"Law and Order" Is So Conservative It Makes Michael Savage Look Like John Rawls

Why am I even blogging about this. I'll admit this latest "Law and Order" rant originates with a pretty tense and potentially-explosive moment in the shower the other day (why do these moments always seem to happen in the shower?), when the girlfriend admitted that she had watched a couple episodes of "L&O" with a friend of hers, to which I replied, "Ugh I can't stand that show, for reasons I've probably shared with you like a hundred times by now," to which she replied, "well, what are they," to which I replied....well, I'm getting a bit ahead of myself. It's just that it occurred to me, while simultaneously disputing and washing myself, that the case against "L&O" is about much more than television or artistic tastes, that "L&O"'s malignancy is rooted in things that matter like, a lot, and that its sustained popularity over the course of two decades and about a half-dozen spinoffs and iterations reveals something actually quite dark and terrifying about the state of American society. I didn't convince her that this was the case, but I was able to convince myself that this was the case, which is really all that matters for the purposes of this introductory paragraph. I became so convinced of my own rightness on this issue--so convinced that "L&O" is reactionary and authoritarian at its core, and that it both appeals to and exposes a reactionary and authoritarian strain in American culture and politics--that I now find myself writing a blog post as a result of it.

I want to say, first of all, that I haven't actually watched an episode of "L&O" for several years now, and few specific episode synopses or plot points are coming to mind right now. My anti-"L&O" brief won't be based on any specific, anecdotal evidence, but this hardly seems to matter: "L&O" is marked by its extremely repetitive and formulaic nature, and the structure of an "L&O" episode is so rigid, so codified, that the episodes are virtually identical.

In my own experience, as well as in my own cultural and individual vocabulary, repetition and sanctification are inextricably linked. Holidays and liturgies are repeated; the Torah is repeated once a year according to a reading calendar from which no Jewish sect, no matter how liberal, would ever dream of deviating. With prayer, repetition sanctifies: if you've ever witnessed a Hardei Jew driven to near-madness with kavanah during a Tuesday night Shemona Esrei, then you understand what I mean. Someone who only reads through Shemona Esrei a handful of times of year--someone like me, that is--is incapable of transcending the stilted and often quite-difficult reading of the words in front of him, and is therefore incapable of being driven to near-madness with kavanah while reading Shemona Esrei on a Tuesday night. In religion, the deepest regions of spirituality and mystical truth are often accessed through repetition, and "L&O" is quite possibly the most repetitive show ever made.

What exactly is "L&O" sanctifying? What is this nightly or, in some cases, hourly (my dad once remarked that it seemed like "L&O" was on TV virtually every second of the day) ritual of crime/investigation/red herring/arrest/trial/trial nearly bungled as a result of clever lawyering and/or technicalities/trial saved at the last minute/punishment meant to consecrate? The answer is fairly obvious, at least when you contrast "L&O" to a show that I'm guessing most people have completely forgotten about.

"Juvies" ran on MTV for what, like a season? Maybe it's still on? I don't know. It was probably one of the bravest things the channel has ever broadcast, and a reminder that MTV was once capable of displaying a surprising sense of responsibility towards the same youth culture it does so much to encourage and create, as well as degrade and destroy. Basically, "Juvies" was a jarring look at the criminal justice system, as told from the perspective of people who were roughly the same age as most MTV viewers (much in the same way that "16 and Pregnant/Teen Mom" is a jarring look at the pressures of motherhood and family life, as well as at what an unforgiving and difficult place the real world can be, as told through the perspective of people are roughly the same age as most MTV viewers).

"Juvies" allowed MTV viewers to witness simulacra of themselves--attractive, suburban, mostly upper middle-class teenagers with families and schools and aspirations in life--navigating the Byzantine corridors of American Justice and having a pretty rough time of it. They'd be arrested for extremely dumb shit, have all of their clothes confiscated, be forced to chill out for a couple days in a featureless, soulless building in which they're treated like human turds, and then go before a judge (and because "Juvies" was filmed at a single correctional facility, it was the same judge every single time) who wielded a highly arbitrary power-of-life-and-death over befuddled and often terrified high school kids whom she had never met before. I don't know if this was the producers' intent, but "Juvies" invited its audience to imagine themselves in a similarly Kafakaesque situation. It was, in its own way, a powerful example of dissident journalism, a reminder of how massive and fucked up and insurmountable The System can be, and is:



In contrast, "L&O" is all about how The System is always just and right and working in our very best interests. Every episode is a canned, fairy-tale rendering of authority in action; every conviction a semi-ritualized confirmation of the inherent rightness of the prevailing moral and social order. Hell, the word "order" even appears in the title. Law and Order, in this context, represent the triumph of the liberal, technocratic state over society's most intractable problems. The show invents monsters--rapists, mobsters, serial killers, psychopaths, child murderers, sex traffickers, terrorists, loners, losers, wife-beaters--and a small group of extremely intelligent and often-attractive people employed by the government slay them, every single time, one after another. My professor Ross Posnock (in the course of discussing The Sun Also Rises) once explained bullfighting as imperialism in miniature, as the ritualized assertion of the Spanish national will over not just nature, but over some monstrous and easily-victimized Other. "L&O" is the American version of bullfighting (or at least the American version of Ross Posnock's version of bullfighting). It's a vindication of The System, repeated again, and again, and again, with only cosmetic variation, with Sam Waterson as matador, and Jerry Orbach, Richard Belzer et al. as picadors.

My theory for why this spectacle had endured for two decades, 456 episodes and about a half-dozen spinoffs actually contradicts the title of this post. "L&O" is appealing partly because it appeals to the very worst aspects of liberalism and conservativsm both: for the right, it proves that the system is working and that everything is A-OK; for the left, it validates a positivist, utopian notion of liberalism, wherein power is inordinately capable of remedying society's deepest and scariest ills. The idea of empowering a privilaged and in many ways extra-legal interest group to arrest, beat and even kill any minority (or, in many cases, non-minority) they please while prohibiting the rest of us from smoking a harmless herb or drinking wine in parks, is an outrgorwth of the positivist, utopian, power-can-solve-our-problems-if-we-could-just-be-subjected-t0-enough-of-it school of liberalism. Ruddy Guilliani or hell, Barack Obama are both exemplars of this strain of liberalism, to which the Foucaldian idea that Order results not from power, but from a network of socially and historically-informed (and therefore non-consensual) power relationships, is fundamentally opposed. "L&O" occupies a weird political middle ground. "L&O" is reactionary because it kashers and justifies The System, but oddly forward-thinking, since The System--which is portrayed as being freakishly highly-functioning--is itself the logical endpoint of liberal social management.

We, as a society, want badly to believe that the liberal-conservative compromise that "L&O" has drilled into millions of heads hundreds of millions of times is a good and worthwhile one. While "The X-Files" is all about one man's seemingly-delusional insistence that The System is one huge, monstrous lie, "L&O" is about assuaging everyone's--yours, mine, everyone's--discomfort with it. And as Mulder demonstrated, it's much easier to just passively accept things than to consider how profoundly fucked up they may be. To consider that the American justice system is based more on perverse institutional incentives rather than serving the public interest (see Wire, The), that drugs maybe shouldn't be like, illegal (see Wire, The), that The System in its current form is fairly racist (see Wire, The, and this), that America has a massive prison population and that, according to no less an authority than the U.S. Supreme Court, many of the members of said population are horribly mistreated--bro, that's some heavy shit. I mean, who wants to think about all that shit? Thinking about shit isn't like, entertaining. Why go to bed troubled, when you can watch Waterson and Co. in full, beast-slaying mode?

What really bothers me about "L&O" is that it ingrains (and even ritualizes!) the popular avoidance of unpleasant truths. It's a slickly-produced, highly entertaining palliative that's also meant to distract from the systemic problems in the American justice system, while also subtly arguing that these problems aren't important and maybe don't even exist. In a fairer, more humane America, such a show will, like minstrelry or Birth of a Nation or Toby Keith's "Boot in Your Ass," be considered a embarrassing relic of a misguided era and its under-evolved cultural values, rather than an enduring source of entertainment.

+++

Last night I caught a few snippets of the Caps-Blues game, and fuck was it strange to see someone other than Bruce Boudreau standing behind the Washington bench. Boudreau was an institution in Washington, that rare sports figure whose out-sized persona was suited to his actual coaching/playing ability. Is there anyone in the past decade of DC sports who matches him in this respect? Gil arguably does, although his tenure in the Nation's Capital ended on far worse terms than Boudreau's--bad enough, I'd say, to taint his entire legacy in this town (well, that town. I'm writing this in New York). LaVar Arrington's current media career distracts from the fact that he wasn't even the most flamboyant or outspoken player on his own team (Fred Smoot wins that distinction). Steve Spurrier--folksy, idiomatic, and like, painfully obviously out of his depth during his brief tenure with the Redskins--was like a walking cartoon character, but could only coach the team to two mediocre seasons. Jim Riggleman, meanwhile, is arguably the most mediocre manager in the history of baseball, although his spectacular kiss-off of an exit (after a win!) ensures he'll be remembered much longer than Manny Acta.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that a legend has passed from the scene. The Falstaffian Mr. Boudreau, the youngest (and undoubtedly most profane) hairless blob ever to reach 200 NHL victories, married skill and temperament in a way DC hasn't seen for awhile, and might not see for awhile yet--at least until he shows up behind the Hurricanes' bench the next time they visit the Verizon Center.

+++

My next post will probably be in about two weeks, and will definitely be a end-of-year music blowout, including top 10 lists and superlatives and other such nonsense.

This song won't be on my top 10 tracks list, since it came out like two years ago:

There is Nothing About the New York Islanders That Isn't a Travesty

A few months ago, a couple of druggies shot up a pharmacy on Long Island, killing four, including a young teenager. Days after the story broke, I was not in the least bit surprised to learn that the druggies became engaged to be married at a New York Islanders game. Deadspin wasn't surprised either--in their immortal words, "Of course the pill-popping couple charged with four pharmacy murders got engaged at an Islanders game." Of course for decades, the most obvious Islanders word-assocs. weren't "druggies," "losers from Long Island" and "quadruple homicide," but "Trottier," "Nystrom," "four consecutive Stanley Cups" and "one of only two American-based NHL-recognized dynasties in hockey history." Now, 23 years after the last banner was hoisted to the already-crowded rafters at Nassau Veterans Memorial Coliseum (for the 1987-88 Patrick Division title. The Patrick Division doesn't even exist anymore, by the way), the Coen Brothers' humor of a couple of psychopathic, murderous druggies getting engaged at an Islanders game is so self-evident that it barely requires explanation. In fact, why haven't the Coens directed a sort of dark suburban, po-mo apocalyptic Bonnie and Clyde-type yarn that begins with a deeply-in-love Hempstead meth head proposing to his mate via NVMC jumbotron?

Again, not the sort of question that the once-glorious Islanders once begged. Going to a game in Uniondale is sort of like visiting the Agora in Athens, or the Forum in Rome--or, more accurately, the Colossi of Rameses in Thebes, about which Shelly wrote these familiar and actually-immortal lines:

"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

The Nassau Coliseum is the cradle of a fallen empire; theirs was a vast imperium that few can remember, but that casts a decrepit and ever-receding shadow on our present day. Look on my works, ye Mighty! Seven Stanley Cups or Regular Season Titles (the pre-President's Cup award for most points in a season) in just a five-year span! Nine Hall of Famers (the Caps, who have been around as long as the Islanders have, boast only Gartner and Langway)! A ceiling crowded with banners! Unquestioned home-ice supremacy! A rivalry with the Rangers as embittered as any in sports!

And despair: when the girlfriend, the younger brother and I arrived at the NVMC for Saturday night's Capitals-Islanders game, we were told our cheap, upper-deck seats had turned into expensive (yet complimentary!), lower-bowl seats on account of a ceiling leak pissing all over section 305. NVMC is in a pretty advanced state of dilapidation, but then again so is RFK, a building that, against all logic-based argument to the contrary, I believe should stand as a permanent memorial to the Redskins' 20-year golden era. Decrepitude can add character to a sports venue is what I'm saying, but emptiness can only detract. And what was sad about the leaky ceiling snafu is that, on a Saturday night, in a game against the best team in the NHL (and a former Patrick Division rival, at that), a game in which Alex Ovechkin, Brian Rolston, Niklas Bakstrom and a host of past and present stars and almost-stars would be competing--was that they actually had lower-bowl seats they could move us to. The official attendance, according to ESPN.com, was 14,812, but there were far more than 1,500 empty seats on Saturday night. And about a third of the 10-12,000 seats that did have people in them were occupied by those who, like myself, were wearing Capitals gear. Which means there were somewhere between 6 and 9,000 actual Islanders fans at a Saturday night game against a former division rival with a two-time MVP on its roster. I bought my tickets on StubHub for $13 each--$10 below face value.

