"Laughing in the dark..."

Ta-Nehisi Coates' recent guest column in the New York Times made me feel things. It's an honest, emotional piece about his reaction to Forest Whitaker's incredibly upsetting frisking incident at the Milano Market in NYC.

Of course it's also about so much more. I see it as written by a person who isn't mad anymore (maybe he is, but if so he has beautifully tamed it in his writing), but rather is deeply, passionately disappointed. It's written by a person with life stories that I won't ever be able experience in the same way.

I tried, though. Still trying quite hard, actually, to relate to exactly what Coates must be feeling. I've found that I have an intense need to do this, to try to experience things in the exact way that others must have experienced them so I can feel their emotions. This is generally a losing battle, but it's worth the effort. His post made me desperately realize that I can't ever get to that exact place, that so many things are out of my control, and that so much history is prescribed into the way we all think and act, at least on some level.

His post did what all good writing should do, it provoked deep thought into the weird, murky areas of my life, past and present. 

I've been called homophobic slurs by however many Allston, MA bros just like most other Boston musicians who dress a certain way. In fact, in high school lots of folks assumed I was gay because my voice is higher and I can tend to be effeminate. People would just say this out loud like it was nothing, and use Gay as if it were a bad word. I thought about how I've never really let it bother me, using the defense that I'm not actually gay, so whatever. But I think there's something much worse at work here: I'm conditioned to people being that offensive toward homosexuals. That actually really frightens me now that I've written it down.

I do partly understand the Louis C.K. theory that words are words, and that you have the power to choose not to be affected by what ignorant, offensive people sling your way. But in his 2008 special Chewed Up, Louis himself jokingly/seriously notes, "I'm a white man, you can't even hurt my feelings! What can you call a white man that really digs deep? Hey, uh, Cracker?" God, does he hit the nail on the head of our little societal blueprint. (I don't want to go off on a total tangent here, but it really is amazing to watch Louis C.K. rip the power away from certain words, at least for a moment, by overly insulting everyone, himself included. That's an incredibly rare feat, and people like him do not come around very often.)

But think about it: We laugh when a white guy is called a cracker. I cannot even begin to imagine what the slurs must feel like for someone who's race or sexual orientation has been slighted their whole life (in visible or invisible ways). I will never be able to put myself in those shoes. Because of history, words are more than just a combination of letters. They can be compassionately powerful, and they can be poison. Because of history, the reality we live in today is that so much is etched into our subconscious, all these emotions the words carry along with them.

The flip side to all of this, of course, is that Coates can't ever realistically put himself in my shoes either. But I think his point goes deeper than that. Of course he doesn't know what it's like being a white kid growing up in the suburbs in the 80s/90s. 

I thought about another point in high school when I was the only white kid on a basketball team in Northern Virginia. Racial paranoia consumed my every thought for the first few practices; I distinctly remember feeling shame over that. I had grown up being vaguely taught that "we're all the same! yay!" But here, clearly, I came from a completely different neighborhood. Sure, we shared so many similarities like lots of teenagers, but there was absolutely no getting around the fact that we were not at all "the same" like I'd been taught. I never once wondered if my education had failed me. 

There were so many other elements at work here, though. I was also the new guy, and I basically became their little brother in the way that all sports-team newcomers are initiated. The other guys used to jokingly call me Whitey, or even sometimes LWB (Little White Bitch). I'm sure some folks would call that racism, and I guess I wouldn't call them wrong. I just never thought about it like that. I don't know how to clearly explain that this was done in a loving way, the kind of camaraderie that happens in tight knit groups of boys like that. Just like how my older brothers back home would pick on me, it told me that I'd been accepted into the team. It also kind of helped that I could play. My teammate J used to do a totally side-splitting, fake play-by-play: "Whitey passes it to Darkie; Darkie dribbles, passes to other Darkie; other Darkie tries alley-oop back to Whitey but, folks, Whitey cannot jump! He cannot jump! His feet are nailed to the floor!"

