Flying Houses

Special Comment: The Dismantling of the Chicago Cubs

2012-01-05T21:18:00.000-08:00

Not long ago on my facebook wall, I posted a link to my last post on Flying Houses about the Cubs—a report card for every player at the end of the 2009 season. Appended to this was a comment that included five things the Cubs must do to win in 2012. Here is what they were:

Top 5 things to do to win in 2012:
5) Re-sign Carlos Pena, or else an awesome 1st baseman.
4) Get another high quality starter - an ace. Matt Garza is okay, but I don't think he qualifies as an ace.
3) Give Carlos Marmol one more chance ...to close - if he blows 5 saves by the all-star-break, we can say that he is suffering from "mark wohlers-syndrome" and should be sent to AAA and given mental health therapy.
2) Keep Zambrano for pinch-hitting purposes. Allow him to pitch if he promises to behave himself. Reign him in. Turn him back into the player he once was. Get him to make the all-star-team. Get him to win the Cy Young. Turn him into a different person. Make it the feel-good story of the year. Numbers such as 19-7, 3.26 e.r.a. 200+ IP 200+ K's, 10 HRs, no hitter #2.
1) Hire the right manager to make #2 happen. Since Sandberg is not an option, and I am not exactly excited about Sveum, convince Tony LaRussa to reconsider his retirement by offering performanced-based incentives involving a sliding-scale of donations up to $10 million to ASPCA.
-November 13, 2011

Theo Epstein came in and was greeted as if he were the Messiah. He was 28 when he joined the Boston Red Sox, and helped lead them to their first World Series in a very long time in 2004. I recently watched Moneyball and (spoiler alert) apparently Billy Beane interviewed to be the GM of the Red Sox in 2003. Had he taken this job, perhaps Theo never would have made his big splash, and I would not be writing this post.

The Cubs are now a completely different animal than they were in 1998, 2003, 2007, and 2008, the four times they went to the playoffs in semi-recent years. These playoff runs were sparked by several players and managers: Kerry Wood, Dusty Baker, Lou Piniella, Carlos Zambrano, Aramis Ramirez, Mark DeRosa, Carlos Marmol, Derrek Lee, Ryan Theriot, Geovany Soto, and arguably Alfonso Soriano. With the trade of Carlos Zambrano yesterday, my anger reached its pitch.

I screamed, “NO!” This is was a far more emotional reaction than the one I had upon hearing that David Foster Wallace had just hung himself—the same night Carlos Zambrano threw his no-hitter against the Astros when the Cubs played as the “home team” in Miller Park. Probably, no one will agree with me on this issue, but the loss of Carlos Zambrano signals the end of an era. Everyone thinks we will be better off without him. Only time will tell, and truly, Ozzie Guillen and him are a match made in heaven. But Zambrano, who has said he will retire at 30, and now is about 30, may have ten good years left of pitching in him yet. He may still turn it around yet, and could still make the Hall of Fame if he were able to pitch the way he did from 2003-2007. There is no telling what is going on inside his mind at any time. But he was never boring to watch. That he was brought in to pinch-hit, and that he was more exciting to watch at the plate than nearly every other position player, further validates that he is a player of extraordinary talent that should have been given one more chance to stay with the Cubs. Instead, they’ll pay $15 million for him to pitch against them. Smart, very smart, everyone says. Volstad is younger, and may still be great yet, they say.

Theo Epstein has made many mistakes in his first couple months with the Cubs, and nobody seems to care except me. He is rebuilding the ballclub. They will not contend in 2012, unless some sort of miracle happens. They are aiming to win by about 2014—“Cubs win World Series – SWEEP – against Miami?” Well Miami will need to switch to the American League for that to happen, or at least there will need to be an NLCS showdown so that Back to the Future Part 2 will be prescient.
Regardless, the Cubs will not be a fun team to watch in 2012. The only players they have left that have any kind of entertainment value are Soriano, Soto, Marlon Byrd, Carlos Marmol, and obviously, Starlin Castro. Kerry Wood will be addressed later, and Matt Garza, it seems, is destined to leave as well. But now, it is important that Epstein’s major mistakes be highlighted:

#1: Not Hiring Ryne Sandberg as Manager
They had the chance last year, and they blew it. They had the chance this year, and they formally acknowledged that they would not ask him to join the team. This was the first sign that life was going to be miserable at Wrigley Field this year.

Ryne Sandberg (or “Ryno” as I like to call him) is a Hall of Famer. He played almost his entire career on the Cubs. He was a big part of their playoff runs in 1984 and 1989. I grew up watching and idolizing him. He was my childhood hero. I grew up watching the Cubs in the early 90s, when they had Sandberg, Mark Grace, Greg Maddux, and Andre Dawson. Two of the four are in the Hall, Maddux is undoubtedly going in immediately upon eligibility, and Mark Grace probably deserves a spot too, even though his only record may be compiling the most hits in the 1990s.

But Ryno was special, and has become more special since making it into the Hall. He was always a quiet player, but he decided to open up more, and his stints working his way up through the Cubs minor league system were attached with the presumption that one day, he would take the reins from Lou Piniella. He was ejected several times. He became a fiery manager. His teams did very well. Then Lou exited, Quade entered, Sandberg was passed over, went to the Phillies. The Cubs betrayed him, and I felt betrayed.

Theo had the chance to open up his tenure with a bold move that would have caused a riot. There is no manager that Cubs fans would have been happier with. I would have watched every single game just to see Ryno, and it would fill me with so much happiness to know that the player I grew up with, my hero, was back on the team, and playing as important a role as ever. Whatever excuses were made about any potential issues of Ryno’s experience are just lies used to justify a decision that is Theo’s attempt to change the “culture” around the Cubs. The “culture” (of losing, of drinking, and of ecstatic excitement in recent years when it looked like things were about to change anyways) is what makes the team great, the most popular team in baseball after the Yankees and Red Sox. Theo wants the Cubs to be like Red Sox, or maybe the Rays. Maybe it’ll “pay off” in a couple years, but the team I love is gone.

#2: Trading Sean Marshall

Sean Marshall was the lone bright spot on the extremely disappointing team last season (aside from Starlin). He was one of the best relievers in baseball. The Cubs got Travis Wood in return. I think he’s a starter, or something, and they needed one? Regardless, it shows that Theo has no idea what he is doing.

#3: Trading Tyler Colvin

I know, I know, Tyler Colvin had a terrible season last year. But he had a very good rookie year and it’s possible he can bounce back and be the all-star caliber player that he showed flashes of during his first year. Theo simply has no faith in certain players. Theo wants every single possible Cub to leave and start afresh. I want to throw up.

#4: Zambrano

Zambrano has already been addressed above. This is the move that really set me off though. I hope Carlos Zambrano wins the Cy Young award this year and beats the Cubs whenever he pitches against them. This sounds extremely perverse, but it would prove me right, and we all know I care more about being right than about the Cubs winning a championship.

#5: Garza, Wood, Etc. (Whatever Stupid Moves Theo Will Make Next)

It seems like a given that Garza will be gone – who was probably the only pitcher on the team that came close to being Ace material. If Kerry Wood leaves for another team, then I am going to kill myself. If he retires, that’s another matter entirely. Kerry Wood is not an essential element to the team, but he is the only player left from 1998. He is Pure Cub. He needs to stay on the team. He is still very effective. But if he leaves Chicago for another team, because Theo doesn’t want him there anymore, I’m going to kill myself. Kerry Wood is the best player to keep the “locker room” together. He is a “clubhouse” guy. On top of that, he is a nice person.

If Garza stays by some act of God, then MAYBE I can muster watching a game or two this year. Marlon Byrd is a great player, I love him. Everybody knows I have a soft spot for Soriano. Starlin is the Man. Carlos Marmol can bounce back. Ryan Dempster can be his old reliable self – arguably, the strongest “glue” player on the team after Kerry Wood. Soto can bounce back, call some great games, and be an all-star caliber player if he can get it together. Blake Dewitt, I’ve got no problem with, he can play every day as far as I’m concerned. (Mark DeRosa was available as a free agent, and Theo was moronic for not even considering bringing him back—I know he is past his prime, but I also know he was more effective in Chicago than any other place, and he was one of my personal favorites – I never saw him make any dumb mistakes.)

Theo did not try to get Pujols. This is understandable. Theo didn’t bother trying to keep Ramirez. That too, is understandable. Prince Fielder is the last major free agent left on the market. If Theo picks up Prince, then maybe, just maybe, I could applaud a single move he makes. But he has revealed himself to be a totalitarian dictator that wants to change the “culture” of the Cubs. You know what? I’ve been a Cubs fan all my life and I’ve loved this team as much as anyone – even when they were at their worst. But everything I’ve loved about them is gone, and they’ve been replaced with this “wunderkind” who plays stats just like everyone else is doing now and cares nothing for what the fans want to see. I hope Wrigley Field falls a hundred thousand visitors short this year. I hope real Cubs fans will boycott this team. I’ll be in New York, and I’ll pay attention, sure, but I really won’t care about missing the chance to watch them play on TV. They’re going to be terrible this year, and while all this nonsense may pay off one day, Theo has crushed my dreams. This could have been a really exciting year. The Cubs had enough guys, that, with a couple smart moves, could have gone the distance. Maybe Dale Sveum will be a good manager, but big bad Carlos was too much of a liability—they were too afraid to even bother giving him another chance.

Carlos’s anger at the team last year reflected my own – it was a team that had lost its will to succeed. “We sucks,” he said. They did. He was right. Make no mistake – he’s a loose cannon all right –and walking out on the team in Atlanta was kind of a messed up thing to do. Fighting with Derrek Lee, kind of a messed up thing to do. Fighting with Michael Barrett, kind of a messed up thing to do. However, throwing a no-hitter? Awesome. Hitting a bunch of home runs? Awesome. Carlos was unpredictable, and that is what made him fun to watch. He was never boring. He was as emotional and crazy as anyone in baseball this side of Miguel Cabrera. I loved him for it. And I prayed that he could stay—just one more chance—and that he could come back and carry the team on his back to the playoffs. But all those dreams are gone. Theo drew a line in the sand with this move. I imagine a lot of Cubs fans will be very happy to have Carlos gone, but not me. I’ve disagreed with every single thing that Theo has done so far. I may be no expert, but my knowledge of the Cubs is pretty darn good. I know this team is fueled by psychological nuance. Theo wants to forget about all that junk about curses and such. What he doesn’t realize is that he’s just the latest one to hit the North Side.

The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court - Jeffrey Toobin

2012-01-01T18:53:00.000-08:00

About nine months ago, my seat buddy in Constitutional Law asked me, "Have you read The Nine?" A few months later, at my 10th high school reunion, a recent J.D. recipient and classmate asked the same question. I said no, but I joked vociferously with him about the Supreme Court. He said the book showed that the justices just liked to squabble all the time. It made it seem funny.

Turning into a nerd, I started joking all too often about the Supreme Court. Truly, the justices were the greatest political celebrities in America. They may be the greatest celebrities of all, though I am sure Snooki commands a greater majority of the public consciousness than Stephen Breyer. Over this winter break, my nerdiness reached its absolute. Recognizing that my family had 9 members, I decided it would be appropriate to institute a family court. All decisions that affected all members of the family significantly would have to be voted on, with a majority opinion written which would then contain "holdings" for future decisions. My hope is that the practice would be handed down from generation to generation. Whenever a family member died, rules were in place to appoint replacements. However, all opinions would be "advisory," which Supreme Court opinions never are. This caused considerable confusion, but it was fun to attach a justice to each member of our family:

Dad - John Roberts (Dad was offered the position of Chief Justice, but gave it to Mom. They look alike and are conservative - though Dad would never admit as much, having supported Obama - and both have a son named Jack.)
Mom - Ruth Bader Ginsburg (Their political ideologies are almost perfectly aligned.)
Brooke - Sonia Sotomayor (Liberal, and with a middle name of "Vanessa" the most vaguely Hispanic - though I am not sure Vanessa has any Hispanic implications whatsoever.)
Marc - Stephen Breyer (Only because he looks 10 years younger than he is.)
Lindsay - Samuel Alito (There is no good reason for this - except that his seat was Sandra Day O'Connor's, and they wanted a woman to replace her, but they got him instead.)
Me - Antonin Scalia (We are at opposite ends of the political spectrum - but we are both also incredibly angry, enjoy grandstanding, and have a flair for incendiary prose.)
Michael - Anthony Kennedy (He is unpredictable, the "swing justice," the most powerful man in America.)
Emma - Clarence Thomas (She is the most black, and extremely conservative.)

I bought The Nine for Michael as a Christmas present. Before Christmas, I did my best to get through as much of it as possible. Whatever ringing endorsements there may be for it are all true. This book is essential reading for all law students, and for anyone else interested in what is probably the most important branch of government.

The focus of the book is on the nine justices that served together for the longest period in American history, 1994 - 2005: Rehnquist, Stevens, O'Connor, Scalia, Kennedy, Souter, Thomas, Ginsburg, and Breyer. The area addressed is (almost) exclusively Constitutional Law. Any 1Ls (or 2Ls at certain schools, I am told) that have not taken this course will be well-served to read it. I got a B in Con Law last year. I've written enough about my failure to address the Commerce Clause, but this book serves as an effective "nutshell" for a very high percentage of cases that will be covered in that course (had I read it, I might have gotten an A-, given my professor's then-seemingly peculiar method of placing the justices on a line from left to right). Those cases are:

-Roe v. Wade (+ Planned Parenthood v. Casey, Stenberg v. Carhart, and Gonzales v. Carhart)
-Grutter/Gratz v. Bollinger (+Adarand v. Pena, Bakke v. Regents of University of California, and the Louisville/Seattle school district cases that close out the text.)
-Bush v. Gore (+ Clinton v. Jones)
-United States v. Lopez (+United States v. Morrison and Gonzales v. Raich)
-Hamdi v. Rumsfeld (+Rasul v. Bush, Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, and Boumedienne v. Bush)
-Kelo v. City of New London
-Lawrence v. Texas (+Bowers v. Hardwick)
-District of Columbia v. Heller (in the Afterword)

There are many others I am forgetting. But aside from being an entertaining primer and supplement to the sometimes inscrutable language of their opinions, the book is above all, a great mini-biography of all the justices.

John Paul Stevens probably comes across as the most admirable. He was still serving at 89 (90?), and stayed on the Court nearly as long as anyone in history. More importantly he was from Chicago and went to Northwestern Law rather than Yale or Harvard. His vote was not always that predictable, but in later years he moved to the left. He always applied a certain degree of common sense in his decisions that is a breath of fresh air, considering the underlying theme of this book: the conservative movement to control the Court.

It's extremely disturbing to read about hardcore Federalists and Evangelicals. However, Toobin notes near the very end that, "They organized more, mobilized more, and cared more about the Court than their liberal counterparts. And when their candidate won the presidency, these conservatives demanded more--a pair of justices who were precisely to their liking [Roberts and Alito] (and the ejection of one nominee, Harriet Miers, who was not). With admirable candor, and even greater passion, conservatives have invested in the Court to advance their goals for the country." (393) It seems clear that Toobin favors liberals, but he does not seem to criticize conservatives unfairly. However, I do not want this review to dissolve into a discussion of partisan politics. The Nine will provide a heavy education if you are seeking that. Needless to say, I consider the squabbles between liberals and conservatives over affirmative action and abortion and gay rights extraordinarily annoying, and heavily favor O'Connor's view of judicial independence. Anyone that votes along partisan lines without considering the issue from their own independent point of view as an individual deeply steeped in the practice of law is abusing the system. Judges are not supposed to be partisan. But they are. This is the ultimate take-away from the book.

Sandra Day O'Connor was the most powerful woman in America during her time on the Court. She was quite conservative, and her move to the center, and then the left, makes for a fascinating read. She was the original "swing justice" and controlled the Court. Toobin takes pains to point out that O'Connor, better than any other justice (with perhaps Stevens in 2nd), tried to vote on every decision as she thought the American popular consciousness would vote. And most of the time she got it right. Except in Bush v. Gore.

Bush v. Gore merits special mention because it was sort of glossed over in my Con Law class, but is described in such minute detail in The Nine that it takes up its own special section of the book (Part Two of Four). Toobin frankly seems obsessed with this decision. He has very strong opinions about it: "The struggle following the election of 2000 took thirty-six days, and the Court was directly involved for twenty-one of them. Yet over this brief period, the justices displayed all of their worst traits--among them vanity, overconfidence, impatience, arrogance, and simple political partisanship. These three weeks taint an otherwise largely admirable legacy. The justices did almost everything wrong. They embarrassed themselves and the Supreme Court." (165)

It is worth noting that Stevens is perhaps the only one that didn't embarrass himself in this case. Toobin cites a "peroration" that Stevens composed from his home in Fort Lauderdale that pretty much sums it up perfectly: "Time will one day heal the wound to that confidence [in the men and women who administer the judicial system that is the true backbone of the rule of law] that will be inflicted by today's decision. One thing, however, is certain. Although we may never know with complete certainty the identity of the winner of this year's Presidential election, the identity of the loser is perfectly [formerly "pellucidly," as Toobin notes] clear. It is the Nation's confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law." (207)

David Souter nearly resigned after Bush v. Gore. It took a serious toll on him. It seems clear that the he hated serving on the Court. This is probably an exaggeration. However, he comes across as, by far, the most interesting person in the book. One would naturally assume that Scalia provides most of the entertainment in this book, but it is actually Souter who is hilarious.

"Fifty-two years old and a lifelong bachelor, he had the habits of a gentleman from another century. During the day, he would leave the lights off in his office and maneuver his chair around the room, reading briefs by the sun. He ate the same thing for lunch every day: an entire apple, including the core and seeds, with a cup of yogurt. When the justices sat together in the dining room, the two items would be delivered Souter on the same fine china that served his colleagues; Souter was familiar with Coca-Cola, but he had never heard of a beverage that several of the other justices favored--Diet Coke. Souter did all his writing by fountain pen. Perhaps the best known fact about the new justice was that when Warren Rudman, the New Hampshire senator who was Souter's friend and patron, gave Souter his first television set, he apparently never plugged it in." (51-52)

I could cite more examples but I don't want to spoil it all. Just one more to highlight the awesomeness of being a federal judge:

"Souter had minimal financial obligations and a lifestyle that hovered somewhere between modest and ascetic. He had no wife, no children, a venerable family homestead in New Hampshire, and a small apartment in an unfashionable neighborhood in Washington. He worked about seventy hours a week, and his main hobby was jogging. In the annual disclosure that the justices are required to file, Scalia reported being reimbursed in 2003 by universities and bar associations for twenty-one trips, several of them abroad; O'Connor came in second among the justices with nineteen. Souter was last, as usual, with none. He also reported no outside income from speeches or publications and no gifts. Still, Souter's New England frugality was one factor that kept him on the Court when he thought about resigning after Bush v. Gore. Years earlier, he had invested in local bank stocks in his home region, and after a series of takeovers, the value of his shares had soared. By 2003, he reported cash and stock assets between $5.2 million and $25.5 million, nearly tying with Ginsburg for the highest on the Court. But Souter was also acutely aware that federal judges were entitled to retire with full salary after fifteen years on the bench, a benefit that would become available to him in 2005, when he would be sixty-six. A resignation before that point would forfeit his full pension, so he told friends he thought it would be unwise to forgo that bounty. It was characteristic of his quirky personality that he would worry about his pension when he had little need for it--and almost nothing to spend it on--but Souter's colleagues were used to his eccentricities." (283-284)

Anthony Kennedy is probably the second most eccentric justice profiled in the book. He has a flair for the dramatic. His "sweet mystery of life" passage from Casey is mentioned more than a couple times. His prose is purple. However, I happen to like it most of the time. Also, though conservative, I tend to agree with a lot of his decisions. He is referred to as "the most dangerous man in America" when he seems to turn his back on the conservative movement by joining the "troika" of Souter and O'Connor in Casey, but now that O'Connor has retired, he is the ultimate "swing justice" and the most powerful man in America. (Everyone knows that he will cast the deciding vote on the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act in June 2012--but then again, it would be just like the Court to surprise everyone on this issue. Further speculation on this issue is likely to be rendered moot and I do not like Flying Houses to exhibit obsolescence.)

His opinion in Roper v. Simmons (a case with which I am not intimately familiar) is emphasized because he pointed to the practices of other countries in generally not allowing the death penalty for juvenile offenders (the only countries that did allow it were Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and China) and this greatly offended conservatives. There are some funny parts about him too, but probably the best is when Tom DeLay chastises him for doing research on the internet. But his chambers are (is?) worth noting:

"Understatement was the rule for the decor in most justices' chambers. Everyone had a few personal touches--O'Connor employed a southwestern motif, with Native American blankets and curios; Ginsburg had opera mementos; Stevens had the box score from the World Series game in 1932 when Babe Ruth his his 'called shot' home run against the Chicago Cubs. (Stevens had attended the game as a twelve-year-old boy.) Kennedy, in contrast, installed a plush red carpet, more suited to a theater set than a judge's chambers. Worse (or better, depending on one's perspective), the carpet was festooned with gold stars--garish touches that made the office a sort of comic tourist attraction for law clerks and other insiders. All of the justices had the right to borrow paintings from the National Gallery, but Kennedy had taken the fullest advantage, plucking several near-masterpieces from the collection. What was more, he wedged his desk into the far corner of his office, away from the door, so that visitors had to traverse the expanse of his room to shake his hand. It was an office that tried hard, maybe too hard, to impress. (Kennedy even labored on his magnificent view of the east front of the Capitol. When Congress announced plans to build a massive visitors' center between the Court and the Capitol, Kennedy took the lead in lobbying the legislators to make sure it was built entirely belowground, so as not to disrupt his vista. The negotiations turned out to be surprisingly complex, and lasted for years, but Kennedy won this battle, and the view from the Court was largely preserved.)" (172)

Antonin Scalia deserves mention next, as he was appointed close to the same time as Kennedy, and was actually his classmate, and former running partner. They are also close to the same age and likely to retire around the same time. Scalia is probably one of the most noteworthy members of the Supreme Court ever. He had 9 kids. He is of Sicilian descent. He was raised in Elmhurst, Queens. I think he is a Mets fan. I am very fond of his dissent in Romer v. Evans because of his bizarre mention of a law firm interviewee's hating the Chicago Cubs being permissible grounds for denial of an offer. Scalia rarely wrote important majority opinions, and probably has the all time record for dissents. His ideology may be abhorrent to me, but my feelings about him are much more complicated. I really respect his ability to "humanize" the Court and lighten the mood. I am also of Sicilian descent, and Catholic. Also, I totally agree with him about Crawford:

"In two decades on a generally conservative Court, his number of important majority opinions was almost shockingly small; asked at a public forum his favorite of his opinions--a common question for the justices in such settings--he came up with an esoteric case interpreting the Confrontation Clause of the Sixth Amendment." (368-369)

If this is indeed a reference to Crawford v. Washington (US, 2004), Toobin is making a serious mistake by calling it an "esoteric case." Crawford is one of the most important cases in the study of Evidence. Scalia draws upon practically the whole of human history in the development of the Confrontation Clause of the 6th Amendment. It makes for one of the more interesting reads that the Supreme Court has produced, at least for its storytelling quality of the trial of Sir Walter Raleigh in 1602. Furthermore, his recent dissent in Michigan v. Bryant (US, 2011) is also worth a read. Scalia feels very strongly about the Confrontation Clause, and I am inclined to agree with him on it. Moreover, he is often "a voice in the wilderness" and no one joins his dissents. This makes me feel bad for him in a way, and also makes me feel closer to him, because I feel the same way a lot of the time. His rejoinder to the editor of the Boston Herald after a reporter had written about his making an "obscene gesture" at a church is worth quoting at length:

"Your reporter, an up-and-coming 'gotcha' star named Laurel J. Sweet, asked me (oh-so-sweetly) what I said to those people who objected to my taking part in such public religious ceremonies as the Red Mass I had just attended. I responded, jocularly, with a gesture that consisted of fanning the fingers of my right hand under my chin. Seeing that she did not understand, I said, 'That's Sicilian,' and explained its meaning--which was that I could not care less. That this is in fact the import of the gesture was nicely explained and exemplified in a book that was very popular some years ago, Luigi Barzini's The Italians: 'The extended fingers of one hand moving slowly back and forth under the raised chin means: 'I couldn't care less. It's no business of mine. Count me out.'...How could your reporter leap to the conclusion (contrary to my explanation) that the gesture was obscene? Alas, the explanation is evident in the following line of her article: '"That's Sicilian," the Italian jurist said, interpreting for the "Sopranos" challenged.' From watching too many episodes of the Sopranos, your staff seems to have acquired the belief that any Sicilian gesture is obscene--especially when made by an 'Italian jurist.' (I am, by the way, an American jurist.)" (370)

Clarence Thomas dispels the notion that Scalia does all the work for him in this book. He may often vote with Scalia, but he is actually more conservative. By far the juiciest part of the book details his confirmation hearings. Flying Houses tries to avoid gossip better suited to tabloids and this is old news anyways. Thomas is noteworthy for being especially quiet. He has not asked a question during oral arguments in years. Perhaps this gives the impression that he really does not like his job. He always votes against affirmative action, and hates it, though he himself is a beneficiary of it. He is probably the most controversial member of the Court. However, Toobin points out that he is also universally beloved, and extremely nice to everyone in the building. He makes a personal effort to know the names of the cafeteria workers. He befriends a lesbian couple and keeps the picture of one of them, a snowboarder, on his desk. He also occasionally gives interesting speeches.

"He had an understandable sensitivity to the common (and false) notion that he functioned as Scalia's pawn on the Court. This idea was absurd not least because the two justices' voting records were different, with Thomas well to the right of his senior colleague. What was notable, though, was that Thomas attributed this canard to racial, not political, bias. As he put it in a speech in Louisville, 'Because I'm black, it is sad that Justice Scalia does my work for me. I understand how that works. But I rarely see him, so he must have a chip in my brain that tells me what to do.'" (126)

More egregious is the Media Research Center's annual dinner story:

"After speeches by Michael Reagan, the president's son and a talk show host, and Oliver North, also at the time a figure in right-wing radio, the climax of the evening came with the presentation of the 'I'm-a-Compassionate-Liberal-but-I-Wish-You-Were-Dead Award for Media Hatred of Conservatives.' This award was presented to an obscure columnist named Julianne Malveaux, for saying in a cable television interview about Thomas, 'I hope his wife feeds him lots of eggs and butter and he dies early like a lot of black men do.' Thomas had been laughing so hard early in the evening that Evans, the MC, said to him, 'Justice Thomas, you are a great audience, too.' When Thomas stepped up to the microphone to 'accept' the award for Malveaux, he received a standing ovation. 'Thank you,' the justice said, still laughing. 'Normally, we are busy. This is a sitting week, so we have cases to decide tomorrow morning at 9:30, and I usually spend this night working. But we realized that this was such an important occasion that we decided it was time to put aside our personal obligations, the Constitution, the work of the Court, our little nephew, to attend...I am pleased to accept this award on behalf of Suzanne Malveaux.' Thomas had mixed up Suzanne, a CNN correspondent, with her distant cousin Julianne; both are African American women. As always, the confirmation hearings were never far from Thomas's mind. 'As I was listening to those awards, I was hoping that Nina Totenberg would also share in it,' he said. Totenberg, the NPR legal affairs correspondent, had played an important role in bringing Anita Hill's story to the public. 'I have finally had the opportunity to have my surgeon remove her many stilettos from my back, and I'd like to return them.'" (132)

By contrast there is very little interesting to say about either Breyer or Ginsburg. They are both liberals, both former law professors, and generally vote in a reasonable manner. Breyer is probably the most obscure member of the current Court. His expertise was in Administrative Law. He always likes to avoid conflicts and tries to make compromises with all of the other justices. He also really enjoys his work on the Court. He stays in good shape. Ginsburg, by contrast, seems annoyed most of the time. She writes very well, and has been extremely influential in the field of women's rights. However, if anyone watched the State of the Union Address last January and saw her basically face-forward asleep, it's clear she hates formal committments that have little meaning. Also, it's clear the work on the Court is not for the faint of heart. Who knows how they have the energy to deal with all that reading and writing? Ginsburg and Breyer were both nominated one after the other by Clinton (not unlike Roberts and Alito by Bush) in the wake of Byron White's and Harry Blackmun's retirements. Along with these two, Lewis Powell also figures somewhat prominently in this book as a friend and mentor to O'Connor, and the author of the Bakke opinion. The friendship between O'Connor and Breyer is also heavily emphasized. But really, most of what comes across in this book is the absolute mess that Clinton made in his search for replacement justices. It took an incredibly long period of time and he went through dozens of options.

This is one of my major complaints about the book. There is a very heavy focus on the "search" for replacement Supreme Court justices. Probably 50-75 pages of the text are taken up on this issue. Now, this will prove very useful to any reader (perhaps an 8th grader) that wants to set themselves up perfectly for an appointment (as apparently Roberts did). But to the rest of us it is just depressing. The lengthy background questionnaire you have to fill out it is just scary. The scrutiny is unbelievable. However, Thomas managed to get confirmed despite his controversies, so maybe it's not all bad. Just so long as you can prove you're going to make the right vote, you should be fine. It also helps to have some experience as an actual judge.

We end this lengthy review with William Rehnquist, who, near the end of his tenure as Chief, stopped caring about the reasoning in the opinion and just cared about the votes. He thought that was all anybody cared about anyways, and the reasoning would get overruled eventually too, so who cares. He was meticulous when it came to being on time and keeping the Court efficient and organized. He knew O'Connor from their days at Stanford together. They were friends for 50 years. He was very conservative, but eventually, he stopped caring so much about the "cause" and arguably moved a tad towards the middle. His health problems are emphasized in the book:

"For a large, strapping man, Rehnquist had a delicate constitution. He had a chronically bad back, from an injury he sustained while gardening, and the pain would sometimes cause him to stand up during oral arguments at the Court and take a few steps behind his chair. In the early 1980s, he was even hospitalized for the back problems, and the treatment created new issues. The painkillers caused him to slur his words, and the problem became embarassingly noticeable when he asked questions in Court. The FBI investigation in connection with his promotion to chief justice revealed that Rehnquist's medical problems were more serious than the public was led to believe. He had been addictied to the sedative Placidyl for at least four years, and when he was hospitalized during his withdrawal from the medication in 1981, he suffered hallucinations. On one occasion, he told a nurse that 'Voices outside the room are saying they're going to kill the president.' Still, by the time he became chief, in 1986, his condition appears to have stabilized, in part because he took up tennis. Even though he was entitled to hire four law clerks, he generally took only three, which suited his weekly doubles game." (37-38)

The book came closest to bringing tears to my eyes during a particularly moving passage near the end of Rehnquist's tenure:

"In truth, Rehnquist was a tired old man in the spring of 2004. And he had grown cynical about the work of the Court. Over the years, his opinions had become more terse and cryptic because he had come to think that only the results, not how the justices explained them, really mattered. As Rehnquist told one colleague, who was shocked by the chief's gloom, 'Don't worry about the analysis and the principles in the case. Just make sure that the result is a good one this time around--because those principles you announce will be ignored in the next case." (276)

"In 2004, Stevens was eighty-four, the oldest among them, but he enjoyed robust health and no affinity for the president who would appoint his replacement. Rehnquist, closing in on eighty himself, was the most likely to leave. He had spoken candidly of his belief that justices should hand their seats to the party of the presidents who appointed them, and George W. Bush's conservatives politics reflected his own. But Rehnquist didn't want to retire. He was a widower who lived in a small town house in suburban Virginia. His three children were long grown. He liked his job and his colleagues. His health was satisfactory, if not robust. With his trademark directness, Rehnquist would point out the grim truth about retirees from the Supreme Court: all they did was die, usually sooner rather than later." (277)

I'll leave it there rather than spoil it any further, but I was quite shocked by Rehnquist's condition at the end of his time on the Court. I think I have said all I need to say about this book--except that it ends on a note of uncertainty--whether Obama or McCain would win in 2008. We know what happened, and we know Sotomayor and Kagan are now on the Court and that it is pretty much split down the middle with Kennedy. I read an article in the Tribune today about how both Clarence Thomas and Elena Kagan should recuse themselves from the Affordable Care Act decision. They cancel each other out anyways. The conservatives will fight tirelessly to get Kagan to recuse herself, and the liberals will fight (perhaps with less vigor) to get Thomas to recuse himself. "Politricks" at work to again....It makes me sick.

But if you care at all about politics, you owe it to yourself to read The Nine. I doubt you will be disappointed.

Manic: A Memoir - Terri Cheney

2011-12-27T15:31:00.000-08:00

My first year of law school was an emotional roller coaster ride. One year ago today, I was seriously debating dropping out, taking my $10,000 in debt, and walking away from it all. It clearly was not worth it. Yet something told me I would be too afraid, thinking that all of my friends and family and colleagues would judge me for wasting so many years studying for the LSAT, applying to schools, and getting this "higher degree" of education on track. Here I am halfway through. The second year has been better (so far - and we do not yet know our grades), but the anxiety will never end until we find our job and support ourselves like normal people are supposed to do.

I digress. I often told my older sister about this strange phenomenon which I had been experiencing since 2008 or so. I called it a "rapid rapid cycle of manic depression" - a term I had gleaned from wikipedia. Basically, it involved a cycle from a manic to depressed state every 24 to 48 hours. For me, it was every other day. Sunday I would go to bed hating life inordinately. I would pray that I would have a heart attack in my sleep and never wake up, never have to grow older and get lonelier, never have to go on welfare, never have to live sober and try to attain happiness. A little part of me would say, it's okay, tomorrow, you'll have your rocket fuel. Monday I would wake up and feel this sense of empowerment, like I could do anything. I could sit down to study and be enormously productive. I could talk to everyone without feeling self-conscious. However, I would have trouble falling asleep Monday night. Tuesday would be depression. Wednesday would be mania. Thursday would be depression. Friday would be mania. And so on. The only way to subtly affect this pattern was to self-medicate. My sister told me I should read Manic so I did.

Manic is the story of a woman who clearly suffers from manic-depression. Anybody who reads this book will inevitably think of James Frey and his famous fake memoir A Million Little Pieces. I have not read that book, but this memoir presents scenes that are so over-the-top that a reader cannot help but think that Cheney, a lawyer, is using a little bit of hyperbole for emotional heft. However, Cheney comes off as sincere, and her goal in writing the memoir wholly admirable. Who knows what Frey's intent was - warn against the dangers of drug addiction? I do not know. I do not want to particularly read that book as it seems a waste of time.

Many people may consider this book a waste of time but it is relatively short. It took me a while to read because of other obligations. However, the main audience for this book is manic-depressive attorneys or law students. There is little to no legal jargon in this book so non-attorneys will probably enjoy it more and the myth that a professional career in law is a surefire way to a lavish lifestyle will be propagated just a tad bit more. To be fair, Cheney leaves her job in the legal world behind in the end to write, and explains it in this pithy aside:

"It took me sixteen years to realize this. Sixteen years of reassuring myself on the way to work every morning that there's no such thing as a happy lawyer. It was just this particular case I was working on, this client, this judge, the latest Supreme Court ruling, the airborne viruses in my corner office. Perhaps if I tried another firm. So I tried another firm, several other firms in fact, each one bigger and better and more prestigious than the last. I landed higher-profile clients and took long, exotic vacations, and made a considerable amount of money. And I went to parties, a whole lot of parties, for every cause imaginable, or no cause at all. I billed the time regardless.....
If you nurture it long enough, a lie can become a life. Bad nights don't surprise you much after sixteen years. You come to expect them. You just don't expect them to go on forever. I should have known that the bout of depression that finally ended my career was the worst one yet, when I ran out of business cards and didn't have the energy to order new ones. Nothing mattered to me at that point except the pain, and the pain was everywhere." (234-235)

Cheney was an entertainment lawyer, arguably the dream job of many a law student (myself included, though I don't pursue it relentlessly as I go to school in New York, not L.A. - Cheney went to UCLA Law). To repeat, she does not write so much about her daily practice as much as her "pharmaceutical cornucopia." Perhaps it was reading this book that finally led me to see a psychiatrist and obtain prescriptions for Celexa, Ambien, Klonopin, Ritalin, and Adderall. The combination has worked well for me over the last few months but the concerns about chemical dependence remain. I do not recall many passages parlaying this particular concern, but I do believe Cheney mentions that she will probably be on medication for the rest of her life. She does, at the end, point to the need for sobriety, as many non-diagnosed depressives tend to self-medicate.

