In Praise of the Bizarre, or, Why Tom Waits Will Save Us From The Nazis and Save My Soul

I don't know if I've ever told you this before, but I really like Tom Waits. Yes, I know that's a little like saying I like... um... cake*... but it is, nonetheless, true. Tom Waits has been a part of my life since high school, and if I were to fill out one of those "Which Albums Have Shaped You?" Pick 5's on Facebook, Rain Dogs would have to be on my list. But what keeps me amazed about Waits is how, almost ten years after I first started listening to him, he keeps surprising me with the both the depth and breadth of his art.

OK, wait, let me backtrack and explain to you why I'm telling you this now.

So you know that I've been reading Gogol lately, and, yesterday, I finally got around to reading The Nose, of which I had heard a lot about, but have never before read. And, kind of to my surprise, what it reminded me the most of us was not Kafka but rather Woyzeck by Georg Büchner. It was the sense of humor, I think, the slapstick, the kind of naïve peasant sensibility with which the narrative unfolds.

But what really struck me about The Nose was the manner in which the main character, Kovalyov, goes about the streets of St. Petersburg, in search of his AWOL nose, and throughout, he tries to find someone to blame for us bizarre predicament, from his barber to his doorman to the mother of a young woman whom he had been courting. But there is nobody for Kovalyov to accuse for his situation; not that he can be necessarily faulted, either, but the point is that this is just something that happens, that, you know, sometimes your nose just runs off your face and becomes a state counsellor for the Russian government.

I'm sorry, that was a long sentence.

But it brings me to Woyzeck, which, as you know, will eventually get me back to Tom Waits. And then to Heidegger.

Woyzeck has the same kind of desperate, slapstick frenzy that characterizes The Nose.** Woyzeck is shown as being a kind of victim to doctors and soldiers, but in the end, he doesn't have somebody upon which to lay the blame for his sense of victimhood. And how does that end? Well, he murders his wife and then kills himself. So, yes, he ends up much worse than Kovalyov, but they both run into this obstacle of having an anger and a frustration to vent and not being able to find anyone upon whom to vent. It's a form of impotence, of course, but also an example of something that we see even today in our post-existential world - you feel angry, and deeply, deeply wronged, but, in the end, there is nothing to stand there to act as an object for your anger.

Which is why we get shit like Mars Hill. And Nazis. Horrid, horrid, Nazis. That is, groups that invent a target for their rage when they cannot find one in this world.

Which gets me back to Tom Waits.

My second favorite Tom Waits album is Blood Money, which Waits wrote as a soundtrack for Woyzeck.*** Of course, I only learned this years after I had bought the album and read the play. But the fact that Tom Waits has such a deep and committed appreciation for this strange and fractured play says a great deal about his ideological standings. Which is why I love him. Woyzeck, like The Nose, is a story about one man, one very flawed, ridiculous man, trying to find something approximating justice in his world, and, in the end, failing miserably. And for Tom Waits, this is a kind of hero worth memorializing in song. Beyond that, Tom Waits has devoted his entire career to cultivating an ideology directly opposed to the kind that is celebrated by the SA; an alien and an outsider that has perhaps become a kind of a trope in today's irony obsessed white middle-class culture, but one that, I think, will be important to remember during these coming times of woe and want.

For evidence of this, I direct you to Tom Waits' IMDB page:

1. (2010) (post-production) .... Engineer
   
   
2. The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (2009) .... Mr. Nick
   ... aka L'Imaginarium du Docteur Parnassus (France)
3. Wristcutters: A Love Story (2006) .... Kneller
   ... aka Pizzeria Kamikaze (International: English title: informal title)
   ... aka Pizzerija Kamikaze (Croatia)
4. Domino (2005) .... Wanderer
   ... aka Domino (France)
5. Coffee and Cigarettes (2003) .... Tom (segment "Somewhere in California")
   
   
6. Mystery Men (1999) .... Dr. Heller
7. Short Cuts (1993) .... Earl Piggot
8. Coffee and Cigarettes III (1993) .... Tom
   ... aka Coffee and Cigarettes: Somewhere in California (USA)
9. Dracula (1992) .... R.M. Renfield
   ... aka Bram Stoker's Dracula (USA: complete title)
10. At Play in the Fields of the Lord (1991) .... Wolf
11. The Fisher King (1991) (uncredited) .... Disabled veteran
12. