Jeff Mangum Concert Prep: The Ten Best Neutral Milk Hotel Songs that Don't Appear on Any of Their Official Releases

If Jeff Mangum had completely eschewed the traditional music industry--if his output had been limited to concert bootlegs and self-produced, self-released, low-distribution cassette tapes and if there had been no official, Merge Records Neutral Milk Hotel discography--what would his legacy be? I'm thinking he wouldn't be playing a massively-hyped comeback show at Town Hall tomorrow night, for which tickets are going for $200 and above on StubHub. Chances are he'd be thought of as a kind of Daniel Johnson figure, a fringe, outside artist-type with powerful raw songwriting ability, buffeted by a winsome sort of nonchalance vis a vis production values, record labels, the vagaries of the modern world, etc. He'd be like Ariel Pink, pre-Before Today, a jelously-whispered secret among fans of the I-don't-give-a-fuck school of lo-fi bedroom rock. Or perhaps he'd be like the dearly-departed New York punk collective Live Fast Die, putting out 7-inch after 7-inch without ever sniffing mainstream success or ever hewing to traditional, formalized standards of musical production like The Album--and not caring about this, in any event. What I'm saying is that there's a precedent for fringe artists to stay fringe and revel in their fringiness and become important thereby; Jay Reatard was another serial 7-incher whose music hardly lent itself to traditional commercial packaging, and he turned out OK, except for the whole death part.

Mangum could have done this; in retrospect, it's a little surprising that he ever made a single traditional full-length, never mind two of them. The most productive period of his career arguably predates Neutral Milk Hotel's involvement with Merge, and between 1990 and 1993, Mangum produced about a half-dozen demos and tapes, almost all of which are incredibly rare in their physical form. Some of the songs he recorded on them ended up on later albums and compilations, but a lot of them did not. There are 20 or 30 songs and song fragments that never made it on to any official release, as well as 6 or 7 songs that were performed live but never recorded.

The demo format--and especially the live format--embodies the NMH ethos far better than the album or the EP, I think. One of the miraculous things about Aeoroplane is that it captures the stream-of-consciousness spirit of Mangum's home recordings without flying completely off the tracks. But this doesn't mean that the album is the format best suited to Mangum's particular talents. He's comfortable making music for small groups of people, for the friends who would get copies of his demos and tapes, for the few dozen people sitting in Jittery Joe's, for the hundred or so people at the old Knitting Factory, at the very most. He's comfortable playing snippets of sound collage for a Pitchfork reporter. But the intimacy, immediacy and sponteity of the demo--and of the live performance, a format that's only slightly more ephemeral than the early-90s, homemade demo--doesn't always translate to the album. The album, which is part artistic statement, part promotional instrument, is a more rigid, more tyrannical form than the ones with which Mangum was most at ease.

Which isn't to say that Mangum's unofficial work is superior to NHM's actual Merge discography. It definitely isn't. Many of his demos actually kind of suck! But they're a glimpse into the spirit that motivated all of Mangum's subsequent work. And again, if he never recorded an official album, Mangum would still be a semi-legendary figure, at least among a certain group of people. These ten tracks are part of the reason why.

So here they are--the TOP TEN BEST NEUTRAL MILK HOTEL SONGS THAT DON'T APPEAR ON ANY OF THEIR OFFICIAL RELEASES (and that you probably won't hear at Town Hall tomorrow night):


10. "I Love You More than Life" (1993 or so)



A twee, tender, and surprisingly non-fucked up lo-fi ditty (at least by NHM standards) from a 1993 demo. Add an electrified bassline and a tight rhythm guitar and this almost sounds like it could be a Sinead O'Connor song or something.


9. "She Did a Lot of Acid" (?)



It's 93 second long, but this song's importance is vastly disproportionate to its length. Not only is it narrative and surrealistic (and just downright disturbing) in the same way that a lot of the songs on Aeroplane are--it also just sounds like a classic-period NMH piece, and Mangum's voice begins to take on that frenzied, tortured quality that all but dominates his two albums. The fact that the track cuts off on the line "it makes me ill"--a line delivered in such a way that you know that this little story of suicide and child abuse, actually like, makes him ill--is probably accidental, but powerful nonetheless. The definitive NMH discography lists this as a live track with no corresponding studio version. But the poor audio quality and apparent lack of an audience mean that this is probably a pretty early track, back when he was playing for small groups of people who weren't in possession of professional recording equipment.


8. "I Hear You Breathe" (1993 or so)



This sounds like a slight, even throwaway track until about the 1:15 mark, when that tinny toy piano kicks in--a disquieting but somehow perfect bit of instrumentation that modern-day bedroom pop artists like Bradford Cox could probably appreciate. The lyrics get increasingly twisted and weird from that point on, and the string of abuse at around the 2:00 mark is reminiscent of "Idiot Wind" and a handful of other early 70s Dylan revenge tracks. Like so many other NMH songs, this song is far stranger and a good deal more existential than it appears.


7. "Sweet Marie" (1993 or so)



According to everything I've read about Mangum, he wasn't (and isn't) really a serious drug user. I don't know if this is true, but I'd like to think of the guy as just constantly being on his own, individual trip, like all the time. I like this track because it's undoubtedly the most psychedelic of the early NHM demos--hell, it could be the most psychedelic thing Mangum ever wrote. It's fun and upbeat (at least in its first half), and there's no menace here, at least none that I can detect. It's a pure sunshine daydream--although the digression in its second half prefigures the meandering song structure of his later work.


6. "Wishful Eyes" (1992)



The slow, repetitive strum on this one immediately brings "Oh, Comely" to mind. Mangum's characteristically deliberative, slightly howling delivery gives lines like "the time has come for leaving" a sense of near-apocalyptic gravity (like the line "the circus is in town" in Dylan's "Desolation Row," kind of). Some of the lyrics are fairly ridiculous and it sounds like Mangum made a lot of them up on the spot. But Mangum has a talent for making his nonsense seem utterly and infinitely profound--after all, even the most strung-together lines in this song culminate in the arresting realization that "the world continues on/whether or not you're still breathing"--a thought just powerful enough to hold the rest of this thing together.


5. "Candy-Coated Dream" (1993 or so)



Mangum shows some actual, conventional songwriting chops on this one. The chorus is huge--much bigger and more complicated than on any other of the early demos. And he really sells it, with the drums and guitars build into the chorus, his voice jolting from a whisper into the closest thing to a shout you'll encounter on a lot of these early and more subdued recordings. Everything about this suggests that it could have (or should have) been an Apples in Stereo song. But it's not. It's as plodding and pregnant with dread as just about anything else in the NMH catalog, and part of the song's strength is that it isn't as unambiguously upbeat as the stuff the Apples were producing at the time, even if it's fairly similar in structure.


4. "Little Birds" (1998)



This is the only Mangum song that definitely post-dates Aeroplane, and ho boy is it dark. It's arguably darker than anything on Aeroplane, like it's so dark that you sorta wonder how the person who wrote it can be anything other than deeply, deeply troubled. It draws attention to its own darkness in a way that "Two-Headed Boy Pt. 2" does not, but it's this high on this list because it points towards a future that never materialized--towards brooding, Nick Drake or Syd Barret-like masterpieces of isolation and psychosis, towards records that no sane or stable person could just casually listen to while they're cooking or driving or trying to get work done-- towards records that are practically discomforting in their intimacy. Mangum never made these albums. But he could have. "Little Birds" proves that Mangum didn't stop recording music because he ran out of ideas--but because those ideas might, inevitably, have gotten the better of him.