Forget that the Islanders are now so easily mocked, that they've sucked for 20 years, that the Long Island white trash nature of their fan base is an implied punchline on a nationally-read sports website, or that they play in a decaying building in the middle of a parking lot off the frickin' Long Island expressway, for fuck's sake. A formerly proud franchise can hit rock-bottom and still retain some essence of its former mystique, as anyone who's been to a Mets or Redskins game over the past few years can attest. But that essence has totally dissipated in Uniondale. It's sad to have to say this, but one of the NHL's all-time great, historic franchises should no longer exist. For a few reasons.

Firstly, that existence is predicated upon a once-fashionable, once-plausible social theory that time and history and demographics has gradually debunked. In the early 60s and 70s, the triumph of the suburbs over the city--and the automobile over every other form of transportation--seemed all but assured. Even visionaries like Frank Lloyd Wright were convinced that the ideal American society should be arranged around peace, quiet and living space rather than proximity, convenience and social cohesion. The Islanders were founded in 1972, at the tail end of Robert Moses's auto-centric building spree, and at a time in which The American City wasn't thought of as the country's social and intellectual engine, but as a decaying national disgrace. Some of the worst urban riots in American history took place a mere 4 years before the first drop of the puck at NVMC; "Taxi Driver" came out in 1976; the famous "Ford to City: Drop Dead" headline graced a 1975 issue of the New York Daily News; the Son of Sam stalked the streets in '76 and '77. In the mid-70s, New York City (and Cleveland, and Detroit, and Washington DC...) was violent, black, menacing and broke; if Wikipedia is to be believed, New York City lost over 10% of its population between 1960 and 1980. If it weren't for a combination of a sort of auto-centric teleology in American urban thinking and good ol' fashioned white flight, Nassau County's population wouldn't have doubled between 1950 and 1970, and the New York Islanders likely wouldn't exist.

Now, thanks to the housing crisis, expensive gas, Jane Jacobs, ebbing racism and all sorts of other shit that the Islanders ownership group and the NHL simply could not have anticipated back in 1972, the suburbs are over. Hell, according to the Wall Street Journal, white flight is over. The Nets' relocation from a parking lot in the middle of the Jersey peat bogs to Flatbush and Atlantic in Brooklyn encapsulates a kind of positive, macro-level shift in American society. And it's a shift that the Islanders are incapable of adapting to, so long as they keep playing in Uniondale.

A fan said as much to me at the game the other night. In the first period, P.A. Parentau meekly shoved a typically-clueless Roman Hamerlik into the boards, leaving him prone on the ice for about 20 terrifying seconds, during which I half-wondered if I'd just seen a guy get paralyzed in front of between 10 and 12,000 screaming, bloodthirsty hockey fans. Hamerlik was fine enough to play the rest of them game (albeit poorly), and because the play was off the puck and a good 5 or 6 feet off the boards, Parentau was whistled for a weak but arguably-justified 5 minute boarding major. "He was six feet off the boards! That couldn't have been a penalty. He should get five minutes for diving!" some dipshit behind me opined. For some reason, I felt obliged to explain to him that a player's distance from the boards is actually part of the justification for a boarding penalty--that you can only shove the guy into the boards if you're like, next to the boards and going for the puck, rather than six feet from either of them. I got an argumentative and totally-expected "have you ever played hockey before?" (I haven't, not that it matters here...)...but the guys behind me ended up being pretty sold by Islanders-fan standards, since we spent the first intermission talking about the Redskins, Ovechkin, DC sports, and, finally, the fate of Uniondale's seemingly-doomed NHL franchise.

The Islander's lease on NVMC is up in a couple years, and the team has failed to secure public financing for a new arena in Uniondale. Where's this team going? I asked them. "They'll figure something out. They'll keep them here," said an older gentlemen with the kind of bullshit gravitas that crusty looking older dudes can lend to mildly insane statements, such as "the Islanders have a future in Long Island."

"See, the problem is that the arena isn't close to any public transit," a younger, more intelligent fellow added. "You think this place is empty now, come here on a weeknight. I want them to play out by where the Mets play." Then again, if this guy thinks that New York City is going to throw down $400 million for a new arena for the New York Islanders, maybe he was as delusional as his older seatmate. No one mentioned a third possiblity: that the Islanders could play at the soon-to-be-compelted Barclays Centre in Downtown Brooklyn. It's obvious why this never came up: Barclays is on top of a dozen subway lines and the LIRR, but it's also much further from the Long Island suburbs than Flushing is. A Flushing arena would allow Islanders fans to conveniently see their favorite hockey team (probably by driving, I should add. Flushing is more easily accessible by car from the Long Island suburbs than it is by LIRR...), but their convenience isn't worth the high public-sector cost of a new building.

