great to very good. The scene had an easy unearned moralizing quality that diminished Brian's madness, and simultaneously painted the shrink in only the most 'evil guy' light imaginable, and we all know that good art usually tries to show the good and bad in someone, since life is never so easy. I could imagine everyone who knew Brian having a problem with this rather simple telling of how he lost his mind, and was the victim of bad psychology, but to give the movie credit it really did show Brian losing his mind in the Sixties, so I wouldn't say it shied away from this hard truth. The trouble is "Love and Mercy" glossed over an entire decade that Brian stayed in bed (the Seventies, when I knew him), and though Brian alludes to some of his bad behavior in Cusack's unmistakeable monologue voice, the movie doesn't show it, and therefore romanticizes Melinda and Brian, takes down the evil doctor, and say's love conquers all. Artistically, I actually loved Brian's relationship with Melinda, and how the shrink was the third wheel on their dates, so take this criticism for what it's worth.

I'm not sure what it would feel like to be a famous person who has a movie made of them, let alone the close family who watches the film, and wonders what is going to be said about them. I wasn't close enough to Brian Wilson to think this was going to happen to me when I walked into the cineplex, but I was scared about the emotions it would tap into, but for the most part was pleasantly surprised. It made me love Brian all over again, and kindly showed his big spirit not to mention his bad childhood and all of the most giving parts of his genius.

After work:

Well, I almost wrote my Mom about "Love and Mercy" because she's a big movie fan, but she didn't want to see it, because she thought 'truth was stranger than fiction,' and she may be right. I can't deny that recreating the real Brian Wilson is impossible, but I'm not sure a movie is required to do this, or a work of art, so I questioned her take right off the bat, and if anything it made me go to the movie! That said, I didn't know what to write her and it occurred to me that Brian Wilson has had a second life as a Gen X phenomena, and in the Seventies I really didn't see this happening. Brian was down and out and the music scene had passed the Beach Boys by, even if they could sell out baseball stadiums. They became an oldies act with the genius, Brian, on the side lines, and not even close to going back on stage.... trust me.

I wanted to tell my Mom the movie was really good art, which it was, and that should be enough for her to want to see it, but I suddenly realized that I'd be saying that through the filter of a Gen X critic, and that she's a boomer and really might not give a shit about what I saw in "Love and Mercy." Let's face it, the whole movie, including the director (I think), were not boomers, but a younger generation imagining the life of Brian Wilson, infected with his genius. I was always told he was a genius as a kid, but people didn't care about it as much back then, because Brian was sidelined with three live-in shrinks. I'm not exactly sure what my generation saw in Brian Wilson to elevate him above the Beatles but I didn't see it coming, trust me, and I knew him (maybe that's why I didn't see it coming). In high school, my musician buddies made fun of the Beach Boys as being wussy, and were more into jazz. Believe it or not, there was a moment in time in the mid Eighties when I was almost embarrassed to admit my association with the Beach Boys, because they were so uncool, but now they are the coolest thing since wonder bread, or Nirvana, and boy has my self image changed (wink, wink)! Don't get me wrong, I knew even as a kid that it was a big deal to be in such close proximity to a great mad genius of the rock scene in the Sixties, but we were all pretty down to earth about it, because Brian Wilson's situation may be fun to romanticize, but it wasn't fun to see. Brian was a sweet guy but he couldn't take care of himself and lived in the chauffeur quarters in his Spanish Mansion, with the psychedelically swirled carpet.

8/18 Love and Mercy left my mind and now I'm headtripping on "the end of the tour," about the brilliant novelist, David Foster Wallace, author of Infinite Jest, who committed suicide. It's another movie about a brilliant guy who loses his mind so it must be a theme.

why are there no Gen X candidates in the democratic party primary for the presidency?