3. "My Dream Girl Don't Exist" (1991)



Because who hasn't thought the same thing, at one point or another? Of course this song is about suicide and possibly also genocide, if you think of the coda and in fact the entire song as a warmup for "Holland, 1945." But Mangum has a genius for shrinking the incomprehensibly horrible down to a comprehensible human scale. And while this song's about five-year-olds slitting their wrist and tortured, trans-historical lust, it's also a bittersweet kind of coming of age story--just like Aeroplane, it uses something abstractly horrifying to convey feelings more immediate and tangible. Worth mentioning that the chord progression here is almost identical to "King of Carrot Flowers, Pt 1."


2. "Through My Tears," (1993 or so)



I'll admit that I have no idea what this song is about. The moaning vocals and ticking-clock like drum line always struck me as vaguely conspiratorial, both in the sense that there seems to be something fucked up going on in it, and in the meta-sense that the song's meaning is deliberately withheld from the listener. Where were you when what caved in? It isn't ours to know. This song evokes a profundity wholly divorced from meaning. The message is sent, but the message is also unknown. There are plenty of potentially-brilliant songs whose opacity really bugs me--"Senor (Tales of Yankee Power)," for instance. Here, the opacity is the point, and it's so well-plotted, so knotty and evocative, that it's actually one of the song's chief assets. And that opacity lends a gravity to everything that happens in it. "Where were you when it all caved in?" is easily one of the most sinister, most suggestive lines in the NMH cannon, even if I have little idea of what it means.


1. "Ferris Wheel on Fire," (1998?)



At the risk of revealing how my talents as a writer have deteriorated over the years, here's what I had to say about this song a long, long time ago:

Mangum eventually gave those dissonant, historical echoes a more coherent voice. Aside from his home-recorded tape loops, most of Mangum’s early demos were stream-of-consciousness reformulations of the problems that stalk most young adults: friendships, relationships, and the darker regions of the late adolescent psyche. But there are also songs that suggest a certain progression in his thinking—songs like “Ferris Wheel on Fire,” which seems like it could be based upon an actual event. And even if it is not, the song weaves together fragments of memory and experience in a way that echoes the disquieting, abstract sound collage.

Mangum sings,

Now I’m keeping stow
In someone’s bright carnival ride
All the crowd just cheers
As the bolts break and metal collides
Spiraling through
And flying up all over the hills
And now everything’s broken in two
And everything’s way over.

“Ferris Wheel on Fire” is a pre-Aeroplane composition that didn’t make it on to either of Neutral Milk Hotel’s full-length albums. But it introduces Aeroplane’s interest in forcing some catastrophe upon listeners, and Mangum places listeners in the middle it, making them think or feel their way through it even though the music serves as their only frame of reference. In “Ferris Wheel,” Mangum narrates as his emotional naïité is swept away by a world of senseless tragedy, and as the catastrophe becomes intertwined with the very innocence it disallows. The “bright carnival ride” is a vestige of uncomplicated youth turned into a smoldering symbol of the chaos and complication of the adult world.

But there’s more to it than that. In lines that could have been written about 9/11, Mangum sings,

But now most of all
I am holding you under my skin
Watch these buildings fall
Watch as each weak resistance caves in
All over you all over
And now finally fading from view
Is everything we ever knew

The narrative goes from a Ferris wheel on fire to two late-adolescent lovers clutching each other as their world is spectacularly destroyed. Perhaps the line about “weak resistance” equates the catastrophe to the crossing of certain sexual or emotional boundaries, or maybe the prospect of great personal upheaval is playing itself out in a figurative, personal apocalypse. Either way, to be young and exposed to the world’s traumatizing realities is catastrophic in its own right—in Aeroplane, Mangum takes this a step further and narrates the loss of everyone’s naïvité.

Because in Aeroplane, the Catastrophe is the Holocaust.

Fuck, what can I add to this. I can think of a half-dozen great songs about youthful disillusionment--"My Back Pages," "Dreams Burn Down," Deerhunter's "Desire Lines," more recently. None of them are quite the atom-bomb that "Ferris Wheel on Fire" is. This song is the pure, musical distillation of psychic disorder and change. Few other songs capture Neutral Milk Hotel's astounding talent for evoking life's rawness and messiness in a way that is neither self-pitying nor self-indulgent. You only have to listen to the last Antony and Johnson's record to understand how hopeless this usually is. But for two records, an EP and a handful of self-released demos, Mangum and company pulled it off perfectly.

Gilad is Still Alive

I have several other ideas for posts that would be easier and a lot more fun for me to write, but I have to cover this particular topic before the sense of urgency wears off, since the sense of urgency is already wearing off. I'm not in Israel, but I imagine that Gilad-mania, deprived of its organizing purpose, has ebbed over the past few days. At the moment, there's only one story about Gilad Shalit on the front page of the Jerusalem Post's website, although there are actually two or three prisoner swap-related articles on Haaretz's homepage, including one explaining why the deal isn't cause for celebration. And I agree. Maybe it's cause for relief, for a certain yet probably very small abatement of the psychic tensions related to the precarious nature of Israel's existence and the sacrifices that particularly its young citizens are forced to make on that project's behalf. But it's unseemly to celebrate the conclusion of a story so utterly tragic in its details, details that have been constantly cycling through my mind over the past few days--as they have been for the past few years, actually.

See for my first few months of studying abroad in Israel, I lived alone in a cheap apartment on the far side of Katamon, just off HaRav Herzog, the six-lane road connecting the downtown to the far northern reaches of west Jerusalem. Whenever I walked downtown, I would have to pass the intersection of Ben Maimon and Derekh Aza, which, until last week, contained one of the most heart-wrenching juxtapositions in all of Israel, if not the entire world. In the center of the triangular intersection is Restobar, an upscale restaurant that was bombed during the Palestinian terrorist campaign of the last decade. On the other side of the intersection is a walled-off complex that includes the Prime Minister's residence--and in front of that was, until recently, a tent in which Gilad Shalit's family was keeping constant vigil, reminding whoever happened to reside in the building behind them that his or her work wasn't complete until their son had returned home--and, by implication, until the terrorists responsible for attacks like the one on Restobar returned home as well.

In those days the counter wasn't even at 1000 days, I don't think. Every time I walked past it, the tent itself was an invitation to the kind of sobering reflection that one must constantly avoid while in Israel, lest the place become just unbearable heavy and sad. Would the counter ever reach 1000?, was a thought I would often have, along with far more potentially troubling ones: where was Gilad Shalit? What was he doing right now? What was being done to him right now? What got him through every day? Was he even alive?

A less constant thought, but one that's strongly occurring to me now, as I write this: Deep in his heart, did Gilad feel horribly cheated and duped--did he feel like the ultimate freyer, exiled and beaten and starved and tortured, simply so that a nearly insoluble logic of violence and hatred could perpetuate itself? It's irresponsible, I think, to flippantly psychoanalyze an entire country, but I think that the most disturbing thing about Shalit's ongoing captivity was the public spectacle of generations of deeply-endured physical and psychological trauma being heaped upon the back of an anonymous, unassuming youth. Gilad was--is--a jarring reminder of the steep moral costs of Israel's continued existence, and of the perverse necessity of making young people shoulder them.

Would Gilad's safe return negate those moral costs, or lessen their perversity?, I sometimes found myself wondering when I walked past the tent. Sometimes I'd glance across the street at the plaque commemorating the victims of the Restobar bombing, and realize that no it wouldn't, that those costs would probably always be there, and that the fact that Israelis embraced those costs with a graceful, infinitely admirable, Kohelet-like stoicism was likely the sole reason that I or any other foreign-born Jew could safely go there. As a taxi driver in Tel Aviv once told me (in Hebrew, actually...) in America, you pay for things in money. Here, we pay for them in blood. Zehu.