I don't mean to make it out as even a thing, like it happened every day or something. We were just all able to see how strikingly odd and hilarious the reality was, how I literally stuck out on the team. (When we took the team pictures, J pointed at me in the photo saying, "Whoa where'd that ghost come from?! You guys see that ghost?!" and we all just about died laughing.) We would have done anything for each other, just like brothers, and that included making fun of each other. We knew we were similar in many ways, but also quite different, and I think we tried to embrace it all. The key here is that, in the moment, we never really thought about it. After those first few days, racial paranoia ceased living in my own brain, at least.

Sadly, real life just isn't like that for everybody. I will always truly and strongly believe that the quiet, compassionate people in this world outnumber the small-minded racists, homophobes, etc. But, again, I'm not sure that's Coates' point. His point, I think, is that our world has this blueprint that can makes some people feel uncomfortable in certain situations with people of color (and/or makes people of color feel uncomfortable with all these unspoken, subliminal things going around), and these same people tend to use the defense of still being a "good" person when what they're actually doing is racist. It's just a cold, hard truth, and ignoring that only makes it worse. It doesn't mean that white people don't suffer from reverse discrimination, too, but that's not an argument worth having or winning. Any type of discrimination like that is awful. But what you cannot avoid is this: It happens more to people of color than it does to white people. Sure, this is a generalization, but try to tell yourself it's not true. It just doesn't work. Ignoring the history of our country is a very scary thing to do.

Seriously. Think about Coates' statements: "...it haunts black people with a kind of invisible violence that is given tell only when the victim happens to be an Oscar winner." Or, "I am trying to imagine a white president forced to show his papers at a national news conference, and coming up blank. I am trying to a imagine a prominent white Harvard professor arrested for breaking into his own home, and coming up with nothing. I am trying to see Sean Penn or Nicolas Cage being frisked at an upscale deli, and I find myself laughing in the dark."

I saw this video a while back and it was terrifying:



I'm not even entirely sure what the point of my post is. I know there are also myriad examples of Irish, Italians, Polish, Jews, and so many other folks being discriminated against; Hell, even lots of Southerners get lumped into one big "racist South," which just isn't true, down to the person, either. Thinking there's an easy answer (or even just one answer) is naive. But I'm certainly not trying to make this a competition. All I know is I was moved to write all this down because of Coates' piece, and I think what's so moving about it is that he's still trying so hard to be compassionate and forgiving, even with the burden of history all around him. I cannot imagine how hard this must be. You can feel his utter desperation in those last sentences, "And right then, I knew that I was tired of good people, that I had had all the good people I can take."

I cannot blame him for feeling that way, and his honesty is so powerful. Even me sitting here writing all this down feels somehow self-indulgent. But I think it's important. Please don't give up. There are some truly Righteous people out there from all walks of life and, to paraphrase my man J.R.R. Tolkien, they are eternally worth fighting for.

One very sexy anecdote

I recently wrote a little piece for a cool series called Living, Breathing History that a good friend of mine moderates on his blog, From An Unknown Indian American. It's called Any Single Impact and is just begging for your eyes to look it up and down.

Also here's another song:

Rhytidectomy

Felt like it was time to give the blog a good scrubbing and face lift. Time for something warmer. Except the cool fonts I picked in blogspot's create-a-blog-o-page thing are showing up as very uncool fonts for a split second before reverting to the right ones. It kind of looks like it's making the post titles Comic Sans, which...jesus. No idea why it's doing that, or if I care enough to try to sort it out. But, Comic Sans...oof.

So, let's forget about it and listen to a song:

[update!]: the quick wrong font doesn't look like comic sans on all web browsers, apparently just on my dumb work PC. Haven't figured out what the deal is, but I have discovered that I don't care, for now. This has been Melvin Ralsh with a worthless UPDATE. But here's another great song:

Choice, Compassion, and David Foster Wallace

I recently found this introduction David Foster Wallace wrote for The Best American Essays 2007 and, like all his stuff, he manages to cover so much ground in one piece, and follow a line of thought further than most. It's also really interesting to me because I've also recently stumbled on some retroactive critiques of DFW that deride his fiction for lacking faith in character and story-telling, or--in really odd, severe criticism--lacking heart. Which is really weird to me. It makes me wonder if they've really read the man, or if they just rely on what certain Deciders have said about him. If you've read Infinite Jest and don't find little Mario Incandenza to be the most amazingly compassionate character whose story is moving, deeply sad, and hilarious, I think you might need to get your heart and soul checked out. And Mario's just one of dozens of characters in the book.