Long story short, even Islanders fans are sorta in denial here. They admit that no one wants to drive to games, and that the team needs to move to the city. But in the process, they invalidate the Islanders original reason for being.

Second reason this team isn't viable, and this is gonna sound sorta tautological but fuck it: they're just not viable. According to Forbes, the Islanders are the NHL's fifth most worthless team (or 26th most valuable team, if you prefer). In this day and age (at least according to an epic Nate Silver essay in Baseball Between the Numbers. It's the one about whether or not A-Rod is overpaid), a sports team makes a lot of its money off of the sort of things that really offend sports purists: stadium naming deals, luxury suites, expensive tickets, overpriced stadium concessions and television rights. NVMC has only 15 permanent concession stands (15! For the whole arena!) and only 32 luxury suites; by comparison, MSG has 88 luxury suites, and probably 15 concession stands on the club level alone. Islanders games are broadcast on something called MSG+, and according to Forbes, they rank 22nd out of 24th in television viewership among American NHL teams. NVMC's naming rights are currently unsold, probably because the team is going to leave in 2015 when their lease on the arena expires.

As Forbes points out, the team's current financial model is unsustainable. And hockey, unlike Baseball and arguably unlike Football and Basketball, has a number of markets it can successfully expand to. An NHL team in Hamilton, Quebec City or even Hartford (which is building a new arena for the UConn basketball team, I believe) would probably sell out every game. Gary Bettman is understandably worried about the NHL turning into a regional, small-cap sort of league, which explains why the Coyotes are still playing in front of 6,000 people a night in Phoenix rather than in front of 17,000 a night in, say, Saskatoon. But as the NBA's experience with the New Orleans Hornets demonstrates, it's better for a league to maximize its profits elsewhere than subsidize an open, festering wound in a market it badly wants to penetrate. The NHL should go where the hockey fans are, to places where a team's success won't depend solely on socio-economic factors that are outside of the league's control. Demand for hockey is elastic in Uniondale, but it sure isn't elastic in Canada (so far this season, the Ottawa Senators have the lowest attendance among the Canadian clubs, at least in terms of per-game percentage capacity. They only sell 98.8% of their seats).

Finally, and this is the real reason the Islanders should move: the human mind believe that certain things--nations, cities, sports franchises--are as immovable as a mountain range, and as permanent a feature as the Agora or the Forum of the Colossi of Ramses. How often this belief in immutability is revealed as the arrogance that it is. The Agora and the Forum aren't functioning urban spaces but tourist attractions; even mountain ranges are slowly eroding into the ground. Nothing in this world has the inherent right to continue existing, least of all you or I, whose obsolescence could be closer than we realize--and least of all a hockey team in Long Island, whose point of obsolescence has long since passed.

Saturday night's game was one of the most exciting I've ever been to. There were lead changes and lots of scoring, but also plenty of the little things that hockey fans thrill to: clean open-ice hits, diving blocked shots (most of them by the Islanders, unfortunately), and a couple of glaring, game-changing strategic fuckups (by the Capitals, also unfortunately). There was the excitement of seeing Alex Ovechkin draw a bullshit interference penalty as only a player of Ovechkin's stature can, as well as the weirdness, peculiar to hockey, of seeing a player get a major penalty, two assists and a game-winner in a single, schizoid 60-minute span (Parentau is a beast, as it turns out). And then there was Rick DiPietro, who had to hear an arena of gutless fans chant Al Montoya's name after letting in a couple of blazing wrist-shots in the first period. He demonstrated astounding mental toughness in the process of ignoring the crowd and stonewalling the Caps during the last two frames--in a final "fuck you" to the NVMC faithful, he even recorded an assist on the Islanders' game-icing, open-net goal. The Islanders fans underwent this wareworlf-like metamorphosis from garden-variety hockey fan dipshits to uber hockey fan dipshits when the horn sounded on their team's 5-3 victory. But I felt genuinely happy for them for a couple seconds there, with the NVMC rocking like a high school gym and the 9,000 or so Islanders supporters relishing a gutsy, hard-won victory over arguably the best team in the league. The optimism, that delusional feeling that the good old days weren't quite as far off as the dates on those wrinkled, dusty banners cluttering the (leaky) NVMC ceiling would suggest, was briefly infectious, even for me, and I hate the Islanders, who beat the Capitals in an infamous, quadruple overtime playoff game back in 1987.