In a less humane, less moral society than Israel's, people would just instinctively suppress any reminder that so shocking a formulation could actually be true. But when I was in Israel, I found that the last thing Israelis wanted to do was banish Gilad from their national consciousness. It's not that his situation embodied certain tensions that Israelis couldn't run from--it's that it embodied tensions that Israelis clearly didn't want to run from. His presence was pervasive. When I was sitting at the Beersheva bus station, a woman handed me a Tanach and told me to read a page at random, in the hope that greater Torah learning on my part would hasten Gilad's return. At a seudat shlishit meal, the host reminded us to keep Gilad and all the Jewish captives in our hearts during birkat hamazon. In Eilat, Gilad's sad-eyed visage would appear on the jumbotron in front of the beachfront shopping mall, eyeing me as I crossed the street. And there was the tent, of course, that daily shock to the conscience, that reminder of the unfathomable cost of everything I saw before me. For the past five years, Israelis have been bombarded with the suggestion that Shalit's predicament is an outgrowth of their own predicament. As I've said, there's a lot that's disturbing and actually sort of horrifying about analogizing the two. But this makes the Israeli obsession with Shalit all the more noble, in my mind. Yes, the idea of Shalit-as-the-ultimate-freyer is the dark obverse of the widely-embraced idea of Shalit-as-universalizable-symbol-of-the-Israeli-condition. But the latter possibility is dark enough already, thank you very much. Gilad-mania and a million other things (their famously sardonic sense of humor, for instance) prove to me that while Israelis do not wallow in the darkness, they don't willingly deflect of ignore it either.

But back to Gilad. Gilad is a human being--one with almost super-human mental and moral toughness; a heroic figure whose survival should serve as an example to generations of Israelis and Jews and perhaps even human beings in general. He triumphed over homicidal evil, just by surviving--sort of like the Jews and Israel and maybe, one day I hope, human beings in general (we're still not out of our genocidal phase, I don't think). But I'm already slightly disgusted at myself for taking the metaphor even this far. Gilad is still alive, as the bumper stickers and tee-shirts once defiantly and quixotically claimed--and he must live every day of the rest of his life as a human being, and not as a metaphor or a scapegoat or a billboard or a near-fetishized symbol of a painful, national dilemma. Gilad is still alive, and maybe, in the end, that's the only takeaway I'm comfortable with here. Gilad is still alive.

+++

A post-script, also on the Israel beat: Gilad was captured and imprisoned by Hamas, a terrorist organization supported by a band of pseudo-militant yahoos called the International Solidarity Movement. Vittorrio Arrigoni, the recently-murdered "peace activist" and anti-Semite who palled around with Hamas politburo chief Khaled Maashal, was an ISM activist. The ISM's website refers to the Hamas terrorists released as a result of the Shalit exchange as "political prisoners," which they were not. The ISM has numerous members actually living in Gaza, which on its own suggests a morally-compromising acceptance of the Hamas government. The ISM are basically the Larouche-ites of the Middle East, albeit with a paramilitary and international flavor that the Cheney-is-worse-than-Hitler brigades seem to lack.

I recently discovered that an old Hebrew school classmate of mine is now an ISM activist living in the West Bank. One of my best friends used to be an SJP activist at Hampshire, so anti-Zionism is wrong and horrible but clearly not disqualifying for me in a social context, for reasons that I myself am not consciously aware of and would probably rather not explore, in any event. But there's anti-Zionism, and then there's moving to the West Bank and turning anti-Zionism into your life's defining project. There's campus activism, and then there's proudly joining the ranks of Hafez al-Assad, Osama bin-Ladin, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and all the other psychos and mass-murders who are actively trying or did actively try to stricken the Zionist crusader state from the face of the earth. And you know what, I'm actually weirdly tolerant of a certain subset of that kind of work, in a vacuum, at least. A lot of so-called "civil society" groups in the West Bank are likely motivated by anti-Zionism, but nevertheless perform worthy, important work or the sort that makes a lasting, two-state peace more likely. But anti-Zionism can rise to the level of pathology, and the ISM is a case in point. So why did my old Hebrew School classmate join them? When did the ISM's pathology become his, and how?

I don't think his trajectory was the result of self-hatred so much as an absence of self-criticism. The most troubling thing about this--and the reason that I'm blogging about it--is that I suspect you don't know you're on the road to being an ISM activist until you actually become one. For the past ten years, my friend has been on a journey from being an obedient Hebrew school student (compared to me at least; I was fucking terror when I was 11) to being an enabler of terrorists and anti-Semites. Did he know or even suspect it at the time, I wonder?

+++

RIP Kim and Thurston, who wrote the song for which this blog is named. Sonic Youth lasted for nearly 30 years, and it's a bit solipsistic to expect two people who clearly can't live with each other to endure decades of a loveless marriage just so that the band can last for another album or five. But one only needs to listen to the past few SYR records to understand that a vital artistic energy is being snuffed out.

Sonic Youth had (has?) a radically inclusive sense of a rock band's artistic mission. The SYR series are ten self-released records that run the gamut from drone jams to Steve Reich covers to skronk-heavy post-jazz. Some of it is conventional (comparatively speaking...) and actually pleasant to listen to; I remember thinking that SYR 2 had some of the best guitar effects of any Sonic Youth release, which is saying something. But some of it is cheerfully impenetrable, like 2008's SYR 8, which contains a single, 56-minute jam with jazz experimentalist Mats Gustaffson. It's a record that is by turns abrasive and plodding, a work of no-wave maximalism that only the most open-minded listener could endure, and that only the most open-minded rock band could create.

SYR 8 is a stunning insight into the artistic mentality of late-period Sonic Youth, for whom being a rock band meant doing everything, or at least trying everything, or at least mapping out new creative territory with an energy and fearlessness that no other contemporary act could match. Sonic Youth maintained its wildly creative ethos until the very end, and as this Thurston Moore-Mats Gustaffson jam hopefully demonstrates, that ethos was anything but bullshit. As much as I love Daydream Nation and EVOL (and Sonic Nurse, and Murray St., and A Thousand Leaves, and Washing Machine, and...), it's records like SYR 8 that made Sonic Youth so special--and that help explain why I'll miss them so much.

The Existential Blood-Sport that is IndyCar, Then and Now

The 1964 Indianapolis 500 was a bloodbath. Although "Hell on Earth" is probably more apt a cliche, since here we have the era's great monuments to technological progress and human ingenuity--as well as a placid, mid-American afternoon, and what was at that point the most American of all non-football, non-baseball-related sporting events--consumed by a fireball surreal in its sheer massiveness and destructive scope. Thirty-one of the 33 drivers in the 1964 Indy 500 were American; this was also a period when auto racing served as a proving ground for experimental or even slightly conjectural automotive technology, much of which was actually produced in the United States back in those days. But what are hope and optimism and American-ness compared to the near-Biblical pillar of fire unleashed in only the second lap of the race, a conflagration that claimed the lives of fan favorite Eddie Sachs, as well as Dave Macdonald, one of the most dominant American-born drivers in open-wheel history? It's as if hidden, infernal forces were mocking some collective belief in our, i.e. America's ability to contain them.