I know the primaries are a ways out and anyone can jump in at this point and declare their candidacy but it's not that far out so with the field taking shape I had an insane realization yesterday that there are no young candidates running for President in the Democratic Party! How could this be, they were the party of youth, the party that brought you the 18 year old vote, the party that supported the Kennedy's, and the party that courted the youth to launch Obama, a much younger candidate than any they have now, but even he isn't quite Gen X, being born before the assassination of J.F.K., and on the thin wispy line between generations. Don't get me wrong, I'm a Bernie Sanders fan, and maybe he's just the kind of socialist Grandfather the U.S. needs, but I'd be remiss to not say that the party representing the youth has no young candidates running, while their stodgy conservative counterparts, the republicans, have a plethora. Sure, the Repugs (ha!), have 16 or 17 candidates running, a fact that illustrates how philosophically confused the party is, but two or three of the most promising are from Gen X (Marco Rubio, Scott Walker, and Rand Paul), not to mention Paul Ryan who is not running but was Mitt's choice for VP.

I can imagine all of my liberal fun loving friends fighting with me about this but it's an objective non-partisan truth. I know there are reasons for it and the first that comes to mind is that Gen X came to age in a conservative Reagan era time where Bush/Reagan/Clinton ruled, and though Clinton was a Democrat, he was to the right of Nixon on many issues, and in my opinion did all he could to gut the F.D.R. New Deal tradition of the Democratic Party, at least on economic issues, so it would be very hard to call "Bubba' a traditional liberal. In the primaries the 'left wing' nominees like to say "I'm from the Democratic Wing of the Democratic Party," as an attack on the Clintonistas. Bernie Sanders carries that mantle now with Hillary trying to steal it from him, but no candidate spoke like that when I was in my twenties or thirties coming of age and would've been groomed as a politician, or at least a politico working on a campaign. I was taught I was living in a conservative backlash against the Sixties, and there was no room for me.

If all I had were political ambitions I would've joined the Republican Party in a New (Jew) York second (ha!), because that's where you could be successful. Clinton was the only one who figured out how to win as a Democrat and be popular, and I didn't even vote for him, the first black President according to Toni Morrison, or anyone. I was classic Gen X in that way, the same as the coke can they wanted to make of my generation, with a young dude in a lawn chair, drinking a coke, smoking a cig, and looking at a Nuclear power plant across the street. I was an apathetic archetype, but my apathy was born of a real loss that I fear infected many idealists born in the Sixties who were taught that it was their duty to bring the races together and save the world, but saw an incipient dream fall apart by the time we turned 12 when Reagan became President in 1980, and freed the Iranian hostages (ha!). The free flowing way we were taught to look at the world disappeared very fast, and the rest has been an afterthought, so we're a generation of afterthoughts, or little caught breaths, suspended in space.

The only candidates who represent us in the 2016 race for the President of the United States, the leader of the free world (remember that one?), are Republicans. All the pundits acknowledge that Rubio, Walker, and Paul are legitimate voices in the party, something the democrats, the party of the left, the young, don't have. Now don't get me wrong, I know Jimmy Carter was a great liberal but an older guy, and L.B.J., no spring chicken, basically pushed through J.F.K.'s agenda, but weren't the Boomers the generation that famously said, "Don't trust anyone over 30." Hillary and Bernie Sanders are well into their Sixties, and I want to say Jim Webb fought in Vietnam (the other two don't count). I'd also argue, that I'm not expecting a young(ish) candidate to be the nominee, but I'd expect one to throw his hat into the race, even on a whim, but there's no such daring. The dark pessimistic side in me would like to say that NPR has made modern day liberalism so boring that no one in their right mind under the age of sixty could even imagine caring about it, but that's the pessimistic side. I tend to believe this side especially since my rather scientific political observation hasn't been echoed in the mainstream/NPR media, and I'm not so pompous as to think I'm the first person the in the United States of America to figure it out, maybe in the State of Washington, but not in D.C., the real Washington.

Naomi Klein is a great radical Gen X voice who wrote a book about disaster capitalism and she warned that the vulture capitalists were circling when Obama became President, and that he had a chance to clamp down on them, or set them free, and his Justice Department, headed by the cowardly Eric Holder, Obama's other black man, who I really think the President appointed because he was more of an Oreo than Obama, never brought any of the major banks responsible for one of the greatest crashes in the history of Wall St. to trial. To me, this is the real scar on the Obama administration, along with how they treated the Gulf Oil spill barely better than the W. administration would have. Anyway, Naomi Klein veered from her radical left wing idealism to the saddened defeatism of a liberal with a baby, and she read about how scared she was to bring her newborn into a world that would certainly see the end of the world through global warming, and how the human race was going to have to practice greater sensitivity and spiritual compassion to get through it. Naomi Klein literally read from her book and I was a little disappointed by it at the time because I wanted a more rigorous intellectually stimulating presentation from a brilliant woman who struck me as the last great revolutionary, but I'm haunted by the reading almost a year later and its prescience and necessity are becoming clearer. I laugh at the critic in me that thought Klein was taking the easy way out because what she wrote and envisioned for the future of the world, not just the U.S., was nothing short of what aestheticians call dystopia, and make small. The truth is the world is getting hotter and I'd say global warming is kicking in on the primal level, though it's far accelerated scientifically, and we're going to Mars!

It all reminds me of a movie I saw in 1983 called "Testament" about a Marin family that survives a nuclear war, and the sadness of their life. I'd say there was a genre in the early Reagan years, and maybe even the later ones, of a new kind of cold war movie, whether it be "Red Dawn," where the U.S.S.R. takeover a small Nebraskan town, via vis the McDonald's, or "Testament," a straight out drama of what it would feel like to survive a nuclear holocaust. Thankfully, the nuclear holocaust hasn't come yet, but tonight I'm seeing that movie set in the Redwoods at the height of the Reagan era, when preppy ruled, as a premonition for the crisis we are now facing, because in some ways Gen X has become Jane Alexander, William Devane, and the other actors who made up the cast of "Testament." I intuitively think that we're being faced with global warming sooner than we thought, and OUR generation will be the elders who guide the youth, and I wonder if we'll do a good job? We've mostly been interested in looking to the past, because it was a time we thought the world was going to a better place, but we're going to have to look to the future. We're the metaphor for all the nuclear holocaust Reagan era Fifties revivalist cinema we watched, but instead of a nuclear war we're going to be wiped out by global warming but maybe that will lead to nuclear war, considering the global desperation. The difference between the two catastrophic disasters is that we were taught nuclear war was an existentialist choice in the moment, or an accident that came the way of existential choice. Global warming implies that the existential choice was global rather than individual and wasn't the sovereignty of one state but the colluding of the world to bring itself down so that not one Country was responsible but all the Countries envying the greatest perpetrator, the U.S.

Sure, the WORLD made an existential choice, but that's like every character in a play deciding on the same thing, so that the viewer can't blame anyone, and that's no fun. I miss the existential chaos of a nuclear war, but I'm afraid Naomi Klein was right and the vulture capitalists took over long ago. Gen X may have started idealistic, and then gone cynical, but we're going to end spiritual, like everyone alive, wondering what the fuck the human race did to the planet, like Jane Alexander in "Testament," or Charleton Heston in the "Planet of the Apes," the great NRA leader in real life, when he sees the Statue of Liberty submerged in the ocean.

8/18 I saw the Black Lives Matter/Bernie Sanders rally in Seattle, and can only say that this begs the question more than ever 'why aren't any Gen X age politicians running for the Presidential nomination on the Democratic ticket. The democrats are famous for their youth, and yet they are an old party, full of Sixties has-beens. Don't get me wrong, I wear a 'feel the bern' button that I bought at the rally where Sanders spoke no more than a salutation, until he was pulled off the stage, in a compromised stance towards the black community, even though the raw facts of his voting record would indubitably disprove it. Make no bones about it, Black Lives Matter is a Black Nationalist movement, and who can blame them, but those bitches who took the mic in Seattle didn't want to listen to anyone, and that's unconstitutional. The boomer, Bernie Sanders, was crippled by them, and maybe a Gen X candidate would've been too, or maybe not. Maybe he/she would've been free of the civil rights wars of the '60's to be free enough to call out an idiot, but not Sanders, who probably hadn't even read the literature on Black Lives Matter. After the rally, and what I read online, I found out they are like the occupy movement and free of organizational/hierarchical structure, a political strategy I question. The only thing the black girls at the rally had was chutzpah, but that's a powerful force. It's like the military nationalist who will die on the front lines for his Country, and start a debate, whatever his intelligence.