The bonds between fan and team are strong in hockey, and the few Islanders fans who came out on Saturday don't deserve to have a part of themselves skip town for Quebec. But then again, only sentimentality can justify the Islanders' presence in Uniondale. Time and necessity have a near-perfect head-to-head record against sentimentality, I think. They'll triumph in this case, as they always seem to--and sooner rather than later, I hope.

A things-being-over themed song:

Science Fiction Omnibus Post

I've only read about 100 pages of Proust's In Search of Lost Time, an unreadable (in English, at least) 290483209834-page saga of memory and association and various psychic ills. But even I understand how the faintest memories of childhood can take on a kind of autonomous, independent existence that can be totally unrelated to the experiences these memories are intended to record. When I was like a 6 year old kid, my dad used to take me to see the Washington Savoyards--DC's foremost and probably only Victorian light opera company--perform at the Duke Ellington School in Georgetown. I remember being bored out of my fucking mind, and anything Gilbert & Sullivan related now instantly transports me to those antsy, long-ago afternoons spent wondering just what the hell I was watching, when the singing would stop, why most of the people onstage we're standing weirdly, disconcertingly still a lot of the time, how long it would be until I could get a Snickers' bar at intermission, why I couldn't just go outside and play on the giant green chair. I probably only went to 5 or 6 Savoyards performances, but they stick out as a few of the defining experiences of early childhood. The very fact of my dad's imposition of Gilbert & Sullivan upon a child who must have been just painfully obviously incapable of appreciating such things, reveals something important about him, something I expect I'll puzzle over for the rest of my life. With a bit of age and perspective, even a memory of oppressive boredom takes on an unanticipated poignancy that's only faintly related to the substance of that memory.

So yeah, Star Trek: Deep Space 9. How many episodes of this show did I watch between the ages of 5 and 10? Not many, I don't think. Probably less than 20, certainly less than 30. There are a few individual episodes that I definitely remember watching, particularly a heartbreaking season 1 episode in which Chief O'Brien befriends a humanoid from the Gamma Quadrant who has been genetically bred to act as prey in a sort of intergalactic, to-the-death sport-hunting expedition. O'Brien tries to convince the GQ'er of his intrinsic worth as a humanoid-being, and attempts to sell him on the notion that, despite the fact that he's literally been engineered to be hunted down and killed, he still has free will and is as deserving of a shot at life as any other creature in the universe. And the GQ'er tries to convince O'Brien that his life is in fact meaningless if he isn't hunted down and killed, and that if O'Brien were really his friend he would just let his pursuers board the station and kill him.

What kind of kid was I, to be drawn in by this sorta shit? On TNG (which also ran when I was a young kid), the interior of the Enterprise is bright and modular, its very cleanliness and order a triumph of science and the human/humanoid spirit. But the interior of Deep Space 9 is shadowy and dark; even its portholes have a severe, identifiably Cardassian look to them. TNG takes place on a kind of warp-powered transgallactic cruise ship; DS:9 takes place on a war machine, and even on the aesthetic level there's a certain tension between Sisko, Bashir, Jadzia and O'Brien's sleek Starfleet uniforms and the moral and political chaos that threatens to overwhelm them at any given time. Suffice it to say, even at the age of 6 I thought the Enterprise was staffed by a team of insufferable, self-absorbed knuckleheads (the worst of which was Data, who, in addition to ruining the dreams of some poor, non-robotic Starfleet hack who'd probably hock both of his testicles just for a shot at working as science officer on an Ambassador-class starship, just got on my fucking nerves). I liked DS:9 more. I think I flatter myself by saying that DS:9's rather flagrant attempts at undermining everything that the more sanitized TNG stood for is part of the reason I was attracted to the show as a kid. But I'm gonna say it anyway. Or at least I'm going to determine my early fascination with DS:9, and the fact that I have such an enduring memory of my early fascination with DS:9, to be indicative of later tendencies.