Which partly explains what happened next: they actually finished the damn race. After the accident, the race was suspended for the first time in Indianapolis 500 history. Sachs's car was tarped and wheeled into the paddock, where his dead body was pried out of the cockpit. Macdonald died of smoke inhalation a few hours later, but by that point the 500 had already restarted. AJ Foyt won. It couldn't have happened any other way: see paradoxically, auto racing in the 21st century is both a more globalized and more standardized than it has ever been. Chassis, engines and fuel delivery systems are basically identical throughout NASCAR and IndyCar. Indy specifications are fairly strict; a stock car is basically a souped-up version of a typical compact car, and is far less technologically complex than you're typical, circuit-level open-air vehicle. This means that American auto racing is arguably a purer test of driving ability than it used to be. But it also makes it easier to forget what American auto racing used to be--a competition between people courageous enough to drive wildly experimental vehicles at heinously unsafe speeds; a test of individual technological mastery as well as physical and mental endurance, and the only sport where scientists and visionary, forward-thinking engineers and designers could join the athletes in the winners' circle (just check out this picture of the 1963 Indy 500 field. The cars are not identical.) Win on Sunday, sell on Monday, the saying went in the auto industry. Auto racing was the sport of optimism and progress. Reading Sid Collins's impromptu, on-air eulogy for Eddie Sachs during the 1964 Indy 500 radio broadcast, it's obvious why all the fires of Hell (as well as, arguably, basic human decency) couldn't convince race officials to call the thing off:

You heard the announcement from the public address system. There’s not a sound. Men are taking off their hats. People are weeping. There are over 300,000 fans here not moving. Disbelieving.

Some men try to conquer life in a number of ways. These days of our outer space attempts some men try to conquer the universe. Race drivers are courageous men who try to conquer life and death and they calculate their risks. And with talking with them over the years I think we know their inner thoughts in regards to racing. They take it as part of living.


A race driver who leaves this earth mentally when he straps himself into the cockpit to try what for him is the biggest conquest he can make (are) aware of the odds and Eddie Sachs played the odds. He was serious and frivolous. He was fun. He was a wonderful gentleman. He took much needling and he gave much needling. Just as the astronauts do perhaps.

"Some men try to conquer the universe. Race drivers are courageous men who try to conquer life and death. " Today, American racecar drivers are thought of as slick corporate shills or corn-fed good ol' boys. But back then they were like earthbound astronauts, gambling with their lives in the name of an oddly American form of spatial, technological and even metaphysical conquest. Did Collins realize how ironic this formulation was, in light of the hell he'd just witnessed? See the reason contemporary auto racing is so standardized (other than the fact that standardization is a savvy business move for suffering auto producers and cash-strapped racing leagues like IndyCar) is because standardization helps achieve a baseline of on-track safety that simply didn't exist in the 1960s. The MacDonald-Sachs crash was so catastrophic because MacDonald was the only one on the racetrack driving a newly-designed, high-clearance car with an 80-gallon fuel load contained in rubber bladders placed on either side of the cockpit--i.e., he was driving a lightening-fast experimental vehicle laced with potentially-lethal design flaws. Wrecks like this one (both of MacDonald's rubber fuel tanks exploded, as you can see in the video....) hastened the era of standardization in motor sports--after the 1964 race, drivers were forced to pit at least twice per contest, taking away any justification for rolling with humongous and poorly-designed fuel tanks. And it's standardization that robbed drivers of some of that heroic, astronaut-like quality.

So drivers are human beings now. And when Dan Wheldon was killed yesterday, in a crash that was every bit as difficult to watch as the one I've embedded above, the Indy World Championship did not continue. The consensus is that he didn't go out in a blaze of glory, but that this was a senseless, tragic accident, and a horrifying reprise of the sort of incident everyone had hoped the sport had been purged of. Dario Franchitti told ESPN something to the effect that you go out and you race and try to win a championship and then something like that happens and you're reminded that it just isn't worth it, that nothing's that important. In 1964, as Sid Collins put it, "the race continues," metaphorically as well as literally ("we’ll be restarting in just a few moments," Collins told listeners at the end of his eulogy). In 2011, it's just like fuck. Fuck.

Cultural changes are only part of the reason why. Wheldon was one of the 10-15 greatest drivers of his era. He prevailed in arguably the two most memorable Indy 500s of the past 20 years. He played the spoiler in Danica Patrick's coming-out party in 2005--if I remember correctly, Patrick led late but was forced to pit during a crucial final stretch. And the recently-fired Wheldon played the spoiler in this year's race, passing J.R. Hildebrand (his replacement at Panther racing) after the race leader skidded into the wall on the contest's final turn. Wheldon has the distinction of being the only driver to history to win an Indy 500 without leading a single lap. Even then, the accomplishment was slightly marred by the possibility that Wheldon passed Hildebrand during a yellow flag, which would have resulted in caution laps, a restart, and a possible one-lap penalty for Wheldon himself. Wheldon's win wasn't clean, but it was cleaner than say, the travesty that was Helio Castroneves crossing the finish line under a yellow flag in '02. It was also fluky. This isn't to take anything away from Wheldon: when you consider that Will Powers basically blew his shot at this year's Indy series title by clipping a lapped car in a race a couple weeks ago, it's clear that flukyness is intrinsic to auto racing, one of those things that drivers have to cope with and eventually master if they want to race at a championship level.

Wheldon was both the victim and beneficiary of the sport's randomness. He went from champion to unemployed in five short years--only to beat the man who replaced him in one of the wildest finishes in Indy history. And five months later, he died on the track, partly as the result of an accident that Hildebrand had a certain involvement in starting (Hildebrand's car was clipped by another car that swerved out of control while trying to switch lanes on a crowded banked turn. Why drivers were going four-wide at 220 miles per hour on a banked turn, on a nearly-circular track with maybe a few hundred yards of actual straightaway is a question that needs to be answered at some point in the next few months...). There's something old-school, folk-songy, even mythological about the chain of causality spanning Wheldon's inevitably lethal trajectory, something suggesting that auto racing is a kind of existential blood sport, a struggle between randomness and control, or a struggle between the conditions that man imposes upon nature and the sheer senselessness that nature imposes upon all of us--like bullfighting with cars. I'm slightly ashamed to admit that this is, in a sense, why auto racing is compelling, and why I've been an on-again off-again Indy fan since I was 8. Wheldon might have been one of his era's all-time great spoilers. But whether it's propelling a talented driver to victory or taking away his life in a smoldering, 15-car cataclysm, happenstance is a greater spoiler still.

A driver-themed song:

Pynchon's Tribute to Steve Jobs

appears on page 668 of Mason and Dixon:

"The true humiliation came at the end of each Exhibition, when Vaucanson actually open'd me up, and show'd to anyone who wish'd to stare, any Bas-mondain, the intricate Web within of Wheels, levers, and wires, unto the last tiny piece of Linkage, nay, the very falling Plummet that gave me Life,-- nowadays, itself 'morphos'd, so as to fall without end....They pointed, titter'd, sketch'd exquisitely in the air,-- Indignity absolute. He would never allow anyone the least suspicion that I might after all be real. Inside me lay Truth Mechanickal,-- outside was but clever impersonation. I was that much his Creature, that he own'd the right to deny my Soul."

The speaker here is a robotic duck built by the Enlightenment-era inventor Jacques de Vaucanson. This duck, it is worth noting, actually existed, although it was a kind of glorified (although, considering its remarkable theoretically underpinnings along with the fact that was built in like 1706, pretty audacious) wind-up toy that never achieved quite the level of self-awareness that Pynchon depicts. But no machine has, and neither do most human beings for that matter. See the freaky thing about this passage is that it's almost dizzyingly self-reflexive--the duck, which knows on some purely intellectual level that it's actually a network of wheels and levers and wires, etc., is struggling to understand how and why it is even capable of struggling to understand how and why it exists. And the questions it poses are maddening. What is this sublime, un-explicated Truth Meckanickal? More importantly, how can anyone or anything redeem itself from a state of soulessness? The poor duck is trapped in the kind of paradox that can only be made sense of with the help of an especially twisted sort of metaphysics (or negative metaphysics or what have you). Which is to say that it's condition is our condition, basically.