It's nearly impossible to look at his writing now without seeing it through the lens of his 2008 suicide, an event as powerful as a black hole pulling in almost everything he accomplished in life. So with that in mind, this introduction can seem even more earnest, and maybe it is--it's hard to say for sure, but either way it's beside the point. In this piece, there's so much compassion for the modern, every minute struggle of turning all the information that gets thrown at us into usable, practical knowledge. His writing shows that he was living that struggle, just like everyone else, without ever talking down to us or seeming to push some self-interested agenda or pretense. This is incredibly difficult to do.

Here's a couple neat snippets:

"You can drown in dogmatism now, too—radio, Internet, cable, commercial and scholarly print—but this kind of drowning is more like sweet release. Whether hard right or new left or whatever, the seduction and mentality are the same. You don’t have to feel confused or inundated or ignorant. You don’t even have to think, for you already Know, and whatever you choose to learn confirms what you Know. This dogmatic lockstep is not the kind of inevitable dependence I’m talking about—or rather it’s only the most extreme and frightened form of that dependence." [This is just in a footnote, by the way]

"Part of our emergency is that it’s so tempting to do this sort of thing now, to retreat to narrow arrogance, pre-formed positions, rigid filters, the ‘moral clarity’ of the immature. The alternative is dealing with massive, high entropy amounts of info and ambiguity and conflict and flux; it’s continually discovering new areas of personal ignorance and delusion. In sum, to really try to be informed and literate today is to feel stupid nearly all the time, and to need help. That’s about as clearly as I can put it."   

Thoughts on irony from a real human

Maybe it's just me, but it seems like there are articles written like this NY Times Opinionator column every 5-10 years, basically by someone who's grown up and tends to look at their own past too nostalgically, seeing in current 20-to-30-year-olds something that their generation did just slightly better.

Of course I'm sort of biased myself, being at the tail end of my 20s. The article is so smart in many ways, and its overall idea of taking an honest self-inventory and cultivating sincerity is an excellent framework. But the details of this column are quite odd. In a lot of places, the writing is completely blind to what I like to call basic real-human thought. Apparently this columnist did not throw up when her friend used the sentence "Wherever the real imposes itself, it tends to dissipate the fogs of irony." Did he also adjust his bow-tie and speak without moving his lower jaw? And I don't mean that entirely sarcastically/ironically.

I think we have a columnist who is occasionally a victim of over-intellectualizing and over-generalizing. If you haven't figured it out yet, I don't tend to be a fan of those things. Right out of the gates, first sentence: "If irony is the ethos of our age--and it is--then the hipster is our archetype of ironic living." What kind of a sentence is that anyway? Why start with an If that you're just going to turn around to say isn't an If at all? But I won't get too bogged down in sentence structure. How has this author figured out that 'our Age' has just this one ethos and its corresponding archetype? After rattling off her idea of exactly what a hipster is--apparently anybody who homebrews, rides fixed-gears, listens to records, and plays trombone (??)--she eventually gets to why irony might be so pervasive: "Life in the Internet Age has undoubtedly helped a certain ironic sensibility to flourish. An ethos can be disseminated quickly and widely through this medium."

The ol' Internet Age argument! If we're going to stereotype what a hipster is, how about I go ahead and use another stereotype: anyone who uses the phrase "In the Internet Age" is probably almost 40, or older than 40. If an ethos can be disseminated quickly and widely, doesn't that suggest that there might not just be one over-arching capital E-Ethos anymore? Take a peek at the Internet sometime; you can seriously find absolutely anything, and you can also find swarms of people interested in it. Practically everything has a niche and a way to flourish.