Just recently, I discovered that every single episode of DS:9 is on Netflix Instantwatch. Holy shit, the 6-year-old in me screamed, before commanding me to spend a not-insignificant amount of funderemployment-related flex time watching every single arc episode, in order, as well as interesting-sounding non-arc episodes such as the one where the Vulcans beat the humans in baseball, in addition to every Quark-centered episode, for obvious reasons. Right now I'm at the end of season 2. The Maquis seem intent on triggering another border war, the Bajorans just elected a conniving religious fundamentalist as their new Kai, and the Cardassian high command is up to some flagrant Iran or even North Korea-level shenanigans. But these conflicts will soon seem quaint in light of the hell that awaits on the other side of the wormhole, i.e. the Dominion, which dominates the season 3-7 arc.

A few things jump out at me, during this re-acquaintance with DS:9. The first is that it's impossible to watch this without constantly comparing it to Battlestar Galactica, a show it is similar to in spirit but arguably superior to. So far, the most intriguing point of comparison is between the shows' putative villains, i.e. the Cylons and the Cardassians. One of the things that didn't really bug me when I was watching BSG but now makes the show seem far more frivolous than it originally appeared to be, is its portrayal of the Cylons, particularly in seasons 3 and 4. BSG went out of its way to draw comparisons between the Cylons and the Colonists, even to the point of making an in-retrospect unforgivable episode suggesting that the humans had intentionally triggered the initial Cylon attack. The equivalency between Cylon and human was even more torturously drawn out as the show progressed, and BSG's moral relativism reached a kind of apogee in the wake of the discovery of Earth in season 4, after which it became increasingly clear that the humans' and Cylons' collective destinies were mystically or even religiously intertwined. I think Ronald Moore and Co. (Moore, by the way, wrote dozes of DS:9 episodes; BSG's aesthetic and arc format echo DS:9 in ways that I won't get into at the moment) wanted to blur the moral distinction between Cylon and human as much as possible in order to make the Cylons seem like complicated villains. By drawing as many parallels between the Colonists and their tormentors as possible, Moore probably wanted to turn the Cylons into a dark and disturbingly familiar reflection of their human prey. But this is a cop out. In the series finale, we find out that all of us (at least in the show's mythology) are a little Cylon, and that the humans of the Colonies aren't "human" in the same sense that we Cylon/human hybrids are. How convenient. The villains responsible for slaughtering 10 billion colonists turn out to be no more intrinsically evil than we are. In the end, they're hardly even villainous.

Unlike the Cylons, the Cardassians are not a blatant appeal to post-modern liberal guilt. They are a noble, technologically-advanced race with a love of art and literature. But they're also a backward, oppressive people whose social and cultural values are meant to appall us. They do things that moral relativism simply cannot explain away--a season 2 episode entitled "Tribunal" is a Kafkaesque, darkly comic portrayal of the Cardassian legal system, in which the verdict and sentence are announced before the trial even begins, and the proceedings act as a kind of collective affirmation of the inherent rightness of the greater social order. The Cardassians are militarists and totalitarians, convinced of their own superiority and enlightenment. But they are enlightened in the same sense that, say, the Nazis were enlightened. DS:9 never tries to apologize for this. It doesn't go for false equivocation. The Cardassians' basic incompatibility with any kind of western (or, in this case, Federation) moral and political system is constantly laid bare. But they aren't cartoon villains. The Federation has no choice but to live with these people, to find some accommodation with them that doesn't overly offend the values of either party. Sisko always seems like he wants to strangle Gul Dukat, but he understands that he can't, and the show's first two seasons milk all sorts of drama out of the Cardassians' and the Federations' mutually-uncomfortable coexistence. There are good Cardassians--Garak, for instance. But their otherness is never completely elided or written out of the show.

Another major difference between BSG and DS:9 is that DS:9 has an even more pronounced and in fact eerily prophetic political aspect to it. Much of the show is about the discontents of political and economic unity, and about the basic inability of politics (or, at least, the basic inability of politics alone) to definitively bridge the gap between nations and peoples. Fuck, just look at those ultra-nationalist, uber-religious and by no means peace-loving Bajorans, possibly the most well-developed bad good-guys in the entire Star Trek cannon. Federation membership doesn't solve all their problems so much as create a series of increasingly-fraught identity crises. Meanwhile, the Cardassian political system, with its weak civilian government, powerful yet oddly incompetent military council and seemingly-omnipotent intelligence services, bears a striking resemblance to Egypt or Pakistan's. And as a Twitter user mentioned last night, Kai Winn, with her wild eyes, condescending tone, religious beliefs and ambitions ill-matched to her actual leadership abilities, is something of a Bajoran Michelle Bachmann. Of course, BSG was a deeply political show as well, but it was mired in a kind of War on Terror mindset and was largely uninterested in the kind of big-picture, armchair-polisci type stuff that DS:9 excelled at.