To pivot away from Pynchon for just a moment, I suppose one of Apple's signal accomplishment is to make us realize how little control we actually like, want to have over the technology we use. Apple's business model is an especially energetic form of horizontal integration. Hardware, software, fabrication, retail and even product maintenance operate as a seemless whole. On top of that, Apple products are just stupidly easy to use. But this integration works on the psychic level as well. Apple's programming architecture is notoriously rigid. There's a reason you void your warranty when you jailbreak an iPhone. You're not meant to countermand the choices that Apple has already made for you; to do so is to violate the entire spirit of the product. As best I can tell, Apple's success proves that we want our interaction with technology to be as simple and homogeneous as possible. Simplicity and homogeneity are a virtue when it comes to technological design, but excuse me for pointing out that they're virtuous in few other contexts, and are downright corrosive as far as matters of social, intellectual or moral import are concerned. In fact, "simplicity" and "homogeneity" are really shitty things to organize a society around.

Now I don't think Steve Jobs had some kind of evil plan to co-opt some basic passivity or laziness endemic to human nature, and then conscript as much of the human race as possible into his vision of how technology should work and what role it should play in our lives. But that's sort of how things have turned out, and this is both an exhilarating and terrifying thing to consider. Would that we, the children of this modern-day Vaucanson (at least according to Farhad Manjoo), have as self-critical a spirit as Thomas Pynchon's talking duck. Outside is but clever impersonation...

...Posts I'm gonna write at some point over the next couple weeks, roughly in order of urgency:

-Gambling, and what I learned about myself and the moral and spiritual composition of the universe whilst occasionally doing quite poorly at it--but also, at times, quite well.

-This, and why it was all I could think about when I was jogging the other day (I think that has something to do with matters of personal choice and political first principles, and how abstractions like "personal choice" and "political first principles" might end up being completely meaningless in the end...).

-Venture Bros. vs. Archer, the defining cultural debate of our time, if you really think hard enough about it and are the type of person willing to take a wildly contrarian and deliberately provocative argument like that one at all seriously.

Gamar chatima tova, everyone.

September 11th, 2011

I just stumbled across this on Twitter. The New York Times asked its readers how they were commemorating the tenth anniversary of the September 11th attacks. There's a diversity of answers on the subject--people are mowing lawns, sitting in complete silence, making chocolate truffles. The difference between America in 2011, and, say, the Soviet Union or North Korea is that people can commemorate events like these however they choose to. We have the right to be just as aimless and generally unreflective and bored and anomic today as we are every other day of the year--there's no parade we're all forced to go to and no speech we're all forced to watch. So free is this country of ours that we can reformulate our daily ennui--basically the shit we'd be doing regardless of what happened ten years or ten minutes ago--as, in fact, an attempt at reflecting on the events of ten years ago--which of course seems like complete intellectual and moral evasion, revealing a kind of discomfort with feeling or thinking anything about the implications of our being an entire decade removed from the event itself, because really, seriously this:

I'm making chocolate truffles, as a sort of life-affirming rebuke to the attacks. I'll be enjoying them this evening when I light a commemorative candle.

Jennifer Weston via nytimes September 11, 2011 at 12:14

Dear fucking God. It kind of reminds me of that moment late in Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, when you find out that Darl is actually a deeply traumatized World War I veteran, and that the sort of callousness and pathos and, inevitably, violence that characterizes his relationship with his mother might really be an attempt at suppressing or coming to grips with something even darker, experiences that he (we? The human race?) never consciously faces or even acknowledges--and that he only subconsciously acknowledges in the mania of trying to incinerate his deceased mother's corpse. Anyway, my fear is that we're all Darls, at this point. Today recalls a darkness so dark that we (and by we I mean me, and chocolate truffle woman, and probably most people in America I'm thinking) can only face it by proxy--through other darknesses, through darknesses more comprehensible to us.

Because even after 10 years 9/11 is incomprehensible to me. The events of Septebmer 11th, 2001 follow a kind of nightmare logic; the Onion's famous proclamation that Americans were "living in a bad Jerry Bruchiemer film (note: I don't care enough to look up how this dude's name is actually spelled)" sort of evokes the like, rupture in the very fabric of reality that occurred on 9/11. Except maybe it doesn't actually, because 9/11 was reality, and the temptation to think of it as something other than that--as part of some great, patriotic narrative, as an event that happened in history or to history, rather than an event that happened here, to us--reveals the impossibility or at least the extraordinary difficulty of facing the thing head-on.

What would it take to put yourself back in the exact mindset of Sept 11th, 2001? Can anything do that? Can memory? Do we really remember how it felt to see the middle of our greatest city turned into a charnal house? Do we remember the surreal horror of watching fellow human beings--and they seemed, in a painfully immediate way, like our actual, fellow human beings; like real, actual people--flinging themselves from the 70th floor of a burning building? Do we remember the confusion, the numbness deeper than anger, even? Can we inhabit it again? Can we remember what it is like to understand, for the first time, that the world we thought we were living in wasn't the world we were actually living in? Do we remember what it was like to not understand it--to feel it in our guts, or to not feel it, or to live in denial of the fact that the world we thought we were living in wasn't the world we were actually living in (by the way, after Iraq and Afghanistan and the Great Recession and the other gothic horrors of the past decade, I think that sense of psychic dissonance is far weaker now than it was back then)?

But I'm not sure. I mean I was like, 13 at the time anyway. My memories of the day are vivid, but distant. I remember the weather. I remember a teacher--I can't remember who, exactly--coming into Ms. Carpen's science class (I think we were studying rocks, or basic chemistry or some shit) and explaining that a plane had just hit the World Trade Center. Weirdly enough, it was as if class was already over--my eighth grade magnet class was scheduled to go on a five-day field trip to New York in late October, so anything New York-related was of immediate interest. I don't know why, but Ms. Carpen turned on the TV.

It was on for about ten minutes. Only one tower was on fire. People were still joking around, socializing; the images on the TV didn't seem real to us because, let's face it, most shit on TV isn't real to us, even now. And we were still children back then. In the mind of a child in America in 2001, the collapse of an 1100-foot building for any reason whatsoever was impossible--hell, in the mind of most adults in America in 2001, the collapse of an 1100-foot building for any reason whatsoever probably seemed impossible. If I had to pinpoint the deepest psychic scar that that day inflicted upon me and maybe even upon America in general, it was the realization the same outlandish horrors whose physical or historical distance allow us to avoid the fact that they were actually visited upon real people who feel and think and suffer just like we do--genocide, terrorist attacks; war and action movie fodder, basically--are real. When I visited Babiyar, I sat cross-legged and tried to imagine the children who had been massacred in the very spot I was sitting in. But Babiyar was only a place for me, not an event, I didn't see any evidence of it, just a ravine and a crumbling memorial shaped like a Menorah and even people walking their dogs. I was blindsided by the reality that the temporal and physical gulf between myself and the darkest moments in Jewish history were unbridgable for me. I left with a deep sense of guilt. And though I didn't think this at the time (at least not consciously), watching the tower burn, live, on television, was maybe the first and only sign I've ever received in my entire life that the world actually is that horrible.

Anyway, the tower looked like it was tilting a bit to one side, but it only might have appeared that way because of the camera angle or the curvature of the TV screen or something. "If the tower collapses, it will be the most spectacular moment in television history," I remarked to a friend. It just didn't seem possible that that could happen, which is why I could talk about it so flippantly, and why people were still joking and carrying on despite the in-retrospect obvious fact that we were watching hundreds of people burn to death on live television. This came from nervousness, rather than actual levity. What we were watching didn't seem possible. I could only process what I was seeing on a sort of crude, purely aesthetic level. Thank God Ms. Carpen turned the TV off, because I think the second plane hit only a few minutes later.