She's certainly not wrong that the ironic, sarcastic persona exists--and maybe in excess, though it kind of seems like there's an excess of everything right now--but she speaks of this persona like it's some wildly new thing to be newly feared. She even notes that her own memory might be over-nostalgic, but just rolls on and somehow remembers the 1990s as seeming "relatively irony-free." Hundreds, possibly thousands of comedians would beg to differ. Then there's the head-spinning sentence, "The Grunge movement was serious in its aesthetics and its attitude..." The very idea of using the words "grunge", "aesthetic" and "movement" in the same sentence is kind of hilarious. Doesn't it seem like any real movement ends as soon as writers, critics, professors, etc start trying to find a way to classify and label the movement? Then, she references David Foster Wallace near the end of the column, talking about how he was part of something called a "New Sincerity movement" and, I think, tries to link that "movement" to an "attempt to banish irony." I wonder if she read DFW's 1993 essay E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction. Irony has been pervasive in U.S. culture since the end of WWII, the introduction of broadcast and then cable TV, and sitcoms. Does our columnist remember M*A*S*H? What about David Letterman of the late 80s and 1990s (when he was quite good)? Or any sitcom from like 1970 onward that featured a snarky, self-loathing, ironic character? Basically, if you want to read about the intense U.S. history of irony, meta-referentiality, generational gaps, and so many other things, read DFW's essay, because it's far more comprehensive and doesn't try to tell you how to live. Where he talks about broadcast and cable television influencing U.S. fiction, you can pretty much substitute the Internet and extrapolate further. Wallace wasn't nearly trying to banish irony; nobody in their right mind would. But he was keenly aware of the dangers it presented if not used in balance with direct, real emotion. The best writers display this idea so well. It's never just good vs evil, or ironic vs. sincere, and so on. Everything's always been mixed and blurred; now we have 24/7 access to it all.

The column's penultimate paragraph is the most interesting and most disappointing part: 

"What will future generations make of this rampant sarcasm and unapologetic cultivation of silliness? Will we be satisfied to leave an archive filled with video clips of people doing stupid things? Is an ironic legacy even a legacy at all?" 

What about the rest of Youtube's archive that is incredible? Sure, there's a ton of crap on Youtube, but I can also watch an entire hour-long 1966 set of Thelonious Monk in Norway. A lot of this stuff comes down to personal choice, so instead of cataloging "How to live...", what about "How to sift through layers of bullshit." That'd be kind of awesome if the NY Times published that headline. It might turn a younger generation on to interesting intellectual thought. Or, where's the Why in the column? Why do deeply ironic people seem to have what she earlier calls "a deep aversion to risk...cultural numbness...emptiness and existential malaise." Maybe that could help figuring out why so many folks fill their computers with "stupid" videos. Could part of the problem possibly be that some folks in older generations seem dead-set on telling younger generations how they ought to do things?

I don't know what the answer is to cultural numbness, but I'm pretty sure it's not an article called "How to live..." And for someone who found sincerity in the "Grunge Movement"--a generation of folks who rejected being told how to live--you'd think our columnist would understand that this kind of writing only makes young people feel more alienated, more numb. 

Real Heroes

It is possible to love words a little too much. I had started writing this yesterday as a reflection on Veterans Day, and got warped into a rabbit hole vortex of wondering whether it sounds too joyous to say that we "celebrate" the day, a day where probably a lot of Veterans reflect on buddies who didn't make it home. Then I started thinking about the word Hero, about what it really means and how it gets flung around so much it starts to lessen the true meaning. But then I couldn't really come up with just one tried and true meaning of a Hero anyway, and also thought about how probably most Veterans don't like to think of themselves as Heroes. Most veterans I've spoken to, the ones who made it back home, use the word Lucky more than anything else.

I was thinking too much about words and the various subjective meanings everyone applies to make things fit neatly into whatever they're talking/writing about and my head started spinning.

Then I thought about how words can suddenly shrink down and feel totally puny when put into context with Action. It's not that words are meaningless--far from it--but sometimes they take a little bit of a back seat. Words are the way the story gets told, but they can't capture the essence of certain things, these universally huge things that we have important words for, like Sacrifice, Courage, Valor, Honor, Duty, Country. These words get close but still don't quite capture It (whatever it is), and it's hard to know how to feel let alone what to say.

I finally realized I should just write about a couple moments in my life where I truly understood what I idolize in certain people.