The second thing I've noticed, and this also has a lot to do with BSG, actually: as far as TV shows go, I like to distinguish between realism on the one hand, and plausibility on the other. Think of it this way: we don't know what daily life would be like on a Federation-controlled Cardassian battle station, because the Federation and the Cardassians do not exist and will never exist (probably). A show like DS:9 can't be "realistic," because there's no reality to measure it against. But, if Cardassians and the Federation did exist and if they had fought a war and if that war partly resulted in the Federation taking over one of their orbital battle stations, what would daily life on said battle station be like? What would Bajoran-Cardassian attitudes be like, if they had existed and fought a 20-year long guerilla war against each other?

See, science fiction lives and dies on plausibility. No individual has teamed up with his best friend to invent a time machine in his garage. But if someone were to invent a time machine with his best friend in a garage, how would it affect him? What would they do? Would their friendship survive? Would their sanity survive? Would they learn anything? The reason "Primer" is a modern classic is because in the process of answering these questions--questions that, again, have little actual bearing on the real world, and whose answers are totally non-disprovable--it delves deeper into human nature and the human psyche than nearly every other non-science fiction film ever made. And at the same time, it accomplishes something that non-science fiction films cannot, i.e., it engages in and advances a sort of dialogue about how technology, progress and human destiny are or are not interrelated:

DS:9 passes the plausibility test, and it does so without having to resort to heavy-handed political metaphors (I love "Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country," but it's such a product of the early-90s, post-Cold War cultural moment that it already feels dated), and without having to draw painfully explicit correspondences between the fantasy universe and the real world (I'm looking at you, BSG). In an odd way, the DS:9 universe is just alien enough to seem plausible to me. It resembles real life, even if it isn't real life--paradoxically, a fantasy world that is too much like real life actually becomes implausible, by virtue of its straying too far outside the bounds of its own non-reality. But DS:9 seldom violates this rule. It maintains both distance and familiarity--there's a bar on DS:9, but it's more like the Mos Eisley cantina than the local dive. Even aliens enjoy a drink every once in awhile. But they're still aliens.

+++



Speaking of plausible, check out the weirdly compelling Freudian drama (or don't. Huuuge SPOILER ALERT here) between the killer computer in the forgotten high-concept B-movie masterpiece "Colossus," and his creator, the dapper Dr. Forbin. The Colossus is one of the most terrifying villains in sci-fi history, partly because of the unimpeachable ultra-rationality of everything it does. The Colossus is willing to use nuclear blackmail to solve all of mankind's problems. And who's to say that's not a good thing? Obviously Colossus is a bit pushy ("Forbin had better be up at 6:30 AM tomorrow morning, run 3 miles and keep himself at under 1000 calories for the day or I'm nuking Chicago"), but its intentions are pure and perhaps even altruistic. It doesn't like, have to end war and hunger and suffering, after all, especially when it has the entire American and Soviet nuclear arsenals to look after. The computer's motives go beyond altruism, even. Watch the film to the end, and you'll even find that the computer badly craves his father's approval and love. Nuclear blackmail is an odd way of attaining it, perhaps. But you've gotta think that Colossus will eventually wise up to his lack of people skills. And if he doesn't, you can't blame a nuclear-armed super-computer for trying now can you?

You could think of Colossus as a kind of Luddite warning against the development of artificial intelligence; one particularly dimwitted IMDB commenter warned that Colossus-type computers actually exist now, and that the hell the film depicts isn't as far off as it seems. But the film's message, such as it is, is more about human imperfectability than about the dangers of artificial intelligence. Forbin's tantrum in the film's final moments are an oddly life-affirming reminder that it's better for humans to remain imperfect than to try to correct their imperfections at gunpoint (see also: totalitarianism). As you learn in the beginning of the movie, the Colossus was designed as a means of ending war once and for all. But excise that bit of us that decides it's a good idea to kill other human beings to serve a political or social purpose, and you excise that part of human beings that's capable of deciding that anything's a good idea, at all. The Colossus represents the fantasy that there's some easy, push-button means of saving us from ourselves. But there isn't, and there shouldn't be. Depressing? Empowering? Both, I think.

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.