School was canceled in the middle of Spanish class. By then, people had sort of figured out that a second plane had hit the World Trade Center, and they'd sort of figured out that this was a major terrorist attack, and we'd sort of sensed that we wouldn't be at school till 3:10, which is great, right? Official word came just before noon. School was out. My mom met me just in front of Eastern Middle School. School's out! I said. Both towers collapsed into the ground, my mom said.

On NPR, they were reporting that car bombs were going off in the middle of DC. Well they weren't reporting it, but they were reporting that some people had claimed that car bombs were going off in the middle of DC. It dawned on me how plausible this suddenly sounded. My God. There was another report that the 14th St. bridge had been bombed. I wondered aloud if there would be a war soon. I watched three hours of TV coverage, played touch football in the side yard, played Madden 2002 (we didn't have cable, so video games were our only mode of escape from network news) watched three more hours of TV, wondered if that Sunday's Redskins game would be canceled, did my Spanish homework, for some reason. Sportstalk 980 was simulcasting NBC news; they wouldn't return to anything resembling sports coverage for another four or five days or possibly longer. There is no world, my dad said at dinner.

I couldn't sleep that night, at least not easily. The people jumping from windows was what disturbed me the most. My strongest memory about September 12th--which is to say, my strongest specific memory, other than school getting canceled--was that the only article in that day's Post that wasn't about the attacks was about the health of Redskins running back Stephen Davis.

Have I accomplished anything by listing what I remember from that day? Does it make the destruction of lower Manhattan and the murder of 3,000 innocent people on American soil any easier for me to comprehend? Just the opposite, I think. My memory of that day is highly schematic; one thing happened and then another thing happened and they're things I'll always remember and reflect back upon. But in recalling them like this, I realize they happened to someone else in another time and in another world, and they produced feelings that, for better or worse, I will never feel again.

Lay Down Your Weary Tune

I've been thinking of endings lately, mostly because a major and occasionally quite torrid chapter of my own life just ended. On Thursday, I graduated from the Jewish Theological Seminary's joint program at Columbia University, a surreal accomplishment given how unlikely and even impossible it seemed for a few terrible and stressful weeks in the middle of sophomore year. And even afterwards--even until I walked across the stage and shook hands with JTS Chancellor Arnold Eisen--it felt like something that wasn't meant to happen, like it was a sort of miscarriage of reality, something that countless failed Hebrew tests and hazy philosophy seminars and long, disaffected months and years spent avoiding my JTS classmates and professors seemed to rebel against. I can still remember the Friday afternoon of my first Hebrew exam freshmen year, when I was simply too shellshocked and depressed to do anything other than pass a few rude and detached hours with a friend from high school, before shaking her off and collapsing into a favorite downtown jazz club for a solitary night cap. This whole thing, this whole going-to-JTS thing, is the height of self-deception, I decided. It's not something I should be doing. I'm being crushed under the weight of a contradiction that I'll never be able to free myself from.

But I did free myself from it. Maybe I would have been a happier person if I'd transferred to Maryland or Sarah Lawrence. But would I have been wiser? In my heart, would I have been more satisfied? Or would the sense of dissatisfaction lingered? The weight of self-doubt never crushed me completely, and perhaps, paradoxically, I have JTS to thank for it. Or more specifically, I have Franz Rosenzweig, a particular Talmud professor, the Zohar, Hebrew University, the Conservative Yeshiva--a sense of communal belonging, which seemed to exert a greater hold on me the more I tried to deny its reality--to thank for it. I've made my peace.

Which brings me to a conversation I had with a high school friend about a month ago while we were driving around DC. This friend observed that if Dave Chappelle hadn't flamed out spectacularly back in 2005, his show would be on its seventh season--and he'd be in the last year of the infamous $50 million contract that was at least partly to blame for his unraveling, at least according to conventional wisdom. Why couldn't he have just sweated it out?, my friend wondered. We have a black president, for fuck sake. Just imagine what he could have done with that, never mind everything else that's happened over the past six years.

The answer to this question--the question of why Dave Chappelle is, for all intents and purposes, no longer with us--isn't immediately obvious even to obsessive fans of his show. But it's still there, even right there in the show itself, I'd argue. And I don't mean it's there if you really look for it. I'm convinced this isn't something I've projected onto the show's 27 episodes, even though I watched them all pretty recently, with Chappelle's meltdown very much in the forefront of my mind the whole time. I mean it's clearly very much there, and it's even there in a way that squares with the famous, hour-long interview with Oprah Winfrey that aired a few weeks after Chappelle's astonishing career suicide. It's painfully, obviously there.

What's there? Let's go back to Oprah for a moment. I can't find a transcript of the interview online, but it has to rank as one of the most uncomfortable things I've ever seen on television. And also one of the most consequential: my senior seminar teacher in high school made my class watch the entire thing, presumably as a lesson in...well, as a lesson in something. Because there are lessons in, say, the following exchange that are more valuable than anything we would have learned in most of our classes anyway:

During his third season, Dave began questioning his work on the show. From the very first episode, Dave's sketches sparked controversy. But, over time, he says some of his sketches started to make him feel "socially irresponsible."

One particular sketch still disturbs Dave today. The skit was about a pixie (played by Dave) who appeared in black face, which Dave describes as the "visual personification of the n-word."

"There was a good-spirited intention behind it," Dave says. "So then when I'm on the set, and we're finally taping the sketch, somebody on the set [who] was white laughed in such a way—I know the difference of people laughing with me and people laughing at me—and it was the first time I had ever gotten a laugh that I was uncomfortable with. Not just uncomfortable, but like, should I fire this person?"

After this incident, Dave began thinking about the message he was sending to millions of viewers. Dave says some people understood exactly what he was trying to say with his racially charged comedy...while others got the wrong idea.

"That concerned me," he says. "I don't want black people to be disappointed in me for putting that [message] out there. ... It's a complete moral dilemma."

Now it's incomprehensible for high school students--and actually for most people, I think--that there are people in the world who will gladly give up $50 million and universal admiration and fame for the sake of a moral dilemma. No moral dilemma, in most people's minds, can possibly be worth $50 million--or at least there's no moral dilemma that's both worth $50 million and totally immune from some form of compromise. It's natural that people thought that Chappelle was on drugs or had experienced a psychiatric episode. To value your integrity that greatly, one must either be insane or a devout Ayn Rand devotee.

So here's "what's there," what's not exactly coded into Chappelle's show, but what's really fucking plainly obviously there, at least to me--what's there is inescapable evidence that the driving creative force behind "Chappelle's Show" was, ironically, the exact same moral dilemma that eventually made him quit. "Chappelle's Show" put its star's social, political and even psychic anxieties on wrenching display. By the time season 3 rolled around, this compromise between selfhood and fame was one that Dave Chappelle the human being--as opposed to Dave Chappelle the beloved comic performer, Dave Chappelle the arguably greatest comedian of his generation--could no longer honor.

I don't think I'm imagining that this tension pops up with alarming frequency throughout "Chappelle's Show." The signal example, of course, is in the Clayton Bigsby sketch in the series' very first episode. The sketch is funny because the idea of a black man unwittingly becoming the leader of a white supremacist movement is funny. But it's funny for a fairly disturbing reason: intentional ethnic self-hatred is a psycho-social hornet's nest, the sort of thing that very serious Showtime original movies get made about. But unwitting ethnic self-hatred is hilarious! Clayton Bigsby is blind, so he's been deprived of a sense of identity that's indelibly or necessarily connected to any race or group of people. He's the darkly ironic flip-side of cosmopolitan self-making, in a way: a black man who chooses a white supremacist identity because he simply doesn't know any better. And racism born of that kind of deep ignorance is something that we can safely laugh at.