My Dad is a 1968 West Point graduate. He and my Mom married in June of '68, and from what I understand Dad was sent more or less straight from West Point to Vietnam. Of all the incredible stories I've heard about his service, two moments truly stand out for me:

1. Joining Dad at a West Point class reunion at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in DC, and shaking the hand of man who told me, "Your father is a good man. He saved my life." I'd never heard that story before, and Dad would never say that he saved another person's life, even though that appears to be exactly what he did. I bet what he'd say is that he did exactly what any of those other guys would have done for him.

2. Going through my parents' record collection one holiday, pulling out Simon & Garfunkel's Bridge over Troubled Water LP, and listening to Mom talk about how she used to listen to that record, and the title song in particular, and pray for her husband to make it home safely. It was already one of my favorite records, but now I truly save it for sacred listens, imagining the power that song must have awakened in my mother, helping her hold on just a bit longer. When I really think about it, it shakes me to my core.

***

At my grandma's funeral this past September, there were so many incredible older photographs I'd never seen before. But the one at the top of this page made me need to sit down for a bit and think about the It (whatever it is) I was talking about above. That photo is of my grandpa (on my mother's side) in uniform with my grandma and their first child; it was his first time with his wife and first child after coming home from Okinawa.

***

Driving around Somerville yesterday I remembered that Sgt. Henry O. Hansen Memorial Park is just down the street from where I live. Hank Hansen was born in Somerville, Mass. in 1919, graduated from Somerville High and joined the Marines at age 18. He was killed at Iwo Jima, apparently by a sniper while being treated for wounds, on March 1, 1945; he was 25. (Both the book and movie Flags of our Fathers, and the Japanese counterpart Letters from Iwo Jima, tell the incredible story of this battle and all the subsequent drama that played out, and are definitely worth checking out, by the way). I'm not sure if it's attributed to Sgt. Hansen, but either way the inscription on a piece of granite in the memorial captures It:

When you go home

Tell them for us and say

For your tomorrow

We gave our today.

There are so many other men and women out there just like these folks, and you're not likely to read too much about them, which I submit is not an accident. A journalism professor of mine at Richmond told me that, "for the most part, the people you read about in newspapers are people who want to be read about. It's the quiet folks who have the way more powerful stories inside them." 

It's very easy to talk superficially about things like Selflessness, Sacrifice, Valor, Courage, etc. It's quite another thing entirely to truly Give Yourself Up for Something/Someone Else, even if that something else is unnameable. Putting mere words and feeling into Action and embodying It takes Power on such a different level that, I think if you have that power, the thought of turning it into a story simply does not register. That's for somebody else to do.  

And that's the best part: Thanks to folks like the ones I mentioned--trust me, I simply believe deep down that there are so many others just like them, and they are very quiet and very amazing people--thanks to these people, most of us won't need to define It; putting It into the perfect wording isn't necessary. All we need to do is try our best to Remember as often as possible.

Back, Jack

Ohhhhhh yes, the blog. Back here for a little dance, I am.

Still writing and writing the ol' Novel, which now has a title: Last Night with the Holy Ghost. Should be ready to post a short excerpt from the first draft soon.

My newest band The Most Americans have just about finished recording our first album, and we just released two tracks mixed by Pretty & Nice's Jeremy Mendicino. You can stream and/or download for free on either our Bandcamp or Soundcloud pages. We'll be at O'Briens in Allston, MA Friday Nov. 16--dig it!

Pretty & Nice also just released a new EP called US YOU ALL WE and it's got my drumming DNA, and even a little vocal appearance, all over it. That above link will take you to iTunes, or you can get the vinyl, or a cassette, or go ahead and stream it at Spotify or Rdio. Look out for a full length LP sometime early next year. I made an adult decision and got myself a full-time job at a hospital this past July, which I'm very much enjoying, but it bittersweetly means I'm not P&N's touring drum-man anymore. But hey, that's life. You make strong decisions and don't regret them because regret is a little thing I like to call fucking poison.

I'm also reading Infinite Jest for the second time and it's even more remarkable this time around. If you're reading it, make sure to avoid the people who ask, "Oh, I've heard of that but is it actually any good?" I dunno man, why don't you calm down and just READ.

 THIS, though, is just incredible.

Next up after IJ is J. Robert Lennon's new book Familiar.