There are many memorable episodes in this memoir--chief amongst them a few suicide attempts, and stays in psychiatric wards. There is also a whiff of the bizarre, when Cheney describes her relationship with food, when going through depressive episodes where she would sleep 20-22 hours a day, and eat for the time she was awake:

"My mother went grocery shopping one day a week, usually on Sunday, so by Friday we'd be almost completely out of food. I clearly remember those endless Friday nights when there was nothing left in the cupboard and depression was gnawing a hole in my stomach. I had to eat something, anything. Toward the end of my depression, I ate whatever was there: iced coffee packets, bags of flour, spices ranging from anise to fennel to marjoram to thyme. Of course my body eventually rebelled and I wound up throwing up half of what I frantically shoved down my throat. I didn't stop until I finally fell asleep, exhausted, with my hand still clutching whatever I was eating." (191)

There is not much more I can say about the book that will not spoil any possible readings of it. In short, there is nothing offensive about it to me. I do not complain about people being "whiners" because I am a whiner myself. People that don't understand depression will probably still write it off and erroneously infer that Cheney is exaggerating. While I may not be as depressed as her, I can certainly relate to certain portions, where, for example, she describes in a rather profound way, hypomania as an idyllic state where everything seems (and perhaps is) possible:

"I've looked in the mirror when I'm hypomanic and even I can see it: my eyes are an open invitation, a bottomless well of empathy. 'Trust me, tell me everything,' they say, and people do. Not just men sitting across from me at a candlelight dinner, either; and not just men, for that matter. Men and women everywhere seem compelled to talk to me, touch me, give me their confidence. It happens in the oddest of places: in the aisles of the supermarket, waiting in a movie line, sitting at a coffehouse, and especially in elevators. Hypomania breaks down that invisible wall that exists between well-mannered strangers. There are no strangers anymore, only unknown friends, waiting to tell me their stories." (208)

In summation, I am not jealous of Cheney for writing a memoir that became a New York Times Bestseller. I usually am jealous of such authors. While the book may not be a pleasure to read, it is a book that has something to say, and will probably help a lot of people. It also may create a small and unnoticeable increase in business to the pharmaceutical industry. But that is probably just a sign of the times.

S/M: Chapter 25

2011-10-17T16:45:00.000-07:00

I was recently writing a journal entry today and noted that it was my half birthday--28 1/2. It reminded me of something--28 1/2 Cuts--which is the name of the student film a character in my second novel creates. The event is the subject of the 25th chapter. I figured it was time to publish an excerpt from this novel. It is too rare of an opportunity. I hope you enjoy it.

Self-mutilation starts to seem tedious when you force yourself to follow a structure, and you find yourself simply filling in the blanks, finishing something just to finish it, as if it were a paper in college that you really didn’t know how to write, so you faked your way through it as best as you could, and you handed it in, and were content getting back a C, because you could be sure that next time, you would focus in the appropriate manner and get an A. Is that the way I feel about this confession, reader? It’s average, not excellent? I wonder what separates the average book from the excellent book. Is it an economy of style or God-like knowledge of all things? Is it a page-turner of a story, or is it something that could only affect the most isolated reader in a highly personal way in their heart? I don’t know—book reviewers confound me. What do they hope to get out of a book—something that makes their critical assignment more fun? Is it more fun to write a positive review that everyone will agree with, or a negative review which displays a higher taste for art than the masses would understand? Most book reviewers are authors themselves—so is it only that they know how hard the publishing process is and all of their reviews basically attack the notion of whether or not the book should have ever been published? No—that’s outside the scope. Their reviews describe whether or not the book is a successful work of art.
I say a successful work of art is something that unites rather than divides. Of course, what unification is possible amongst the isolated spectacles of printed words? The unification is dependent upon a reader’s fine memory, a reader’s articulation, and a reader’s professed enthusiasm for a text. Who among us can remember printed words verbatim as they are read silently to ourselves in our mind, and who among us can quote films or television shows with the utmost veracity and imitation of the actors annunciating the words for us? I feel very hopeless working in this medium. And all I wanted to talk about in the 25th chapter of this confession was how nobody had the same idea of fun as me.
Am I to recount the specific experience for you? It started with Robby calling me in February or March. I had seen him over Thanksgiving and Christmas, but now he was calling to tell me he was going to take a road trip out to California as his graduation gift. His mom said he could do it so long as he devised a budget for the trip and allowed her to approve it, seeing how much money he had to his name and how responsible he could be in an independent arrangement. I told him this was great, as I would be living in L.A. for the 1st half of the summer between my freshman and sophomore year. I would continue to live in Dykstra Hall at a rent significantly lower than typical L.A. housing and I would take my first filmmaking course where our final project would be our first black & white film without sound. Robby told me he was going to leave from Highland Park on June 10 and he hoped to be in L.A. by the afternoon of the 16th. He said he would stay for only a few days—he had to be back by the 26th because his budget would not allow for any more loafing than that. I would be leaving L.A. by the end of June, and flying home, and going to Martha’s Vineyard after a day or two for the rest of the summer. My parents had no interest in staying in Northbrook, and they were not going to let me stay by myself there. Better for them to keep a close eye on my expenses.
So Robby would be there either as I was shooting my film, or immediately after. I would be busy working on it, but it was also the only class I had to worry about. I figured that Robby would be happy to see my work and help me to improve upon it. Maybe he could even be used as an extra in the film, and divert my notions of what the film would be about. Whatever the case, he was still my closest friend from whom I could never keep any secrets, and I looked forward to his company in California. Under these very different circumstances, who knew what we might accomplish?
By the way, the rest of my freshman year was decent. All in all, I was happy I had made some good friends and I was happy people were treating me normally. It was the first time in my life nobody was putting up obstacles to my success. (Only now do I realize, the problem with that was, the success I could accomplish there meant nothing to anyone). Nick and I got along alright, and he went back to the O.C. for the summer, and I stayed in our room by myself. Jake also stayed in the dorms over the summer, and we were the only two people on our floor to stay past graduation ceremonies. A few other students came in for the summer and occupied a few other rooms on the floor. I looked forward to my first filmmaking class immensely.
Samantha and I had signed up at the same time for the class. She was the only person I knew in it from before. On the first day, our new instructor Professor Wazir, who insisted we call her Jackie, explained the way the class would unfold:
“All of your equipment will be rented out from our film department, and all of the expenses for your film usage have already been included in the additional fee for the course. The first week we will learn all of the mechanics of operating the camera with real film. We will not be using digital film in this course. You will learn the basics here, and you will probably never use the basics again. For the last ten years or so, digital has become more and more popular. First there were digital camcorders and then there were DV camcorders and people started saying, the hell with film, this camera costs $700 and you can tape over and over a digital file infinitely and save it on your computer. Celluloid is for purists, and if you are going to be filmmakers, you must at least grasp the foundations of filmmaking, the history, and the techniques of all those that came before you.”
“We will not be using sound in these films because that adds a level of complication to the scenario that I do not want you to worry about. Your films will be silent, and whatever stories you decide to tell must be communicated by wordless gestures, or, if you so choose (though I must admit many find it eccentric and unseemly) by way of letter cards. Your films will have a cap set at seven minutes, so you will have to be very precise about how long each shot is held for, and exactly what image you want to capture in order to tell your story. Some of you may be saying, ‘That’s so limiting, I want to use dialogue, I want to tell an amazing story!’ and to that I am just going to say two things. Number one, seven minutes is a lot longer than it seems for a silent film. Number two, I say you go write that amazing story, with dialogue, with a long-running-time, with everything, and then you figure out a way to tell it without sound, and in seven minutes.”
“By week eight, we will begin showcasing your films. And, while silent shorts are generally ignored by the ‘industry’ at large, if any of your films turn out to be, shall we say, revelatory, I will use my connections to submit it for consideration at next year’s Sundance film festival. And regardless, all of your films will be showcased in one sitting at the end of the course, which everyone in the UCLA community this summer will be invited to attend.”
We went around the room, saying our names, where we were from, and what our favorite movie was. When they got to me I said, “My name’s Oscar, I’m from Chicago, and my favorite movie is Secretary,” which wasn’t true, but which I just wanted to say. A few people in the class who had seen it laughed appreciably. When it got to Samantha she said, “My name’s Samantha, I’m from Las Vegas, and my favorite movie is Annie Hall,” which nobody found very funny. We left class and she asked what I thought my film might be about and I told her I had already been planning it for a year and I knew exactly what its story would be. I found it amazing that I had only thought of one idea for a movie and it was going to be highly appropriate to make that idea a reality.
That night I saw Jake and asked him if he would be my lead actor for the film. He said he would love to do it and then he asked me what the film was about. Of course, I knew what the film was going to be about—the kid who ran away from home to L.A. after the SATs, before college. But, in that moment when Jake asked me, I had a brief vision of saying, “It’s about a kid who cuts himself.”
So you see, reader, the seeds of this document date back to my first significant creative exercise. I knew it was the only story worth telling, the only story not to exist in a conventional framework. It could go anywhere and it could do anything. It could be like the movie Waking Life or Slacker—not in its subject matter, but in its redefinition of what a film could be. So what if this kid just keeps cutting himself? So what if that’s not an exciting enough plot—it’s reality, man! And art, art must mimic reality if we are to find it revelatory, if we are to feel it deeply in our hearts and minds. All the other boys and girls that cut themselves would seek it out and idolize it, the same way I idolized Secretary, because no other movie could be so bold as to take up such abnormal concerns—except that film had focused on it from the female perspective, which just seems like its easier for a mass audience to swallow, for some reason. No, I couldn’t make a movie out of it—it was too dark and uncomfortable for actors. Also, I didn’t yet know how the story would end. Reader! People complain about despairing circumstances being clichéd, but despairing circumstances can often reveal the artist’s consciousness in its totality.
But I told Jake about the runaway story and he said it sounded good. We started work on it immediately the next week. I recruited Professor Diminico to play Jake’s father, and his wife agreed to play the part of the mother. We could not use dialogue, so I had to show Diminico speaking vociferously at a dinner table, Jake looking down at his plate, and Mrs. Diminico regarding the scene with a look of extreme concern. The actions were exaggerated so the meaning could not be missed. I decided not to use word cards—I wanted there to be a greater challenge.
The dinner table scene was the first, and the second was a short shot of Jake with his head in an SAT Test Prep book. The third was a short scene meant to communicate a meeting with a guidance counselor—I also recruited Professor Lang to play this part. Jake was handed a sheet of paper with a list of unimpressive schools. This was the hardest part of the film for me. I didn’t want to offend anyone by saying they were bad schools. There was a key on the sheet that said 1 = reach, 2 = 50/50, 3 = safety. Northwestern University was at the top of the list with an unprecedented 1+, Beloit College had a 1, DePaul had a 1, UIC had a 1, Loyola had a 1, Northern Illinois University had a 2, Columbia College had a 2, and Oakton Community College had a 3. There was a long shot of this sheet of paper as if it were in an old Looney Tunes cartoon and the viewer was meant to process all the information therein contained.
The next scene showed Jake at a desk in the library, taking a standardized test meant to represent the SAT. I could not recreate test-like conditions, so I did my best to gain the support of everyone in the section of the library where we were filming to re-arrange themselves four to a desk and to appear to be focusing on a test. I had roughly sixteen people in the shot and it succeeded in creating the illusion.
Next I showed Jake receiving a letter of acceptance from Northern Illinois University. Then, laying on his bed, looking up at the ceiling, pondering. Then, packing a large backpack, slipping out of the house at night (Diminico was kind enough to let me use his house as well), walking down the street, sticking out his thumb, getting picked up.
It was difficult to create the illusion that Jake was traveling from Chicago to L.A. when we were filming it in L.A. in the middle of June. Luckily, the script had him leaving in May, so the weather was not the problem. It was the rolling hills of California and the flat plains of Illinois. We went beyond the valley, up and around the most distant suburbs of L.A. County, finding roads far from the freeway, far from the insane crowds, giving the illusion that we were in the desolate Middle West. We did not worry about showing the different rides Jake found while hitchhiking—a few different shots of him in the passenger side with changing scenery in the window was more than enough to suffice.
Finally we showed him arriving in Hollywood, of course utilizing that famous sign, and shot a couple L.A. landmarks, which our tour (documented in the “24” chapter) had inspired in us. He had to get a room at the YMCA, so we showed one of those facilities, which the owners were very kind in letting us film. We showed him going into the Cold Stone Creamery with a Help Wanted sign on the front—the one in the mall on Hollywood Blvd, right by the Chinese theaters. We showed him in uniform, scooping out the cake batter flavor into a cup. Finally, we had to intimate that he moved out of the YMCA and into an apartment, so we showed him moving his stuff into an apartment with one of his co-workers as a new roommate. Then, to complete the film, we used the unifying shot of him collapsing onto the bed, looking up at the ceiling, pondering.
I was so happy with this movie! Jake also found my vision very precise—he was very impressed that I had such a clear notion for my first film. How economically we had told such an epic story. The only thing left was to come up with a good title.
Robby had arrived in L.A. the day we were filming the final scene in Jake’s new apartment. He had driven the same teal Toyota Camry he always drove the two thousand miles to California. It occurred to me that I should have asked him to take some footage, which I could have spliced into the film—but I was using real film, not digital, and Robby did not have a camcorder that I knew of anyways. After the last shot, we went back to Dykstra Hall, and Robby put his stuff down in Nick’s old place. I told him I had to go into the editing room tonight to work on the film, and Robby asked if he could come along. I said of course, but it would be boring. He said he didn’t care because he was really interested to see my movie.
We ordered Domino’s after we had been holed up in the editing room for two hours. Robby was assisting me with artistic decisions. It was a very epic story that had to be told in a very short time, and some three or four minutes had to be cut to make the seven-minute restriction. Robby said to cut back on the L.A. landmarks montage—Jake was only going to be working at Cold Stone Creamery—he was not going to be living the stereotypical L.A. lifestyle as traditionally depicted in American cinema. Just that section of Hollywood Blvd. should have been emphasized, Robby said, because that was Jake’s world.
Sometime around 1 AM, we left the editing room and went back to the dorm. Robby said he had a surprise for me. I could guess what it was. The drug box. He took it out of his suitcase. It had been transferred to a shoe box. Inside were twenty-five pills of ecstasy, twenty-five tabs of LSD, five grams of coke, a half ounce of shrooms, an ounce of weed, and two grams of heroin. Robby had kept it almost perfectly halved. To be honest, I felt it was something of a burden, but I also knew I could make a lot of money off it. I thanked Robby at least ten times, showed him the bong I had bought in Venice Beach, we smoked some of the weed from the ounce bag, and we played XBOX 360 until we couldn’t keep our eyes opened. We went to bed sometime after 4:30, because it was one of those rare occasions that we were able to smoke at 4:20 AM.
Robby was going to be in town for the UCLA screening of all the student shorts, which was going to be happening in just a couple days. My film had been finished, and all that was left was to publicize its screening. And title it.
I thought about it for a while, and decided 28½ Cuts would be the best possible title. There were many different variations on why this worked. It had manifold associations. Namely:
-It was in many ways an updated version of Les Quatre Cents Coups, only with Jake being a few years older than Antoine Doinel, and in him never ending up in a detention center, and in it being in English, not French, and translated more appropriately by the word for the purposes of its creator.
-At 7 minutes, it was roughly 1/14th the length of that aforementioned film. Thus, if the number four hundred were to be divided by that total in order to concentrate the essence of the film into a more action-packed short, it would be twenty-eight and a half cuts.
-I edited the film to exactly twenty-eight and a half cuts after I decided on the title. It was not very hard. That was pretty much what I had. How did I accomplish the ½ cut—isn’t, isn’t that impossible? Perhaps, but I freeze-framed the final shot as an homage, to make it even more apparent if anybody couldn’t have caught the more obvious references. The freeze frame may actually be a full shot, but its finality contains an abruptness that gives the illusion of an abbreviated cut (not unlike the final image in Fight Club).
-It ended on 8 ½ which probably made people think it was going to be a Fellini homage. Actually there was really nothing reminiscent of that masterpiece. It was merely a mathematical truth that coincidentally leant itself to multiple film homage interpretations.
And the night before the premiere, when Robby was playing XBOX 360 in my dorm room and I was taking a shower, I cut a film canister right below the surfboard, using the pocket knife. It was a circular shape with three circular triangular shapes cut out. Rather intricate compared to many previously, but this cut had meaning. My first film had inadvertently become named after a number not far from how many times I had marked down a blade upon my skin. I wanted to get closer to that number. 28½. Could I devise an homage to myself when I reached that point, a la my “golden” cut? I didn’t want to think too much about it. The natural course of events often led to the basic conditions necessary for complicated psychic gestures. The film canister was an easy one, like a photograph or journal entry, to remember a time when I was very excited because I had created something that was now going to be let forth into the public, for everyone to dismiss or praise. The film was an integral part of my life—all I had claimed to be studying for had led up to it, and I had finally proven that all was not a waste. So this was actually more of a “tattoo” cut, not necessarily done in a time of great stress or depression or sadness, but when I was actually feeling good (was really high, actually), and I thought it would be cool to see what it felt like then.

Blindness - Jose Saramago; Blindness - Dir. Fernando Meirelles; Contagion - Dir. Steven Soderbergh

2011-09-21T05:01:00.000-07:00

This review is primarily about Blindness, the novel, but I watched the film adaptation as my final Netflick before it became known as a Qwikflick (and sadly cannot afford this new service--though I admit it is dumb, as much business sense as it makes--another perfect example of the world going to hell), and then the night after went to see Contagion in the movie theater. Because of the close proximity of experiencing all three, and because of the similarities between them, this will be the first ever triple-review on Flying Houses.

Blindness provided me with two personal epiphanies--two philosophical insights, slight as they may be, unworthy of a full essay devoted to exploring them, but appropriate here: #1 relates to imagination and ideation. It can be explained by this simple illustration. Let us suppose I am reading a book. Let us suppose it takes place at a time not in the distant past nor the distant future (in other words, anytime between the 19th and 21st centuries). Let us suppose one of the primary settings in this book is a farm. I know one farm in my life better than any other. It was my grandmother's house, the farm my mother grew up on, which we would visit every single Sunday of my childhood, a one hour drive from our house. If there is ever a farm in a book I read, absent some incredibly long and detailed description, I will automatically associate the farm imagined by the writer with the farm I recall in my mind. This could have been an interesting discussion in the class I took called "Borders of the Western Imagination." Our imagination stretches only so far as our experience. Thus the writer forges a connection with the reader through an abstract measure--a single word, a noun. It is impossible for us to imagine the same object in our minds (unless it is a familiar object that everyone can recall, like an Egyptian pyramid), and this is where my literary epiphany comes in. It has always been clear to me that long, descriptive writing is boring, and that I will slog through it thinking, what a waste of my time, anyone can describe what a house looks like from the outside, but who can describe what it feels like to live in that house. Houses are different from farms. They are a far more common object, you can imagine hundreds of different variations, whereas I have not been to many farms, and primarily remember one. Ultimately, description makes little difference. We are all human, and we all have our imaginations to supplement the words that the writer provides. The story is what matters, the dialogue is what matters, and the reader's ability to identify with the characters and their actions is what matters. Blindness is perhaps the ultimate illustration of this concept.

Oeuvre rule: I have not read anything else by Saramago, but apparently all of his books contain the same style of dialogue, which is like this, I'm not going to use any quotations, Why would you do that, Because I am original, because I don't care what rules I'm supposed to follow, Don't you think people will get confused and stop reading, I don't care if they stop reading, they won't because as I said in my previous post, dialogue is like candy for the reader, and even if we include a two-page-long paragraph dialogue between two characters where you begin to lose track of who is who, readers will go to the end because each dialogue is almost like something you'd find in Plato.

That's a tall compliment, but Blindness has the unmistakable flavor of a myth or a parable, and while published in 1996, it can sit alongside Apology or Phaedo or The Oedipus Cycle as well as any other book released over the past century. For one, it is relatively short. It is not an all-consuming, deeply-nuanced study of a family in decline, but the presentation of a philosophical situation, and a reasonable prediction of all the events that could follow.

Here is the plot, shorn of spoilers (and indeed, if you read the back of the paperback copy, it provides spoilers up until the final third of the book--this is a book that won't really be spoiled, except for a few key events--indeed if you watch the movie and look at its R-rating, the description of why it is Rated-R, that is an even bigger spoiler): a man is in his car. He is waiting for the light to turn green. It does, but he goes blind, and he starts freaking out. Another man comes up to his car and asks if he can help him. He walks him back to his home, which happens to be nearby. The first blind man tells his wife, and they go to see the ophthalmologist (I will just use "doctor" from now on because it's hard to spell ophthalmologist). At his office is a girl with dark glasses (a lady of the night, pun intended), a boy with a squint, and an old man with an eyepatch. Later, the scene shoots back to the man who helped the first blind man. He has gone back to the car, and he steals it. He is actually a thief. However, before he can enjoy his new prize, he goes blind. The scene shoots back to the doctor's office. Doctor sees the first blind man and says, I don't know what's wrong with you, there's no medical explanation for this sort of thing. Later that night he goes home and sees his wife and tells her about this unusual case of blindness. He goes to study from his books, and he goes blind.

Soon, the Government begins to notice that people are going blind, and they set up quarantine facilities. Our basic group of characters are all placed in the same mental hospital. They are given food rations, but little direction from the military personnel guarding the facility, because they too are afraid of contracting the "white sickness," called such because the person does not see "blackness" but rather a "sea of milky white." The scenes in the mental hospital comprise the second act of the book. Several key episodes occur, but I will not discuss what happens. Let us just say that the primary allegorical element of the novel is introduced--that is, when civilization and society cease to exist, de facto representatives and leaders emerge in some form or another, either by tyranny or some democratic agreement. What happens to the mental hospital is disgusting. Saramago devotes a good deal of description to the filth.

The third part of the book is probably the strongest section. The last twenty or thirty pages are quite good, too. However, I borrowed this book on a recommendation from a girl who graduated from Fordham Law School. We were talking about Hemingway (as my previous post indicated, back in June 2011, I would soon finish that endless behemoth of a biography on him) and how the ending to The Sun Also Rises is just one of the most beautiful things ever, and how The Old Man and the Sea was a book that you could read anytime, in one day if you had the time, that could just sort of refresh your conscience and remind you of what it is to live and to be alive. She spoke beautifully about literature, and so when I saw Blindness on her shelf and remarked that I had heard great things, and when she said that the ending, also, was worth the total experience, I was convinced. Now, the ending is something of a "twist," and the last section of this book is certainly, to my mind, the strongest part, and the final paragraph can be both mesmerizing and confusing, but still, to a certain extent, I was underwhelmed. That said, I think Blindness is worth reading.

It is something of a long literary experiment, in the vein of Italo Calvino or Haruki Murukami. (I always say those two are experimental because I have only read "If on a Winter's Night a Traveler" and "Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World"--the latter of which is the only book I have read since April of 2008 that is not reviewed on Flying Houses, probably because I just don't know how I feel about it). The characters do not have proper names. The book is dialogue-heavy, but I don't believe there is a single quotation mark in it. The characters are blind and they struggle to complete the most mundane tasks. And there are not many portions that I find easy to quote:

"We came out of internment only three days ago, Ah, you were in quarantine, Yes, Was it Hard, Worse than that, How horrible, You are a writer, you have, as you said a moment ago, an obligation to know words, therefore you know that adjectives are of no use to us, if a person kills another, for example, it would be better to state this fact openly, directly, and to trust that the horror of the act, in itself, is so shocking that there is no need for us to say it was horrible, Do you mean that we have more words than we need, I mean that we have too few feelings, Or that we have them but have ceased to use the words they express, And so we lose them, I'd like you to tell me how you lived during quarantine, Why, I am a writer, You would have to have been there, A writer is just like anyone else, he cannot know everything, nor can he experience everything, he must ask and imagine, One day I may tell you what it was like, then you can write a book, Yes, I am writing it, How, if you are blind, The blind too can write, You mean that you had time to learn the braille alphabet, I do not know know braille, How can you write, then, asked the first blind man, Let me show you." (292, quotations mine)

Here, Saramago seems to be inserting himself as a character. The "writer" becomes an archetypal figure, as do the other characters, but this time as an even more transparent philosophical mouthpiece. And while the pleasures the book contains primarily relate to larger issues of the comprehensibility of the different facets of human existence, there are a couple traditional "novelistic" episodes that may bring tears:

"Men are all the same, they think because they came out of the belly of a woman they know all there is to know about women, I know very little about women, and about you I know nothing, as for men, in my opinion, by modern criteria I am now an old man and one-eyed as well as being blind, Have you nothing else to say against yourself, A lot more, you can't imagine how the list of self-recriminations grows with advancing age, I am young and have my fair share already, You haven't done anything really bad yet, How do you know, if you've never lived with me, You're right, I have never lived with you, Why do you repeat my words in that tone of voice, What tone of voice, That one, All I said was that I have never lived with you, Come on, come on, don't pretend that you don't understand, Don't insist, I beg you, I do insist, I want to know, Let's return to hopes, All right, The other example of hope which I refused to give was this, What, The last self-accusation on my list, Please, explain yourself, I never understand riddles, The monstrous wish of never regaining our sight, Why, So that we can go on living as we are, Do you mean all together, or just you and me, Don't make me answer, If you were only a man you could avoid answering, like all others, but you yourself said that you are an old man, and old men, if longevity has any sense at all, should not avert their face from the truth, answer me, With you, And why do you want to live with me, Do you want me to tell in front of everybody, We have done the dirtiest, ugliest, most repulsive things together, what you can tell me cannot possibly be worse, All right, if you insist, let it be, because the man I still am loves the woman you are, Was it so very difficult to make a declaration of love, At my age, people fear ridicule, You were not ridiculous, Let's forget it, please, I have no intention of forgetting it or letting you forget it either, It's nonsense, you forced it out of me and now, And now it's my turn, Don't say anything you may regret later, remember the black list, If I'm sincere today, what does it matter if I regret it tomorrow, Please stop, You want to live with me and I want to live with you, You are mad, We'll start living together here, like a couple, and we shall continue living together if we have to separate from our friends, two blind people must be able to see more than one, It's madness, you don't love me, What's this about loving, I never loved anyone, I just went to bed with men. So you agree with me then, Not really, You spoke of sincerity, tell me then if it's true that you really love me, I love you enough to want to be with you, and that is the first time I've ever said that to anyone, You would not have said it to me either if you had met me somewhere before, an elderly man, half bald with white hair, with a patch over one eye and a cataract in the other, The woman I was then wouldn't have said it, I agree, the person who said it was the woman I am today, Let's see then what the woman you will be tomorrow will have to say, Are you testing me, What an idea, who am I to put you to the test, it's life that decides these things, It's already made one decision." (306-307, quotations mine)

So, let's just take a moment here to point out that, yes, Blindness, is worth reading, and Saramago may have justifiably won the Nobel prize--and indeed, reading it in its original language (which translates directly to Essay on Blindness) might shed even more light on how great a triumph of clarity it is. But seriously--writing a book like this is much easier than writing a book like Buddenbrooks or The Magic Mountain. Those take years, and maybe we have to be much more fast-paced in 1995 than we do in 1915, but if you look at the total oeuvre, Mann's probably outweighs Saramago's by 100%. This in terms of page numbers. And it may be interesting to compare how much money each made from his books (this information in the publishing industry in general seems to be kept secret, and should be addressed more directly so people don't throw away years of their lives writing books no one will ever read), or how much time they spent writing their specific novels, compared to whatever "side-projects" they did for money. But they do have one thing in common: their depiction of reality, and of people acting as they really act, rings true. This is another literary epiphany that I have emphasized greatly over the last several years: REALISM IS ALL THAT MATTERS.

Before we enter into film, philosphical epiphany #2 came to me at some point during my high school years. I had a roommate my sophomore year. High school, is, I think, a cliquey time (law school is too but save that discussion for later). People band together in their own little groups. And it caused me to reflect, how, as the group of participants grows, so also does the group you as an individual are willing to ally yourself with. This is the simple illustration: you are in your dorm room with your roommate, and you are having an argument, or playing a computer game against one another on a local-area-network (Command and Conquer, for example). You hate each other. You want to kill the other person. You want to beat the hell out of them. The next day, you and your roommate play on a team, against two other roommates who live down the hall. Now you are friends and you have to work together, and the other roommates are your enemy. The next day, your dorm has organized a basketball tournament, and every floor has to form their own team to play against the others. The day after that, your dorm has to play in a tournament against every other dorm. The day after that, your school has to play against another school in a big football game. The day after that, an All-American team is selected from the group of 15 schools of which your school is a part. The day after that, All-Americans are chosen from every high school in the country. And so on, until Earth is itself the ultimate community, but it does not seem likely that there will be intergalactic warfare anytime soon. The point is this: we are all part of communities, as tiny as an apartment and as huge as the planet. Our concerns shift and we are more likely to be agreeable the larger the community that we function within, because there will be many other people on your same side that will denounce you, or question your beliefs, not out of some personal animus, but out of the altruistic motive of discovering what is best for one and what is best for all. That is, there is a search for reason, not some kind of search for dominance over the other side. This is the basic problem with the adversarial system of law, personal relationships, a free enterprise society, everything.

After that incomprehensible thought pattern, let's move on to Fernando Meirelles. First of all, if you have not seen City of God, please watch it next weekend. I only saw it once, like 5 years ago, but it stands out to me as one of the best films of the decade of the 2000s. Second, I thought The Constant Gardener was real boring. Sorry, but I don't remember anything about it. Finally, Blindness is ultimately a poor adaptation of the book, but its heart is in the right place. This is meant to be an absolutely faithful adaptation. And it is. No characters are named--except "The King of the Ward 3" who is played by Gael Garcia Bernal. Now, he is one of my favorite actors--I really liked Y Tu Mama Tambien and The Science of Sleep and those movies show that he has kind of an incredible energy. His character is definitely in the book, but he is also given an auxiliary role so that his character could also be named "the bartender," which is not in the book. Also, Sandra Oh plays the "Minister of Health" which is not in the book, really, or if she is, in disembodied form. Either of these actors would have been good to play one of the major characters, but to me they are basically wasted in the roles they are given. Julianne Moore and Mark Ruffalo do fine with the material they are given, but everyone else seems rushed to develop their character, or they just come through less clearly than in the book. Many key moments are transported directly from the text of the book (like when the Doctor asks for a show of hands when voting on something, and then realizes the absurdity of such a directive), but many are left out (like the second long quotation from above). The book's third act in particular seems cut down sharply. There are several key scenes there that would have made the movie much better.

Basically, there are several problems with the film. #1: Blindness is meant to be read, not viewed. It all has to do with the comprehension of our senses. Reading is, in a sense, a blind activity. We are not looking at objects--we are looking at words and imagining objects. When you watch a movie, you are looking at the objects. The director and cinematographer make an effort to portray the "white sickness" through combinations of visual trickery, but it feels like an empty exercise. #2: Blindness the book is much funnier. The book is hilarious, whether or not always intentional, and the movie is pretty serious all the way through--excepting the one joke about raising hands. #3: The movie is marketed as a "thriller." And it is made like that, with an emphasis on plot--what's going to happen to these people? A more dreamlike, detached, philosophical approach might have made for a better adaptation. It appears as if the producers were shooting for the moon--they wanted a big-budget blockbuster with an uber-art house director adapted from a Nobel-prize winning author that millions of people all over the world would see. But Harry Potter Blindness is not. That said, I still believe that an adaptation of White Noise would be a huge success. BUT IT HAS TO BE DONE RIGHT!

Of special note in Blindness is the final shot. It gave me a different interpretation than what I had of the text, and upon re-reading, it is the correct one.

If one was reading Blindness in September 2011, one could not help but think of its similarities to Contagion when the posters started showing up in New York. Here is a movie that everybody knows. It is the follow-up to Outbreak in a sense, fifteen years later, with a bit more sophisticated technology, and a slightly amped-up cast. Many elements from Blindness and Contagion coalesce. In particular, the quarantines that are implemented. However, the key difference is that society does not crumble in Contagion quite the way it does in Blindness. It's less philosophical and more realistic, though plenty of readers will admit that what happens in Blindness is totally plausible--if such a "white sickness" were to actually happen. Contagion is very scary. The first thirty minutes scared me. I really liked it for a while towards the middle. Then towards the end, (I won't spoil anything, though it seems this film is incredibly popular, and has already made more money and attracted a bigger audience than either Blindness ever will) I started to get bored.

But yeah, a depiction of a disease that is visceral rather than invisible will generally be more engaging on film. The converse will generally be more engaging on page.

Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story - Carlos Baker

2011-07-07T13:19:00.000-07:00

Few people in this world will spend a full year reading a single book. It happened to me, who happens to run a blog primarily devoted to literature. It will never happen again.

To be sure, there were extenuating circumstances. But I recall that bright day in June of 2010 when I chanced upon this volume in a basket of books in my parent’s bedroom. It stood out to me like a beacon. It was a long book, but I had just finished Ada, which ran about 600 pages and made for extremely difficult reading. Soon I would be starting law school, and I would not be able to read anything besides my casebooks (so I thought). I thought I could finish it before I left for school, roughly two months away. I read the back, and the first line from the introduction: “He used to say that he wanted no biography written while he was alive, and preferably for a hundred years after he was dead.” (vii) It was immediately apparent that it must be my final book before law school. I had read many books which I thought might teach me how to write a stunning first novel (Less Than Zero, The Sun Also Rises, This Side of Paradise, The Catcher in the Rye) and I had read books by John Gardner or Stephen King or Anne Lamott or James Wood or Francine Prose on how to write good books and I had read a book of letters between Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald but I had never read a biography on a writer I admired that might indicate a manner in which to live to best accomplish the task that I had set as my life’s purpose and mission: to write books that would outlast my own life, that would be a record of the life I had lived, that would elucidate my stance on the bits of human existence that were most worth remembering.

I took the book and went outside into my backyard. No one else was home, or would be for days, so I stripped to my underwear and sunbathed and read the first 50 pages. No one saw me, or if they did they said nothing, and I did not care. Here for a brief instant life was good. I had the day off work. I could fill my body with intoxicating chemicals and no one would know. I had settled down to learn from the example of a master.

The months rolled by and Friday, August 13th came, and I moved into my new apartment in Brooklyn. I had made it 250 pages through the book. I was obliged to put it down and read The Buffalo Creek Disaster. I did not read any more for a long time. Over Christmas Break, I began reading Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison. That was a very good book, and I was flying through it, and was preparing to write a review for Flying Houses when it was unfortunately stolen along with my messenger bag and iPod and digital camera and D & G glasses from a bar in Chelsea, on or around January 8, 2011.

I returned to this volume at points nearing the end of Spring Semester. My life between August 2010 and May 2011 was extremely painful and has been written about on this blog before, and will likely be written about again. I was finally able to return to this book in earnest near the end of May, before borrowing what will be the next review on this blog, Blindness. Still, I rarely read in Brooklyn, consumed by an internship and feelings of anxiety and hopelessness, time always slipping away without a thing to show for it. I have finally finished today, July 6, 2011, on Nantucket island, and will now state that this book is difficult reading.