On the other hand, racism born of funny deep ignorance is only superficially different, I think, from racism born of unfunny deep ignorance, i.e. the racism of lynchings and gas chambers and white-hooded klansmen. From the very beginning, Chappelle was able to domesticate the issue of race while slyly reminding his audience that the issue nevertheless persists. The opening ten seconds of the sketch--when a white-sounding voiceover warns his audience that "the 'n-word' will be used before saying the hell with it and uttering that very n-word in full--captures this perfectly. It's a politically incorrect or rather politically inflammatory or in any event pretty uncomfortable reality deftly packaged as an apology, as a compromise:



For the next 2 1/3rd seasons, Chappelle would try to telegraph to his audience that he was trying to be serious. The question is, did he know he was being serious before the "pixie-sketch" incident he describes in the Oprah interview, or was his self-awareness a late-breaking development? In other words, when did Chappelle become convinced that satire of the Clayton Bigsby variety made him complicit in the trivialization of his own deeply-held grievances?

His now-classic "Jury Duty" sketch proves to me, at least, that he wanted his comedy to be as honest as it possible could be. His answer to his "dilemma" was to create comedy that could appeal to both the conscience and the sense of humor. Fast forward to the 11:50 point on this video for instance. The gist of the sketch is that Chappelle has been called in for jury duty for R Kelly's child pornography trial. R Kelly was accused of taping himself having consensual sex with a woman who turned out to be a minor. Chappelle rants about the evidence needed to establish beyond a reasonable doubt that 1) R Kelly is the person in the video and 2) the woman in the video is under 18. Pissing is involved, making this even more absurd than the details of the case would suggest.

The lawyer asks Chappelle if his standard of proof (the woman holding her ID up to the camera, R Kelly's grandma identifying him on video, etc) isn't a bit "excessive." And then, at around 12:00, Chappelle begins a tirade that strikes me as 100% sincere:



Why are you prosecuting R Kelly when Biggie and Tupac's killers are still on the loose? Why convict him when cops have been acquitted of brutally beating up black people--on video? Then, the coup de grace. Chappelle pisses on the prosecuting attorneys' faces. "That was from the heart," he says in a tone that's best described as bitterly triumphant.

What if we took him at his word? "Chappelle's" becomes a much different program if you begin to assume that all of his anger and frustration is real, and real in a straightforwardly unironic sense. Of course, these frustrations are expressed ironically, like in the Clayton Bigsby sketch, or the largely misfired black-people-as-monsters sketch in the show's final episode or even "The Mad Real World," which has a clear sociological tilt to it. But the frustrations aren't funny even if they're being played for laughs (now there's the kind of nuance you can expect an American television audience to understand!), and they pop up in subtle, perhaps even subconscious ways as well. Hell, they even show up in the less brilliant, funny or incisive sketches. Check out this Moment in the Life of Lil John. The distance between a prepossessing white woman in her mid-40s and the screaming, pimp-cup sipping Lil John is downright Kafkaesque. Even in a sketch like this, Chappelle is getting at the same question that Philip Roth and Richard Wright and countless others have grappled with: how do we live, never mind thrive, in a world that wasn't entirely made for us?

How, indeed. "Chappelle's Show" didn't duck the issues that clearly bothered its creator. If seven years later, it has jarringly prophetic moments, it's because Chappele never even attempted to duck these issues. This is another sketch that isn't widely beloved, but the "Asteroid Heading Towards Earth, Black President Blamed" bit sure rings true today:



Honesty and prophecy came at a steep personal cost. Again, I'm not sure when Chappelle went from cynical exploiter of America's racial divide (this is his own characterization of his work, by the way--not mine) to self-aware prophetic truth-teller. According to the Oprah interview, Chappelle wanted to make his show socially aware and then realized almost instantaneously that is viewership didn't realize this and that he was actually making a mockery of his deepest, truest self. While introducing the Clayton Bigsby sketch, Chappelle joked that he'd shown the clip to some of his black friends, who said he was "setting us back." By season 3, such an observation wasn't funny anymore. He was expected to spend the next five years profiting off of a kind of socially-destructive self-abnegation, playing to an audience that only wanted to laugh at him but that never wanted to understand or listen to him. I'm not saying that this is a fair characterization of things. I just think this is how Chappelle actually felt. Chappelle is accused of being a psychopath and a crack addict because he refused to live a lie, and because he committed our era's most remarkable, most public, most self-destructive act of artistic integrity.

I was reminded of Chappelle again while reading Kelefa Sanneh's New Yorker article on the disappearance of Odd Future's Earl Sweatshirt. Earl, who released a deliriously awesome self-titled debut at the age of 16, vanished from Off Future's studio work and live act about a year ago. Sanneh tracked the rap prodigy to a reform school in Samoa. It turns out that Earl, who is actually the son of a one-time poet laureate of South Africa, was living in a kind of self-inflicted exile in the most remote place on earth. I get the sense that he still wants to be the kind of generational talent that everyone says he could be--but not on anyone's terms but his own. An excerpt:

The only thing I need as of right now is space… Space means no more “Free Earl.” If you sincerely care then I appreciate the gesture, but since you know the hard facts from the source you no longer need to worry. I miss home. I don’t have any definite date though. Even if I did I don’t know if I’d tell you. You’ll hear from me without a doubt when I’m ready.”

Chappelle and Earl's careers ended messily but honestly. While at JTS, I wasn't sure what honesty meant most of the time--whether it meant climbing out of the hole I found myself in, or digging ever deeper, in the hope of learning why I dug, or where I was digging to; in the hope of acquiring a sense of peace and equanimity that only the diggers can access. I'm not ready to embrace the kind of principled quietism which Chappelle and Earl Sweatshirt now epitomize for me. God willing, my biggest challenges and accomplishments lie ahead of me. But these artists teach that self-destruction can be the better part of self-making--that it can be a salutary fate to be remade by the same tensions that formed us.

The Cobble Hill Mafia: An Encounter

There aren’t many places in my section of Brooklyn that are actually noire, which to me means “ambient with mystery or potential intrigue.” My neighborhood is usually a sedate sort of place where even the whiff of potential sociopathic activity would be out of keeping with its stroller-friendly, artisanal grocery store type vibes. In fact I sometimes wonder why I, at the age of 23, live in a place so amenable to the raising of children, a place that looks and feels older than I feel or wish I could feel—in other words, a place unique for its total lack of spontaneity. Any number of times I’ve strolled through Williamsburg and found myself in a place I never planned on going to: sucked for an hour into the whimsical quicksand of a bookstore that sells nothing but zines, drawn trance-like into a motorcycle repair shop where a three-piece punk band played its heart out for ten or fifteen people, who, like me, had probably been walking down the street, and were unable perhaps on the level of instinct to simply ignore the rhythmic artillery fire emanating nearby. This would never happen in Cobble Hill. Nothing fun or interesting happens by surprise here.

This bar wasn’t noire per se, but it was the only one in the neighborhood that could sometimes feel noire. It’s a dim, cash-only sort of place near the subway, mostly empty on a Tuesday night, staffed by a stocky, slightly dwarvish Mexican and a shaved, corn-stalk hipster in suspenders. A mismatched pair, communicating in furtive sentences of badly-accented Spanish, and, jarringly, unaccented English. Not a busy night, so the hipster would disappear into and then re-appear from a back closet every few minutes, leaving a rare scene, at least in these parts, during his temporary absences—a single, aproned bar-back stoically presiding over a fancy cocktail bar, hard bop and 70s calypso and Afrobeat playing softly but somehow anxiously from a single stereo, a cold draft blowing in from an open back door, conversation absent or whispered to the point of instant sonic evaporation. Sometimes you get a dreary feeling sitting in a bar like this on a weeknight, like who are these people and why are they here, and why am I here, and what drove me here, and why this languidness, this static quiet, this sense of nothing happening or about to happen, in senses both more and less immediate, or senses more and less, how to put it, existential? But sometimes this dreariness gives way to the occasional and for a moment overpoweringly weird and weirdly promising tableaux —i.e. the Mexican presiding over the bar, without the authority to pour or mix a drink for his six or seven customers, all of whom were sitting almost in the dark, clutching or staring into highball glasses or cocktail glasses and hunching to avoid exposure to the wind blowing through the back door.

