NOway

And that's Nadál

Rafael fucking Nadál. Seriously.

That's all.

Fighting against "The Braindead Megaphone"

In college, I worked as a videographer for four years. I would tape various goings-on around campus like lectures on architecture and graphic design, football practices and various conferences dealing with issues like healthcare and terrorism.

It was all wonderful learning, considering that I was often skipping classes to shoot these things for seven bucks an hour. Out of the hundreds of events I shot, the most rewarding by far came when I was assigned to be the videographer for a class called "Living Writers." This was a survey class for incoming freshman, run by the incredibly talented authors and poets of Syracuse University's well known MFA writing program. It wasn't like most other classes, or indeed like any other class. The program would bring in a different writer every other week to read a selection, usually from their latest work, and then submit to a question-and-answer session in which the mostly disinterested students would be lined up and forced to ask questions.

In this way, I saw an parade of great writers and poets, from Dave Eggers (whom I later worked for in San Francisco) and Stuart Dybek to brilliant SU faculty members Mary Karr, Brooks Haxton, and George Saunders.

And in reading through the latest issue of GQ I found that Saunders has a fantastic and hilarious piece on, for all intents and purposes, young journalists and how we often unwittingly help to numb the public's consciousness. It's an excerpt from his new book, "The Braindead Megaphone."

Here is an excerpt of the excerpt:

There's no conspiracy at work, I don't think, no ill will, no leering Men Behind the Curtain, just a bunch of people from good universities, living out the dream, cringing a little at the dog-crap story even as they ensure that it goes out on time, with excellent production values.

How does such a poor, potentially harmful product emanate from such talented people? I'd imagine it has to do with survival; each small piece of the machine doing what it must to avoid going home to Toledo, tail between legs; each doing the best it can, within the extant constrants of time and profitability, each deferring his or her "real" work until such time as he or she accumulates his or her nut and can head for the hills or get a job that lets him or her honor his or her heart.

A Hollywood director once told me that everyone in the movie business was trying to make Richie Rich III in order to garner sufficient power and influence to someday make Citizen Kane.

This first requirement of greatness is that one stay in the game; to stay in the game, one must prove viable; to prove viable, one has to be watched, one has to be watchable, and a convention of Watchability has developed—a tone, a pace, an unspoken set of acceptable topics and acceptable relations to these topics—that bears, at best, a peripheral relation to truth: that is, to the difficult, endless, perhaps-not-so-fun-to-watch process of searching out real truth.

Parallax

I still miss New Orleans terribly. I constantly entertain ideas of dropping everything and heading back down, even though I know the place is not exactly heaven right now.

A couple of days ago, a guy at this bar I used to hang out in in the Mid-City neighborhood just got up, slashed another guy with a knife and then slit another woman's throat, killing her. He didn't know either of the victims; apparently he'd just had a crappy day at work.

There's a screening of short films about New Orleans called "New Orleans Parallax" on Saturday at Hallwalls. Check it out.

This from Courtney Egan and Helen Hill's film "Cleveland Street Gap."

Mercury Falling

Lately, for no reason in particular, I've been obsessively watching interviews with the late Freddie Mercury on YouTube. The thing that strikes me about him, more than anything, is his abrasiveness toward any member of the press, his obvious discomfort with interview situations that was responsible for Queen's long-standing no-interviews policy.

Every day, I talk to people who would rather be filing their nails, rather be watching awful TV shows, rather be getting in terrible car accidents. So, while I watch and revere Mercury, I identify with the man on the other side, or sometimes the same side, of the camera.

Here are a couple of worthwhile clips that reveal the potential for awkwardness and embarrassment in a journalist's every day life:

And Now For Something Exactly the Same

After an extended period of dormancy and near-obsolescence, I've decided to reestablish this faux-blog with what are sure to be increasingly erratic posts dealing in an immense range of intriguing ideas from the whole of human experience (that is, the Internet).

Since my last unanswered squeal into the sphere more than a year ago, my landscape has changed drastically. Mountains have been made of molehills and vice versa; rivers have dried up and meteors crashed; bags have been hastily packed, unpacked, repacked and discarded. I have attacked new endeavors with varying degrees of enthusiasm and success. As varying as those degrees have been, they have usually tended toward the imperceptible.

The period adjoining this post to the last has been a shift away from boundless optimism and toward a kind of constant fear, insecurity and anger. This has resulted from a year of death, its resultant agony and listlessness, and more than any one individual's share of unappealing self-pity. Needless to say then, that I have landed back in my hometown of Buffalo. I now have an ideal job (in reward for what?) that affords me the opportunity to write about art and culture in a city that—despite its shrinking population and several months of monotonous and practically Siberian bleakness—has a heartening supply of both.

That all being said, this probably foolish reestablishment is meant, above all, as a stimulant for writing, a kind of Adderall for the fingers, a motivation to practice and hone this almost comically rough craft into something more marketable or at least worthwhile. The idea is that as I ingest more and more of the city ('s art and music and theater), material ripe for exploration herein will present itself and I can make some weak stab at coherence and productive reflection. Obviously there are uncountable miles to travel on that foolhardy journey.

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I heard a poem the other day on NPR that made me sit in my car and cry for about 10 minutes. I know I am no expert in poetry, but this one moved me, as things increasingly do, inexplicably and immediately to tears:

"It Was Like This: You Were Happy"
By Jane Hirshfield

It was like this:you were happy,
then you were sad,
then happy again, then not.

It went on.
You were innocent or you were guilty.
Actions were taken, or not.

At times you spoke, at other times you were silent.
Mostly, it seems you were silent - what could you say?

Now it is almost over.

Like a lover, your life bends down and kisses your life.

It does this not in forgiveness -
between you, there is nothing to forgive -
but with the simple nod of a baker at the moment
he sees the bread is finished with transformation.

Eating, too, is a thing now only for others.

It doesn’t matter what they will make of you
or your days: they will be wrong,
they will miss the wrong woman, miss the wrong man,
all the stories they tell will be tales of their own invention.

Your story was this: you were happy, then you were sad,
you slept, you awakened.
Sometimes you ate roasted chestnuts, sometimes persimmons.

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This from Hirschfield's February, 2007 collection "After: Poems"