One would not expect a biography to be a difficult read, but this is a very minutely detailed book. There are not many reviews of this book on Amazon but the few there admit it to be great. And true, one cannot complain that Baker leaves any stone unturned. This is a remarkably comprehensive account of Hemingway’s life. However, for me, it was too comprehensive, and those looking to tackle it should be forewarned of several distinguishing features.

First, there is almost no dialogue. Now, true, any biography attempting to portray a life realistically should not include much dialogue. A person’s words, spoken aloud in daily life, often go unrecorded and it is dangerous to try to imitate the way the subject may have spoken. Of the 564 pages in this book perhaps three or four pages (or less) consist of dialogue in quotations.
At first this may seem a petty complaint, but I do not think I have ever read a book with such little dialogue. And it leads to me reflect upon a comment a writing teacher of mine once said: “Dialogue is a reward for the reader.” Dialogue is like candy. Dialogue may be difficult to write, but is almost always easy to read. Pages consisting of dialogue in quotations will be flipped through noticeably faster than those of thick, dense, descriptive paragraphs. Law students reading casebooks may experience a similar feeling when reading cases that quote extensively from the record. These are often a relief. A little break. A reward. Here is the main dialogue I remember from the book:
“Buck, I just called to tell you I got that thing.”
“That thing? What thing?”
“That Swedish thing. You know.”
“You mean the Nobel Prize?”
“Yeah,” said Ernest. “You’re the first one I called.”
“God-damned wonderful,” Lanham said. “Congratulations.”
“I should have had the damn thing long ago,” said Ernest. “I’m thinking of telling them to shove it.”
“Don’t be a jackass. You can’t do that.”
“Well, maybe not,” said Ernest. “There’s thirty-five thousand dollars. You and I can have a hell of a lot of fun with thirty-five thousand dollars. The big thing I called about, Buck, is I want you to come down here and handle me. Everybody’s going to be banging on the door of the Finca. Buck, how about it?” (527)

“Buck” is Buck Lanham, a general in the U.S. Army stationed in France, Belgium, and Germany during World War II. He figures prominently in this book. The biography is actually dedicated to Buck Lanham and Dorothy Baker (the author’s wife). Buck Lanham becomes a close friend to Ernest, and later to Carlos Baker. Lanham must have provided the majority of first-person accounting on Ernest over the last seventeen years of his life or so. They met when Ernest was a war correspondent in Europe between 1943 and 1944.

My earlier point about dialogue should not be misconstrued. My comment referred to “blocked” dialogue. And that excerpt above may be the only such example in the book. But there is plenty of dialogue contained within the dense, descriptive paragraphs of the book. However, they are mostly phrases, or single sentences. Like one line of Ernest’s that he liked to say after his experiences in World War II: “How do you like it now, gentlemen?” This he said to his mother after threatening to cut her off when she was a poor old woman living in River Forest, IL in the late 1940’s. He had a very bad relationship with his mother because he believed she drove his father to suicide.

If the lack of “blocked” dialogue is a complaint, then my other complaint involves the subject matter of this book. True, there is plenty about Ernest’s writing, and his love and disdain for other writers, but the book is decidedly focused on the events in his life that inspired his writing. Consequently, there is an incredible amount of material of his time serving as a correspondent for the Spanish Civil War and World War II. The sections of the book about his time served as an ambulance driver during World War I are, for some reason, less tedious, perhaps if (or because) one has read A Farewell to Arms. There is almost nothing I remember about the Spanish Civil War from this book. But the stories from World War II are frankly ridiculous. Notably, there is one part where he sees a general crouched down behind a rock with his men, and he tells Buck Lanham, who is worried he will have to replace him, that the man is going to die because he has a stink of death about him. A day or two later the general does die, and Lanham asks how he could possibly know that was going to happen. Ernest replies that it is something one picks up while serving in a war.

There are other episodes where he narrowly escapes death about a dozen or so times, and it is incredible to observe such behavior where there does not seem to be any real hope of gain except for the thrill of being in a dangerous situation. Later he is questioned by the Inspector General when they suspect him of acting outside the scope of his duties as a war correspondent, in violation of the Geneva Convention. He lies, he commits perjury, and he is ashamed, because he actually does command troops. It is sort of hilarious that yes, he does have war experience, but he is basically just this writer that loves danger, and he is a big man with a big beard, and people automatically assume he is some kind of general, and he speaks with authority, and they listen to him.

There is much about his life near Havana, Cuba, and his fishing boat, the Pilar. In another hilarious episode, he learns about German submarines surfacing and demanding provisions from fishing boats in the area. He decides to assemble a ragtag group of eight individuals and calls the scheme Friendless, after the name of one of his cats. They get a bunch of grenades and plan to throw them into a German submarine when the enemy party might emerge on deck in an attempt to raid their fishing boat. They patrol the area, but they never get the opportunity to actually attack the Nazis.

There is much about hunting, and fishing. And there is much about the friendships he makes along the way, but few of the names will be previously familiar to readers of this book. If one wanted to make a movie of Hemingway’s life, this would be the place to start. However, it is clear from this book that he would absolutely hate the prospect of such a film. There are episodes involving all of the films that are adapted from his works, and it is only the film of his short story “The Killers” that he finds comes close to his written product.

The above material, if one is very interested in hunting, or fishing, or first-person accounts of wartime adventures, will be quite enjoyable. However, I must take issue with Baker’s writing style during these sections. True, he does seem to write with authority on the subject matter, but it can often be confusing for the lay reader without such experience—or worse yet, boring. But this is how Hemingway really lived: he wrote, he travelled, he admired the courage of those on the front lines of war and spent as much time with them as he could, he hunted and fished extensively, and he liked to surround himself with friends to drink and carry out such activities.

While he may come off as egotistical at times, what comes across more is his ability to listen to others and his thirst for hearing their real experiences. I have often marveled at Nabokov’s linguistic capabilities, and while Hemingway did not write in his second language, he also spoke French, Spanish, and some Italian. Rather than college at Oberlin or the University of Illinois, he immediately starts as a journalist in Kansas City, and readers in 2011 with too much money spent on education and too few practical skills actually learned will bemoan their existence. His knowledge of the arts and sciences is not diminished by lack of such education. He does not learn by studying (except when it comes to literature), but by doing.

Baker is at his best when discussing the literary aspects of Hemingway’s life. And I do not think it is just because I am so partial to him, but any paragraph that mentions F. Scott Fitzgerald is instantly quotable. It is true that there are too many quotations I could include here, but there are few other subjects I would want my review to contain. Here, after Baker mentions that Hemingway had been reading Thomas Mann (Buddenbrooks) and Turgenev (Fathers and Children) near the end of 1925, is one of the many episodes in which he holds court with visitors from a sickbed:

“From the fastness of his featherbed, Ernest discoursed at length to Fitzgerald on the importance of subject in fiction. War, said he, was the best subject of all. It offered maximum material combined with maximum action. Everything was speeded up and the writer who had participated in a war gained such a mass of experience as he would normally have to wait a lifetime to get. Dos Passos, for one, had been made by the Kaiser’s War, having gone to it twice and grown up in between. This was one reason why his Three Soldiers was such a swell book. Other good subjects, according to Ernest, were love, money, avarice, murder, and impotence. The Sun Also Rises, which he must now work all winter to revise, engaged none of these except the second and the last, but his hopes for the book were high. As soon as he recovered from his respiratory infection, he would take up the task of revision and typing.” (161)

Several of these episodes would be contained in A Moveable Feast, which is the last book that Hemingway works on, besides a lengthy article on bullfights that he observed on his last trip to Spain around 1959 or 1960. A Moveable Feast is treated as a series of “sketches” but if one has not read it, and would like to read about Hemingway, it is the real place to start. Much of their friendship took place after the writing of The Great Gatsby and before the publication of Tender is the Night:

“In spite of his own writing difficulties, Ernest played Dutch uncle to Fitzgerald, repeatedly urging him to get forward with Tender is the Night. The only thing to do with a novel, said he, was to finish it. Scott’s mood of depression was nothing but the Artist’s Reward. Summer was anyhow a discouraging time to work: only in the fall, when the feeling of death came on, did you find ‘the boys’ putting pen to paper. The good parts of a novel might be something a writer was lucky enough to overhear or they might be the wreckage of his whole damned life. The artist should not worry over the loss of his early bloom. People were not peaches. Like guns and saddles, they were all the better for becoming slightly worn. When a bloomless writer got his flashes of the old juice, he knew enough to get results with them. As always with Fitzgerald, Ernest managed to sound like a grizzled veteran of fifty rather than a comparative youngster of thirty whose second novel was not yet published.” (204)

Their friendship, however, is not always nice and friendly. In fact they have something of a falling out:

“As for Scott, he felt that only two events could possibly redeem him: either Zelda must die or Scott must develop a stomach disorder severe enough to make him stop drinking. Why did he refuse to grow up? Why was he drunk whenever Ernest saw him? His ‘damned bloody romanticism’ and his ‘cheap Irish love of defeat’ were becoming tiresome. Ernest, on the other hand, said that he had a damned good time all the time. When he was able to work, he never felt low. He took great pleasure in living for 340 days out of every 365. He was always conscious, he said, of living not one life but two. One was that of a writer who got his reward after his death, and to hell with what he got now. The other was that of a man who got everything now, and to hell with what came to him after death. Fame was anyway a strange phenomenon. A man might become immortal with ten lines of poetry or a hundred pages of prose. Or not, no matter how much he wrote, if he never had what it took. In his lifetime, a writer was judged by the sum total and average of his work. After he died, only the best mattered. He was convinced that human beings were probably ‘intended’ to suffer. But his experience had shown him that a man could get used to anything as long as he refused to worry about bad luck before it happened.” (238-239)

When Tender is the Night is published, Hemingway first rejects it, finding that it is basically a portrait of Fitzgerald’s life on the French Riviera, without any understanding of the psychological complexities of the characters he had picked out from real life. But his opinion would change:
“At first he had understated the book’s virtues and overemphasized its shortcomings. Scott obviously had talent to burn, said Ernest, but he had ‘cheated too damned much in this one.’ His problem was that he had stopped listening long ago, except to answers to his own questions. This was what dried a writer up. The minute he started listening again, he would sprout like dry grass after a sozzling rain. He must also learn to forget his personal tragedy. Everyone was bitched from the start, anyhow, and it was clear enough that Scott had to be hurt like hell before he could write seriously. It was his obligation to use the damned hurt in his writing, not to cheat with it. Neither he nor Ernest was a tragic character: they were only writers who must write. Most good writers, including James Joyce, were rummies. But good writers could always make comebacks. Scott was twice as good right this minute as he had been at the time of The Great Gatsby. ‘Go on and write,’ said Ernest.” (262) Fitzgerald then replies with an enthusiastic letter about how much he looks up to Hemingway and even needs to stop reading his books for fear that he will influence him too much.

Their friendship continues along pleasantly enough until Fitzgerald published “The Crack-Up” in Esquire in 1936. “Ernest was shocked. Scott, he felt, seemed almost to be taking pride in the shamelessness of his defeat. Why in God’s name couldn’t he understand that writers went through that kind of emptiness many times?” (283) Then there comes a decisive moment. Both Fitzgerald and Hemingway made a practice out of carving their characters from real life, but one story goes too far, and is worth a long excerpt:

“The story [“The Snows of Kilimanjaro”] also reached out to involve Fitzgerald. The dying writer was made to remember ‘poor Scott Fitzgerald’ and ‘his romantic awe’ of that ‘special glamorous race’ who had money. When Scott had discovered that they were not so glamorous as he had supposed, the realization ‘wrecked him just as much as any other thing that wrecked him.’ Ernest was determined not to follow Fitzgerald into the wreckage of a crack-up. As he had long ago told him, wreckage was made to be used by writers, even if it was the wreckage of one’s whole damned life. If the rich were indeed the enemy, Ernest would use them as such in his fiction.
“Ill and depressed among the green mountains of North Carolina, Fitzgerald was angered to see his name used in Ernest’s story. He got off a curt note on the stationery of the Grove Park Inn in Asheville.
Dear Ernest: Please lay off me in print. If I choose to write de profundis sometimes it doesn’t mean I want friends praying aloud over my corpse. No doubt you meant it kindly, but it cost me a night’s sleep. And when you incorporate it [the story] in a book would you mind cutting my name? It’s a fine story—one of your best—even though ‘Poor Scott Fitzgerald, etc.’ rather spoiled it for me. Ever your friend, Scott.
[P.S.] Riches have never fascinated me, unless combined with the greatest charm or distinction.
“Ernest presently wrote Perkins that Scott’s reaction was damned curious coming from a man who had spent all winter writing ‘those awful things about himself’ in Esquire. His reply to Scott himself said ominously that for five years now he had not written a line about anyone he knew because he had felt so sorry for them. But all that was past. He was going to stop being a gentleman and go back to being a novelist, using whatever material he damned well chose.” (290)

They correspond a couple other times with less rancor, but this is pretty much the extent of “gossip” contained in this book. Hemingway later reflects that Tender is the Night is probably Fitzgerald’s masterpiece around the time of the publication of For Whom the Bell Tolls and Fitzgerald’s death. Other literary figures, such as Ezra Pound, Sinclair Lewis, William Faulkner, J.D. Salinger, and Tennessee Williams appear in varying degrees, usually treading lightly so as not to upset Hemingway, who may justifiably be deemed a prickly personality—that is, if the slightest hint of a criticism emerged in an article or lecture. The exception is for Italian historian and art critic Bernard Berenson, who was in his 80s when he befriended Hemingway—Berenson never does wrong in his eyes. Famous movie stars such as Gary Cooper and Marlene Dietrich become close friends of his, as does Ingrid Bergman (but not her husband) and his attitude towards Spencer Tracy, who would play Santiago in the film adaptation of The Old Man and the Sea, is ambivalent.

In general the book is long and slow, but it is detailed. And it has always been something of a hobby of mine to stop by the same places where Hemingway has been in the past. While in Paris in 2003, I went to the Closerie des Lilas in Montparnasse and wrote a paper about how it had changed over the last seventy-five years. I have only been to Oak Park, IL proper a few times but have not driven by the house of his youth. He did not have very strong feelings for New York: “The homeward voyage was both stormy and dull. He gazed with surly distaste at the skyline of New York—the damned ‘chickenshit cement canyon town’ which he had left so exuberantly four months earlier.” (482) But he stayed at a friend’s house at 116 E. 64th St. in 1956 and at 1 E. 62nd St. in 1959. Notably for my present circumstances, he stayed at 45 Pearl Street in Nantucket in 1910 and sang at the First Congregational Church in a choir with his mother. I ran by the First Congregational Church yesterday en route to Cliff Rd. and hope to pass by 45 Pearl Street before I leave here the day after tomorrow.

His influence continues unabated fifty years after his death. While on vacation here, one of my sisters brought a biography of J.D. Salinger which came out this year. I found the coincidence remarkable. Here we are, both English majors (to a certain extent), both on vacation, one in law school and one considering going, one with an Ernest Hemingway biography and the other with a J.D. Salinger biography. I pointed out the one paragraph (on page 420, which only passes “the test” previously described here if one considers Salinger’s prose a narcotic) that describes their meeting in Paris in 1944 and asked whether she would show me the corresponding section in her book, which she did not. I wanted to have a debate about which writer would better stand the test of time as an American literary hero. It is tough, but I think Hemingway wins out. Another sister brought The Paris Wife, which my mother then read, which is a fictionalized account of his years in Paris, the title a reference to his first wife (out of four) Hadley, with her as the novel’s protagonist. So many coincidences show that he has permeated a great many fashions underlying the fabric of daily American life, down to the men in their middle-to-old age who have white hair and full beards, who bear an unmistakable resemblance. There are not many others who can be said to inhabit a state of appearance.

This book took me a very long time to read, and perhaps I found it slow and disappointing because it does not read like one of Hemingway’s books, where the prose has a tendency to fly off the page in often beautiful and original ways. Like Salinger after him, his literary style became the status quo, and remains a serious influence to this day. The final section of the book, the last fifty pages or so, went a good deal faster for me. His mind begins to deteriorate, and his weight drops to 175 pounds. The ending is somewhat sad, and also darkly funny when on the last night of his life he acts like everything is totally fine, and he wakes up early, and though his wife Mary has locked away the guns, he knows where the keys are kept. He goes about his death in a very matter-of-fact way. Of course he died too young and he might have produced several more great books yet, but he lived more than twenty years longer than Fitzgerald and surely left his mark on the world. If suicide is universally regarded as an immoral act, he at least may have had the excuse that it ran in his family, and that he could not help it if it were in his genes. He had two stays at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN during the last couple years of his life to tend to his psychiatric condition with shock treatments and other medication, which seemed to have a positive short-term effect, but obviously not long-term.

I have surprisingly never reviewed one of Hemingway’s books on Flying Houses but The Sun Also Rises is a masterpiece. I read The Old Man and the Sea as an 8th grader, required for school, and probably did not appreciate it enough at the time. It deserves a second look. I read A Farewell to Arms in high school as another required book, but I enjoyed it very much. It also deserves a second look. I have read A Moveable Feast two or three times and it is highly entertaining, oftentimes hilarious. I have not read For Whom the Bell Tolls and this will hopefully be reviewed sometime here in the not too distant future. But for now, I have been consumed deeply enough by Hemingway and will move onto a new book with renewed vigor and a goal to never take this long to read a book again.

Special Comment - Scamblogs

2011-06-01T16:55:00.001-07:00

This post required a large amount of painful research. One could ignore it, or take it with a grain of salt. One could also take it seriously and induce a nervous breakdown. It depends on whether one sees themselves in their posts.

I am talking about scamblogs, of course. These are blogs that focus on law school. One wishes there were more blogs like Flying Houses that can help you with 10 different case briefs written in a creative way. However, most blogs about law school focus on the detriment it is causing to individuals. These blogs are united in a common cause for law schools to be more transparent in the information they present to prospective students. They focus intensely on the employment rate of the class 9 months after graduation. They suggest that it does not show what percentage of that number (which is almost always between 90-99%) is employed outside the legal profession. They suggest that it is a voluntary survey that does not take into account the students that don't respond. They suggest that there are too many law schools and too many law school students and not enough legal positions to go around. And also that law school is too expensive and not worth going into debt over unless maybe you are going to one of the top 15 schools in the nation. Sometimes debt goes from $100,000 - $200,000. Mine is $60,000, plus whatever interest accrues by then. This is assuming my parents are able to support me for the next two years (and time to study for the Bar, and $3,000 for the Barbri course, and however long it takes me to find a job in NYC, plus rent). What happens when I go broke and I need to start paying off my loans? The only positive thing I have heard about loans is that you can defer their payment because of "hardship" (i.e. lack of employment). No matter what, I do not want to go into any greater debt than $60,000--that scares me enough as it is. And here I may not qualify for my merit scholarship renewal (grades are released in a week...perhaps grades will be released before this post is actually posted) and I could lose all of my funding, or at least a significant amount. If my grades aren't that great, and if I'm not at a top 15 school (or not even a top 50 school), and it's getting expensive for everyone involved, is it really worth it to go on? Will I ever get a job? Who knows. Impossible to know until you are faced with the situation. But it appears the odds are against us.

If I were to write a letter seeking advice from someone writing or posting on one of these sites, it is clear they would tell me to drop out. Who knows if I will get the same response from a person affiliated with my institution--a career counselor, a faculty member--if I reveal the same facts. My guess is that they will say, "Do what you really want to do--if your heart is set on being an attorney, then don't give up because eventually things will work out." I know that if I try to bring it up to my Dad, he will say, "There are so many other jobs you can get with your degree if you finish it out." Or if I tell him I want to quit he says, "What are you going to do then--work at a restaurant for the rest of your life?" And I say, "I don't know, I'll figure something out."

It appears to me this post might be most powerful if written entirely as a hypothetical dialogue--one of the few skills I have developed as a creative writer, the ability to present two sides to an issue--but no, this is a statement about scamblogs, and as such, it must go into an analysis of several websites, and attempt to answer the question, "How bad is it out there, really?"

We begin with the most popular of all sites, previously mentioned here in a couple posts, but most prominently back in my first post since Flying Houses went on "academic hiatus"--here is a link: http://flyinghouses.blogspot.com/2010/11/special-comment-on-using-movie.html

This website is of course ABOVE THE LAW.com (hereinafter "ATL"). It is worth noting that I read this blog somewhat frequently--every couple of days, whenever I become sufficiently bored, or run out of other interesting websites/blogs/news to read. I will admit that this blog is sometimes entertaining. It has made me laugh on more than one occasion. Its information is presented in a very reader-friendly way. The articles are never absurdly long (though I will argue that the longer the article, the closer it gets to truth) and are often about sex, or drugs, or lawyers behaving badly, or judges "benchslapping" them, or celebrities' legal affairs, or gossip about all of the nearly 200 law schools accredited by the ABA. It seems written by people who went to Harvard or Yale and are basically elitist, and proud of it (or at least exhibiting shades of ironic shame for blogging about law rather than practicing it). I will admit: this site has tons of ads, and is probably a very successful blog in the monetary sense, which seems like an oxymoron. It has many readers--but many of the readers are repeat visitors who leave stupid comments after every article. Still, it can be exciting to know your school has been written about--that everyone in the country/world who goes to this site (because I do think it is the most popular website for people seeking legal gossip) will know that yes, your school invites clothing companies to hold photo shoots of people in their underwear simulating sex in the cellar portion of the library (my "office," as it were, that I perhaps adopted in the hopes of living out such fantasies). Fortunately, we did not report our public service grant situation, as had been suggested at a couple meetings of students fighting it--that was one of my proudest moments as a member of this student body this year. I told people to fight the administration, and they all said no, it's hopeless, nothing will change, and guess what, it did change. Of course, next summer it will not be the same, and one wonders whether we will fight again. But I digress. ATL loves to make fun of our school because it is ranked #67. ATL loves to make fun of law school in general though, and it is leading the charge of the scamblogs, since it is the most visible online presence of this movement. Note the recent article on the lawsuit undertaken against Thomas Jefferson School of Law. Yeah, I wish there were a way for me to sue my school for punitive damages. I'm sure that's going to work out for them.

Scamblogs basically aver that students will not get jobs when they graduate, and who knows when this pattern will end. I know that people graduating right now (Class of 2011) have told me they have basically been ignored. I do not know many graduating 3Ls, but I did not know any who were "living the dream" of a law student--that is, working as a summer associate after 2L, being offered a position to start in the August or September after graduating, with a stipend for June and July to study for the Bar, and all BarBri tuition paid for--perhaps that is the norm at the higher-ranked schools, but that is not the norm where I go, and you need to be at the top of your class. So if you do well--maybe the 1 in 4 students who will graduate in the top 25%--it really doesn't seem so bad. Yet if you do that well, and can't find work, it's certainly frustrating. People in this position have the greatest cause for complaint. And our class is over 400 students. So 300 people in our class will not be in such an ideal position. We have to get creative.

Scamblogs do not talk about this issue very much. They focus on the "average" student at whatever school they are mentioning. ATL is the "super-scamblog" because it has adopted the philosophy that law school is basically a bad idea. There was a recent article about how prospective students will not be swayed by scamblogs, and this is also an intelligent observation. Am I the only one who, in the years (yes, from 2008 - 2010 I studied for the LSAT and took it twice, and could not get the 170+ necessary to become an "elite" future member of the legal profession) leading up to application, acceptance, and enrollment heard the all-too frequent rallying cry, "Don't go to law school?" I remember sitting in on a class at Loyola Law School, with a professor whose greatness was impressed upon me in those 90 minutes (Laurie Levenson), who called on the five or six of us who were visiting to ask about various points of Criminal Procedure, and then at one point said, "Well class, do you think they should do it?" And they all said aloud, in unison, "Don't go to law school!" Those five words have become such a buzz phrase. It was a remarkable experience that I could not take to heart, because I had spent all this money applying, and flying down to L.A. and renting a convertible, and this was my plan. One cannot shelf their plan before they have even started, particularly when they spent so much time getting ready for it. Prospective students think the hiring patterns will turn around by the time they finish, and they also think they will do well enough that they will not have to worry.

One could write much more about ATL, but there are more egregious websites for comment. One of the problems with scamblogs is that they are tasteless. They use foul language, and whatever intelligence they display is marred by the slip-shod nature of their writing, which leads to the direct inference that, if they are hosting a scamblog, they went to law school, and did not get a job, and want to take it out on the world. The inference is that they may not have been one of the best students--they may have been exactly the type of sucker they write about--doesn't know what they want to do with their lives, not necessarily sure they want to be an attorney from birth on, see that a J.D. is a relatively quick degree to get that doesn't require mathematical/scientific/technical college major background, think that law school is a ticket on the gravy train. They're not crazy--really, they're not--there are too many unemployed law students out there for them to be crazy--but their quest for transparency is, shall we say, compromised by their presentation.

But there is one blog that ATL frequently links to, and it is generally of a higher literary quality than the others that will be mentioned later. It is called THE PEOPLE'S THERAPIST (hereinafter "TPT") and it is written by a guy who went to a top law school, then worked at a large private law firm for several years then went to med school to become a psychiatrist because he hated the legal profession so much. This is a very personal blog--and in a certain sense I appreciate the brute force honesty and personal history that is offered by its author--but man does it hit you over the head! Many people will frequently mention that many attorneys have drinking and drug problems, and that it is a miserable profession. TPT is specifically dedicated to spreading this idea. Most of the posts that ATL links to are about why students should drop out. TPT's author seems to think that his ideas hold true for everyone. In a sense, this is how great writers become successful. They forge a connection with their readers by showing that they share the same feelings and have felt the same way when faced with a particular situation. But there is a difference between persuasive, enjoyable writing, and the rhetoric of brainwashing. This author may be happy now, but he is not a great writer. He is a better writer than most bloggers out there, but he does not affect me. He does not say every potential lawyer should become a psychiatrist (and there are obvious similarities between these two "counseling" professions) but he does say that law school can be a huge waste of time and money and that you should be focusing on doing what you love. (I will reserve my personal comment on this issue until the end of this post.) Basically, if you want to be a lawyer then you should not read this blog because he will try to convince you that you are making a big mistake because he didn't like working in the atmosphere that most law students dream about (where you are worked to death and make enough money to subsidize a fairly lavish lifestyle). Most law students don't have a reasonable shot at this kind of work, and this blog seems to stand for the idea that, if they did have a 3.9, journal, and top 15 school, and they could work at Skadden, etc., they would hate it anyways, so they should just quit. If you don't want this kind of work the blog is basically inapplicable and does not comment on the poverty aspect that other scamblogs are so effective at presenting. Reading all of these blogs makes me hate my life, but reading this one in particular upsets me because the author needs to point out how great his credentials are in order to appear persuasive. I do not advertise my academic credentials on Flying Houses (but you can probably figure out my history if you read the posts). My hope is that my writing speaks for itself.

But now unfortunately, we must move into darker territory. Our first stop on this tour of Hell is "Temporary Attorney." I first became aware of this site when trying to figure out who our President was, and what she did, and why there was so much antipathy for her. This is what I found:
http://temporaryattorney.blogspot.com/2010/07/joan-wexler-of-crooklyn-law-school.html
I think some of my fellow students used this information when we fought for the public service grant. This is a really upsetting story in no small part because of the picture. Why not use a real picture? The writing is flanked with urban dictionary prose, and may justifiably be deemed "alarmist," but is not totally devoid of persuasive qualities. Yeah, I totally agree she should take a paycut--but many of these sites just point to a salary and never say what should be a reasonable one. Of course, any compensation over $500k is too much, but people in this world dream of "big money" and for some 500k is not enough. Once you are used to making it, a pay cut is painful. I used to make $36,000/year + bonuses. That was straight out of college. Now six years later I am making $12/hour through a public service grant, and I hope that I can get more than that once I pass the Bar. There is no way for me to support myself (in NYC) on these wages. One can support oneself on $500,000/year, but if one has expensive mortgages, and all of the other accoutrements to a high-class lifestyle (if you go out for every meal, and they all cost $300-$1,000), it is difficult to go back to that previous life. But this does not mean I am sympathetic. Our President's salary is unconscionable, and should be scaled back by at least 50%. If she makes more than the President of the U.S., it does not seem fair. Our school is not as complicated a venture as our country.

Mainly, Temporary Attorney focuses on the jobs available for unemployed/underemployed J.D.'s, i.e. Robert Half, which was responsible for supporting and killing my L.A. dream. I am scared that I will have to resort to their services five years after my last position worked through them, but I digress. Temporary Attorney also focuses on people like our President, who make too much money, and who lead to the further inference that law school is indeed a scam where professors and administrators get paid very well to delude students into thinking they are making a brilliant life decision, when in fact they are basically killing themselves in a much less fun way than going on a Chris Farley-esque bender (which has always been my personal plan). It is not the most offensive of scamblogs. But it has been useful as a link for me to find the more egregious ones.

There are too many scamblogs out there to try and review so I will focus on the links that have been updated most recently. One of the blogs, "The Jobless Juris Doctor," has stopped writing about the issue after 18 months. I agree that is long enough to run one of these blogs. You can only repeat variations on the same theme so many times. "Esquire Painting" is an affecting blog written by a person who was 300K in student debt. It is a very creative blog, one of which I would usually approve. But as personal as Flying Houses gets, I do not venture into such sheer autobiography--that is reserved for literature--and am not sure what I can get out of reading such a blog as that. "First Tier Toilet!" boasts a well-placed exclamation point, but seems to want to post many pictures of roaches and other bugs. There was one post decrying ATL, which was nice, and in general this site sometimes puts together an intelligent argument. It is not unpleasant to look at, except for the bugs. "Legal Nihilist"'s last post talks about how scamblogging and surfing these different blogs is unhealthy and a waste of time and how it is time to get over the injustice of what was done to them. This is perhaps the most uplifting thing I have read on the topic. "Tales of a Fourth-Tier Nothing" gets my vote for best blog name and is not all that offensive. There are many others that are in this category--fairly well-written, not offensive to the senses--but in general, reading these blogs will make you depressed.

There are two more I want to focus on: the first is the worst--"Third Tier Reality." This is an extremely offensive blog because it posts a picture of fecal matter with each new article. It is noteworthy for its narrow focus--it only profiles schools, and individuals, who are supposedly contributing to this scam. I must admit, I am impressed by the number of posts--but I am not impressed by the writing quality. Of special note is the profile on our school: http://thirdtierreality.blogspot.com/2010/07/deconstructing-crooklyn-aka-brooklyn.html

This post will make you sick if you go here. The entering class profile is right on the money. We have too many students. They should cut it down to about 200. But I don't think they can without majorly re-organizing the infrastructure of the school. It is designed to be this big. I have mentioned before the claustrophobia at this school, the feeling that sometimes you cannot breathe because you are surrounded by too many other students in the halls. But I am not here to criticize, I am here to point out the unoriginality. The Jessica Alba line under "intangibles" is similarly repeated in other school profiles. Our tuition is ridiculous, but this blog will point to any school's tuition, even if it is $10,000 less (like DePaul's is), and say it is too high. The blog also does not take scholarships into account. Neither do most scamblogs. The semi-recent article in the NY TIMES about this issue points out this is other "scam-like" behavior, but in general, when your load is $28,000 less, it at least appears that the school is not out to get you and actually doesn't want their school to put you into a lifetime of debt servitude. This fact is frequently glossed over. The comments on this site (like many others I presume) are where the real zingers fly. Over and over again it is just terribly depressing. At least one person in the comments says they are an intern and it can't be so hard to get a job as everyone says it is--nervous energy and overanalysis.

"Shilling Me Softly" also has an impressive number of posts but appears to be similar to a few other blogs in that they are basically a Jr. version of ATL (the same goes for "But I Did Everything Right!"). The last one I want to mention is "S*** Law Jobs" which posts ads from craigslist from across the country that pay terrible wages. This site is mainly good for a perverse version of comic relief. But I really can't write anymore about this. I envisioned this post as something great, but I see now it is futile to take these actual bloggers to task about specific things they have written, and it is more important to present my personal feelings on the matter as a person who has just finished their first year at a much-maligned institution:

My feelings change on a day-to-day basis. There is no consistency to my internal sense of happiness. To work with an impending sense of doom is nearly impossible, but I have done it all year long. People tell me I worry too much. Maybe I am just too gullible a person. Maybe I would be better off if I had never discovered any of this information. As a person who has complained about their life all along, and who has joked about suicide for approximately 18 years, and who has already gone broke once, I still have never been in debt until now, and the feeling is a bit overwhelming, even when it is only 20K at this point and I would be able to pay off at least a little bit of it pretty soon. But I would go back to that life I had before, where my market value was $13/hour. Cynical scambloggers will say, "$13 is better than the $10 you'll be making in s*** law!" Plus there's no extra debt. However, most will make more than $10. Actually, it seems not totally unlikely that I would be qualified with this degree to receive a salary in the 50-60K range. And I know it is hard to find a job now, but I want to ask everyone--have you ever tried to be published?

Which is worse--the legal industry or the publishing industry? You tell me. I'd love to be a literary agent. I won't stop writing. I came into this school knowing that. Some people say that work as an attorney is too time-consuming and you will never find the time to write. Whatever. All the jobs I could find were boring, and legal work may be boring at times, but at least it deals with semi-interesting subject matter and real issues that figure imporantly in other people's lives. It is a profession where you can "make a difference." The difficult thing to do is balance the terrible financial situation it may end in with the possible benefits of personal fulfillment and more lucrative job opportunities. If I said I hated it, I hated it because of all of this bad news flying around. It was yet another time in my life when I made a decision that seemed like my destiny but I was slapped into the reality that I am indeed a superfluous human being.

I don't give up on writing because it is a form of therapy. Law school is not a form of therapy. But I do think it is harder to make it as a "writer" than it is to make it as a "lawyer" and that is pretty much the last reason I have for not feeling totally demoralized. So thanks for all the great information. I have really appreciated becoming depressed. At least I am not wearing horse-blinders (unless the information has actually been blown out of proportion, in which case I was brainwashed--but I felt uneasy enough about my personal finances 10 months ago to know otherwise). Mission accomplished, law schools know they need to be more transparent and maybe they will actually be regulated more closely. I come to no thesis in this post. I cannot ascertain veracity until I am in the situation myself. Apparently, it is a hopeless one.

Reflection on 1L Year

2011-05-18T14:34:00.000-07:00

It is not easy to sum up a 9-month period in a single blog post. Nor do I know exactly what I want to say about the experience of a law school student that I will not touch on in my next post (which is sure to be controversial, and as un-biased as humanly possible). I was considering writing about the top 10 cases we read, and a short description of why each was so great, and then a list of the 10 worst cases (the most painful to read). This might take a very long time. The fact is, I am planning on composing a follow-up to Think and Grow Poor: Cultivating a Negative Mental Attitude, otherwise known as my only work of creative non-fiction/memoir, about my experience of traveling to and living in California for 10 months. Ironically, this book, which has the present working title of Loss of Enjoyment of Life, may cover a period just as short and as packed with emotion. My grades will be released June 8 and then I will begin to know for sure whether this will be the end or not. To be sure, I had a better time in California, working dead-end office jobs and going on pointless interviews and waiting in traffic and never dating anyone but pining for my dermatologist. Clearly, it was much better than these past 9 months, which all too frequently involved reading and re-reading sentences and paragraphs of opinions, escaping a day or two or three later with zero to little recollection when called upon in class to recall a pivotal point of reasoning. I do not think I studied as effectively as I could have.

Believe me, I put in the time. I was not a slacker. My social life was almost laughable. I moved here for school (and with the hopes of practicing and living here for the long run) because it was where I had the most friends--but who could have guessed that 90% of them (those not extremely close, but more near acquaintance, perhaps signaled by a wave in the street) would ignore me as I attempted to reconnect.

Were the classes boring? At first, they were terribly boring! But a funny thing happened when we finished all of our assignments and entered exam period--I sort of began enjoying thinking about the topics we covered. This is a ridiculously dorky thing to write. But by the end of the year, I could think of a positive thing to say about Civil Procedure, Torts, Criminal Law, Contracts, and Constitutional Law. Property was probably my least favorite class, though ironically I think it may carry more than its fair load in the top 10 best list (and probably the top 10 worst list, too). The book we used was interesting, but the class was maddening. I could review all of the books we used too, but that would be boring. Better to focus on individual cases. Still, look at my last post about the ad coelum doctrine for proof that I am able to say something nice about even my least favorite class.

But yes, I was not a slacker, but my outlining was not where it needed to be. Outline early, outline often. That is my advice. My outlines were all unmanageably long, particularly spring semester (Con Law-74 pages; Contracts-96 pages; Property-98 pages). Fall semester they were all in the 50-60 page range. This led to a lot of insecurity.

I watched a lot of Netflix, and I will probably watch too much Netflix forever or until I get a TV with cable or something. I watched almost everything on my computer, and worked on this computer, and it cost about $500 last August, and it has had its share of word processing malfunctions, but never anything truly serious, and so I have been lucky. I also ate in front of it often and there are probably many little crumbs in the keyboard. It should probably be cleaned, but who knows if I ever will get around to this.

I was not very good about making friends with my classmates. But let it be known that if I didn't suffer from a chemical imbalance or manic depression or bipolar disorder on an ultra-ultra rapid cycle or whatever you want to call it, I am sure I could be a happy and healthy and social individual. I also would have been a more productive law student. I did not know any other classmates specifically suffering from depression as intensely as myself (that I could tell...), but believe me it is an impediment to success when every other day you go to bed praying that you will not have to wake up in the morning and endure another charade of the professor's question-and-answer session or unbelievably dull lecture. It is also an impediment to making friends because depression results in a loss of speech. And while people will generally be nice to quiet people, a person has to carve out a personality. And people will not generally want to surround themselves with people who feel uncomfortable, because their lack of comfort spreads, like an infectious disease. One might be able to say this feeling pervades law school classrooms and that few will be totally impervious to a moment or two of weakness by way of osmosis. But those without any "clinical" hang-ups stand a better chance of success.

Really most of what I would want to say will be included in Loss of Enjoyment of Life. Let us hope that it will be published. How many unemployed law students turn to literature in their darkest hour? Probably too many, like everything else in this world:

10) Christian v. Mattell (286 F.3d 1118) (9th Cir. 2003) (Civil Procedure)
The first sentence of this opinion gives a sense of the greatness to come: "It is difficult to imagine that the Barbie doll, so perfect in her sculpture and presentation, and so comfortable in every setting, from "California girl" to "Chief Executive Officer Barbie," could spawn such acrimonious litigation and such egregious conduct on the part of her challenger."

This is a case about Rule 11 sanctions, arguably the most interesting topic in Civil Procedure. In 1990, a young woman at USC created a cheerleader doll, and in 1996, Mattel released "Cool Blue" Barbie, which looked very similar to this doll (a cheerleader, with face paint), and Christian sued Mattel for $2.4 billion and injunctive relief. The attorney she hired, Hicks, is the subject of the opinion:

"At a follow-up counsel meeting required by a local rule, Mattel's counsel attempted to convince Hicks that his complaint was frivolous. During the videotaped meeting...Hicks declined Mattel's invitation to inspect the dolls and, later during the meeting, hurled them in disgust from a conference table."

This was a fun case to read, and Civil Procedure was a more interesting course than it appeared at first blush, because it could also be named "Lawyers behaving badly." Plus I sometimes fear (or fantasize?) that I will become a terrible attorney in the future and bring stupid lawsuits and do things like throw Barbies around an office. The image alone is what ranks this case #10.

9) Monge v. Beebe Rubber Co. (114 N.H. 130, 316 A.2d 549) (1974) (Contracts)
This is a rather famous Contracts case that I think most classes will read. I think it would make a very good movie. It would be a very sad story. It is about a young woman who came to New Hampshire from Costa Rica in 1964 and went to night school 5 nights a week from 7-10. At 11, she would go to work for $2.79/hour on a degreasing machine (whatever that is). Her supervisor at work made passes at her, and she rejected his requests for a date. Then, he demoted her to a sewing machine, which paid $1.99/hour. She was later fired, then reinstated, then called in sick, then found unconscious on the bathroom floor, then called in sick again, then deemed a voluntary quit.

The case is famous for stating this rule of contract law: "In all employment contracts, whether at will or for a definite term, the employer's interest in running his business as he sees fit must be balanced against the interest of the employee in maintaining his employment, and the public's interest in maintaining a proper balance between the two."

The dissent noted that there was a different way of looking at the case, and that the supervisor was not quite the monster the majority opinion made him out to be. This is another reason the story behind this case would make an interesting movie. I thought it was fun to read because it was just so messed up. "Oh, you don't want to go out with me? Well, you're fired."

8) Grutter v. Bollinger (539 U.S. 306) (2003) (Constitutional Law)
Along with Bakke and Gratz, these three cases represent the majority of the Court's jurisprudence on the topic of affirmative action in educational settings. The other two cases rule that affirmative action is unconstitutional--because they implement some type of numbers-based acceptance procedure for minority students. Those dealt with the UC-Davis School of Medicine and University of Michigan's undergraduate institution, respectively. This one deals with University of Michigan's law school--and their method of implementing affirmative action is more holistic, less numbers-based, and is therefore valid. My analysis of this case may be a bit simplistic, but I believe it is accurate. The fun of reading this case primarily turns on its being about law school admissions and being a point of study for law students.

It was also probably the only moment all year that I uttered anything close to a controversial comment during one of our classes. I actually volunteered when asked a question about this case, and the professor asked me, "So basically, if you are a minority, and you apply to law school, and your score is above a certain threshold, and your GPA is above a certain threshold as well, the admissions office can basically accept you automatically, does that sound accurate to you?" I said, "I think it's pretty much done that way." He seemed a bit upset that I said this, and said my view was probably not exactly the way these things happened in real life. What I would have liked to have offered was this: I am not a minority. But, I know I called BLS after I got a 158 on the LSAT and asked, "So, if I apply, and I have a 158 and a 3.6, what are my chances?" They said, "Get a 160." I retook the LSAT and got a 163. I got into BLS with a scholarship. I think everyone with my stats automatically got accepted with a scholarship. Maybe I'm wrong. But minority or not, I think this was pretty much the way the admissions office worked. It would have been interesting to comment on the concept of "minority"--just because I am a white male, can't I still be a minority? Aside from the obvious issue of sexual orientation (which apparently works similar to race, but with less aggressive reforms in terms of remedial legislation), am I still stuck with all of the associated past history of favored treatment? Am I rich? Have I always been picked first for the kickball team? I guess the answer is this: I am just one person, and the vast majority of minorities have suffered from real discrimination that does not apply differently from person to person, but is widespread across an entire class of individuals. It is too bad I will not be born in 2028, which is when O'Connor says affirmative action will no longer be necessary to achieve diversity. Of course there is always the possibility of reincarnation.

7) Indiana Harbor Belt R.R. v. American Cyanamid Co. (916 F.2d 1174) (7th Cir. 1990) (Torts)
I am mainly picking this one because I had to include one case written by Posner. I have to include him because I am proud of him for being such an important figurehead over the past 40 years and for staying based in Chicago. I am surprised he was never appointed to the Supreme Court. Perhaps there was talk of it once. But anyways, this is a case about abnormally dangerous activity, an interesting topic in Torts. There is a train carrying liquid acrylonitrile that stops in Blue Island, and one day, workers notice a leak. This is a great case for Chicago culture as well. Posner cites a case about a hot air balloon landing in a rooftop garden in New York City in 1822. It was apparently a "paradigmatic case for strict liability," but its analogous quality appears elusive and was probably cited just because Posner is so awesome. Then near the end of the opinion, he comes to this conclusion:

"It is no more realistic to propose to reroute the shipment of all hazardous materials around Chicago than it is to propose the relocation of homes adjacent to the Blue Island switching yard to more distant suburbs. It may be less realistic. Brutal though it may seem to say it, the inappropriate use to which land is being put in the Blue Island yard and neighborhood may be, not the transportation of hazardous chemicals, but residential living. The analogy is to building your home between the runways of O'Hare."

6) Commonwealth v. Carroll (194 A.2d 911) (Pennsylvania Supreme Court) (1963) (Criminal Law)
This is a case where the defendant gets charged with first-degree murder and probably doesn't deserve it. It is then followed by a case where a defendant gets second-degree and totally deserves first-degree murder. The differences between the cases are egregious. In this one, the defendant is an Army veteran married to a wife with a schizoid personality disorder. She is made out to be a very annoying person. He then shoots her after an argument where she tells him she won't allow him to take a teaching position at night. They were about to fall sleep, in bed, and he was overtaken with a sudden urge--some form of temporary insanity, one might argue. The opinion seems to make clear that he deserves first-degree murder, even though he appears to have enough adequate justification that it might appear a less morally blameworthy crime. It is then followed by People v. Anderson, which was probably the single most brutal case we read all year long. A much less sympathetic defendant, and yet the court comes out with a lesser charge. The casebook argues that these decisions should be opposite. The casebook was written in part by my Criminal Law professor who was my favorite teacher all year, but he also ended up giving me my worst grade (I hope I don't do worse than C+ in any of my spring semester classes--whose grades come out June 8--19 days from now...). I truly believe I have a good understanding of Criminal Law, my grade notwithstanding. I was working with a diminished capacity. I could not sleep the night before. I fell asleep finally at 4 AM, woke up 3 hours later, trudged my way through the 3 hour exam, and wanted to go home and cry. I know depraved heart, malice aforethought, and felony murder like the back of my hand.

5) Hecht v. Superior Court (16 Cal.App.4th 836) (CA, 1993) (Property)
This was a case about the concept of “personhood” as property. “Personhood,” in this case, means sperm. It is about a guy named William E. Kane, who killed himself at age 48 in a Las Vegas hotel on October 30, 1991. Kane was a divorced attorney with two college-aged children, who had been living with a girlfriend, Deborah Hecht. He left her his sperm in a will so that she could impregnate herself with it. The trial court ruled in favor of his children, who wanted to have the sperm destroyed, apparently because they thought the idea of a child that would never know its father was unconscionable on moral grounds. The court of appeals rules that there is a property interest in sperm, and that the trial court abused its discretion in ordering the sperm destroyed.

The chief appeal of reading this case is for all of the personal pathos it involves, including Kane’s suicide note, and a mysterious betrayal. Once again it is another case that would make a great movie. Kane wrote this letter to his children 9 days before he died:

“I address this to my children, because, although I have only two, Everett and Katy, it may be that Deborah will decide—as I hope she will—to have a child by me after my death. I’ve been assiduously generating frozen sperm samples for that eventuality. If she does, then this letter is for my posthumous offspring, as well, with the thought that I have loved you in my dreams, even though I never got to see you born. If you are receiving this letter, it means that I am dead—whether by my own hand or that of another makes very little difference. I feel that my time has come; and I wanted to leave you with something more than a dead enigma that was your father. I am inordinately proud of who I have been—what I made of me. I’m so proud of that that I would rather take my own life now than be ground into a mediocre existence by my enemies—who, because of my mistakes and bravado have gained the power to finish me.”
“After several pages of childhood memories and family history, the letter stated: ‘So why am I checking out now? Basically, betrayal, over and over again, has made me tired. I’ve picked up some heavyweight enemies along the way—ranging from the Kellys of the world, to crazies with guns, to insurance companies, to the lawyers that have sucked me dry…I don’t want to die as a tired, perhaps defeated and bitter old man. I’d rather end it like I have lived it—on my time, when and where I will, and while my life is still an object of self-sculpture—a personal creation with which I am still proud. In truth, death for me is not the opposite of life; it is a form of life’s punctuation.”

(I am sorry but I have to comment on just watching “Wheel of Fortune” now. On tonight’s episode, Vanna White missed a letter. It was left lit up after the next team spun, and when they tried to answer, she moved to touch the box and reveal the letter. At the end of the show, Pat Sajak said, “You know I have made a lot of mistakes over the years, but you almost never make a mistake. It’s good. It shows that you are a human, not that there was any doubt about that.” And it made me think of the Property case White v. Samsung Electronics America, Inc. (9th Cir. 1993) in which Vanna White successfully sued Samsun g for depicting her as a robot in a commercial that said “Wheel of Fortune 2012, the longest running game show in history.” There is a great opinion by Judge Kozinski but I do not want to get side-tracked. I just thought it was extremely ironic and timely, how it made me think of another case from Property (and also Torts), and how the final puzzle answer was “Daily Blog.” I wonder if what Pat Sajak said was a reference to that case, or if he just meant it matter-of-factly, in that she was superhuman, or alien, not necessarily robot, or if he meant it as a seemingly innocent underhanded reference… .Truly the stars align for me to be writing with the TV on and that comment bearing so closely to the very topic I was writing about, at one of the very rare times that I will write a blog post about legal topics.)
I think that is all we need to say about that.

4) Consolidated Edison Co. of New York, Inc. v. Arroll (Civ. Ct. of City of NY, 322 N.Y.S.2d 420, 1971) (Contracts); New York City Transit Authority v. Beazer, 440 U.S. 568 (1979) (Constitutional Law) (tie)
I live in an old building in Brooklyn. There is no A/C, and there is baseboard heat. My school owns this building and has not made improvements upon it. For our particular building, my roommate and I must pay the electric and gas bills. I didn't think it would be too tough. And it wasn't--until we started using the heat. Bills were about $50/month for electric and about $15/month for gas. (This is not about gas--I have no problems with that bill). My roommate and I split them and it added an extra $33/month onto our rent--not bad (but we don't have cable TV, just occassionally reliable wireless internet). In December, our Con Ed (electric) bill shot up to $148. In January, it reached $242. In February, it went up to $245. In March, it hit $299, and the bill said the previous two bills were just estimates, and the extra cost was to make up for that. Assuming $260/month, my roommate and I added $140/month to our rent. That is not an insignificant amount. I e-mailed Campus Services and asked why the bill was so expensive and they said it just was. I called Con Ed and asked why it was so expensive and they said it was comparable to the previous tenant's bills. Finally, when spring semester started, I got a $12 service charge from Con Ed because I had switched my bank account and forgot to update the routing number for direct-pay--but with a negligible delay of a day or two. My temper reached its peak as I argued with a customer service rep for about a half-hour about why she should remove the $12 charge. She said she couldn't without proof of the dates I changed the routing number, necessitating a trip to Citibank, and a fax--too much work for a $12 fee when one is in law school. The next day we had a snow day and I went to the Con Ed headquarters in downtown Brooklyn and made a second attempt--and the customer service rep's supervisor removed the charge in a matter of minutes, almost no questions asked. The lady I talked to the night before was so rude--she hung up at the end of the call, clearly frustrated by my inability to concede defeat of something so trivial as $12. I was so upset and angry that I went outside to smoke a cigarette around 11:00 at night. I remember it being very quiet, and very clean, and I remember watching the snowflakes fall gently, and heavily.

Enter end of March/beginning of April when my bills started to return to pedestrian levels, and I do not feel like I am stuck with a Hobson's choice of either freezing my ass off or accelerating my own financial ruin, and we read this case about a guy who is disputing his electric bills with Con Ed. You can imagine my excitement. Couldn't I sue Con Ed because their rates were unconscionable? No, but couldn't I sue BLS, because the heating bills are a result of failure to properly maintain the building? Undoubtedly not, also.

This case involved bills for the SUMMER months in 1968, 1969, and 1970. Unlike my situation, these bills greatly exceeded past bills for comparable periods. Arroll argued that the meter readings were wrong, and Con Ed argued there was no dispute on the issue--they were accurate. Arroll sent the President of Con Ed and the billing department a letter with a check for $35.00 explaining the situation and saying that he would offer the $35 as payment but would not pay any more than that. Con Ed deposited the check, but then continued to hound him for more payment. (I won't get into the technical details about "accord and satisfaction" and the language of the letter Arroll--an attorney if I remember correctly--used to create the contract). The court ruled in Arroll's favor, saying that if Con Ed took the money, they accepted the contract that Arroll had created, and he was therefore exempt from the extra bill amounts.

This is a case that might be decided differently today--or more likely would not arise, as Con Ed would know how to deal with it (one assumes). This is also a case that caused my professor to remark, "Don't try this at home!" I haven't bought an air conditioner yet, mainly because I am afraid of the higher bills again.

The other case we didn't really read--it just appeared in the book's notes following a case we studied more closely. But basically, the Supreme Court ruled that NYCTA's rule discriminating against methadone users was valid. No methadone users could become employed by NYCTA, because they wanted to ensure job and passenger safety. Do I personally agree? No. I see where they are coming from saying that there is always a risk of relapse of addiction, and it would be awful if you were on a subway train conducted by a junkie. There could be a major disaster. However, NYCTA is a huge employer, and it basically shows no respect for drug treatment programs by setting this rule and basically saying, "Yeah, we know you are trying to quit using, but, you can't work for us until you are free of methadone." There could be some better way to restrict the types of employment available, and more fine-tuned regulations. But the Court granted deference to NYCTA. Note that I am mentioning these two cases in a tie because they both hold personal value to me--obviously the Con Ed situation was relevant. Here, I am not a methadone user, but I do happen to work at the NYCTA's law department right now, and while the cases in our division would not relate to employment discrimination, it is certainly fun to see the place you work represented in a textbook.

3) Gonzales v. Raich, 545 U.S. 1 (2005) (Constitutional Law)
This is a Commerce Clause case, the Court's most recent decision setting out another example of activity that affects interstate commerce and therefore may be regulated by Congress. There are perhaps a dozen or so famous Commerce Clause cases that every Con Law textbook will cover and every Con Law professor will test on. My big mistake on my Con Law exam was just sort of forgetting to write about it--typically, any Act or statute that Congress passes may be subject to analysis under the Commerce Clause. I was always writing about Equal Protection and just sort of assuming that basically any kind of law is valid under the Commerce Clause. The only two that were not recently were Lopez in 1995 (where the Court said that the Gun-Free School Zone Act was invalid because preventing handguns from entering school grounds did not affect interstate commerce--the school found a gun in a 17-year-old student's locker in Texas) and Morrison in 2000 (where the Court said that the Violence Against Women Act was invalid because preventing gender-based violence does not affect interstate commerce). Wickard is a case from the 1940s that is arguably the most famous Commerce Clause case--a farmer sold off his quota of wheat under a plan enacted as part of the New Deal and then harvested another certain amount of wheat for his family's personal use, rather than buying it at market. He was penalized for doing this, and he wanted the act struck down, but the Court ruled that the behavior he had exhibited would have a substantial effect on interstate commerce if every other farmer also did the same thing. This was called the "aggregation principle." And Wickard and Gonzalez are often talked about in the same breath, because they both concern this aggregation principle, and because one is about wheat, and the other is about, um, weed.

This case is a total showdown between California's Compassionate Use Act and the federal Controlled Substances Act. One of them allows marijuana for medicinal purposes (and it is not exactly difficult, one should understand, to make out a case for why one should be entitled to this prescription) and the other is a total ban on all drugs, including marijuana. This case was decided in 2005 and I moved to L.A. in 2007 and, well, all of the dispensaries were alive and well, so California law must have trumped federal law in this case, right? States are allowed to be laboratories where they can carry out their own experiments to see what makes the most sense for the type of people that live there, right?

Federal authorities arrested a couple California residents who were growing their own marijuana, which is allowed under the Compassionate Use Act, but not allowed by the Controlled Substances Act. Raich and Monson brought this challenge against the Controlled Substances Act. The Court ruled that the act was valid. I guess there was no need to talk about federal pre-emption, and I guess that the Court didn't necessarily need to say the Compassionate Use Act was invalid. What does this case mean practically, then? Like most Commerce Clause cases, most types of congressional legislation are valid. And people still grow their own pot in California. This is one of the greatest cases we read because it illustrates a frustrating aspect about law school studies: you learn the principles behind the decision, but it doesn't necessarily allow for a logical real-world explanation. Also, just the fact that one of the U.S. Constitution's most-famous clauses is now intimately connected to weed is one of the reasons Con Law could be the best first year class, in terms of analyzing provocative hypotheticals, and drawing on one's concept of reasonable American values.

2. Allen v. United States of America, Civ. No. C-79-0515J, C.D. UT, (1984) (Torts)
Another opinion whose opening lines bespeak greatness to come: "In a sense this case began in the mind of a thoughtful resident of Greece named Democritus some twenty-five hundred years ago. In response to a question put two centuries earlier by a compatriot, Thales, concerning the fundamental nature of matter. Democritus suggested the idea of atoms. This case is concerned with atoms, with government, with people, with legal relationships, and with social values.
This case is concerned with what reasonable men in positions of decision-making in the United States government between 1951 and 1963 knew or should have known about the fundamental nature of matter.
It is concerned with the duty, if any, that the United States government had to tell its people, particularly those in proximity to the experiment site, what it knew or should have known about the dangers to them from the government's experiments with nuclear fission conducted above ground in the brushlands of Nevada during those critical years....."

I could quote on and on--it uses the "It is concerned with...." phrase over and over in the introductory section of the opinion, effectively conveying a sense of the stakes to the students reading it. There is this semi-poetic introduction, then there is a section explaining the nature of the action--which is brought by 1,192 named plaintiffs, but is not a class action (and note, after the first year of law school, my concept of a class action is no more clear than it was a year ago). It cites several cases that we had studied (including Parklane Hosiery, from Civil Procedure, which I would rate as the #1 worst case to read if I have the patience to do that list), and then makes the point that, yes, radiation causes leukemia, but it is not always easy to tell if a person has leukemia just because they were exposed to radiation--there are other causes too. It states a general rule of law for this sort of case, and then it moves onto its best part, which is a brief review of the situation of certain representative plaintiffs, the conditions they have exhibited, and the probability of their cancers having been caused by the radiation, and whether or not they should recover. Sometimes, it seems almost arbitrary and unfair that some plaintiffs recover and others do not.

Basically, this was a great case because it was well-written, factually interesting, dramatic (another good subject for a movie), and useful. It cites many cases from Torts that students will study, and it covers a topic that is almost guaranteed to be on a Torts exam (depending on the professor, of course): abnormally-dangerous activity/toxic torts/nuclear radiation. To me, these were some of the most difficult, but also most interesting areas of Torts. I knew it could be tricky, so the night before my Torts exam, I read this case (our copy was a print-out, so perhaps removing it from the cumbersome medium of a 1000 page law book made a psychological difference--see also Monge v. Beebe Rubber Co., also a print-out for us). I was able to relax--this case makes sense, for the most part--get a brief review of some other related concepts, and gain a clearer understanding of a tough topic. It worked out well for me. While I didn't exactly ace the exam, I ended up with a B+. This is nothing to write home about, but I had gotten a C on my midterm in Torts--good for the lowest grade in a class of about 40. When that happened, I wanted to drop out straight away, feeling I could never compete with anyone else. That counted for 20% of our grade, so its possible I may have scored an A- on the exam, to end with a B+ in the course. And it's not a great grade, but I considered that one of my top 3 personal achievments in law school. It is hard to find cases as good as Allen to re-read the night before an exam, but I recommend it as a way to manage anxiety.

1) Murphy v. Steeplechase Amusement Co., 166 N.E. 173 (N.Y. 1929) (Torts)
This is an opinion written by Justice Cardozo about a ride at Coney Island called "The Flopper." It being by Cardozo, I could quote the entire thing and not know where to stop. A young man went on the Flopper and fell down. Cardozo mentions that there would be no point to the ride if there was no risk of falling--this is why the walls and floors on the ride are padded. The plaintiff was on notice that he could fall down. "The very name above the gate, the Flopper, was warning to the timid. If the name was not enough, there was warning more distinct in the experience of others."

The plaintiff fractured his knee cap. He asserted in his complaint that the ride was dangerous, and not properly equipped to prevent injury. He was thrown with a jerk. Cardozo rules that he cannot prevail in this action, because "Volenti non fit injuria. One who takes part in such a sport accepts the dangers that inhere in it so far as they are obvious and necessary, just as a fencer accepts the risk of a thrust by his antagonist or a spectator at a ball game the chance of contact with the ball."

There are several other quotable portions of this opinion, but I will stop things here, and note that the reason "The Flopper" is the #1 case in the first-year of law school studies is because it is about Assumption of Risk, and anyone choosing to go to law school may be taking a certain risk with their lives. It may seem overly dramatic for me to write this, but it is true: one goes into it with fair warning that it will be graded on a curve, that the reading will be heavy, that only the best grades will get the best jobs, that there are less jobs becase certain schools enroll too many students, that lawyers are parasites of society, that some students won't know how to deal with the stress of it all and will drop out in a manner of economic forfeiture, that some students will chug along pleasantly enough and accrue all of the student loan debt in the world and find the inherent difficulty of squaring life and this profession just too overwhelming, that the social life is a weird hybrid of high school and college and is ultimately more embarassing and less comforting than either because we are supposed to be adults now, right, we are supposed to be responsible individuals that make intelligent choices about our life--enough so that we can advise others on whether their choices are intelligent or not, that the whole mess of it all is a big risk, which one can't say quite as clearly about high school or college, which are overwhelmingly par for the course of education, when law school may seem less expensive than college because it is shorter by a year, but also signals a different period of life that has suddenly become both scary and boring.....In a sense, law school is The Flopper, and if one goes to law school near Coney Island, the metaphor stings that much more. When you complain about law school, people will say, "You wanted to do it." People will say, "You knew what you were getting into." But you didn't, and you can't.

Any ride at any amusement park in the country will now have warning signs that tell you not to ride if you are pregnant, or have a heart condition. The Flopper is thus influential. Law schools do not have warning signs. The warning signs come from outside, impersonal sources (i.e. scamblogs, the subject of the next post) that one has dificulty taking seriously, or believing until it becomes the status quo in one's own personal life.

Professors and upperclass students will talk to 1Ls at the beginning of the semester and give them their "tips" for academic success. The experience is different for everyone. While many elements of the experience will be shared by all, the overall personal impression one walks away with cannot be adequately described by any universal phrase. When people ask me what I thought of it, I say, "It was terrible." Sometimes I will lie and say something is interesting but that is only because I do not want to cause any friction. But when people ask me how I really feel I will be honest. But the problem goes deeper than personal unhappiness. I do feel that if I were in a position where I had a job, that paid decently, where I could manage to pay off my loans and manage to pay rent in New York, and manage all of the other dozen or so "duties" that modern existence imposes on the individual, I could learn to be happy and feel that I hadn't made a mistake in what I chose to do. But the uncertainty of it all is enough to make one crack. But we cannot sue our law school for failing to warn us that attending their institution may not be the best idea for us personally, the same way we cannot sue Coney Island because we got hurt on one of their wilder rides: we assumed the risk, and we should know ourselves better than an institution should know us. But I will say this: the institution has more information than the student at their disposal, and only sharing the good news while ignoring the bad news amounts to deception. In person, those affiliated with the school will offer a moment or two of truth. But in promotional materials, and likely on campus tours and information sessions, the good will be inflated so much that it appears the bad does not exist. And I often wonder how much my fellow students think about the bad, how they convince themselves that things will turn out fine, because honestly I am the only one that seems to worry about it. I don't want to be a Debbie Downer--haven't I said that before?--but in this age, in these times, it seems just about impossible to make a "good decision." If I could offer one piece of advice to high schoolers, it would be this: get an engineering degree in college. Or train to become an IT Professional. They may not be interesting topics relating to the humanities and philosophy that you can B-S your way through, but you will still have fun, and you will not be faced with a world that considers you superfluous and unrealistic in your hopes and dreams.

For the rest of us English majors and creative writing majors, what's done is done, and we have no choice but to keep dreaming, "like boats against the current, born ceaselessly into the past."

Top 10 Worst Cases:
10) Harms v. Sprague (Property) - if it involves mortgages and concurrent ownership, have fun.
9) Semtek Intl Inc. v. Lockheed Martin Corp. (Civil Procedure) - who knows what this means.
8) Erie Railroad v. Tompkins; Guaranty Trust Co. v. York; Byrd v. Blue Ridge Rural Electric Cooperative; Hanna v. Plumer (tie) (Civil Procedure) - these cases are important, and painful.
7) Gonzales v. Carhart (Constitutional Law) - for a gruesome description of a partial birth abortion.
6) People v. Anderson (CA Supreme Court, 1968) (Criminal Law) - for a gruesome crime.
5) Rothko v. Reis (Property) - for one page that is ridiculously complex.
4) Allied Steel and Conveyors, Inc. v. Ford Motor Co. (Contracts) - for difficulty of summing up facts. 3) Morrison v. Olson (Constitutional Law) - for appearing 3 times in casebook, and being annoying.
2) Ultramares Corporation v. Touche (Torts) - almost completely incomprehensible.
1) Parklane Hosiery v. Shore (Civil Procedure) - an important case, and painful.

Edwards v. Sims (Kentucky, 1929)

2011-04-23T14:15:00.001-07:00

At the beginning of the academic year, it was suggested to me that I should write reviews of cases on this blog in the same way I wrote reviews of books. Now, I did not think I had the time to do this (indeed, writing about every single case would become unbearably time-consuming, and while my next post may be a milestone (#150), had I done this I might be approaching #1000, seriously diluting the quality I have endeavored to achieve on Flying Houses), but I promised myself that I would call attention to this single case from my Property class. I promised myself that when I covered it in my outline, I would transcribe a good portion of its dissent.

Now, our professor in this class did not seem to like this dissent very much. He claimed it "goes on...and on....and on...." True, when it goes on, it does not discuss legal principles. However, there are plenty of opinions that go on, and on, and on, and make one positively drowsy. I have mentioned many times on this blog that "normal people" in 2011 think reading novels is "boring." If you think that is boring, do not go to law school (more on this later).

Whatever the legal utility of the dissent, it was the single-most transcendent reading experience of the year for me. I showed it to my roommate one night, and tried to read it aloud. I could not. I could not stop laughing. He read it aloud instead and agreed that it was fantastic. Perhaps it is unintentionally hilarious, but it is also striking in its beautiful quality.

Some discussion of the facts may be necessary. This is a case about a cave that was discovered underneath a person's land. Edwards discovered the cave, and he improved its conditions, and opened it up as a tourist destination in Kentucky. (This reminded me greatly of "The Lost Sea," an underwater lake in a cave in Sweetwater, TN, which I had planned to visit with a friend, but which unfortunately never came to pass). His neighbor brought an action claiming the ad coelum doctrine, which posits that a person owns everything above or below his land. The cave was beneath his land, and he claimed a right to it. The court held in favor of the neighbor.

The dissenting judge, Logan, found this incredibly unfair (and I agree with him). For the first two pages, Logan mostly keeps to legal principles, while still affecting a somewhat poetic manner. However, by page 3, he completely shifts his focus to a comparison of this cave (The Great Onyx Cave) to Hades, extolling the virtues of the brave workers who excavated it. The best possible explanation I can make is that he smoked a lot of weed and then wrote the part that begins here:

"...Edwards owns this cave through right of discovery, exploration, development, advertising, exhibition, and conquest. Men fought their way through the eternal darkness, into the mysterious and abysmal depths of the bowels of a groaning world to discover the theretofore unseen splendors of unknown natural scenic wonders. They were conquerors of fear, although now and then one of them, as did Floyd Collins, paid with his life, for his hardihood in adventuring into the regions where Charon with his boat had never before seen any but the spirits of the departed. They let themselves down by flimsy ropes into pits that seemed bottomless; they clung to scanty handholds as they skirted the brinks of precipices while the flickering flare of their flaming flambeaux disclosed no bottom to the yawning gulf beneath them; they waded through rushing torrents, not knowing what awaited them on the farther side; they climbed slippery steeps to find other levels; they wounded their bodies on stalagmites and stalactites and other curious and weird formations; they found chambers, star-studded and filled with scintillating light reflected by a phantasmagoria revealing fancied phantoms, and tapestry woven by the toiling gods in the dominion of Erebus; hunger and thirst, danger and deprivation could not stop them. Through days, weeks, months, and years--ever linking chamber with chamber, disclosing an underground land of enchantment, they continued their explorations; through the years they toiled connecting these wonders with the outside world through the entrance on the land of Edwards which he had discovered; through the years they toiled finding safe ways for those who might come to view what they had found and placed their seal upon. They knew nothing, and cared less, of who owned the surface above; they were in another world where no law forbade their footsteps. They created an underground kingdom where Gulliver's people may have lived or where Ayesha may have found the revolving column of fire in which to bathe meant eternal youth."

"When the wonders were unfolded and the ways were made safe, then Edwards patiently, and again through the years, commenced the advertisement of his cave. First came one to see, then another, then two together, then small groups, then small crowds, then large crowds, and then the multitudes. Edwards had seen his faith justified. The cave was his because he had made it what it was, and without what he had done it was nothing of value. The value is not in the black vacuum that the uninitiated call a cave. That which Edwards owns is something intangible and indefinable. It is his vision translated into a reality."

"Then came the horse leach's daughters crying: 'Give me,' 'give me.' Then came the 'surface men' crying, 'I think this cave may run under my lands.' They do not know they only 'guess,' but they seek to discover the secrets of Edwards so that they may harass him and take from him that which he had made his own. They have come to a court of equity and have asked that Edwards be forced to open his doors and his ways to them so that they may go in and despoil him; that they may lay his secrets bare so that others may follow their example and dig into the wonders which Edwards has made his own. What may be the result if they stop his ways? They destroy the cave, because those who visit it are they who give it value, and none will visit it when the ways are barred so that it may not be exhibited as a whole."

"It may be that the law is stated in the majority opinion of the court, but equity, according to my judgment, should not destroy that which belongs to one man when he at whose behest the destruction is visited, although with some legal right, is not benefited thereby. Any ruling by a court which brings great and irreparable injury to a party is erroneous."

All judges should write like this. True, applications of legal rules to facts of whatever the present case may be are not always conflated by such poetic subject matter, but they really should make more of an effort. There should be a certain pleasure in reading judicial opinions. Sometimes, they are pleasurable. Many law professors speak of Cardozo as the be-all, end-all of linguistic masters. Holmes is similarly held up on a pedestal. As much as I may disagree with much of what he has to say, one cannot deny that Scalia sometimes strings together an entertaining phrase or two. One of the first dissents I read, by Justice Black in Goldberg v. Kelly, I found similarly great. I should state that I am a huge fan of Posner, and that if I were a much better student, had a background in economics or engineering, and had gone to say, Northwestern or U Chicago, it would be my "dream job" to be his clerk or intern. Kozinski has also written more than his fair share of very humorous opinions.

Yet these moments of literary epiphany in law are rare. 95% of the opinions I read are boring, tiresome, and as dry as a math textbook, despite the usually incredible circumstances they are called upon to adjudicate. I would love to be on a journal next year, and write a "note" on this topic, but unfortunately I doubt it would be supported by the staff. You are supposed to write about novel legal issues that have not been addressed by anyone before. I would love to write a biographical note on Logan, to see what his other opinions looked like, and to gauge his legal philosophy, or to write about the phenomena of poetic or humorous judicial opinions in general, but I am afraid this would not be allowed. Note that this is one of the reasons I hate law school. There, I said it.

What legal issue is important to me, that is novel, that no one has addressed? Something in intellectual property law perhaps, copyright, whether posting large sections of text from novels is legal (I hope so). But this is not something I care particularly deeply about. My 4 "followers" (and I cherish each and every one of them) may know that the only thing I care particularly deeply about is literature, and creating my own, in a search for perfection or transcendence. It is a shame that there is so little money associated with such a venture. It is what led me to think a position within the legal profession was the next best thing. It is not. I do not think it will (would?) be the worst job in the world, but what you have to go through in order to get it is certainly one of the worst things in the world. Oh, I know it must be very hard to get a PHD or an MBA or CPA certification, and probably MD too. However, I think psychologically, there is nothing more difficult or painful, particularly going through it from 2010-2013 at a "2nd tier" school in New York City.

It is time to draw this post to a close. The next post I write will be after May 13th. It will be a reflection upon the entire year. The post to follow that will be a commentary on the phenomena of "scamblogs." That post will be dedicated to every one who is considering going to law school, or who has already sent in their seat deposit for the class of 2014. I now must return to my outlining. Good night, and good luck.

A Lawyer Walks Into a Bar...- Dir. Eric Chaikin

2011-03-04T11:53:00.000-08:00

About a month ago, I was up around midnight on a Saturday night, searching randomly around documentaries on Netflix. I came across this movie and found it worth writing about on Flying Houses for several reasons. First of all, there are many films and television shows about the legal profession, but they never address the boredom and mundanity of it all. They make it seem exciting. In a review on Flying Houses from about a year and a half ago (here http://flyinghouses.blogspot.com/2009/11/lawyer-myth-rennard-strickland-frank-t.html), there contained a quote from Roger Ebert to the effect that nothing could be more boring than an absolutely accurate movie about the law. I am sure that, were I to read The Lawyer Myth again, I would not review it so easily. Or perhaps it would be more illuminating, a quicker read, and less boring at points. Any books published for the general public will be less tedious than the mechanical methodology of a judicial opinion. There are plenty of books about the legal profession, but few films, and owing to people's inability to find time to read, or general laziness, it seems that more should be made in the near future.

There are plenty of feature films, but as already mentioned, they do not expose the mundanity. This film exposes the mundanity, but in a way that still makes law school seem like fun. Or rather, there is little discussion of the actual 3 years. The focus is upon the two and a half months in between graduation--second half of May, June, and July--and the hell that newly-minted J.D.'s must undergo in California. They face a Bar Exam with a 39% pass rate, the lowest in the country. At least, that is the percentage the film cites. The figures I find are 44% or 46% from 2004 or 2005. In 2009, it was 49% (and in 2008 it was an impressive 54%)--also these are "overall" numbers--the first-time numbers are generally a bit higher.

This film follows six different aspiring Bar-passers. I say that because one of them is a social worker by trade who has taken the Bar exam about forty times. Many organizations utilize both social workers and attorneys, so maybe actually he would just change his position where he was working. He has consistently failed the Bar and it inspired him to write an article called "Fuck the Bar," and at one point in the film he shouts it at the building where they are all taking it in Ontario, CA.

The five others graduate from various schools. There is a girl who is part-Native American and who says she was a 50% actress/50% law student while attending UCLA law school, the most prestigious school represented. She has a scholarship or a grant from the Tribe she is affiliated with. In one scene, she should be studying for the Bar, but instead she is out partying, and I am surprised the footage of that remained in the film, though it does make for its most hilarious moment. It seems almost staged.

I think THREE of the six actually went to Loyola Law School, which is why I found this so worth writing about, as I nearly attended that school in a dead-lock (decided about a year ago) with its arguable "sister-school," where I now reside. One of them is a guy who graduated the year before, and he is taking the Bar his second time. The two others are girls who have just graduated that year. I realize now that it is hard to write this review without getting deeply into their personal stories.

The last person went to People's College of Law in L.A. and some of the scenes with the director of the school are some of the best in the movie too. I've forgotten the quotes she has but practically all are classic. The student in question is a Mexican immigrant mother who is in her late 30s or early 40s. Some of the scenes with her are very moving, and her story of going through community college in East L.A. and making her way through law school to become a potential attorney may inspire those in situations where the odds seem improbably stacked against them.

I do not want to give away the ending but let us just say that it is not very surprising.

I do not have much to say about this film except that I am glad it exists. However, it was released in 2007, and shot in the summer of 2006, so there is very little in the film to suggest that the economy is bad, particularly for lawyers. Now there needs to be a new movie. Nothing about law school translates as well in documentary form as the Bar, because it is the actual end of all the b-s. It would not be feasible to make a movie about all 3 years of law school. I do think a good movie could be made about the first year. There are many crucial moments that would translate well. The orientation, the first month of classes, the legal writing assignments piled up on top of the other work, the different briefing methods, note-taking methods, the midterms, if any, and finally the exams---followed by the grades, which are "all that matter," the next semester classes, the internship search, and finally the last exams, which will determine class rank for OCI, hiring for summer associates, and potential hiring for graduates. Of course the end of the first year is far from the end, and so no real closure could be given. Law school is not properly applicable to a documentary context, but should be portrayed in a feature film, with much drama and much mundanity. This would help that percentage of law students that enter with nebulous ideas of what it is going to be like, and where it is going to lead.

1L (also previously reviewed here) and the The Paper Chase may be instructive, but they portray Harvard Law School in the 1970s. While the actual material students must read in the first year may not have changed appreciably, the general atmosphere pervading the profession has, as has society at large. I want to see a movie that shows 1/3 of the students at an "average" school going on Facebook or playing Scrabble on their computers while in class. I want it to focus on like, maybe 6 students, one who is perfect and gets straight A's, blah, blah, blah, another who is far from perfect and gets bad grades and looks like an idiot when they have to talk in class, who worries about ever getting a job and wants to drop out, and the other four in varying degrees in the middle, maybe one person who commits "sectioncest" and has a romantic comedy storyline, maybe one who is super-depressed and breaks out crying in the middle of class or kills themselves, maybe a totally average student who gets through everything alright and ends up with a job, and is generally happy, and then maybe another totally average student who maybe ends up with a job, but maybe has serious financial difficulties, and always wonders if they made the right decision, if there wasn't something else they'd rather be doing.

A feature film like this would lay out all the issues, and actually be useful to those considering applying. A potential student will probably not find A Lawyer Walks Into a Bar.... and decide they don't want to go. No matter how bad people make the Bar seem, I think students will always think, "Well, I did the LSAT and nothing can be more stressful than that..." However, it seems clear to me now, that the Bar is more stressful than anything, after watching this film. If you fail, what do you do? You take it again. Or else you keep your J.D. on your resume, and maybe some HR people think you may have other skills, but have questions that you can either answer or not, at the risk of looking like a liability. Really, at the end of the day, nothing is more stressful than getting the job, and actually living under the terms of the profession. Once that is achieved, there should be happiness, because all of the hoops and hurdles have been jumped through and over. Unfortunately, from what I can tell, happiness does not generally follow. Rather, lawyers tend to look back fondly on their law school years. It seems as if many are guarded individuals who would rather not open up about their personal feelings on the subject, but will be happy to tell people not to go if they aren't absolutely sure they want to go.

The financial aspect of taking BarBri and the Bar, after the enormous financial burdens of law school is vaguely addressed in this film, but I still think my feature film idea would get this across better. Now, movies extolling Christian ideology by Christian filmmakers always find financing despite not expecting to reach a critical mass, but who will finance my movie? The ABA? The NYC Bar Association? A profession is hardly a religion. But in a profession so deeply concerned with regulation, one would think there would be a way to regulate law schools in a manner that a disproportionate number of students do not graduate with little hope of employment. Unfortunately, such a massive overhaul is unlikely to be seriously considered.

P.S. If anyone actually takes my idea without coming to me for use as a creative consultant, it will make me very sad.

Special Comment - On Using Movie Quotations for Commemoratory Purposes; on “ATL,” on Cyber-bullies, on Entering a “TTT” at a Time of Economic Turmoil

2010-11-24T10:51:00.000-08:00

It has been a long time but here is the first new post on Flying Houses since August. This probably isn’t the best time to be doing it, either, as I should be taking down the notes I just wrote on Compulsory Joinder and Intervention, and transcribing them into my computer. But we can only be such machines when it comes to legal work as may be reasonably expected.
This is a not a personal check-up 9/10 of the way through the semester. This is a response to a (now not so recent) post on a popular website for the legal profession. Here is a link to that post: http://abovethelaw.com/2010/11/brooklyn-law-2010-class-gift-is-more-like-a-terrible-high-school-yearbook-quote/.

For those uninitiated, Above the Law is an online legal tabloid that is basically the TMZ or Perez Hilton of the legal profession. It is something to read on a lunch break, something to laugh at, nothing to be taken seriously. However, this post in particular affected me in such a personal way that I seriously wanted to go out and kill myself, and I would entertain a claim against them for negligent infliction of emotional distress, but I know that would probably not be a very good claim (perhaps it would be protected by the first amendment? perhaps I could not prove any direct physical injury?). Why do I have such a “thin skull” you might ask?

The post itself is nothing particularly untoward. It merely claims that the Class of 2010 made a mistake in the quote they decided to put on a plaque in the library. The quote is from A League of Their Own, a film about women in the 1940’s who decided to form a baseball league to counteract the suspension of Major League Baseball and its many players signing up for service in World War II. There are many quotable moments in the film, but the one the Class of 2010 chose happened to be this: “It’s supposed to be hard. If it wasn’t hard, everyone would do it…The hard is what makes it great.” Automatically, this is turned into a sexual reference, which doesn’t really make sense given the second sentence, but this is immaterial. Should quotes from movies be plastered on the walls of law schools? Don’t we have “higher values” than those of popular culture? (Please don't let us start believing that there are better quotes to be found in film than literature--even judicial opinions would be better fodder). The class has asserted that it strove to begin a tradition, whereby students would touch the plaque as they pass under it while coming down from the second floor of the library. I have not seen anyone do this and I am afraid that if someone was seen doing this, they would be laughed at.

However, there were many comments to this post that were certainly untoward, and a source of my emotional distress (one other article on ATL, written by a psychiatrist who had also been through law school, bemoaned the opportunities of those holding J.D.’s but seeking employment apart from the legal field, which also contributed to said distress). The very first one reads “Crooklyn = TTTT.” Now I am not sure what the fourth T signifies (TTT signifies “third-tier toilet,” a derogatory term for a school not ranked in the top 50 in the nation), but the statement itself, posted by someone known as nothing more than “$$$,” certainly sends a harmful message. The next comment, posted by “Wow,” points the reader to Brooklyn’s budget planner page on its website. It reads, “Lulz at the price tag for this dump!!” Is “Lulz” some variant of LOL or is it something more nefarious? BLS is expensive, but so are most law schools. Scholarships are the only way a student can justify the enormous price tag after already having been through so much previous education. The next comment is from Kenny Powers who is a character on the HBO series Eastbound and Down and he offers the prescient wisdom (for those of us walking into final exams as an already uphill struggle), “If at first you don’t succeed then maybe you just suck.” A couple others joke about how much Kenny Powers sucks, then someone makes fun of the “living with parents” column of the budget (taking housing out of the equation) because that is what students will be doing after graduation. From here on in, the comments become more sporadic and less focused. Apparently, “Watch your head,” was another option for the quotation. This would have been sort of eloquent given the state of legal hiring patterns in 2010. Someone brings up a better quote from the same movie: “You know, if I had your job, I’d kill myself. Wait here, I’ll see if I can dig up a pistol.” This would also have been better, but dark, very dark, and law schools should not be propagating dark thoughts, though they inevitably must.

Now comes the painful part—an alum from BLS posts and sticks up for the school, and legal education in general, saying that it will pay off over time, and not amortize or depreciate like a car. They then get taken to task for failing to discern that student loans accrue interest and therefore may be considered technical amortization/depreciation. Another person says the plaque is fitting for BLS students because women baseball players ended up unemployed and broke. Other potential quotes are considered from the movie: “There’s no crying in law school” and “You’re gonna lose. You’re gonna lose.” There is then a discussion of a possible typo on the plaque in the use of the ellipsis. Blue-booking rules are debated. Someone else points out that all of the comments are cynical, and that everyone posting is an a-hole. A very dry reply read “Law students generally are not cynical. You have to graduate and realize the harsh realities of life and being unemployed/underemployed with massive student loan debt before the cynacism (sic) kicks in.” Another person named “<2012>” simply writes, “You are DOOMED.” Another person suggests the school hang a plaque saying, “See 11 U.S.C.A. 523(a)(8).” This was fairly clever as it forced me to use WestLaw to look up what it meant. Here is a quote that seemed particularly appropriate: “Let me sum up what I think of you when I hear you go to Brooklyn Law (particularly class of 2012 or 2013): (1) You weren’t smart enough to get into a better school, and (2) you’re even stupider than I would have thought otherwise because you’re paying an exorbitant amount of tuition. WTF are these people thinking, particularly those who enrolled this year in the middle of a recession?”

The other contenders for the quotation for the plaque are then listed near the end of the thread. (none of which I like very much, except for this one: "The bravest sight in the world is to see a great man struggling against adversity." -Seneca) And there we are. I luckily did not post anything myself on this thread, because then I would know the pain of a direct attack. I have had enough experiences with that on the Speakeasy at PW.org to know better.

I don’t know if a legal education is worth it or not if you go to a TTT school and this post has given me certain doubts. Of course, one can always tell themselves to buck up and give it their best effort regardless, but can you really forget you’ve seen something awful? Or does it pay to not have an “Ostrich problem?” If I am substantially certain that my education is a waste of time, but I insist on pretending that everything is going alright, aren’t I just as guilty of wasting an education? This is like whether or not I wanted to check my Torts midterm grade last week. I could have not looked, and felt better, but because I did look, I know I am in grave danger, and some drastic measures must be implemented if I am to recover and not waste this opportunity I’ve spent years putting together.

Or are cyber-bullies just out to get everyone regardless, to hide behind their computers and make acid-tongue comments in an effort to convince strangers that they are witty or intelligent, when they really just come off as mean. Or is it just a way to blow off steam? I do know one thing. I don’t feel very good about where I am or what I am doing. It’s not the website that made me feel this way, but it certainly didn’t help matters. Assumption of Risk would be their defense in an action. Law students attending less prestigious schools or with poor academic performances should enter ATL at their own risk. If you want to ride “the Flopper,” you should know that you may fall down. You may not sue ATL for NIED because it is on the internet, and the internet should not be able to hurt you physically. Also, cyber-bullies are not within the exclusive control of ATL. They are not employees—they are followers, they are fans.

I have to bring in the personal element and decide whether or not BLS is a good choice or not. There are a few frustrating elements about this school.

#1: The Bookstore. Admittedly a minor issue, but 1Ls had a rude awakening this year when they found that few of the books they ordered would be available from the bookstore until the second or third week of class, forcing us to find the people with the books, xerox assignments, and generally feel that we did not have the tools to properly comprehend the material. However, the bookstore apologized and offered to pay shipping costs incurred from books bought from outside sources.

#2: The Halls, The Claustrophobia: I always preface this complaint with the statement that, for me, the choice came down to Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, or BLS. I do not think Loyola has the same problem as BLS as their campus has nearly a dozen buildings or so and everything is very spread out and aesthetically pleasing. BLS, by contrast, slams more than 1,200 students together in a giant rectangular building, and puts most of the major classes on floors 4, 5, and 6, resulting in bottlenecks at elevators and sometimes stairwells and hallways—not to mention a generally cramped atmosphere inside the actual classrooms. This underscores the fact that we are all competing for a very limited number of positions and that all of this hard work and discipline and struggle may end up as the ultimate nightmare yet.

#3: The Competition. Brooklyn may be ranked #67 in the nation or whatever, and #4 or #5 in New York City in general, but that does not mean that its students are less intelligent. Oh sure, we scored lower on the LSATs, that is probably a given—but I’m sure there’s some of us that didn’t score that low, and are receiving a full ride. I’m guessing the majority of my classmates, however, are in the same position as me, which provides reasonable tuition assistance, with the stipulation that you must finish in the top 40% of your class (roughly a B to B+ overall GPA) to reclaim it in subsequent years. When I put in my seat deposit and signed my promissory note, I thought I’d coast through law school, I thought I’d be a star, I thought I’d get straight A’s and get offered a big law firm job at OCI and pay off my debt in no time and pay $3000 a month in rent, or even buy my own place. A few months later, and reality has given me a swift kick in the rear again. I will say this about my classmates—sometimes, it can be awkward, if you know someone by face, and you maybe even know their name, but you have not introduced yourselves, for whatever awkward reasons you have. And it may be the case at every law school, but my classmates constitute the smartest, most hardworking group of people I have ever been surrounded by, and I thought I could throw down, I thought I could keep up with anyone, but they are a tough group to be scaled against on a curve.

But maybe we aren’t that intelligent, as the one comment that seems particularly more harsh than the others states. Maybe we have truly nebulous reasons for being here in the first place. People ask me what kind of law I want to practice, or what kind of lawyer I want to be, and I have no idea. I think I am going to start saying “any area that will hire me” or “the kind that has a job.” I thought that going to law school would open up more career options, but it has really just opened up one new area—and one that is extremely competitive. I did not fully realize the gravity of this situation until a couple months into the semester, when we started discussing internship applications.

I will apply for internships starting now. My grades will be out January 15th. There is still hope that I could ace all of my exams, have an awesome GPA, get an awesome internship, get on the awesome law journal, keep my awesome scholarship (maybe even get a better one), and live an awesome life in Brooklyn Heights. [Which reminds me that I never pointed out the positive qualities of BLS. I do think it is the best area to go to law school in New York City because of its proximity to the courts in Brooklyn. I do think that the receptions, events, and other school-sponsored activities it hosts are some of the best I have ever attended (but this also has a negative effect—I have personally spread myself thin between the activities, the clubs, the job search, reading assignments, outlining, and all of the other facets that make up a law student’s life). I do think Brooklyn Heights is a great area (though not as “exciting” or “fun” as the Village may be for NYU students).] But there is also the reality that this is a pipe dream, and a dream that will end when my exams are finished and I see my grades, which, if my first midterm is any indication, will prove horribly depressing and provide material for the most difficult period of my life yet. For now, I can grind, and I can hope that I can change my approach, and I can pray that a miracle will occur, and all of my classmates will suddenly become extremely stupid the morning of the exam, and we will all do very poorly, and it will be okay. But experience knows it is not so.

So I will press on, and I will not think about how tenuous this life may be for me, and I will focus, and maybe it will all work out yet. I don’t even want to express a doubt on the matter (!) because it seems like throwing in the towel, or setting yourself up for disappointment. Let me say this: as frustrating as the whole law school thing may be, if you can’t get into a top 14 (or even top 50) school with any kind of funding, it is no more frustrating than any other technical training for any other job. The main difference comes with the price tag, and it’s the element that can cause serious breakdowns. When cyber-bullies know what is at stake, they should think before they post something harmful or injurious. I am sure there have been suicides because someone has posted something mean about someone on Facebook, and maybe this will constitute a tort action. But when the postings are anonymous, other questions of privacy may be raised. I am going to end this long and rambling post by saying that I am very proud that Flying Houses has always had positive, happy comments. If this “special comment” receives any comments, I hope they will engender a real and beneficial discussion, and not a laundry-list of urban dictionary-isms meant to make others “in the know” laugh in appreciation.

Think Tank for Human Beings in General - Jordan Castro/Richard Wehrenberg Jr

2010-08-19T04:29:00.000-07:00

Can someone please tell me the difference between a "chapbook" and a "zine?"

Jordan Castro sent me this chapbook after I commented on his prize-winning entry into Tao Lin's contest. My entry is here http://flyinghouses.blogspot.com/2010/07/my-essay-on-tao-lin-and-our-histories.html. His is here http://www.thenervousbreakdown.com/jcastro/2010/08/a-comprehensive-review-of-richard-yates-tao-lins-second-novel/. In it, he reviewed my essay and gave it high marks and I thanked him. I think it was the first time anyone ever reviewed anything I wrote on the internet. He sent me a chapbook for explaining that Dakota Fanning was not in The Sixth Sense.

That movie came out in 1999, and I think he was about 7 then, and perhaps its "twist" has been ruined by everyone in the intervening 11 years so now it is no longer quite the "best picture" event that it was then. Plus, M. Night Shyamalan's cultural cache drops with each new film he makes (though everyone seems to think he "may turn it around with this one..."), though I assume that NYU is still proud to have him as one of their more successful recent graduates.

This is the grand finale, the electrifying conclusion if you will. Please note that Bob Pollard broke up GBV on 12/31/04, and now, no more than 5 1/2 years later, they are already doing reunion shows. Flying Houses will be silent for a while, but this is not the end.

In my essay on Tao Lin, I began by stating how I embarrassed myself by a certain comment on his blog made perhaps 4 1/2 years ago about all of the zines I published at NYU while we were both there. I first became aware of zines my freshman year and I put out my first zine my sophomore year. It was entitled "Xenophobia," which was probably not as original as I thought. It was about 16 pages long. There was a poem in it about "almost" getting mugged. There was an essay about meeting 3 celebrities in New York City (Thurston Moore, Carson Daly, and Janeane Garafalo, though I did not technically meet her). I think there was a poem about smoking a cigarette on bleachers in an empty schoolyard near my parent's house during one of my holiday breaks. I don't remember what else was in this zine. I sold these zines for $1.00 out of a milk crate in Washington Square Park and gave out a complimentary kiss to anyone that wanted it. I gave a copy to my creative writing teacher from the summer session of 2002, Paul Gacioch, who was an instructor that I think was about 24 then and obtaining his MFA and trying to get his first novel published. I am going to Google him now and see if he accomplished that. Here is what I found: http://www.sidebrow.net/contributors/paul-gacioch. I left him a copy in his faculty mailbox and I ran into him in Bobst Library and I asked him if he got it and what he thought of it. He said it was "short."

My second zine was a collaborative effort between me and several of my friends entitled "Honey I'm a Prize and You're a Catch and We're a Perfect Match," which is a line from a song by Pavement and in honor of the date it was published, February 14, 2003. I don't remember anything in it (except for a poem called "horse shoe crabs" by my friend Emily, which I think she later published online) but more people read it due to the nature of the contribution process.

My third zine could probably be called a "chapbook." It was entitled "Autointoxication" and it was the best thing I had done up to that point. Arguably it is still the best thing I have done because it was published. I went to a printer in Greenwich Village and asked for 100 copies. I tried to sell them for $1.00 and probably sold about 3 or 4, which is about the total of "Xenophobia." Had I a blog at the time, who knows what might have come.

There were several others but none as important as those first three (except for "Uck Ar" but I played too minor a role in that for consideration). I include this autobiography because, this is a highly symbolic gesture. Jordan and Richard are young, and they probably know what they are doing way better than I did (or do, for that matter) but I am here to warn them about the dangers of literature. But a review first.

I have never reviewed poetry on Flying Houses before, which is another reason I wanted to do this as my last post. I wanted to do something audacious. Each writer contributes 9-10 poems of 1-2 pages in length. Jordan's are slightly more experimental and Richard's are slightly more typical of poems popular over the last 20 years. Both are talented, and while their chapbook may be "short," it deserves commendation.

My favorite poems of Jordan's are "a list of things I am going to do," which I didn't like that much until the last few lines; "weak," which is the first poem I have ever read about the dilemma of autofellatio, thus worthwhile; "haiku" which is certainly topical and formal; and "last poem," which is about achieving inner-peace. Four out of ten is not bad. The other ones have moments but overall seem too "cheeky" or "cute" or "silly" to fully praise.

My favorite poems of Richard's are "excuse me," which is a lament for internet culture, "dumpster dive alone," which I don't really understand but references Scottie Pippen, so I like it; "snow-people easily identify the sun as their enemy," which is pretty original and may be the single best poem in the chapbook; and the so-called title track, "think tanks for human beings in general," which, like most title tracks in music, I usually feel are better than the majority of other songs on the album--but is the best way to end the chapbook.

I like the idea of chapbooks and zines because they are not too time-consuming. They are like regular magazines except they are not filled with useless trash about celebrities and reality stars. They are filled with serious writing by mostly unknown people, reaching out and trying to establish themselves. There is something noble about them. For some reason I do not think self-publishing a novel is as noble as self-publishing a zine.

Do I really have anything else I want to add? When I was 17 I wrote a one-act play for my high school and after my classmates told me how much they liked it (though I was unsure of its quality), I made it my life's mission to write, until every MFA program I applied to rejected me in February of 2007. I did not stop writing after that, obviously, but my confidence was shot. Here is my advice to Jordan and Richard: if you are going to get your MFA eventually, apply to a safety school. I applied to U Chicago's MAPH program, UT-Austin's Michener Center for Writers, Iowa's Writer's Workshop, University of Oregon, Columbia University's esteemed program producing writers like Rick Moody and Wells Tower and James Franco and offering zero aid in general and a $50,000 price tag (and you thought law school was expensive, and didn't offer enough career security). Every single one rejected me. Apply to a safety school. Or don't. Maybe I just suck at writing, and at life.

Do I really want to be at law school, and quitting my blog, and quitting my creative endeavors? No. I intend to work on my 3rd novel whenever appropriate over these next three years. I am 28,000 words into it. It is the best thing I have done, no doubt, but still unpublishable. Too many "fatal flaws." Everybody in or associated with law school says you have no free time and if you have free time you should be studying. Well, now I am going to start doing that and stop blogging. And I have serious doubts about my career in general. I waited too long to do this.

More advice to Jordan and Richard: never move to a random city (like say Los Angeles) because it seems fun and you have enough savings in your account-----unless you have a job there waiting for you. Had I not done that, had I applied to law school 3 years ago, or now without that stint, I'd be having a blast, not pinching every penny, not failing to leave tips for take-out orders, not feeling guilty about an endless reliance upon my parents and not feeling that I have a dubious future in general. I would feel much more confident.

Finally, that is very far in the future for them. They will be at college soon and probably have the time of their lives. I would recommend NYU but I feel as if it is changing. It is expanding, somehow, despite already having been the largest private university in the country 9 years ago. John Sexton is really emphasizing how important it is to study abroad so they can get as many students as possible out of the Village and into their other, expensive international branches in Paris, Florence, Buenos Aires and other places of which I am unaware. They are putting up students in hotels, because the new dorms they have opened since I have graduated still don't provide enough space. Faculty members would complain about their salaries. Still, I wouldn't have rather been anywhere else. Except UT-Austin or maybe Oberlin if I had gotten in there. Liz Phair and I have the same birthday and she is exactly seventeen years older than me and she went there.

Thanks to Jordan for sending me this chapbook. I apologize for using this as an opportunity to explain why this blog will be slipping into a coma and writing so many other random things. I wish him and Richard the best of luck, and hope that their method of e-publishing will work out okay for them. They are on the first-wave of this stuff, and they should ride it out and see where it takes them.

Richard Yates - Tao Lin

2010-08-18T16:08:00.000-07:00

This will be one of the last posts on Flying Houses for a long time. A friend of mine recently told me that I should spend more time studying and less time blogging since studying involves the financial investment. But I requested this book and I am not going to be negligent when it comes to following through on promises.

Yes, perhaps a bit of personal narrative is in order before this official review begins, since it is such a serious occasion. I requested a copy of Richard Yates from Tao Lin's publicist on July 6, 2010, approximately 5 weeks before I would move to Brooklyn for law school. I knew I would receive the book in my new apartment in Brooklyn, and I knew there would be law school assignments, and I knew it would appear negligent if I blogged about underground literature instead of reading and briefing cases. But I did it anyway because I knew it was the last chance I would have to do an advance review of a relatively highly-anticipated new title.

I will not be interviewing Tao as I did for previous reviews of Eeeee Eee Eeee and Shoplifting from American Apparel. Not that I don't want to, but again, time, and negligence. I received Richard Yates in my apartment foyer on Monday, August 16. There were two packages from Melville House* and I was just out of my 2nd day of "preliminary" law school classes. I was very depressed. I was thinking that there was no way I could possibly survive the next three years. It would not be sustainable. In this depressed mood, I immediately began reading Richard Yates, which is usually the best time to read books by Tao Lin. I read for an hour and made it through roughly 1/4 of the book and then decided it was time to go get drunk and watch a movie on Netflix. It was Comedians of Comedy and I laughed very much. Sometimes I would go outside and smoke a cigarette. I would put my iPod boombox by my window and play music and go outside and sit outside my window on a stoop and listen to the music and smoke. It came time to go to bed and I began having a nervous breakdown. Sometime around three or four o'clock in the morning I fell asleep. Then I woke up around 6:30 am or so and resumed having a nervous breakdown, and I opened up my word processor and did a free-write about the inevitability of my decision to suicide. This put me in a weird manic mood, and I went to shower and then went to another set of preliminary classes around 8:15 am.

Several hours later, the nervous breakdown had been quelled, and I enjoyed a calm lunch in the school cafeteria while reading Richard Yates. Then later I smoked a cigarette in the school's gated entrance and read more of Richard Yates. I was enjoying it very much.

I did not read any more of it on Tuesday night. I watched two movies on Netflix after being at a bar for a school outing--The Trials of Henry Kissinger and The Cruise (the latter of which I had seen before and should be required viewing for anyone living in New York City), also while drinking more beer and continuing to smoke cigarettes in this manner.

This morning, Wednesday, I resolved not to smoke any cigarettes or drink anything alcoholic. I went to the bookstore and waited forty-five minutes to get my books and was very frustrated but then happy it was over. I went to a pizza place for lunch and read more of Richard Yates, but only a few pages. Then I went into the school library and read a few more pages of Richard Yates. Then I went to class, and then I came home, and I resolved to finish reading the rest of Richard Yates. I also received a chapbook from Jordan Castro today and think I will try to review it as the last true blog post for a long time.

And I finished reading Richard Yates around 7:05 PM and it is now 7:35 PM. So, I suppose we can begin then?

Richard Yates is a very narrow book. It is about one thing, and one thing only: a relationship between a 16-year-old named Dakota Fanning and a 22-year-old named Haley Joel Osment. It is perhaps worth noting that Tao Lin does not attempt to seriously recreate the lives of these celebrities. Haley Joel Osment (hereafter referred to as HJO) is a graduate of New York University who spends a lot of time in Bobst Library and lives on Wall St. Dakota Fanning (hereafter referred to as DF) is a high-school student living in Secaucus, New Jersey. They meet on the internet and quickly begin dating and take buses and trains to visit one another.

It is about that one thing only, but within that, it is about many other things: self-mutilation, bulimia, health food stores, sex, lying, G-chat, movies, emo bands, and writers like Lorrie Moore and Richard Yates--in short, par for the course for a Tao Lin novel. I don't begrudge Tao for writing about the same topics. I have written enough to know that certain themes become obsessive to certain writers, and there is no shame in repetition, so long as it offers something new.

And I have been looking forward to this book for a couple years now and I predicted that it would be Tao Lin's most mainstream effort yet, and in certain regards I am right and in certain regards I am wrong. Tao does branch out into a more detailed "consistent" "straightforward" narrative than he has in the past. It is much more focused on the characters and there are no tangents that make little sense, as in Eeeee Eee Eeee. And I think technically, the rough draft of this novel was finished before Shoplifting from American Apparel was written, and then this novel was edited heavily after that novella was finished.

And perhaps that holds the key to my feelings. In a sense, I appreciate what Tao is trying to do with this book. But in another sense, I could not get into it as much as his previous two long-form prose works. Perhaps it is because I was rushing through it because I was in law school.

Here is my problem with it, essentially: it does not need to be a novel. I do not want to say that but it is the way I feel. I think it would have made an excellent short story, or a very good novella, but as the longest book he has done yet (not sure on this, but it seems longer than Eeeee Eee Eeee) it tends to drag. HJO and DF are two of the most interesting characters he has portrayed yet, but their story is too narrowly-focused.

So I went through periods where I thought the book was great, and periods where I thought it was not so great. My opinion depended on my mood, and the book could not distract me from present circumstances. Some people have been giving it bad reviews and not even reading to the end. I read to the end but I think the strongest parts are in the first 120 pages. It is in the last 80 pages that most of the "climactic" scenes occur, but I found HJO and DF's conversations becoming too repetitive, and almost too pointless. I do like how HJO wants to help DF near the end despite his weakening feelings for her. And I like the scene where they make funnel cakes at the carnival, and I like the scene where they go to Epcot, and I like the scene where they dye DF's hair black and she "turns goth." I also enjoy the references to self-mutilation and bulimia and Ernest Hemingway biographies and Nicholas Sparks for personal reasons.

There are many little moments in this book that are nice, but on the whole, I did not find it as interesting as Lin's two previous novels. Something has been made about this book being autobiographical and if that is the case then I understand why Tao felt that it needed to be published. I do not think everything in this book really happened. Or maybe everything in this book did happen, but certain details about people are skewed. I can't tell, and it doesn't really matter either way. It is fiction. And while I would love to give Tao positive reviews from here until the end of days, I can only half-heartedly recommend this novel.

It is worth reading for its "experimental" aspect for Tao Lin personally. It is more straightforward, in a sense, but it is also just like his previous work in that description is totally eschewed in favor of maximum repetitive action with repetitious objects. The element I like most is its "realist bent."

This is a minutely-detailed (though not deeply descriptive) account of a relationship that rings true. You feel that you are reading about a "real relationship" that might prove educational in some way. But it is only educational if you are a 22-year-old going out with a 16-year-old and all of the weird things that come with it. Neither HJO or DF is very mature, but obviously HJO has a slightly more complete view of life. The tagline for this book is, "What constitutes illicit sex for a generation with no rules?" I am not sure I like it, and it does not seem like Tao wrote that tagline, but I may be wrong. Regardless of whether or not I like it, the implication is that this book is an exploration of that sort of "illicit sex" and one gets the impression that it will be "titillating." But it is not titillating at all, even with more than a few scenes of sexuality. There is lots of G-chat. I think maybe more than 50% of this book's content is in the form of G-chat. The rest is extremely dialogue-heavy, and most of the dialogue seems almost meaningless.

I haven't read any books by Richard Yates, but I did see the movie Revolutionary Road and that was a narrowly-focused narrative on one relationship. Perhaps his other books are like that, and this is Tao's homage to him. If so, that is fine, that is nice. Hemingway wrote The Torrents of Spring to make fun of Sherwood Anderson.

So maybe there is a deeper layer to this book that I can't quite see, but taken on its own terms, I feel that is lacking in something, or that there is too much of nothing in it. I do believe it would make a great short story, and if it were edited down to just a few essential scenes instead of an exhaustive diary of every conversation (most glaringly, the four-page paragraph where DF tells HJO every single time she has lied to him in a long e-mail, which is either the best or worst part of the book, depending on your view), I would have liked it much more. Such as it is, I am glad I read it, I am glad I reviewed it during this tumultuous time in my life, and I look forward to reading whatever else Tao Lin's next project will be. Shoplifting from American Apparel was "roughly" written after this, and it is my favorite thing by him so far, so whatever he has been working on for the last year, or whatever he will be working on for the next year, I think, will continue to improve. This does seem a bit like an object from a time-capsule despite its latter-day editing. I remember reading a blog post by Tao Lin a long time ago saying he was going to write a novel about Dakota Fanning and Haley Joel Osment and thinking that it was a joke. Imagine my surprise when I read the plot descriptions for Richard Yates.

This novel isn't a joke though. It's a serious attempt at something different, and I respect that. One can learn something from it. Sometimes exhaustive recitation of events and conversations do not automatically make for compelling literature. I have been guilty of this (and am still guilty of this, at times) so I understand the motive behind it. But without any deeper significance, or any hints of deeper significance, the reader finds themselves lost, and wonders why this information was so important to communicate.

*I received two copies of Richard Yates because I requested one from the publicist and then entered Tao's contest, which gave a copy of the novel as an award to all legitimate participants. I have an extra copy so if anyone wants it, I will send it to them, but I would prefer for them to live in Brooklyn Heights so I don't have to mail it.

Antichrist - Dir. Lars von Trier

2010-08-16T15:17:00.001-07:00

While I had wanted to see this movie for over a year, it was very dificult to find. It is unrated. It did not play widely in theaters. But it was the most talked about film at Cannes in 2009. It is actually not out on DVD until November 2010, from the Criterion collection. Recently I signed up for Netflix again and watched it instantly. I found it last night and became ridiculously excited.

Why does it take so long to come out on DVD? Probably because it's such a difficult film. It is definitely in the top 5 "darkest" films I have ever seen, if not #1 itself. Many may know the basic plot but I will recount: Charlotte Gainsbourg and Willem Dafoe played a married couple. In the "prologue" they are having sex (which is a bit graphic) when their toddler son crawls out of his crib to play with some toys on his window ledge. This prologue is filmed in black & white and set to a beautiful score by Handel I believe. In short it is the best part of the movie. It is filmed in super-slow-motion, and the end of the scene is quite painful.

From here, the film switches to color and regular speed and contains dialogue. It is perhaps worth noting that the dialogue is quiet, and I was watching it on my laptop, which does not have the most powerful speakers, so I missed a bit. Charlotte collapses after the funeral of their baby boy and goes into the hospital. Willem is a therapist and seeks to cure his wife of her pain.

There are three chapters: Grief, Pain, and Despair. Charlotte is having a really hard time getting over the death of her baby, of course she feels responsible, she even knew that sometimes he would try to crawl out of his crib in the past. Willem decides to take her to their cabin in the woods for more alternative forms of therapy, like having her imagine lying in the grass and having it consume her.

"Grief" becomes a bit scary at times, and Antichrist is in the horror genre, I would say. It is not as scary as The Exorcist but it is very scary, for example, when a wolf talks to Willem at the end of "Pain." That is what is weird about it. "Grief" has a few scary moments, but then during "Pain," Charlotte even becomes happy and excited and claims that she is cured and there is a brief moment of bliss. But then the wolf talks to Willem at the end in a scary voice and "Despair" (Gynocide) begins.

"Gynocide" is the title of the study that Charlotte has been undertaking, about crimes committed against women in the 16th century. There are lots of weird illustrations and there is a constellation with Grief, Pain, and Despair appearing as a fox, a bird, and a deer. These animals show up in the movie having various bloody tumors or what appear to be severed appendages.

In "Despair," Charlotte drills a hole through Willem's leg, cuts off her labia with a scissors, and runs into the woods and masturbates. I have to say that I give enormous respect to both Gainsbourg and Dafoe for their performances in this film. No other actors of their station would take such risks.

I won't give away what happens at the end, but it is relatively predictable. It is a reasonable ending and I don't think most people will be horrified by it after everything that came before. However, there is still a super creepy ending, where there are like hundreds of women in white silhouette climbing through the woods as a closing shot. And then there is an "epilogue" which has the same score as the "prologue" and the same black & white and super-slow-motion, but it is much more sad because the film is over and there is nothing more to be done.

I don't think this film is meaningless, but I do think some of it may contain crackpot psychology. Gainsbourg's revelation, before going totally nuts, that women are subject to nature, is the major epiphany of the film, only to be derided by Dafoe a second later. Many say that Lars von Trier makes misogynistic films. This film may be misogynistic but I could not help but feel affection for Gainsbourg's character, up to a certain point at least.

This is the type of movie that should be shown in dive bars and indie rock clubs and put on mute. It's the type of movie that should be shown at screwed-up parties. I waited a long time to see it and I was so happy to finally have the chance last night. It's not one of the best movies I've ever seen at all, but it is an event. I actually liked The Girlfriend Experience better because it was more light-hearted.

But this is a horror film, and it's a very good horror film. It's not as good as The Shining but it's definitely similar. Even when you see the cabin in early shots, you know it's straight out of 80's slasher pics. But this isn't a "dumb horror film" (which they usually always are). Like, okay, I like both Hostel movies, but this is much more intellectual. It's intellectual and personal and psychological and horrific. I am sure few couples are going to have to go through what Gainsbourg and Dafoe do, and I am sure even if they did go through it, they wouldn't go to such extremes. That von Trier is able to make it believable and hallucinatory at the same time shows how talented he is. Now, I would like him to do something ridiculously mainstream. But I don't think that will happen anytime soon.

The Girlfriend Experience - Dir. Steven Soderbergh

2010-08-13T21:47:00.000-07:00

While I had wanted to see this movie for over a year, I had mixed feelings going into it. For one, I was unconvinced of Steven Soderbergh's talents as a director. I found Erin Brockovich to be overrated. I found Traffic to be overrated, but in time I began to understand some of its appeal. I consider the Oceans movies to be cashout opportunities, though not without their own (quite unique, I think) niche. I never saw The Good German but I have heard it is terrible. I have never seen Solaris or The Limey, but I have been meaning to. The Informant! was enjoyable, but no other comment on that now.

Second, Sasha Grey is (was?) a porn star. And she is younger than me, and way more fucking rich. And she manages to land her own film, basically, with Steven Soderbergh. So I was jealous, and suspicious of her talents as a "real actress."

Despite his more mainstream occupations, Soderbergh also directed Bubble and Che, (neither of which I've seen) which are not the most obvious choices for a director who can pretty much guarantee a $100 million blockbuster when he so chooses. Furthermore, he is responsible for sex, lies, and videotape, which might not be one of the best movies ever, but certainly helped to launch a genre which has been responsible for some of the best movies over the last three decades. And his cameo in Waking Life was cool. So I respect him, and I wanted to see this movie, but I was still skeptical.

Long story short, skepticism erased. This movie is hilarious, and supposedly sad, but I don't think the desperation it is seemingly meant to portray ever comes across. Here is the plot: Chelsea is an escort. She meets rich men and listens to them talk and goes out to dinner with them and sleeps with them. But she has a real boyfriend, Chris, who is a personal trainer. There is a weird time-zone for this movie where it keeps flipping back and forth to a plane trip Chris takes with one of his clients on a private jet party to Las Vegas. And there are random sub-plots where Chelsea might go to Dubai as part of a prostitution vacation, or sleep with internet messageboard administrators to get a good review and get more business.

In general, the movie is slow, quiet, talkative, and mundane. However, its greatest asset is its timing. It takes place near the November 2008 elections. There are references to the $700 billion bailout and the word "maverick" in debates and Man on Wire. Sometimes Chelsea writes journal entries about her "dates," and one of them is a dinner at Nobu, which I found funny for personal reasons.

The last shot in the movie kind of totally blew me away. And on the whole I found it surprisingly tasteful. I thought the script was good, the dialogue was very realistic, and I laughed out loud several times. Still, not for the faint of heart due to its subject matter. Also I don't think it's a very responsible film in the way I don't think "Mad Men" is a very responsible TV-show. I think they encourage bad behavior.

This film probably won't change your life, but it certainly made me think, and it certainly inspired me at moments. Otherwise I would not be blogging at 1:26 in the morning after drinking, oh, maybe 50 oz of beer. Perhaps there is more I could say about it, or more that I thought I wanted to say about it (i.e. my favorite part, the beginning of a misogynistic monologue at a bar, or alternately, a snippet of conversation about the insufficiencies of using a vaporizer) while I was watching it, but it doesn't matter. You'll either be aware of this film or not, and if you are aware of it, you should take a chance on it. Because while it may not be for everyone, it is exactly the type of film I appreciate, because it attempts to portray reality without Hollywoodization. I know that is not a word but you know what I mean.

My Essay on Tao Lin and Our Histories Intertwining

2010-07-25T11:58:00.000-07:00

ORIGINS

I have been aware of Tao Lin for approximately four years. The first instance of our relationship began when I left a comment on his blog about an interview he had done for Bookslut. This comment is still on his blog and I look back on it and feel embarrassed since it is one of only 2 comments on a link still prominently displayed.

That post attempted to engage Mr. Lin for our similar educational backgrounds, similar age, and similar vocational practices. I do not think we have much in common otherwise. However, one of my best friends once shared a dorm room with him.

GENEROSITY

One of my favorite things about Tao is his generosity. After my first abortive attempt at contacting the iconoclast, I applied to MFA programs, became a reject, finished my first novel, moved to L.A., wrote 70% of a second novel, and returned to my home. Boomeranged, broken. I didn’t know what I was going to do anymore. I finished that second novel, and then I started doing NaNoWriMo. Halfway through November, I got a temp job, which was nice. Then, right as I was about to finish NaNoWriMo, call it a case of “chemically-unbalanced-writer’s-excitement/manic part of manic depression,” I decided to ask Tao if I could review his first novel, Eeeee Eee Eeee for my blog, which I had started in L.A. He said yes and sent me the book for free and I read it and asked him if I could interview him and he said yes. I finally wrote that review on Thanksgiving morning, 2008.

Later I would lend it to my friend who is a tough critic. Tao passed that test.
Later I would ask if I could do the same for Shoplifting from American Apparel. This was in August of 2009. Tao agreed again. More generosity.
A few days ago I asked if I could receive a galley copy of Richard Yates. My request was honored. Generosity again. I hope to have that review up in August 2010. And I hope to do a few more interview questions.

I am not a book critic for the Chicago Tribune or New York Times, and while I am sure Tao would love their coverage, I appreciate his ability to make this complicated job called “fiction writer in 21st century” a little more transparent for all of us. I don’t know if I want to be a writer anymore when I read his blog posts about how little money he earns from writing. I keep doing it regardless, and I don’t think clearly about prospects for my future. Perhaps I am missing the point: my blog. Flying Houses is not even HTML Giant or MOBYLIVES, but Tao gave me a chance, and I am happy with having a few more readers that could potentially find something else they like on it.

NETWORKING

All my Dad ever talks about is networking. I hate networking. I hate going to cocktail parties, because I get too wasted, and whatever connections I might make, well, people just think I am a drunk, and therefore unstable, and therefore not worth their networking time. That’s in person. Networking on the internet is different. For one, it is scarier. If anyone wants, they can go cycle through all my old posts on this blog, or on the messageboard at pw.org. and find something I said that is terribly stupid and deserving of hardcore condemnation. It happens. Cyberbullies exist. But on the other hand, networking on the internet is so easy. Add a friend on Facebook. Talk to someone about what they tweeted about. It’s all well and good and nice and fun. But what about when you want to “get serious” and meet in person? What do you have to say that is of any import? How do you not come off sounding like a total vulture?

No more ruminations on the internet, though the internet plays a huge role, I would argue, in Tao’s literature. I have not read Richard Yates but I want to because I liked both his first novel and his first novella. I have not read Bed and it would be nice to have a copy.

SHORT STORY

Here is a short story about what happened to my copies of Eeeee Eee Eeee and Shoplifting from American Apparel: I met a girl through an online dating site and we went out a few times and she seemed like one of the coolest girls I had ever met in my life. We would go out to lunch or dinner, and we would get stoned and listen to indie rock, and we would watch movies, or else walk nearby Barack Obama’s house in Kenwood. In short that is what I like to do with my time. She was cute and I was willing to look past the fact that she was a Starbuck’s barista and generally unreliable when it came to comprehensive assessments of life. As is the case with most of the girls I have dated, she broke up with me in a very passive-aggressive manner. This was not before I had leant her some CDs, and these two books by Tao Lin. She did invite me back once, so she could give me the CDs. But she had not finished both books. She loved them. She wrote on her Facebook wall that they “made her feel schizophrenic” and that she “couldn’t stop reading.” She also wrote that Tao was apparently a “friend of a friend.” Not anymore, because a couple weeks later, she de-friended me. This after I sent her random text messages asking her if she planned to give the books back. She said, in her text message, “I never intended to keep the books.” Well, she still has them. The copy of Eeeee Eee Eeee had a personal inscription from Tao to me that I cherished deeply. And now it sits in whatever sordid living room she inhabits, corrupt, wrong, inappropriate for her to own.

HIPSTERS

My feelings about this girl are roughly commensurate with my feelings about hipsters in general and Tao’s fans. That is, on the surface, they are fun, they are cool, they are the type of people I want to befriend and hang out with, but underneath, once you get to know them, you realize they are weird and mean and don’t give good reasons for the fucked-up things they do to you. I’m not trying to give them a bad name—I’m just talking from personal experience, and leaving open the opportunity for someone to prove me wrong.

RICHARD YATES, THE NOVEL

Richard Yates, I believe, will be Tao’s best book yet. I don’t want to get too crazy since I haven’t read it yet, and I don’t want to say, “I was wrong!” in my upcoming review. But each of his first two novels showed a progression, and Richard Yates is a more serious title than either of the first two, and Richard Yates was a very good writer (so I’ve been told), and I know Haley Joel Osment and I share at least two things in common and I don’t know why Tao chose to use celebrity names as main character names, but I happened to do the same thing in my third novel (in progress) and I wonder if it has to do with the fact that nobody reads anymore and everybody goes to the movies (or if it is to make casting an adaptation easy).

(By nobody obviously I mean “95% of the American populace does not read, or would not recognize the name Tao Lin” and by everybody I mean “95% of the American populace will not have seen The Runaways but will know who Dakota Fanning is and everybody saw The Sixth Sense, etc.)

MEETING TAO

I have suggested that Tao visit Quimby’s book shop in Chicago so I could see him on tour. I thought that would be so cool. Then I see he has set a date there. Have fun there, Tao! If you moved from Williamsburg to Wicker Park, you’d be like, the coolest person since Stephanie Kuehnart. But now I will be unable to see that glorious moment, as I will be entrenched within new legal studies. Still, I will be in Brooklyn, and I hope I will meet Tao eventually.

He is like a legend, a ghost. But he exists. Who made that “I am Carles” t-shirt? I don’t know, but I saw one person wearing one at the Pitchfork Festival last weekend. Whatever Tao’s army is, it grows. It grows because literature, as we know it, the ability to make our voices heard, to be paid for our time spent actively opening up our worlds for strangers to inhabit and learn from experience, is dead or dying. I suffer, and wait to kill myself until I am 40 because that’s about the time most people realistically publish their first novel these days. But as I suffer, Tao’s army grows, and I attempt to join it, and do not feel like a full-fledged member, but still feel as if I am “part of something.” Tao’s detractors may say that his work is meaningless or immature or just plain stupid (all critiques are understandable, too), but they are just looking for a way to assert their dominance in literary games. They don’t break the same rules as him. They think the rules he breaks are sacred.

DEATH OF LITERATURE

No rules are sacred when literature is dying. I will persist in saying literature is dying until an agent speaks with me personally about why my work is bad. Tao is not going to save literature. And he may not even have found a way for it to pay his own rent yet, but he updates his blog mercilessly, I know he works very hard, and one day it will have to pay off. It will have to pay off or else you have to start challenging anyone who dreams of being a writer: what do you have to say, why is it so important to say, why are you special, and can you figure out the secret combination to unlock a publishing contract?

I don’t like challenging people on their dreams. Society in general is at fault here, but Tao is doing what he can to make things right, and for that I will always read his books.

Pitchfork Music Festival - July 16-18, 2010 (Redux)

2010-07-20T11:59:00.001-07:00

Welcome to my review of the 2010 Pitchfork Festival. I posted this yesterday, but there were many technical difficulties, so I decided to redo it with pictures of every band reviewed.
To be fair, reviews can never be authoritative. There were 54,000 other people there that all had different experiences than me. Due to my own idiosyncrasies, my experience may appear inaccurate, or incorrect, but I will attempt to maintain a subjective stance so when I diss Chicagoans or Pitchfork you will know that not everyone agrees with what I have to say.

Let us begin on Friday, with Liars, the first set I saw.

Liars played a satisfactory set, focusing heavily on material from Sisterworld. I have only seen Liars once before, during the They Were Wrong, So We Drowned tour at a free NYU show in 2004, which interestingly enough, is the only previous concert I have attempted to bootleg--and I have about thirty minutes on my camcorder from that which is so much better than the quality I was able to get out of my digital camera this weekend-- but I digress. Now, Liars are not as much of a "bait and switch" act as they used to be, but I have pretty much the same problem as before. They played material from every album except their debut--and the only songs I really wanted to hear were off their debut. This is basically the problem with every set at Pitchfork. These aren't headlining sets. They're supposed to pick their best or newest songs to play in forty-five minutes. Liars were satisfactory. I have no major complaints beyond not getting to hear "Grown Men Don't Fall in the River Just Like That" or "We Live NE of Compton."

Broken Social Scene was the next band I saw, after getting a couple beers and glancing briefly at the Comedy Stage, where someone was doing a bit about Medieval Times, as if no one had heard of it before. I read in the Tribune's review of the fest that Michael Showalter apparently abandoned his set early? I am sure it wasn't as dramatic as they made that seem---but I kind of get it. The denizens of the Pitchfork fest are notoriously snobby and sarcastic and unable to be impressed. I mean, indie rock fans in general are just moody and quiet, not given to loud, boisterous, stupid laughter. So I can understand why some comedians might have felt they were not "killing it" or getting huge audience reactions. I did hear some laughs, and it actually did look like a nice place to spend the evening, with everyone sitting down, looking relaxed. Two beers, ten bucks, a cigarette, a seat for a few minutes, a couple pages of my new book about the life of Ernest Hemingway, and then BSS.

They opened with "World Sick" and didn't play the last three minutes of that song, which was a good move. Their second song was "Stars and Sons," which had a few variations and reminded me of seeing BSS play Pitchfork in 2005, where they put in one of the best sets of the then 2-day Intonation Festival (only Les Savy Fav remains fonder in my memory). They played "Superconnected" and "Shoreline" and "Forced to Love" and "Ungrateful Little Father" and "Cause = Time" and "All to All" --but no "Chase Scene." That would have ruled. They did close with "Meet Me in the Basement" which Kevin Drew introduced by saying it was their "killer anthem." I thought they were going to play "It's All Gonna Break," but they proved my point about "Basement" being the best song on Forgiveness Rock Record--if only it had words. This definitely wasn't one of the greatest highlights of the weekend, but BSS continue to grow in popularity and people seemed very happy here.

For Modest Mouse, I went to the bathroom and then got a couple more beers. I could not get a good spot. They opened up with "Tiny Cities Made of Ashes" while I was in line for beer and I was all upset that I was missing it. They played a few new songs, which sounded okay, but I do miss Johnny Marr being in the band. They played what you would expect them to play--thankfully avoiding "Float On." A solid set, but I did not have the best spot. Much more engaging than Built to Spill, who played at the same position last year. "Dashboard" was a particular highlight, and everyone around me was dancing and getting crazy and having fun even though we weren't very close to the stage and that made it a bit more fun for me.

The next day I came around 1:3o in the afternoon and saw Free Energy from a distance and didn't really think it was worth it to try to get closer. Their set was almost over, and I decided to give Real Estate a try. Now, I love Sunny Day Real Estate, but I have never heard Real Estate before, and they are perfectly fine. They are no SDRE, that is for sure, but they don't aspire towards that. They're pretty mellow, but sometimes they get a little loud and fast. They're from New Jersey, unpretentious, and winsome. If there were any new album I would get from a band I saw, it would be theirs. Or the new Titus Andronicus.

I have never seen Titus before, but people were way into them. Like, they seemed to have more fans than a band of their years should rightfully have. It seems like they have a bright future. I have The Airing of Grievances on my iPod, and I like it fine. I've never heard The Monitor, but judging from the sound of the set, I would guess most of those songs sound similar to their previous album, whether concept or not. The set was fun for everyone. Patrick Stickles came on saying "Let's have the best afternoon of our lives!" And they tore through everything. There weren't any laid back songs. I put this in the second category of sets from this weekend. It wasn't an absolute can't miss highlight, but it was a damn good show, and I'd see them again on the basis of it.

Now we get to the depressing part of the story. Here is a picture of Raekwon.

I was waiting for Wolf Parade during Raekwon's set. I sat indian-style and dozed, leaning forward, bad posture. Raekwon started late, there was all of that endless "pumping up" prevalent at hip-hop shows, which led me to a realization: I don't like bands that force you to participate. Like, Kevin Drew, at Broken Social Scene, was like, "Everybody scream so you know you are alive!" Maybe I am being a sourpuss but I'll sing along if I like your lyrics enough. I don't know any Raekwon songs, but it was a relatively painless experience, though the weekend was about to get really depressing.

But not before getting really awesome with the Wolf Parade set!

It was difficult to wait 50 minutes in between Raekwon and Wolf Parade, and to listen to Jon Spencer Blues Explosion play at the other stage. They seemed to be going totally crazy. But the wait was worth it, the spot was worth it, and the band played a fantastic set. It was my second time seeing them and this time it was much better. I just had chills running up and down my spine the whole time--the opener "Cloud Shadow on the Mountain," the crowd-pleasing "Dear Sons and Daughters of Hungry Ghosts" and "I'll Believe in Anything" and "This Heart's on Fire." A particular note about this set: my previous post about Expo '86 asserts that Spencer Krug (and to a lesser extent Dan Boeckner) have mind-reading abilities, and Spencer set up directly in front of me with his keyboard and seemed to make eye contact with me a couple times which made me swoon. My point is this: after a few songs, I started thinking that they had read my review on this blog, and tailored their setlist to make some kind of point. I know that's not what happened---but witness the first two songs they played--"Cloud Shadow.." and "Soldier's Grin"--which I mention the opening parts of in comparison to a Sunset Rubdown album opener--and witness the argument about which is the better closing track, "This Heart's on Fire" or "Cave-O-Sapien," which they played back-to-back--and witness Boeckner choosing to play "Ghost Pressure" instead of "Pobody's Nerfect" which I would have preferred reversed, but proved to me "Ghost..." is a good song too. The only thing I would have liked to hear would have been "California Dreamer" or "Grounds for Divorce" or "You are a Runner..."--but those are all Spencer songs, and he seemed to sing more as it was.

Here is Dan Boeckner, playing "Little Golden Age," I think, which was also prescient.

Spencer has long hair now and is less shy than in the past, it seems.

Now we get to the sad part.

You can see Panda Bear in the back right of that picture. He was playing his set, and we were waiting for LCD Soundsystem. It wasn't that long of a wait, really, just over an hour, but it was a very long hour. I have decided that I am going to leave my previous post up because this is taking way too long to write two reviews. You will be able to read there about the crowd-surfing annoying me, the six square inch space to stand within, the inability to move, or sit, but I did not mention the pot smoking this weekend. More than in the past, EVERYONE around me was smoking pot, smoking cigarettes, and drinking gallon water jugs. It made me jealous, and it made me realize why people have negative opinions of music festivals.

I didn't mention the girl who LOVED Panda Bear, and was standing nearby me, waiting for LCD. She screamed about how beautiful he was and how she wanted to have his babies, and she started freaking out during the second song he played. Now, I have not heard that song before, which made me think it will be something off Tomboy, and that song sounded really awesome. But that was it. If you read the other post, you will hear about the kid who said "Animal Collective was the worst experience of my life." And you will hear about how LCD was the worst experience of my life.

See! I was actually pretty close! But I was in significant trouble. Their setlist was almost perfect. "Us V Them," "Drunk Girls," "Pow Pow," "Daft Punk is Playing at My House," "All My Friends," "Trials and Tribulations," and "Movement." I lasted through all of those, and during "Yeah" I couldn't take it anymore. I left, and then heard "Someone Great" and "Losing My Edge" (which was the most crestfallen moment of the weekend for me) as I exited the grounds. They also played "New York, I Love You...." apparently, but who knows if they did the whole "Empire State of Mind" medley. James Murphy turned in an excellent performance, but he did not pay attention to the welfare of the "happy" people in front. Granted, everyone was happy, and only about three or four people in front of me left before I did. But I hated that crowd-surfing, and I hated not being able to move one way or another, and the sweat started to become too much for me tolerate. But like I said, it wasn't even the atmosphere of the set that bothered me so much, but WALKING OUT OF IT, which was like some horror-show obstacle course.

Still, by most accounts, this was highlight of the weekend.

After painful memories of Saturday, I resolved to change my approach on Sunday. I had a couple Stella Artois before leaving Old Town and hitting the El, and that may have made the earlier part of the day better.

Girls were the first band I saw Sunday, overall it was a very good time. I wasn't very close to the stage, but the sound was decent, and I got to see the cool noise jam between "Hellhole Ratrace" and "Morning Light," which was definitely an homage to MBV's "You Made Me Realise." They ended their set with "Big Bad Mean Motherfucker" which sounded good too, though I had already left for the beer line.

Note that I only spent $40 on beer this weekend. 20 tickets, twice. 8 beers. Heinekens mainly.

I also got to hear "Lust for Life," so even though I missed almost half of their set, I saw everything I wanted.

Here is a slightly-zoomed in photo of Girls.

I waited until 4:45 to see Surfer Blood. I don't think there was any other band that I was looking forward to seeing as much as them. Just because I got more into their album than any other new album this year.

They opened up with "Fast Jabroni," which ruled, but no one crowd-surfed or went crazy or anything. My thoughts of their entire set may be read in the previous post, but let me just add that they seemed, restrained in some way. Still, a great setlist, with "Floating Vibes," "Take it Easy," "Swim," "Anchorage," "Twin Peak," "Harmonix," their new song "I'm not Ready," and the one thing I forgot to mention: "Catholic Pagans." Now, this is a good song. But on the album I don't go too crazy for it. This was the only song that sounded way better live than on the album. They made it heavier and it was cooler.

Neon Indian followed Here We Go Magic, who followed Surfer Blood. I sat and dozed during Here We Go Magic. They sounded okay. But I have a negative opionion of a girl I used to know who was into Here We Go Magic like back in February, so I don't need to see them. They did sound okay, to be fair. But I was tired. Neon Indian changed that.

They played almost everything off Psychic Chasms and "Sleep Paralysis," which was my first time hearing it, but I knew what it was ("No sleep! No sleep!") and it made me dance. Overall, I have to say "Terminally Chill" and "Ephemeral Artery," the two songs they played on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon months ago, the first time I became aware of their live presence, were the highlights. But they opened up with "Local Joke" and that was cool. They suggested some audience participation for "Deadbeat Summer" and it was the only time I didn't find that sort of thing corny. This was definitely one of the can't miss highlights of the weekend, one of the best atmospheres.

Before Pavement there was Sleigh Bells.

There was this Asian kid standing with his girlfriend next to me and he just kind of annoyed me with all of his talk about how hot the singer in Sleigh Bells is and how she is a school teacher and how he wondered if maybe she was the sort of teacher to hit on her boy students--now granted, there is a lot of random eavesdropping at music festivals, but this kid, and some other kids around me, actually, were just talking about how Sleigh Bells were going to be the best set of the day, and how no one even came close, and how they had no qualms about missing a good spot for Pavement, and it just annoyed me. I like Sleigh Bells, don't get me wrong! But there's more than a little hype to them. At first I couldn't figure out who to compare them to. Then I realized they sound like a rockier version of Crystal Castles. Their singer is pretty cute, and she does have a certain presence onstage, but without all of the vocal modulation on the album, she sounds a bit pedestrian. But she does know how to stir up the crowd.

I left after two songs. Because Pavement rules.

Malkmus said something about how he lost his voice for a moment, but overall, their execution was good. There was a radio shock-jock DJ who is also on the Slow Century DVD introducing the band. It was funny to see him in person. He talked for like 15 minutes about Q101 and the "original alternative nation" and trying to "break" Pavement and all this weird crap, like you couldn't tell if he was being really sarcastic or not, but obviously he is way into the band. They opened with "Cut Your Hair" and then played, oh what can I remember, "Kennel District" second? "Silence Kit," which was nice. "Stop Breathing" and "Stereo," which were a bit altered. "Shady Lane," obviously. "Range Life" and "Unfair." I guess that's a lot of stuff off Crooked Rain. "Range Life" was a great moment, when Malkmus said, "Out on tour with Chicago's Pumpkins" and the crowd screamed. Playing "The Hexx" as the last song of the festival was also a pretty badass thing to do. But as previously mentioned, I thought an encore was coming, and it was not.

If you have never been the Pitchfork festival, I'm sorry, but now too many people go and it's kind of a claustrophobic experience. That said I still recommend it over Lollapalooza any year.

Pitchfork Music Festival 2010 - July 16-18, 2010

2010-07-19T10:04:00.001-07:00

Welcome to what will surely be one of the longest posts ever on Flying Houses--and certainly the most technological: my review of the Pitchfork festival. To be fair, reviews themselves can never be authoritative. There were 54,000 other people there that all had different experiences than me. Due to my own idiosyncrasies, my experience may appear inaccurate, or incorrect, but I will attempt to maintain a subjective stance so when I diss Pitchfork or Chicagoans you will know that not everyone agrees with everything I have to say.

Let us begin on Friday, with the Liars, the first set I saw.

(clip review: I had a clip of "Scissor" that was longer, but I felt this was one of the most crisp video images I was able to capture, short and sweet as it is)

Liars played a satisfactory set, focusing heavily on material from Sisterworld. I have only seen Liars once before, during the They Were Wrong, So We Drowned tour at a free NYU show, which, interestingly enough, is the only previous concert that I have attempted to bootleg--and I have about 30 minutes on my camcorder from that which is so much better than the quality I was able to get out of my digital camera this weekend--but I digress. Now, Liars are not as much of a "bait and switch" act as they were in 2004, but I have pretty much the same problem with them. They played material from every album except their debut--and the only songs I really wanted to hear were off their debut. This is basically the problem with every set at Pitchfork. These aren't headlining sets. They're supposed to pick their best songs to play in 45 minutes, or newest songs, whatever. Liars were satisfactory. I have no major complaints beyond not getting to hear "Grown Men Don't Fall in the River Just Like That" or "We Live NE of Compton."

They opened with "World Sick," didn't play the last three minutes of that song, and then went into "Stars and Sons." Now, when they played this, it reminded me of seeing Broken Social Scene at the Pitchfork fest in 2005. I had a serious deja vu moment, and realized Broken Social Scene were way better back then. No offense--if you read my review of Forgiveness Rock Record, you'll know I still thought they'd be a good live band, and for the most part, they were. They played a bunch of their hits ("Cause = Time," "Superconnected," "Shoreline") which made me think they consider S/T their best work. Then they ended with "Meet Me in the Basement" which re-affirmed my belief that it would be the best song on the new album if it had words. In general, a weaker performance than I've seen in the past from them, but I'm sure no one else was disappointed.

I seem to be having a difficult time adding pictures to this post. So I will stop with them. Only videos from here on in. Here are the two last pictures that were such a pain in the ass to move.
One is of Real Estate and the other is of Titus Andronicus. Both are from New Jersey

I would add a video of Titus Andronicus, but the Broken Social Scene one is taking forever. I guess I am learning lessons about utilizing technology, massive file sizes for upload. Real Estate was the first band I saw on Saturday. I did not know any of their songs. And I still do not know any of their songs, but they won me over. They were unpretentious, vaguely interesting, and skilled. Titus Andronicus, however, definitely won me over. I have not heard The Monitor (only The Airing of Grievances) but from the sound of their set, most of their songs sound the same. They always get bombastic, and Patrick Stickles always loses it. I was surprised by how dedicated their fan base is. They are a relatively new band, and for so many people to be so into them, well I think they have a bright future.

Then I had my horrible idea about camping out for a good spot for Wolf Parade. The camp out in this moment was not that bad, when I was sitting down indian-style during the Raekwon set, dozing. It was brutal when Raekwon ended, and it was time to get up, and it was time to stake out a position close to the stage for Wolf Parade, and it was time to wait the entire 50 minutes of the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion set, which sounded awesome and which I regret missing in retrospect. Then, Wolf Parade started.

I had a cool video of "Cloud Shadow on the Mountain" which was their opening song, but this video upload is not cool. Of all the sets I saw all weekend, I have to say Wolf Parade was my single favorite. It was probably because the spot in the crowd was pretty good, and because they just brought it. I only saw Wolf Parade once before, but this was a much better show. Their setlist was impeccable. The only thing that hampered my enjoyment was the crowd-surfing, which made "Cave-O-Sapien" more nerve-wracking than blissful.

Then we get to the reason why Saturday was so bad for me, which was LCD Soundsystem. Now, I love LCD Soundsystem. But so do a whole lot of other people. I planned to stand in place to wait for them, while Panda Bear played at the other stage. I heard some kid say, "Don't go see Panda Bear. I saw Animal Collective last year and it was the worst experience of my life." Well kid, what happened to me at LCD Soundsystem was probably not the worst experience of my life, but one of them.

It was the crowd dispersal after Wolf Parade, which did not happen. Everybody who was close for Wolf Parade had the same idea as me. Wait for LCD, and have a good spot. What a mistake! I should have known when Panda Bear started, and everyone around me sat down, except for the people that didn't have room to sit down, one of which was me. I stood on my tiptoes to try to see some of Panda Bear, and I felt wobbly and felt like I might fall on someone. It was terrible. There were six square inches within which I could stand, and I could not change my position, and I panicked and eventually, someone behind me stood up, which allowed me to sit down briefly. Panda Bear's set did not sound that exciting, but I still expect Tomboy to be really awesome.

LCD came on, after much anticipation from everyone around me, since we were all so miserably packed together. Something else happened that annoyed me: during Wolf Parade, someone had moved the garbage can close to the stage, and people were jumping off it to crowd-surf, which made me have to keep glancing back to make sure I wasn't about to be kicked in the head. Someone sat on the garbage can to wait for LCD, and it seemed like a very nice spot to have. Later, people would get up on it and dance during the set, also causing nervousness from me. At one point my calves were brushing up against the plastic bag attached to the front of it, and there was no way to get away from it, and I thought, wow, this is really a terrible spot to have. Later there was a bit of pushing and I did get away. I did not have fun at LCD. I wanted to have fun, but I did not. "US v Them," "Drunk Girls," "Pow Pow," "All My Friends..." --the performance was fantastic. I have no complaints about the performance. Only my experience. "All My Friends" was particularly ironic, as everyone seemed to think this was the apex of the weekend, and it was the point at which I broke and decided I couldn't stay. "Daft Punk is Playing at My House" caused crowd-surfing again, and the only time I got kicked in the head, it was incredibly gentle. But I was sweating horribly. I had to leave.

And leaving, was one of the worst experiences of my life. Because everyone was there. And packed deep. Once I thought I was out of the woods, there were more people to get around. And it would absolutely amaze me how stupid people were, they they wouldn't move aside to let me leave--and that even some of them would look at me like I was getting in their way and make a face at me like I was so disgusting for sweating that much. They played "Someone Great" and I was like, "Wow, I'm glad that I left!" and then they played "Losing My Edge" later, which I could hear from the El platform, and I was very upset because it's one of my favorite songs ever.

The next day I resolved to not be so crazy about getting the best possible spot. I saw Girls first, and they were excellent. I had a cool video that showed the noise jam as a segue between "Hellhole Ratrace" and "Morning Light," but now I think I'm even going to cancel the BSS video because it's still uploading! Girls were excellent and I should have bought their t-shirt, but I only saw the last twenty or thirty minutes of their set.

I was very excited for Surfer Blood. I had to wait through some of Local Natives, which marked my first stop at the Connector Stage, which was probably the place to be all weekend. I had a good time Sunday hanging out there most of the day. Surfer Blood played an excellent set, including a new song called "I'm Not Ready," which was similar to stuff off Astro Coast. I did feel vaguely disappointed, as if it could have been louder, or angrier, or something. Basically, let me say this: I still love Surfer Blood, but on record, their execution is so flawless that in person, they inevitably could not live up to themselves. They did change the line "You and me/could it be meant to be?" to "You and me/it's fucking anarchy," but I still felt they were too nice and seemed a bit more like Vampire Weekend Jr. than the Dinosaur one.

Neon Indian is probably the opposite of Surfer Blood. Psychic Chasms may be a very good album, but I prefer Astro Coast for air-guitar purposes. But, while Surfer Blood could not quite match the sound of their album (it is perhaps worth noting that Liars could not do that with Sisterworld either), Neon Indian exceeded all expectations. Their live show is better than their album. They have so many gadgets. And Alan Palomo is a magnetic performer. They had a great spot on the schedule, warming up the crowd for the big finale, and they did an almost perfect job.

Sleigh Bells came after, and they were okay. I like them. But I only stayed for two songs and then went to Pavement.

Pavement was everything I hoped it would be, but no more. If you look at the tracklist of Quarantine the Past you can pretty much guess their setlist. There were maybe three surprises ("Debris Slide" and "Kennel District" and "The Hexx"). "Stereo" and "Stop Breathing" featured some variations that made it more interesting. I had a spot very far back, and I wished I could have been at the front for "Conduit for Sale!" (definitely the best moment of the set), and I feel I belonged at the front where everyone knows every lyric and sings every lyric and you don't feel like a loser if you're singing along, but I learned this weekend that sometimes the dedication required to have that sort of concert experience isn't always worth it. Pavement was good, but I would have liked to hear "Carrot Rope" or "Speak, See, Remember" or "AT&T" or "Flux = Rad" or "Fight this Generation." But we can't have sets tailored to our specifications.

I did want to say this, before the final rankings: I saw Superchunk on June 20, 2010 at the Taste of Randolph. I had ten times more fun during Superchunk than I did during any single set at Pitchfork, with Wolf Parade the only one even coming close. Pitchfork is too crowded now. It's been happening slowly, but they finally reach their critical mass this year. They did do a good job with the water. They handed it out for free, thinking of the people that camped, and they cut the price drastically as the weekend went on. They need to work on crowd control though. If everyone at LCD had taken two or three steps back, I probably could have stayed. But James Murphy is not Ian Mackaye. The people there were still cool in general, but it just seemed more unbearable for me this time.

How about we end the story with the way it ended, when I left Pavement, after waiting for an encore that looked like it would happen and then didn't (no "Summer Babe?"), and when I tried to get home. The El had a line down the stairs, out the exit, and the platforms were jam-packed. I was not going to wait 15 minutes to move inside the staircase. I kept walking north, at 300 N needing to get to 1600 N, with a huge group of concert-goers. The bus came, but I could not get on it because it did not stop because it was too full. I finally got a cab coming off one of the sidestreets, and I felt like he took an indirect route. When it was over, I was glad. However, I was looking forward to my totally awesome blog post with all those videos in it, and now it won't happen.

I still recommend anyone go to Pitchfork over Lollapalooza. But I don't recommend camping out for a good spot, and I don't recommend going alone.

Liars: 7/10
Broken Social Scene: 7/10
Modest Mouse: 7/10 (not written, but not worth describing said experience)
Real Estate: 7/10
Titus Andronicus: 8/10
Wolf Parade: 9/10
LCD Soundsystem: (Performance: 9/10; Experience: 1/10)
Girls: 8/10
Surfer Blood: 7.5/10
Neon Indian: 9/10
Sleigh Bells: 8/10
Pavement: 8.8/10

Wolf Parade - Expo '86

2010-07-08T15:16:00.000-07:00

When we last caught up with Wolf Parade about two years ago (http://flyinghouses.blogspot.com/2008/06/wolf-parade-at-mount-zoomer.html), we were in Los Angeles, we were calling Spencer Krug's voice "twittering" and we were talking about how he read minds and we were talking about personal problems plaguing the publication of a zine that will now never be resurrected.

Things have changed. We are many miles east, "twittering" is a weird word, and the zine will never see the light of day--but Krug still reads minds. And the new Wolf Parade album, Expo '86, is just fine.

Since then, Handsome Furs put out a new critically-acclaimed album, and Sunset Rubdown put out Dragonslayer, which should have been reviewed here but wasn't. It also should have been named an "honorable mention" on the best albums of 2009 list, along with the Pissed Jeans record, but I am not so thorough sometimes. Dragonslayer was not as good as Random Spirit Lover, in my opinion--but not anybody else's. As far as rock critics opinions go, the leaders of Wolf Parade are at the top of their game.

And this album is receiving middling reviews, somewhat similar to the one I am writing. They say it's good, better than At Mount Zoomer, but not as good as Apologies to Queen Mary. At Mount Zoomer had a few good songs and some decent moments, but makes for a relatively difficult listen. Expo '86 isn't the easiest listen in the world, but there is more to love about it, and it's fair to say that Wolf Parade are "back on track."

The first track "Cloud Shadow on the Mountain" is Krug's, and before anything else on the album you hear him sing "I was asleep on a hammock." It's a very rushed opening, also bearing a certain resemblance the "The Mending of the Gown," the opening track on Random Spirit Lover, but instead of the weird keyboard part that also seems to open At Mount Zoomer, there is Krug's restlessness. And his restlessness is more contained, but still quite satisfying on this opening track.

"Palm Road" is a Dan Boeckner song, and it is almost comical how much it sounds like an Arcade Fire song. Granted, the drummer in Wolf Parade also played (plays?) in Arcade Fire, and even though I said "The Grey Estates" sounded like "Antichrist Television Blues," this time the similarity is totally unmistakable. It has been called a "Springsteen-esque" song, as Arcade Fire songs often are, but this is a "cover-like homage" to a peer like I have never heard before.

That said it's a good song, but I am too partial to Krug, and the next track "What Did My Lover Say (It Always Had to Go this Way)" is one of his and one of the best here. Of particular note is when he sings, "I've got a friend who's a genius/Nobody listens to him/I've got some friends who got famous/la la la la la la." Mind-reading lyrical genius and good music to set it against make for an album highlight.

Boeckner's next song, however, takes him into a higher class, and while I am very partial to Krug, Boeckner's songs on this album are my favorite that I have heard from him. Particularly this 4th track, "Little Golden Age" which talks about getting stoned in parking lots and watching the stars:

"So we hung around and we hung around
and we hung around for days
In the parking lot stoned, star shone out of phase
And the rain came down, cassettes wore out. Oh no!
Then you left town feeling pretty down
With your headphones on and your coat and
your dirty graduation gown you were
In the bedroom singing radio songs
Sing them loud
Sing them all night, Emily
You need something to help you along
Freeze, freeze, freeze Little Golden Age"

There was a review in the Chicago Tribune of this album and they basically said, "Yeah, it's good, (I think they gave it 2 1/2 stars out of 4) but they don't have much to say." The critic (I don't think it was Greg Kot, I rarely disagree with him) claimed the lyrics were weak on this album, and yeah, sometimes Wolf Parade lyrics can be vague (Boeckner) or like young-adult-fantasy-fiction (Krug), but they're never redundant or cliched. They're often mysterious, and seem to be meaningless, which is the critic's issue, but they're not, and he's stupid (unless it was Greg Kot).

The 5th track, "In the Direction of the Moon" is Krug again, with some of his zaniest lyrics ever ("I'm a disaster!"..."I take my meals with weirdos") that save it from being a boring song. It sounds like it will be an epic song, but it's not really. Krug's lyrics are actually very touching, addressed to a lover that is the "most gracious thing I know," "fantastic," and "so composed."
I guess the song is about a relationship that is barely holding together because the narrator is so messed up and the lover is much more together with their life. But there is self-consciousness, and one cannot believe the narrator would make such trouble, hence the touching aspect.

"Ghost Pressure" is Boeckner and probably one of the more unremarkable things on the album. Not an unpleasant song, just unremarkable.

"Pobody's Nerfect," however, is Boeckner again, and his second best song after "Little Golden Age" here. It would be a good candidate for radio airplay, and is perhaps the most accessible song on the album (well, after "Palm Road" maybe).

"Two Men in New Tuxedos" is Krug, so it's good, but also vaguely unremarkable. It also has the line "I can see into the future!" --so it is the point at which Krug finally opens up about his extrasensory talents.

"Oh You, Old Thing" is like a repeat of the previous track, in being an unremarkable Krug song, still containing brilliant lyrics: "As much as I have always loved your dancing/I hate the sounds that come from crowds/that just don't get/my moves."

"Yulia" is another pleasant surprise from Boeckner which always makes me think about the band Mercury Landing and how they used to be called Yulia and I wonder what the fuck that word means and I wonder if it is just some variant of Julia.

Then you get to "Cave-o-Sapien." Now, Wolf Parade have always had good closing tracks, but this is the best they have ever done. It is yet another Krug song, so the bookends of the album are his, and they're two of the highlights of it all. OK, to be fair, it's really hard to be a better song than "This Heart's on Fire"--but that was a Boeckner song. "Kissing the Beehive" had a couple of beautiful moments, but on the whole, like the album it closes, it's a bit to slog through. But "Cave-o-Sapien" is economical, epic, and declarative.

This is also an interesting album because it is named for a fair that happened in Montreal in 1986, where apparently all three main members of Wolf Parade were in attendance as children. The sleeve for the CD is cool, and the CD itself mimics the appearance of compact discs from the mid-to-late 80's, which is so cool. I don't know how that concept fits in with the general trajectory of the songs here, but I don't think Wolf Parade have been interested in "concept albums." Their albums have been collections of songs without a general theme, unless you could say each songwriter brings his own themes to each of his songs, which is kind of true, I think. They're both distinct, and their songwriting strengths helped to make Apologies to Queen Mary such a shot out of the blue. Their other albums continue to eclipse their "supergroup," but nobody will notice them anyways.

The At Mount Zoomer review ends with a ranking of all the albums each member has done, and I will not attempt that--only ask the question, is Expo '86 better than Dragonslayer? And I say yes. But still not as good as Random Spirit Lover and still not as good as Apologies to Queen Mary. Probably the 3rd best album by any individual in the collective--but I still haven't heard that new Handsome Furs one either. It's possible this will make the top 10 of 2010 but it is more likely I will only mention it honorably.

Imperial Bedrooms - Bret Easton Ellis

2010-06-30T10:34:00.000-07:00

A genuine literary event.

That is what it says at the bottom of the front jacket cover for this book, underneath a general description of the plot, which is this: the sequel to Less Than Zero, twenty-five years later. Clay is a screenwriter, who is interested in a girl, and he tries to get this girl a part in the new movie he's producing. Plus Blair, Julian, and Rip are back from the original.

But calling it "a genuine literary event" seems, I don't know, desperate?

And all of the praise on the back seems nice, until you realize it is for Lunar Park. Then maybe you venture over to Amazon to check the reviews to see if it will be worth the investment in a hardcover edition--and you see the reviews are scathing. And you wonder, oh great, what did I get myself into.

But I am here to tell you that you do not need to be worried--those reviews are wrong. This book is good. It may not deliver on every single level that every reader could possibly desire, but it is not a bad book. It is not poorly written, as much as amateur critics may point towards nonexistent complexity of language, poor, vague description, and meaningless run-on sentencing. It is a different sort of book in the same way that Lunar Park was. Obviously, it's not the classic that Less Than Zero is, or even up to the level of The Rules of Attraction, and of course its scope pales in comparison to American Psycho (which I haven't even read to the end) or Glamorama (which I think is the real masterpiece in his oeuvre, thus far). It's better than The Informers, and I like it better than Lunar Park, I think, though that book had moments.

Why is it so similar to Lunar Park? Because the theme is the same: paranoia. In that novel, it may be imagined, and it is played for horror. In this novel, it is not imagined, and it is played for mystery. If Lunar Park is BEE doing Stephen King, then Imperial Bedrooms is BEE doing Raymond Chandler. Aside from paranoia, and genre-hopping, Ellis pokes more fun at himself in the opening segment of the novel. In Lunar Park, it is one of the most dazzling sequences of any of his books, re-telling the history of his literary career, and the various lies and half-truths that have been told about him over the years. In Imperial Bedrooms, it is a parallel segment relating the history of Less Than Zero--except Clay is claiming that it all really happened, and none of their names were changed, and the author was someone they knew. Ellis takes advantage of the opportunity to critique the adaptation of his debut:

"In the movie I was played by an actor who actually looked more like me than the character the author portrayed in the book: I wasn't blond, I wasn't tan, and neither was the actor. I also suddenly became the movie's moral compass, spouting AA jargon, castigating everyone's drug use and trying to save Julian. ('I'll sell my car,' I warn the actor playing Julian's dealer. 'Whatever it takes.') This was slightly less true of the adaptation of Blair's character, played by a girl who actually seemed like she belonged in our group--jittery, sexually available, easily wounded. Julian became the sentimentalized version of himself, acted by a talented, sad-faced clown, who has an affair with Blair and then realizes he has to let her go because I was his best bud. 'Be good to her,' Julian tells Clay. 'She really deserves it.' The sheer hypocrisy of this scene must have made the author blanch. (7)

And then more obvious differences:

"The reason the movie dropped everything that made the novel real was because there was no way the parents who ran the studio would ever expose their children in the same black light the book did. The movie was begging for our sympathy whereas the book didn't give a shit. And attitudes about drugs and sex had shifted quickly from 1985 to 1987 (and a regime change at the studio didn't help) so the source material--surprisingly conservative despite its surface immorality--had to be reshaped. The best way to look at the movie was as modern eighties noir--the cinematography was breathtaking--and I sighed as it kept streaming forward, interested in only a few things: the new and gentle details of my parents mildly amused me, as did Blair finding her divorced father with his girlfriend on Christmas Eve instead of with a boy named Jared (Blair's father died of AIDS in 1992 while still married to Blair's mother). But the thing I remember most about that screening in October twenty years ago was the moment Julian grasped my hand that had gone numb on the armrest separating our seats. He did this because in the book Julian Wells lived but in the movie's new scenario he had to die. He had to be punished for all of his sins. That's what the movie demanded." (8)

And here is a good opportunity to talk about spoilers: many of the reviews on Amazon say they are not spoiling anything by revealing two different plot points of this novel--but they are. In the same way they're idiots for calling the book a piece of crap, they're idiots for saying they're not spoiling anything (...because you wouldn't want to waste your time anyways, etc.)

Clay is in his mid-40's, splitting time between New York and L.A., and recently returned to L.A. for the casting of his new film The Listeners. It is perhaps worth noting that this is more L.A.-centric than anything Ellis has done since Less Than Zero. The city is used in almost every paragraph of the story. Angelenos will find Ellis's choice settings appropriate for the tone of the novel, and that they add another layer of enjoyment. By page 100, it seems clear that Ellis is writing a mystery novel in the tradition of Chandler or James Cain, and the L.A. setting circa 2008 or 2009 is a wonderful update on that sixty or seventy-year-old geographically-centered story.

Most of the plot hinges around one of the girls auditioning for a part in this movie--Rain Turner--and the mystery of her former employment, ex-boyfriends, and general lifestyle. It's a bit mundane--perhaps not all that imaginative--and there is a line near the end of the novel that seems to poke fun at how cookie-cutter/predictable the plot becomes--but even with that, it is surprising enough to keep reading.

Most importantly, Ellis delivers magic with this book: in a way that none of his other books have since, he captures the pace and intensity of the prose of Less Than Zero and puts it to use in a new narrative with old characters. Towards the end, again, there seem to be a few scenes that are reminiscent of the first novel, and this has something of a disquieting effect. The big relief though is that Ellis does not mess it up. Like the Seinfeld reunion on Curb Your Enthusiasm, there can be a lot of doubt about the point of bringing back once-popular characters. And maybe there's no point to Imperial Bedrooms, but I don't see it as an opportunity to cash in on Robert Downey Jr.'s reinvigoration, or to reflect upon the passing of Michael Jackson and John Hughes and 80's nostalgia. No, it writes a new chapter in the previous book, and while its story is nowhere near as fresh and original as the first, it's still a pretty good story: tell me that a film adaptation of Imperial Bedrooms with the original actors from Less Than Zero would not be one of the coolest things ever done.

But people in Hollywood are idiots, and one of the good things about this book is the way it casually acknowledges that. To sum things up, the best thing about Imperial Bedrooms is the way the pace matches Less Than Zero. This is a short book at around 170 pages, but for nearly half of it, let's say between pages 60 and 130, I didn't want to put it down.

And it should be clear at this point why most people like to trash Ellis--you either get it or you don't. You either love him or hate him. People that trash him don't get him. People that trash him might quote the passage I am about to quote and call it a perfect example of why his writing is terrible. Of course, I am quoting it to show the opposite, how a casual epiphany can come out of a commonplace situation:

"Dr. Woolf leaves a message on my landline canceling tomorrow's session and telling me that he can't see me as a patient anymore but that he'll refer me to someone else and the next morning I drive to the building on Sawtelle and park on the fourth floor of the garage and wait for his noon session to be over because that's when he takes his lunch break and I'm listening to a song with the lyric So leave everything you know and carry only what you fear...over and over again and I'm nodding to myself while smoking cigarettes and making a list of all the things I'm not going to ask Rain about and deciding I'll accept all the false explanations she's going to give me and how that's the only plan, and then I'm remembering the person who warned me about how the world has to be a place where no one is interested in your questions and that if you're alone nothing bad can happen to you." (107)

That is all one sentence but I happen to think it is a very good one. And while I totally acknowledge that this book is not a masterpiece, that Ellis has done better, there are totally memorable moments in this novel that will exist comfortably alongside previous ones. I'd rather read Less Than Zero again (especially since my copy was lost)--because that book, more than any other book, can be viewed as a guide to writing your very own breakout novel--but Imperial Bedrooms is a nice treat. You can read it even if you haven't read Less Than Zero, but it helps.

I'm just sad that I'll probably have to wait until I am 30 to read a new book by Bret Easton Ellis. He has continued with his relative consistency, and has not done anything to make me lose any interest in his work. If I were Ellis, I would want to write a Pulitzer-worthy, six-hundred page piece de resistance for publication around my fiftieth birthday, to silence all doubters and haters, but it seems too easy. Perhaps people want to criticize Ellis for not attempting to write a masterpiece here--but he has accomplished something that many in the "industry" often fail at: he's delivered a sequel that isn't disappointing. Who knows if he is going to go back to writing longer books, or books that get mentioned as the best of the year, and who cares. He's about as commercial as you can get, as far as fiction writers go, but I don't consider him a sell-out in the least, and maybe that is what continues to impress me about him.

Closer - Dennis Cooper

2010-06-23T10:12:00.000-07:00

We follow up one re-read with another in what will not be a continuing trend (our next item is the much-anticipated Imperial Bedrooms, referenced quite a long time ago on Flying Houses, here http://flyinghouses.blogspot.com/2009/05/informers-bret-easton-ellis.html?) with Closer, what could be considered Dennis Cooper's breakout novel, published in 1989. This preceded Frisk, and later Try. They form a trilogy which can be considered his strongest work.

In the same way Ziggy is the central figure of Try, George Miles is at the center of Closer. However, the story is not as narrowly-focused, which distracts, but also allows the work to delve into a few experimental episodes that coalesce and form its own unique symmetry. There are eight relatively short chapters in 131 pages with seven narrators, or protagonists in what could be considered short stories, all of which link. This is definitely a novel, though.

John, where the novel starts, draws portraits of his classmates, and gets involved physically with them. He meets George Miles, who takes several tabs of acid every day and smokes grass in between and keeps a shrine to Disneyland in his bedroom. Sex ensues, thoughts of violence ensue, and then they end up meeting a punk who goes with them into a purportedly haunted house and then later the punk describes his predicament:

"'Hurt me,' he yelled in a hoarse voice. 'Fuck me up and I'll never forget you. I really fucking love violence. I want to tell all my friends what we did so they'll hate me or call me a fag or whatever, but fuck them. I'm not a poser like they are. I want to do everything so when I die they'll say I lived and tell bad jokes about me but who cares. I like getting crazy and you seem okay. Anyway, why not?'" (10)

The second chapter is narrated by David, who believes he is a pop star, or fantasizes about it often enough to become his fractured reality. The novel shifts its tone and voice drastically in this chapter and becomes a bit humorous, while still very dark. David is paranoid and talkative, the chapter is breezy, and it serves as a nice transition between the 1st and 3rd chapters.

The 3rd chapter is George's first chapter, and in it he describes getting asked to leave school one day, hitchhiking, getting picked up by a carpenter, more sex, going to a school dance, smoking a joint with his teacher, who is a closet case, and then later meeting Philippe. The segments with Philippe are the point at which Closer tips the obscenity scales at 10. Philippe has a particularly gross fetish that is four letters long and starts with the letter s. That is all I will say about that. But it does become an important plot point.

The next two chapters are 1st and 3rd person alternately with Cliff and Alex, who are more of the same, basically--they are friends, and they watch old scary movies together, sometimes they smoke pot together, they talk about George Miles, and how obsessed they are with him (as does everyone), and then there is always more sex. Cliff watches Philippe perform his act with George, and then later tells Alex about it, who wants to recreate it for a project in his film class. Later an accident happens.

George's second chapter comes next, and it has the probable climax of the novel in his encounter with Tom, who attempts to kill him, because that is what he understood their meeting to mean.

Philippe is the next chapter, and in it he describes the root of his perversion in relatively original prose, such as the interior-dialogue he has with himself as he tries to sleep:

"'What are you feeling, Philippe?' Tired. 'Then you should sleep.' But I am too tense; I keep thinking. 'What kind of thinking?' Well, everything. 'Of Georges?' Some. He represents something I have desired for a long time. 'How long?' Since before I came to America.
'Why did you come?' I came because in my own country I felt afraid. 'Of what?' Everything, but mainly of myself. I was beginning to want what I could not have. 'Can you be more clear?' No. When I try, my beliefs or desires come out beautiful. They are beautiful to me, but I cannot understand them in that form.
'You wanted to kill someone?' That is too simple. I thought about killing someone, though I did not know who. My ideas about death are very beautiful, so I wanted to think about killing a beautiful person. 'A boy?' Yes. 'And you could not find him there?' I could not find myself there. I was known as what I am not.
'Who are you?' I am trying to find this out. It is hard. I am driven to do certain things, and I believe they are helping me, because they seem strong. 'Why Georges?' He makes me feel something. I do not know this answer. 'He has been hurt?' Yes. 'By someone you know?' Yes." (109-110)

The novel's final chapter is narrated by Steve, who starts a nightclub called the Forefront in his parent's four-car garage. Later he meets George, and then an accident occurs, and the novel ends, in fairly effective order.

If there's anything to criticize about this book, it would be its subject matter, but that is a discussion I don't care to offer. I think it's unfair. More to the point: this novel meanders. Sometimes the meandering is great, and Cooper will find some new way to say something simple, in a sentence that the reader feels they might have read before, but with a word or two exchanging positions in order that changes the meaning. Other times, when a new narrator enters the picture, the reader can feel that they're losing the story, or missing the point. My first time reading it, I didn't like it as much.

The second time, I must admit it seems much longer than its 131 pages, but is consistent all the way through, and offers many quotable passages, as deranged as they may be. One of my favorites is more innocent though--it is George's declaration to change his life, in his diary:

"'I'm going to use this to make myself change, like a starting point. I think that's the best thing to do. I won't buy any more drugs. I'll try not to do what I always do. I never do anything other than school and Philippe.
'Tomorrow I'll clean up my room and make it look like a normal place. I think I'll burn all my Disneyland stuff so I can't change my mind. Nobody else was ever interested in the stuff anyway and all my feelings for it are destroyed by the drugs now.
'I called Cliff tonight, just to talk. He doesn't care anymore. He kept saying how cute David was. I guess they're in love. He said that David is sort of obsessed or whatever with me. I don't know why, but it pisses him off. I hung up.
'It's strange I'm not sad about Mom. I guess it took such a long time I felt everything I could feel already. I wish I hadn't been there, but I'm glad the last person she looked at was me. She really loved me once. Likewise, I guess.
'I think I'm afraid of stuff. Maybe that's it. I was afraid Mom would die, but now she has and it's okay. I can't let it stop me from doing things. I'm going to keep that in mind from now on. I mean it." (97)

Closer envisions an alternate reality of sex and violence that many will find shocking, and while it does not reach the heights of Try, it is nearly as good as Frisk, and a decent enough introduction to Cooper's work. It's definitely above-average, but something about it does seem longer--and there is something else worth noting: compared to the rest of the work in Cooper's oeuvre, it seems bland in some way. Like, there is no defining factor that makes it memorable.

For me, this isn't exactly true, but I could see how others might regard it in this light. The final chapter in particular, and the idea of the Forefront, stuck enough in my mind to imagine a parallel setting in my second novel. All of Cooper's work in general influenced my writing it, but several details reminded me of specific scenes, or even phraseology that I would later use, that were pleasures to re-discover. Though it is not a pleasurable read! Reading any of Cooper's books is not a pleasant experience, but it can also be cathartic in ways few other books can match.

Breakfast of Champions - Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

2010-06-14T10:04:00.001-07:00

Oeuvre rule: as previously reported, the only major items by Kurt Vonnegut that I have not read number few more than five: Slapstick, Player Piano, Jailbird, the new story collection, and various collections of essays, unpublished stories, etc. I first read Breakfast of Champions nine or ten years ago, in the midst of Vonnegut mania after reading his oft-cited masterpieces (Cat's Cradle, Slaughterhouse Five, Deadeye Dick--Sirens of Titan would languish in libraries for five more years, Hocus Pocus less than one), God Bless You, Eliot Rosewater, Welcome to the Monkey House, and Mother Night. Timequake fell along somewhere in there too. It was safe to say that Kurt Vonnegut and J.D. Salinger were my two favorite writers before I got into F. Scott Fitzgerald, and then many others later. Vonnegut is prime material for high schoolers because the language is so simple--but moreover, in his re-definition of what literature can be, readers may be driven to reassess the total value of books themselves, and to explore unthought philosophical tangents relating to the fabric of their existence and consciousness. This is one of Vonnegut's chief virtues as a writer: his ability to make his audience think. His body of work is also probably the single funniest in the canon of Great Books.

Breakfast of Champions came out in 1972, or around the time Vonnegut turned 50, and in his preface he writes of how the book is a birthday present to himself, and how he plans to "retire" several of his characters. Up until this point in his career, he had written six other books--Player Piano, Sirens of Titan, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, Mother Night, Cat's Cradle, and Slaughterhouse Five. The progression from novel to novel seems to indicate greater experimentation and more absurd humor--which I think hits its pitch for Vonnegut's career in Breakfast of Champions. In addition to its relative plotlessness, there are probably close to a hundred small drawings by Vonnegut also.

The book concerns Dwayne Hoover, who is a car salesman who is one of the richest men in Midland City, Ohio, whose wife killed herself by drinking Drano. He goes crazy. That is basically the plot of the novel. But in the meantime, a whole other cast of characters is introduced, and destiny will bring him into contact with another major character: Kilgore Trout, who will make Dwayne crazy by giving him his novel Now It Can Be Told, which posits that the reader is the only live creature in the universe with free-will and that everything around them has been created for their stimulation. The novel is actually fairly complex, when you get down into all of the individual episodes--but here is where it differs from Vonnegut's previous work: it can barely be classified as "science-fiction" at all. Kilgore Trout is a "science-fiction writer" and many of his stories are retold or recapped in this novel, but none of the major themes are particularly science-related. Instead, this is Vonnegut's "realist" novel.

Midland City could be any city in America, and Vonnegut's evocation of "small town life" where everyone is interconnected reads like a play on popular television and film of the day. More importantly, Vonnegut breaks down the concept of the novel itself when he juts into the narrative and offers a personal detail about how someone he knew, or someone in his family, is like one of the characters currently being discussed. And later, when he introduces himself as a character as the novel nears its climax. There is absolutely no pretense about the act of reading this book. Vonnegut does not attempt to disguise it as anything but what it is--which can barely be called a novel, though ultimately it is.

I struggled with whether to blog review this book for one important reason: Kurt Vonnegut needs no introduction. He does not need any "press." Anyone who is ever going to read his books will find them on their own. By high school, anyone who cares about literature will be exposed to him in some way. Several of his works stand up in comparison with some of the greatest novels any American has ever produced--while making it look way too easy. Perhaps Vonnegut is responsible for my own (failed as-of-yet) ambitions of writing.

I struggle with whether to quote any single portion of this book for fear that I cannot reproduce the pictures. Any single paragraph could be quoted as emblematic of the rest:

"Dwayne had a hamburger and French fries and a Coke at his newest Burger Chef, which was out on Crestview Avenue, across the street from where the new John F. Kennedy High School was going up. John F. Kennedy has never been in Midland City, but he was a President of the United States who was shot to death. Presidents of the country were often shot to death. The assassins were confused by some of the bad chemicals which troubled Dwayne.
Dwayne certainly wasn't alone, as far as having bad chemicals in him was concerned. He had plenty of company throughout all history. In his own lifetime, for instance, the people in a country called Germany were so full of bad chemicals for a while that they actually built factories whose only purpose was to kill people by the millions. The people were delivered by railroad trains.
When the Germans were full of bad chemicals, their flag looked like this: (Nazi flag picture)
(German flag picture) Here is what their flag looked like after they got well again:
After they got well again, they manufactured a cheap and durable automobile which became popular all over the world, especially among young people. It looked like this: (picture of VW Bug)
People called it a 'the beetle.' A real beetle looked like this: (picture of beetle)" (669-671--my edition, which contains the first six Vonnegut novels, sans Rosewater, a collection I will keep with me forever.)

And so on.

One quirk of this novel that is perhaps worth noting is the prevalence of the "n-word." It appears so many times in this novel that it could be banned on those grounds alone. Of course, it is used satirically, but I am sure it would be difficult to publish this book thirty years later. Upon reflection, the "n-word" appears so many times (it far outnumbers the "f-bombs") that it makes me want to say Breakfast of Champions's secret theme is racism. Its major theme is of course, the "illness" that civilization suffers from (perhaps the major theme of all of Vonnegut's work)--but its primary variant is racism. There are perhaps a dozen little tangents in this book, hateful little anecdotes about racism, sometimes shocking in gruesomeness. The message is ultimately anti-racist of course, but so much of the material is presented with such detachment and objectivity and ambiguity that many could be confused. This "racism theme" is something I did not notice my first time reading it, but seemed to stick out much more the second time.

Of course, both times I could not forget about all of the statistics of penis sizes. Or the line "dumb fucking bird."

I didn't like Breakfast of Champions as much as the other supposed masterpieces by the same author, and I think it does leave a bit of a sour taste in one's mouth. But it's only because the hero is an anti-hero (though Trout is something of a hero), and there is no easily defined plot or action to anticipate. As Vonnegut became more absurd in his humor around this time, he also moved increasingly into autobiography over the next two decades, and one can witness the shift in his artistic sensibilities with this volume. He is confident that he can do whatever he wants and it will be published. But he uses that template to create a much more ambivalent work of art that still contains some of his most beautiful moments (the description of Rabo Karabekian's The Temptation of St. Anthony, the last line of the novel, spoken by Kilgore Trout) but will probably confuse or distress some. I recommend everyone read every Vonnegut novel. I still have several left to go, myself.

I have never read Player Piano, but it is in this edition, and I should blog review it. I have never been able to get into it, the one or two times I tried to start it. I really just want to read Cat's Cradle for the third or fourth time.

On Writing - Stephen King

2010-06-05T05:52:00.000-07:00

There is a literary agent named Nathan Bransford who runs his own blog and asks questions of his readers. I have read his blog for the last several years and often attempted to follow his advice, concerning query letters usually. I sent him one query letter, received a message of zero interest (but thanks for reading the blog!), and now I only read it when I'm super-bored.

Last time I was super-bored, he asked the question, "What is the one book a person must read in order to make them into a better writer?" There were over 200 comments. The comments on Flying Houses are usually porn links.

Many of the comments suggested Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott, a book I read my senior year in high school that I remember very little about beyond the practice of using index cards and beyond the advice that no one ever makes a living off their writing, ever. So I suggested Ulysses for fiction and Bird by Bird for non-fiction. And nobody cared.

The reason I mention this question is that Stephen King's On Writing appeared more on that list than any other volume, and by a longshot. So I thought, it must be something really special, I must check it out. SO, I did that, and while it is a perfectly decent manual on the way to "start taking writing seriously" which includes other interesting variations (memories of growing up, memories of nearly dying after being hit by a car, commentary on The Elements of Style) of course it contains plenty of the sad realities I always hate to associate with the "art" of writing--the commercial aspect, the "less pretentious" aspect.

Oeuvre rule: what I have read by Stephen King, I read thirteen years ago. The best thing I ever read by him was The Long Walk, which merits mention in one sentence of On Writing (King does say it was "pretty good"). I did not like The Shining as much as the movie. In general though, I never really got into him. Of course I've seen a bunch of the movies that his writing has spawned (1408 deserves special mention as it occurs near the end and is one of his most recent adaptations) but I am not a huge fan of his writing for one reason: not that he's a "hack," but he can do pretty much whatever he wants, he has to be one of the most fabulously-well-to-do writers ever to exist, and he chooses to write stories and novels of the supernatural---which he claims, at base, are about reality---but I'm sorry, as a "realist," his work bores me. I want to read about real people making real decisions about their real lives, not how best to outthink a madman in a snow-covered hedge maze.

And not that his writing is "low-brow," but, I don't think he's going to compete for the Nobel anytime soon. I will mention that in the last five years it seems like, I don't know, King has moved into more elite company as far as "serious" writers like Richard Ford/Don DeLillo/Philip Roth go. He had his own interview in The Paris Review and more "highbrow" writers pay attention to his redoubtable success. But I'm still going to say King's success shouldn't mean much to people of my generation. None of us are ever going to be published except on our blogs and we should all rent out a private island for a writer's retreat, make some purple kool-aid, print out everything we've ever written, start a giant bonfire and drink the stuff. One of us may have an idea like Carrie, but no one is ever going to buy that novel, again. Even though "bullying" seems like quite the hot topic now.

But what did I think of this book? I liked parts of it. And I didn't like most of it--because I've heard it all before. Since it comes from King, one is apt to put more stock in it, I suppose. There are several quotes I would like to comment upon.

#1: Passive Voice
"Messrs. Strunk and White don't speculate as to why so many writers are attracted to passive verbs, but I'm willing to; I think timid writers like them for the same reason timid lovers like passive partners. The passive voice is safe. There is no troublesome action to contend with; the subject just has to close its eyes and think of England, to paraphrase Queen Victoria. I think unsure writers also feel the passive voice somehow lends their work authority, perhaps even a quality of majesty. If you find instruction manuals and lawyers' torts majestic, I guess it does." (116--he then goes on to discuss why "The meeting will be held at 7," should be changed to "The meeting's at 7.")

This is just dumb. I use the passive voice more than I should. If anything I consider it dangerous, not safe, because every single teacher I've ever had has said "don't use the passive voice" (and don't use "to be" verbs--which I particularly hate). I don't think it lends my writing a sense of majesty. I do it when the "active" voice sounds awkward. Writing teachers will tell you that active voice is never awkward. That is my complaint about the majority of this text: King does have special advice to give, but instead he falls back on filling his book with the trite suggestions of writing manuals everywhere--and while I am more apt to believe it, coming from him, it makes me sad. The only thing that doesn't make me sad is when King says, "I know, I know. Damn." (note: that is the exact text of an e-mail Roger Ebert once sent to me on the subject of not being able to see Requiem for a Dream as a 17-year-old)

The next comment comes on the subject of daily routine:
"As with physical exercise, it would be best to set this goal low at first, to avoid discouragement. I suggest a thousand words a day, and because I'm feeling magnanimous, I'll also suggest that you can take one day a week off, at least to begin with."

First of all---how come he never mentions the thing about ending sentences with prepositions?--and second of all, he says he reads four to six hours every day on top of the 2,000 words he sets as a limit for himself. I do not disagree with setting a word limit. If one is doing NaNoWriMo, one must do at least 1,200 words every day. No days off! I did NaNoWriMo and I could do 1,000 words a day, when I wrote that third book in November of 2008, my life was not especially painful, just boring in the extreme when I was not actively engaged in creating the text. Because I knew I had to set aside two hours every day to do it. Putting a deadline on it put everything in perspective, and while I finished the majority of the rough draft by December, I did not finish the entire rough draft until April or May of 2009. That is what urgency can do for you.

But I want to ask you: don't you think King finds it easier to spend 90% of his life writing when he has been paid so much for it? I have been paid zero dollars, so why should I think the next twenty-seven years will be any different? As I've said, things are getting worse in the publishing industry. It's difficult to commit yourself to something that may be as fruitless as seeking the Fountain of Youth. That said, I wouldn't trade my four unpublished babies for anything else. Even if they never make me money, they exist as proof that I am not an empty shell of a human being. I'll write, but I'll never write the way King recommends until I have the time for it, and the patience.

Around page 163, King discusses how he came up with the idea for Misery. Earlier in the text, he talks about Carrie and connecting the idea of telekinetic powers with menstruation (which some girls had reported near the time of their first period) and bullying and on this point, I found him quite salient. There was the origin of a story, clearly defined. I am surprised that he does not mention the irony of his car accident with Misery--I think it was too obvious for a joke. When discussing his own work, King makes his most intelligent points. The same can be said for most Paris Review interviews: when a writer discusses generalities, I am apt to dismiss; when they discuss specifics, I am apt to listen.

The most incredible aspect of King's career is his ability to mass-produce literature, and he gives insight into that process in one telling detail:

"A strong enough situation renders the whole question of plot moot, which is fine with me. The more interesting situations can usually be expressed by a What-if question:
What if vampires invaded a small New England village? (Salem's Lot)
What if a policeman in a remote Nevada town went berserk and started killing everyone in sight? (Desperation)
What if a cleaning woman suspected of a murder she got away with (her husband) fell under suspicion for a murder she did not commit (her employer)? (Dolores Claiborne)
What if a young mother and her son became trapped in their stalled car by a rabid dog? (Cujo)

He later talks about characters "doing things on their own" and how it can be weird, but exciting, and how it can make things easier on a writer. I have experienced that phenomenon a couple times and so I do not disagree with King there. I don't disagree with his notions of plot, either, nor detail, nor sticking to "he said/she said,"--but I do disagree about his hatred of adverbs. Pick your battles. I always use adverbs and people tell me they're ugly. Well guess what, you're ugly. I mean that facetiously, of course. There's a reason why they exist in grammar textbooks.

The part I like best about On Writing comes near the end, near page 240 where King discusses his friend "Frank," who is an amalgamation of three writer friends he has known, who all had some decent success in college with writing, published a couple stories in their early-to-mid twenties, and eventually published novels as they neared thirty. This is the single best part of the book for anyone looking to "make it" and I would imagine that it is the part so many were thinking of when they commented on Nathan Bransford's blog question.

Obviously it's not easy to "make it" unless you put in the kind of effort that King dictates, and it's well and good that there won't be dilettantes who make it on luck rather than work (though you'll never stop me from believing they exist), but King still makes it look too easy. Just getting a story published is hard enough these days, forget about ever getting to the point where an agent will care about your query. King states like many before him that all a writer needs is some talent, pluck, determination, and a copy of Writer's Market.

I'd rather say that a person needs to be depressed, possibly suicidal, traumatized by some early life experience, very shy, lonely, and guilty in some way to be a writer. Those are the sort of stipulations I prefer. You can be lazy and still consider yourself a writer. You have the personality of one, right? All you need to do is put in the practice. Not so hard. Until you realize that practice ends nowhere. Like shooting free throws endlessly. You make 70 in a row, and no one witnesses it but yourself. You're a better free throw shooter than Lebron James, but only when no one is looking. You will never be Lebron James because he is 6'8'', 240 and he is paid hundreds of millions of dollars to put in his practice every day and you are paid $13/hour to push paper and what small leisure time you have, you'd rather put in to relax than suffer more frustration. I can't wait until I am rich and famous and can write my own book about writing.

LCD Soundsystem - This is Happening

2010-05-30T08:29:00.000-07:00

The 3rd album from LCD Soundsystem, This is Happening, is an instant classic which will be noted in any retrospective on music from the early 2010's. I realized this during my first listen, around the fourth track. It is the Merriweather Post Pavilion of this year and surely will be named #1 album of 2010 by this website. My problem is that I have listened to it so often already, and have already memorized almost all of the lyrics, that most of its magic is now gone. I haven't quite had the album for two weeks, but I have listened to it every single day, at least once.

There is talk that this will be the last LCD Soundsystem album, and the last tour. If so, you might as well kill me when the summer ends because there is not much else worth listening to in my opinion. There are a lot of interesting bands coming out like Dum Dum Girls and Sleigh Bells, and while I like them, and Surfer Blood, they don't come close to matching LCD's capabilities. This album isn't perfect, but it's close enough to perfect to make the case for being an all-time classic.

"Dance Yrself Clean" opens up the album with a 9 minute dance track that starts out very quietly for its first two, erupts for the next four, quiets down again for another, and returns one last time before ending for good. The song is about how people are jerks--present company excluded--and how losing yourself in music or dance can make it all seem insignificant. It is a great song, but I am always hoping for it to end so the next one can start.

"Drunk Girls" may not be the best song on the album, but it's the shortest, the most tightly-packed with ideas, and probably the catchiest. Definitely the funniest. There is a peculiar type of genre that this album (and to a certain extent, other LCD albums) has spawned, and it is the "cover-like homage." Now, there are 2 songs on this album that are "cover-like homages" par excellence, but "Drunk Girls" is a "cover-like homage" that is like a mash-up between VU's "White Light/White Heat" and "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun." That is the best way I can describe the song, but its lyrical performance is what truly sets it apart. Every stereotype or generalization ever made about girls or boys in relation to partying or hanging out at bars is practically contained, with a very ambiguous attitude. The song doesn't stand in judgment of its subjects necessarily, but it does poke fun.

"One Touch" sounds like something off of 45:33 or the LCD S/T. It's a pretty straightforward dance track with one difference: it seems to be able to induce me into a trance. The lyrics are about how someone "doesn't see how we could be pleased with this" because "we've been waiting such a long time." Obviously you could say that about this album, but I can't believe anyone wouldn't be pleased by this album. The song is good, but not one of the very best off the album. Still, trance-inducing, which is cool.

"All I Want" comes fourth and is the first obvious "cover-like homage" of the album. There are a few things to say about it: #1-James Murphy plays every single instrument on this song, and it is a masterpiece, which shows he is a genius, #2-It is the "All My Friends" of this album--and while it doesn't quite reach the heights of that song, it comes damn close, and #3-If David Bowie hears it, he would not sue, but laugh in appreciation. Just the opening of the song, the first minute, is enough to send chills. Lyrically, it may be one of the LCD's saddest songs along with "Someone Great"--it seems to make the point that relationships primarily exist to satisfy one's narcissism. Maybe that doesn't make any sense, but it's a song about complex feelings.

"I Can Change" seems like the lightest song on the album and first has Murphy advising, "Never change/never change/never change/this is why I fell in love" and then has him assuring, "I can change/I can change/I can change/if it helps you fall in love." The song is most notable for his use of falsetto when he sings "hoping and hoping and hoping the feeling goes away!" It's the greatest moment of the song, but overall, it sounds almost intentionally cheesy, as if Murphy knows the chief sentiment of the song is a cliche of adult relationships.

"You Wanted a Hit" is the sixth track, and arguably the best song on the album. It's a return to the 9 minute dance track, except its decidedly downbeat. There is a weird type of Asian music that opens the song, then fades out for the lone guitar line which persists through the entire song--guitar that might be heard on a Young Marble Giants or Gang of Four album--very simple, almost quiet, but evil in a way, and sort of badass. It's a fantastic song about music criticism.

"Pow Pow" is another 9 minute dance track that immediately follows, and another contender for best song on the album. There is definitely a lot more going on here on the previous track--it almost like sounds like a New Order opening, and then some of the best opening lines of any song, "From this position/I will relax..." "Drunk Girls" may be the funniest song, but "Pow Pow" has the most ridiculous lyrics, they are just usually mumbled or otherwise less audible.

"Somebody's Calling Me" is the other obvious "cover-like homage" and the only song on the album that I don't really like. I'm sorry but it sounds kind of depressing and dreadful, like the song that inspired it. I skip it often.

"Home" is a great closing track that reminds me strangely of the Dismemberment Plan song "Back and Forth," which closed out one of their semi-masterpiece albums. It's less remarkable than many of the other songs, but totally pleasing.

At 9 tracks and 65 minutes, it's not easy to make it straight from the beginning to the end, but it's a loaded album that somehow, incredibly, is actually better than Sound of Silver. It's like Ada being better than Lolita. You never thought it was possible, except from the same person. I may have over-indulged during these last two weeks of May, but there could not be many better ways to start the summer than the release of this album.

Arctic Monkeys - Humbug

2010-05-30T08:12:00.000-07:00

Arctic Monkeys were the biggest English buzz band five years ago and now they are a reliable entity as far as releasing a couple good singles and not stocking up their album with too much filler goes. Then again, I think this is their worst album. And again, not that it's bad, just not as good as their first two.

But there are about five really good songs--"My Propeller," "Crying Lightning," "Potion Approaching," "The Fire and Thud," and "Cornerstone,"--which is probably more than you can say for any previous album. There was speculation that Humbug would be their "stoner rock" album, since Josh Homme produced it in the desert of California. It may sound like that during about three different parts on the album, but it sounds more just like the Arctic Monkeys growing up.

Their sound has definitely matured, and on tracks like "Crying Lightning," it is enhanced. But "Cornerstone" (though listed as a "really good song") is kind of boring, and is only great for its lyrics, which is about finding lookalikes of a lost lover and asking if you can call them by the wrong name.

So basically, same problem with the New Pornographers and Broken Social Scene (though Arctic Monkeys are about 1/5 as "mellow"), the new album just doesn't have a lot of songs like "Brianstorm" or "D is for Dangerous" or "I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor" or "From the Ritz to the Rubble." Its songs sound more like "Do Me a Favour"--which was a great song off Favourite Worst Nightmare--but which gets a bit tiresome without much variety surrounding.

I guess I am being picky. Humbug is their "stoner rock" album and it is cool that they worked with Josh Homme, and it's totally possible that the Monkeys will continue on in this direction and put out their next album which doesn't make too many changes. Overall, I am not upset that I bought it, but find it to be somewhat unremarkable. So maybe you can understand why this is such a short post. I didn't even care about writing it in the first place.

In comparison with their Domino labelmates, Humbug is better than Hidden (not as immaculate, but more immediate), but not as good as Your Future Our Clutter.

The Hold Steady - Heaven is Whenever

2010-05-25T14:51:00.001-07:00

In the promotional packet for the student life section of my future home (*and the impetus for a prolonged hiatus coming up here on Flying Houses*), the Hold Steady is pictured, with the caption, "Brooklyn Band." I am sure this particular institution had their share of options (were I in charge of marketing, it would be Animal Collective), but I suppose the Hold Steady does bring a wider appeal to the potential law student than the usual experimentation going on in the Brooklyn music scene. That said, they're not that experimental, and this album is no different from Stay Postive.

Franz Nicolay left the band, and this is perhaps the major turning point in the band's sound up to this point: no more keyboards. It's back to the same basics as Almost Killed Me. But, Almost Killed Me is about twice as good as Heaven is Whenever. What gives?

Nicolay will be missed, live at least. But Heaven is Whenever is not much different from Stay Positive in terms of its general quality, and as has always been the case for this band, in terms of its general subject matter. Craig Finn does still find ways to bring cleverness into his lyrics, which saves the album from being totally reductive. Not that the songwriting is bad or anything, but on at least a few songs I am driven to comparing riffs from previous albums.

If anything is different, it's that a few of the songs (the first track and last track stand out in this sense, but something idiosyncratic may be coming up...) sound country. These aren't the albums weakest points either, they're just unsettling. "Soft in the Center" and "The Weekenders" and "Our Whole Lives" all pretty much deliver in the same way a bunch of other not quite as memorable HS songs have in the past. Sadly, this isn't half the album that any of their first three were. It's Stay Positive, without Franz Nicolay.

OKAY, maybe Almost Killed Me isn't "twice as good" as Heaven is Whenever, but Separation Sunday and Boys and Girls in America both are. Since we've written about a few bands that have had career trajectories like this (BSS, New Pornographers) perhaps we need to have this conversation:

Is it worthwhile for a band to go on if the inspiration has seem to run dry? In most cases, I would say yes. It is worthwhile, because they can still deliver a powerful live experience. If any of these bands were to hear that accusation, however, they would be incensed (I assume). To accuse them of not being inspired. But this conversation has a different origin, found in my own frustrated attempts at art in a different field, and I have asked the question, do you need inspiration to write, and I heard the resounding answer ("NO"; "it's a job like anything else") and I do not buy it. But being in a rock band is different than being a writer. The Hold Steady are one of the better live bands that still don't truly have national notoriety (though they have more than fellow Brooklynites Les Savy Fav, who have the best live show) and I wouldn't miss the chance to see them. I just wonder about the sort of albums they mean to put out. They recognize their appeal as a "live band" first and "studio band" second, and they tour relentlessly, and they seem like they are having more fun than 90% of their colleagues, and so life must be a dream, that's all. Life must be great for them, and when things get too comfortable, I think art can sometimes suffer. I'm not saying you need to suffer to make good art, I'm just saying you have to know the place it comes from. Craig Finn knows the place it comes from, and he has repeatedly mined it for the last six years, and as "experimental" or "less anthemic" as they've purported to be over the last two, they sound like a band spinning its wheels, waking up every day and going to work, saving up for the futures of their families, and getting drunk, but within reason. I think Craig Finn needs to make the next Hold Steady album an homage to Zen Arcade or Pleased to Meet Me or some other hardcore Twin Cities band's opus. It would be interesting to see his capabilities when aiming for a higher mark. Otherwise I'm afraid I'll be writing the same review four years from now.

Steppenwolf - Herman Hesse

2010-05-20T13:01:00.000-07:00

Oeuvre rule: I have only read one other book by Hesse--Siddhartha--and that was a masterpiece. It was assigned to me my freshman year in college, and it was one of those moments that is able to make one very pleased with the trajectory of their education. The book carries great wisdom and much profundity. It is about one person's journey towards spiritual enlightenment. And so is Steppenwolf. They were published only a few years apart, and one cannot help but wondering what tumult in Hesse's life may have contributed towards the theme in these novels: Siddhartha posits that the most natural path towards enlightenment is asceticism, whereas Steppenwolf--published later--seems to indicate that enlightenment can come courtesy of magic theaters, drugs, sex with loose women, and conversations with Mozart.

I have to be honest and say that I enjoyed Siddhartha more. Perhaps if Steppenwolf were assigned to me it would have been more enjoyable. But it is certainly more "adult" than that previous volume, and as Hesse indicates in his foreword to a later edition, easily misinterpreted by youth that enjoy the more rebellious aspects of its protagonist:

"Of course, I neither can nor intend to tell my readers how they ought to understand my tale. May everyone find in it what strikes a chord in him and is of some use to him! But I would be happy if many of them were to realize that the story of the Steppenwolf pictures a disease and crisis--but not one leading to death and destruction, on the contrary: to healing." (vi)

What is the story about? Harry Haller, who is about fifty years old, who has been married and lived a past life that allowed him to save up income, but who is now alone, seeking a room for rent in an undisclosed city. The entire mood of the novel is quite postmodern, and many of the surreal landscapes may be reflected in more contemporary novelists like Italo Calvino and Haruki Murukami. For being written around the same time as The Great Gatsby, Steppenwolf seems remarkably futuristic, modern, and especially prophetic--perhaps most clearly witnessed in a short scene discussing wireless technology.

Harry is a very depressed person who longs to kill himself right around age fifty. But more to the point--his personality is split in two sides: the wolf and the man. For the first hundred pages of this novel, the duality of the soul is often discussed. Harry goes out to a bar, and then passes by a mysterious entryway to a Magic Theater "for madmen only." Later he finds a vendor in the area, who gives him a pamphlet--"The Treatise on the Steppenwolf."

This novel is broken up into only a few parts:
-the preface (written by another housemate of Harry's, as introduction to Harry's records)
-the opening of Harry's records
-The Treatise on the Steppenwolf
-the encounter of Hermine, and the new way of life
-The Masked Ball/Magic Theater episode

It is not broken up into particularly digestible chapters, and though the book is scarcely more than 200 pages, there are often long, dense passages that make the book seem longer than 300 pages. Some of the material on the division of personalities in the Steppenwolf is quite excellent and thought-provoking:

"We need not be surprised that even so intelligent and educated a man as Harry should take himself for a Steppenwolf and reduce the rich and complex organism of his life to a formula so simple, so rudimentary and primitive. Man is not capable of thought in any high degree, and even the most spiritual and highly cultivated of men habitually sees the world and himself through the lenses of delusive formulas and artless simplifications--and most of all himself. For it appears to be an inborn and imperative need of all men to regard the self as a unit. However often and however grievously this illusion is shattered, it always mends again. The judge who sits over the murderer and looks into his face, and at one moment recognizes all the emotions and potentialities and possibilities of the murderer in his own soul and hear's the murderer's voice as his own, is at the next moment one and indivisible as the judge, and scuttles back into the shell of the cultivated self and does his duty and condemns the murderer to death. And if ever the suspicion of their manifold beings dawns upon men of unusual powers and they break through the illusion of the unity of the personality and perceive that the self is made up of a bundle of selves, they have only to say so and at once the majority puts them under lock and key, calls science to aid, establishes schizomania and protects humanity from the necessity of hearing the cry of truth from the lips of these unfortunate persons. Why then waste words, why utter a thing that every thinking man accepts as self-evident, when the mere utterance of it is a breach of taste? A man, therefore, who gets so far as making the supposed unity of the self two-fold is already almost a genius, in any case a most exceptional and interesting person. In reality, however, every ego, so far from being a unity is in the highest degree a manifold world, a constellated heaven, a chaos of forms, of states and stages, of inheritances and potentialities. It appears to be a necessity as imperative as eating and breathing for everyone to be forced to regard this chaos as a unity and to speak of his ego as though it were a one-fold and clearly detached and fixed phenomenon. Even the best of us shares this delusion." (58-59)

But you can see within this passage alone one of my few complaints about the book: it tends to get repetitive when discussing a particular concept for more than a page or two. And there are many intriguing concepts that Hesse contemplates, but the division of the soul into hundreds, or thousands of different personalities is perhaps the essential point of the novel.

Harry goes to visit a professor friend of his who has a picture of Goethe. Goethe is an old man in the portrait, but very luxuriously pictured--not at all Harry's concept of the noble poet. This leads to a row, and then a bar visit, where Harry meets Hermine. She immediately seems to understand him, and signals a new phase in his life.

There is a curious scene where Hermine asks Harry to guess her name. He knows that he recognizes something in her face from his own past, and he comes to the same realization as Hans Castorp in The Magic Mountain about Clavdia, the object of his affections. In Clavdia, Hans sees Hippe and in Hermine, Harry sees Herman--both friends from their youth of the same sex. This is a vaguely peculiar coincidence, as The Magic Mountain and Steppenwolf are contemporaneous, as Hesse is two years younger than Mann, as both went on to win the Nobel. It does seem that Hesse may have borrowed this particular trope, but one cannot claim that it fails to comply with the theme of "personality division." Later, when Hermine dresses as a boy for the Masked Ball, or is often described as "boyish," it seems to beg more questions of homosexual "potentialities" than any other portion--but no direct link or answer is proposed. See here for previous example: http://flyinghouses.blogspot.com/2009/01/magic-mountain-thomas-mann.html

Later Hermine introduces Harry to her friend Pablo, a saxophonist that offers him funny cigarettes, rejuvenating powder, and a threesome with him and Hermine. As soon as the book shifts into this phase, it becomes wild and crazy. You forget you are reading something written in the twenties. The Masked Ball is transformed into the Magic Theater, and Pablo becomes the Host that offers its delights to Harry.

The Magic Theater sequence is the climax of the novel and its most creative moment. The kinds of experience one could have in the Magic Theater are only possible via two avenues: dreams, or hallucinations prompted by psychedelics. Harry is offered a strange cigarette upon entrance, and later enters an array of doors leading into different worlds. The first is a world of anarchy, demolition derby, and ideological Marxist murder. Another is a series of living memories of every single woman he has ever loved. Another is a chess game that will teach him how to "build up his personality."

The novel ends in the Magic Theater with Harry talking to Mozart, trying to come to some kind of epiphany about what he has experienced. His journey is a happy one, for the most part, despite a gruesome scene or two, and it seems quite clear that Harry's dilemma is solved by "healing" and not "death and destruction."

I would recommend Steppenwolf for anyone feeling particularly depressed or hopeless, and though I found it to be profound on several levels, had a difficult time "getting into it" or moving quickly through it--except for the last thirty pages.

There is one more personal quality I share with this novel, and it is a short story I wrote in December 2007, prompted by a dream. The story ended up being about a "secret museum" devoted to suicide. There are different attractions inside the museum that lead its audience into some kind of deeper understanding of their personality, or station in life. A friend recommended Steppenwolf and mentioned that it reminded him of that story. And indeed, upon reading it, I was seized with many wonderful feelings of deja vu, leading me to reflect upon the boundaries of the imagination, and the similarities of imaginations. It also made me feel better about that short story. Obviously it does not have the same scope as this novel, but to have written something so eerily similar without any kind of foreknowledge makes me feel like I must have been doing something right. The wait for publication beats on...

These New Puritans - Hidden

2010-05-17T13:05:00.001-07:00

When we last checked in with These New Puritans, they were putting out their debut around the same time as Vampire Weekend, and I was claiming that they were the better band. Proof? http://flyinghouses.blogspot.com/2008/04/these-new-puritans-beat-pyramid.html

Quote #1 from review of debut:
"TNP won't necessarily be for everyone...."
It may have been clear after Beat Pyramid that TNP did not cater to the masses and did not aspire to radio airplay. But the album still had a very accessible streak running through it. This is not the case with Hidden.

Hidden is arguably the most "difficult" album I have ever heard. It has its moments of accessibility too, but overall it is a very imposing album indeed. Most notable, however, is the degree to which this doesn't even sound like the same band.

It's like a novelist trying to do something completely different (the quick obvious example is Dave Eggers moving from AHWOSG to What is the What, but those were not consecutive releases, both were successful on their own terms, and Dave Eggers is way more visible than TNP in the literary-musical analogy) with their next book so they can prove they can write about more than one topic. I don't think TNP needed to prove anything after Beat Pyramid.

Quote #2:
"...I think it shows that TNP is more interesting than TNV (Times New Viking) or VW (Vampire Weekend), but I don't think they'll get as much attention as either."

Duh. Putting out an album like Hidden will not get them any more attention either. OK. Hidden is a very ambitious album. Maybe it's Kid A in disguise. There. That is the comparison I was looking for.

Except Beat Pyramid wasn't OK Computer. I don't know what fans of TNP are making of this album. I am assuming they trust Jack Barnett and now look towards him as some sort of demi-god. I think he is crazy. There was a great feature on Pitchfork where he said he doesn't think he'll sing on any more albums and where claimed one of his favorite songs was an ultra-obscure selection from Pocahontas. I am assuming he still wears his chain mail armor onstage. In my last post, I mentioned that Kevin Drew is becoming more iconoclastic, but Barnett is way ahead of him, and at this point beyond M.E.S. himself.

I may claim their soon-to-be-former singer/frontman is crazy, but there is a method to it. It does seem to be a concept album about the end of the world. Or global warming. But Hidden is an album you could talk about for hours in trying to assess its meaning.

Not that anyone would--and this is the album's chief defect: it's so different from anything that's come before it that the listener has no bearings. Much mention is made of the lack of guitar on this album. Throw even less lyrics than before into the mix and you have a very moody, largely instrumental and atmospheric album with occasional doses of vicious noise. But unlike Sisterworld, the music is primarily orchestral, and it never veers into anything resembling punk rock.

KEEPING ALL OF THAT IN MIND, "We Want War" contains a beautiful moment or two, "Hologram" is the closest thing to a fully-pleasant experience, "Attack Music" and "Fire-Power" go back-to-back as the most straightforward stuff on the album, "Orion" has a moment or two of greatness, and that "Drum Courts..." song is definitely something, alright.

Quote #3: "However, if they imitate the Fall more on their next album, they will probably deliver album of the year and will be a buzz band two years from now and no one will remember their debut coming out or else they will drop off the face of the Earth and no one will remember them in three years."

Neither happened, but few know who TNP are, and putting out an album like Hidden could be akin to dropping off the face of the Earth (particularly if the album is about the end of the Earth), so it is possible that TNP will become a cultural artifact by 2011 and no one will know they ever existed.

OK. That's not true. They're well-documented. I document them because I care about them. I don't know if Hidden will make my top 10 of 2010--but I doubt it. I just don't think I'll listen to it enough to figure it out to be able to blast it incessantly and gain some kind of pleasure from it. This is a very moody album for moods that almost don't exist--or moods that aren't advisable: ultra-depressed, evil, intellectual, portentous, and (forgive me) pretentious.

If they had listened to my advice, they could have put out a top 10 contender along with their inspirational predecessors on Domino Records, but I have a lot of respect for making a statement like Hidden. I spent money on this album--I'm crazy--and maybe it will sell as well as it needs to--but the only kind of music like this is made to accompany strange and scary movies. Perhaps there is something of Fantomas in here too.

Vampire Weekend put out their sophomore effort too, and while I haven't heard it, I'm assuming it doesn't sound too different from their self-titled. Apparently they experiment a bit, but obviously it's not as ridiculous as the experiment that is Hidden.

I've got my own prediction for the next couple years: in (or by) 2012, if the world isn't already over then Vampire Weekend will put out their third album--their Merriweather Post Pavilion masterpiece that will finally win me over--and TNP will release an album of ambient music as they transform themselves into an artier version of the Kronos Quartet.

In the meantime I will listen to Hidden, probably more often than Beat Pyramid, solely in an attempt to understand its message (and I will emerge from my underground lair with an apparatus that will bring humanity to its knees).

Maybe time travel has something to do with it too.

If there are such things as secret recordings hiding in plain sight....well there are, and this is one of them. The question is whether you think the secret will be worth hearing or not. My opinion is that I can't tell. It should be fairly easy, though, to guess how consumers will react.

Broken Social Scene - Forgiveness Rock Record

2010-05-17T06:42:00.001-07:00

Part 2 of our Canadian double-bill features Broken Social Scene, a similar group of Canadian musical artists to New Pornographers--with one major difference: New Pornos band members were already "famous" when they started their supergroup; BSS became famous after forming the collective. I don't think many people knew who Feist was before You Forgot it in People.

So this is technically the 4th BSS album, but the first is practically a moot point (i.e. same goes for Deerhunter, or Sunset Rubdown for that matter). The 2nd, You Forgot it in People, and the 3rd, Broken Social Scene, are debatable masterpieces. The size of the group seemed to swell as time went on.

Apparently they were about to break up after their last album, so the title of this one is appropriate. It's also worth noting that both Kevin Drew and Brendan Canning put out solo albums in the interim underneath the "BSS presents" banner. They toured with many members of the band each time, so it's not like it's really been four years since there's been any new music from these guys.

And while I haven't heard the Canning solo album, it's quite clear that Forgiveness Rock Record is better than Drew's Spirit If...(by no means a bad album, just one that often bores--though it does aim for a different mark), but also quite clear that Forgiveness Rock Record is the worst thing they've done since their debut.

Maybe that's a mean way of saying it, but it's the way I feel. Sure, "World Sick" is a pretty good first single, but it's not all that satisfying. "Chase Scene" (which tops out the set with 14 members playing on it) is probably my favorite song, and it seems more like a left-field experiment than a potential radio hit. "Texico Bitches" sounds exactly like something off Spirit If... not a bad thing, but kind of uninteresting for the same reason.

"Forced to Love" is probably my second favorite song, probably the only thing that sounds like classic BSS on this album. "Art House Director" could be a great song in the same way that "World Sick" could be a great song--like, it is apparently, but somewhere in the execution it falls flat. "Meet Me in the Basement" would be the best song on the album if it had lyrics. "Water in Hell" is the track second-most like classic BSS, thus my third favorite.

It's complicated to discuss my idiosyncratic beliefs about Canadian indie rock supergroups, but I do believe that BSS and New Pornos shared the same high in 2003 and have stuck around largely because of that early buzz. For my money, the self titled Broken Social Scene album of 2006 is their best single statement and it's going to be a very tough one to top--but live....

This is why I put these posts together on the same day: BSS are at least 2x as good as the New Pornos live. I've seen them three or four times. Only once was I vaguely disappointed. I am sure that live, these songs will be given new life. Kevin Drew is becoming increasingly iconoclastic. While I wish there were more signs of his obsession with Dinosaur Jr. on this album, I'll greatly look forward to seeing this band at the Pitchfork festival this summer. If it doesn't sell out by Memorial Day, at least.

New Pornographers - Together

2010-05-17T06:10:00.001-07:00

Today on Flying Houses, we feature a double-bill of Canadian indie rock supergroups who have recently released an album two weeks ago. The first is the New Pornographers.

I don't agree with most people about this band--not that I don't think they're great, but that their best work came at a certain moment. Together is their 5th album. It's on par with Twin Cinema, I think, which many claim is their strongest work. Which is my point of disagreement.

Of course there have been lively debates about whether Mass Romantic is better than Electric Version. At the time, the debut would usually edge the sophomore effort. But I don't want to talk about mainstream critical consensus, except to do a ranking:

Most other rock critics' estimation of the New Pornos catalog (best to worst):
1) Twin Cinema
2) Mass Romantic
3) Electric Version
4) Together
5) Challengers

My estimation of the New Pornos catalog:
1) Electric Version
2) Mass Romantic
3) Twin Cinema
4) Together
5) Challengers

note: there is nothing scientific about this claim.

So there really is no debate about where Together ends up in their pecking order. Obviously, it's an improvement over Challengers, though still falling short of their earlier, best work.

Would it be enough to say that it's a huge improvement over Challengers, and their first three albums are pretty much impossible heights to match, thus Together will be on the top 10 of 2010? I don't think so.

But it is a huge improvement over Challengers and "Your Hands (Together)" is one of the best songs the band has ever done and there are a couple others that might inspire similar claims. Still, something is missing. I don't know why everyone thought Twin Cinema was the height of their talent, but for me, that's when it started to head downhill. To me, Electric Version is the moment showcasing the height of the band's powers--every element that made them distinctive, original, fun, and almost perfectly polished came on at full strength. Twin Cinema is the beginning of their attempt at expanding their palette.

This is a band who had an enormous palette to begin with and actually began limiting themselves by trying to sound more "adult" or "mellow." Thus, Challengers, which is not a total disaster of an album, but definitely a hard one to appreciate. Any time you have Neko Case in your band, and anytime she sings on a song, it is pretty hard to make it into a total disaster. But every song without Neko...yeah...

She is the most important piece of the puzzle, and her presence on "Your Hands (Together)" is enough of a faint whiff of nostalgia to make longtime fans feel like it is 2003 again. Actually, the first time I heard the 1-2 punch of "Crash Years" and "Your Hands (Together)," I was ready to proclaim that they were back.

But in the end I've grown tired of the second track a bit and who knows how much I'll listen to Together. My problem with this album is the same problem I have with the New Pornos live--you're not quite sure what you're getting. I have been to a couple festivals where they were on the bill, and I was very excited each time, only to be disappointed by their sets, #1 because Neko Case was never there, and #2 because they attracted crowds too big for their stage, and #3 because their stage presence, crowd banter, live sound, or "energy translation" failed to meet my expectations.

The other day I listened to the first track, title-track, from Electric Version and it led me to reflect that the entire album was great, so the next day I drove into the city listening to that, not Together. To me that is a landmark album which completed the process Mass Romantic set out to begin--which was to create a new sound, a new genre, a new kind of indie rock band that might get mainstream. Certainly one of the best albums of 2003, but it's hard to stay on top.

But one other thing: I bought Together from Best Buy for $7.99. Totally worth the price.

Liars - Sisterworld

2010-05-12T12:28:00.001-07:00

For their 5th album, Liars finally seem to settle down and deliver a crowd-pleaser. Their first album put them on the then-burgeoning electro-clash scene in 2002, and boasted several great tracks--the first two, and "We Live NE of Compton." There was also a portent of things to come in their last track, "This Dust that Makes Mud," which goes on for thirty minutes and is pretty much one of the most boring songs of all time.

For their second album, They Were Wrong, So We Drowned, they famously eschewed the "pop hits" of their debut and delivered an apparently unlistenable concept album about witches. At the time--the first and only time I saw Liars live--that album seemed like a total snooze, though their live show contained crazy and weird energy. Seven years later the album continues to improve with practically every listen.

Their third album, Drum's Not Dead, took them away from L.A. and Brooklyn to Berlin, where one can assume they did a lot of drugs and partied a lot and created another weird concept album--but this time, a critically-acclaimed one. While Drum's Not Dead is a very unique listening experience, few can argue that it is not a beautiful album. That said it is also the least thrashy thing in their catalog.

Their 4th album is quite comparable to Sisterworld--Liars showed the band could bring their "pop hits" back, and still deliver an unsettling listening experience. Songs about running away and taking pills to end their lives and realizing that there is nothing to freak out about made them more accessible than they had ever been yet.

Enter Sisterworld--arguably not their first masterpiece, but certainly a masterpiece. By turns bombastic, hopelessly sweet and melancholy, and nihilistic, I have read and heard that Sisterworld is a concept album about L.A, and the many different landscapes and soundscapes of that city.

The most apparent difference on this album is the way they veer wildly between crazy thrash freakouts and Drum's Not Dead-esque contemplative moments. The album is nearly perfect from start to finish, but the singles stand out more than others--"Scissor," "Proud Evolution," and "The Overachievers." "Scarecrows on a Killer Slant" as well.

But to forget about "Here Comes All the People" (arguably the best song on the album--the one they spent a year perfecting), "Drip," and "I Can Still See an Outside World," would be a mistake. This album showcases both sides of the Liars, and in the perfect dosage.

Opening track "Scissor" has a fantastic video, if you haven't seen it. It's also a perfect way to open the album. The next three tracks are a bit quieter, but when you get to "Scarecrows..." you return to what is great about the Liars--their ridiculous lyrics. They are not printed, but it sounds as if Angus Andrew is saying, "Why'd you pass the bum on the street? 'Cause he bothered you!" (exclamation point obvious from listening). Then later--"Why'd you shoot the man with your gun? 'Cause he bothered you!" And then finally, the menacing end, "Stare them in the street with a gun (?), and then kill 'em all!" Liars have had many violent songs in their past, but this takes them all.

"The Overachievers" boasts similar lyrical genius. It's so simple, it's genius: "I bought a house with you/we settled down with cats/there wasn't much to do/so we just sat and watched the TV." What is great about this band is when you realize they're actually singing that. Later: "We surfed at Malibu/so we could see the stars/and when the sun fell off (?)/we drove back slow into Topanga(?)." Then later they talk about giving up on their jobs and spending the rest of their time walking through the forest. The sentiment is too precious.

Liars seem to have set the bar very high with this album. It'd be very difficult to top. A strong contender for one of the best albums of 2010, I think it is fair to say. I expect Liars to put out another album like They Were Wrong, So We Drowned after this. Regardless of their idiosyncratic nature, with this album they solidify themselves as one of the true powerhouse bands in indie rock. Whether you can get into them or not, if you hear it, you have to admire the artistry.