I wasn’t there alone, of course. We were coming back from the Village and the girlfriend insisted I have a look at the jukebox, which was quite an impressive jukebox actually: a half-dozen Chess records compilations, an ethnographic oddity or two (there are at least 12 Chilean early-70s psychedelia tracks in existence, apparently), and a couple of records that were just wildly out of place: a Budos Band full-length, for instance. Donning my ethnomusicological hat for a moment, the jukebox seemed aimed at constructing a certain cosmopolitan classiness tethered more to a worldly sense of urbanity than to one particular region or time-period. I guess I’m trying to say that it had a lot of world music and jazz. My girlfriend says that she imagined that if I could design my ideal jukebox it would look quite like this one. Neither an accurate nor particularly inaccurate description, so I assume it was meant as a compliment.

Anyway, I was nursing a Manhattan at the bar while the girlfriend was browsing the jukebox when a couple of wiseguys walked in. One walk down Court St. and you understand intuitively that wiseguys still exist in this neighborhood: how else to explain the existence of the Marco Polo, an expensive and altogether mediocre restaurant with a secretive upstairs dining room—and a downstairs dining room that is always, but always totally empty? Or how to explain the persistently old-timey Italiany feel of a neighborhood as succofactingly yuppified as this one? I mean look, I’m not saying that Caputos or Cusamano’s funeral parlor are part of some violent criminal enterprise or another, or that this neighborhood’s unusual preponderance of native Italian speakers in their 60s and 70s means that organized crime has a presence here. And I realize that, if you read the past couple of sentences like really closely, you’ll see that I actually imply that organized crime is caused by the presence of Caputo’s, Cusimano’s, Italian-speaking old folks, etc. But I don’t want to say this. What I want to say that it’s immediately obvious that some of the Italians and some of the old world immigrant spirit that showed up in the neighborhood in the 20s or 30s or even earlier never really left. Who’s to say what stuck behind with them (or with it), or what part of this neighborhood’s 20s or 30s character still endures? Cobble Hill is so palimpsestic, such a sometimes-personality-free tangle of social and economic and ethnic enclaves (the yuppies, the Yemenites, the hipsters, the yupsters, the Italians, the folks from the public housing development on Hoyt St.) as to make an answer to this question utterly impossible to arrive at.

But you can intuit an answer. You just sorta know there’s something organized-crime-y afoot. When a Genovese associate slashed the owner of Lucali at the corner of Smith and Carroll a week ago, the only thing shocking about it was the way in which the neighborhood’s unseemly underbelly started to bleed into its yuppified exterior. That was unexpected. Yuppies love the shit out of Lucali. Place is packed every night. But the fact of the owner of a Cobble Hill Italian restaurant having his faced slashed in broad daylight on the busiest street of an otherwise-safe, otherwise-boring neighborhood was not in itself particularly surprising.

Anyway, the wise guys. They were muscular and slightly squat and very clean-smelling, but they didn’t reek of cologne or seem as if they were trying to smell clean, more as if they’d just gotten out of the shower, or actually, more as if they possessed a freshness, an innate sort of hygiene that’s endemic to gangsters of a certain class, or endemic to gangsters of a certain class patronizing a joint of a certain class. And they were polite, but in a menacingly passive-aggressive sort of way, menacing passive-aggression being one the chief skills of a mobster who can really inhabit the part, at least in my own mind. For instance, they shook the hipster’s hand before they ordered their drinks. I had never seen this before. Who does this—who shakes the hand of a service employee who is not a friend or acquaintance of some kind? Why this familiarity, this familiarity that might not even be familiarity? It seemed like a threatening gesture, an establishment of a kind of icily conditional collegiality, or of a power relationship whose terms the hipster was powerless to dictate. I think one of the wiseguys ordered a vodka tonic and the other a vodka cranberry, after they were done shaking hands. The bartender disappeared for a bit.

I don’t know what the wiseguys were talking about, even thought I was sitting right next to them. The girlfriend swears it was something about beating or at best harassing a woman, and she was so scared or curious or both that she pretended to review the contents of the entire jukebox two or three times, even though she was, in spite of not being in any physical danger herself, too paralyzed by the whole situation to arrive at a selection. But I couldn’t tell. They spoke with a cadence, with a tone that suggested that they were used to speaking so as not to be understood or heard, even by people sitting directly next to them. Theirs was a language of evasion and secrets, and I would steal a glance at them every now and then, just to study their body language, their unsmiling faces, their short, greaseless hair, the oddly detached way in which the shorter one rocked back and forth, pivoting on the balls of his feet, or I’d catch the taller one’s lazy stare over the small cluster of bar patrons, all of whom were too busy gazing into their drinks to notice that they were in the presence of two actual, genuine mobsters. They weren’t exactly dressed like gangsters though, or not dressed like the traditional stereotype of a gangster, at least. They weren’t ostentatious at all, and they both wore a matching ensemble of white shirts and dark, casual pants, as if their gang had a dress code or something.

I fidgeted with a hairclip that I’d found on the bar and had assumed to be girlfriend’s, although she later told me that it wasn’t hers.

The bartender returned.

“I put just a splash of cranberry in there. And some extra vodka.”

“Thank you very much” the shorter one said. Again the menacing politeness. The hipster, I should add, didn’t seem the least bit unnerved by all this. He knew exactly who these fuckers were, knew them by demeanor, although not, I think, by name. The taller one then placed a 100 dollar bill on the table, although he didn’t really place it on the bar, he just sort of set it on its side perpendicular to the bar and cupped it in its hand. I’ve only seen four $100 bills in my life, and two of them were in the same drawer in a college friend’s dorm room. My initial thought at seeing these two dudes, basically a “fuck, could these guys be mobsters?” metastasized into certainty as soon as I saw the bill, which hardened into absolute, lead-pipe certainty when the bill immediately disappeared from view and the bartender refused both that and any further payment.

“Mind if we sit in a booth?” the short one asked, in what is in retrospect the most ominous part of this entire episode: these guys don’t have to ask permission to sit in a corner booth. They know this. The bartender knows this. But asking an unnecessary question is a way of normalizing the whole situation, but in a way that inadvertently or perhaps all too advertently highlights how fucked up the whole situation actually is: “Mind if we sit in a booth?” could be translated as “we’re gonna sit in a booth and do whatever the hell we want, and remind you and every other customer who really runs this place.” But the option of saying no—a false option, a fraudulent option, a lie—at least reinforces the fiction that the bartender is still in control. But he isn’t.

So they walked to their booth, and the girlfriend and I gulped our Manhattans because we were pretty eager to leave at that point. What sort of a city did I live in? An unavoidable thought during the walk back to the apartment, which was shorter than perhaps I was comfortable with, given what we’d just seen. This is a city where hipster-friendly cocktail bars still pay protection money to the mob; worse, it’s a city where something like that could be thought of as a signifier of authenticity, a last, enduring outpost of urban grit in a neighborhood blighted by expensive French bistros and boutique pet stores and bars with growler service, whatever the fuck a growler is. How dare I think for even a second that that was cool, I thought during the walk home. How dare I.

I think this would go well with this post: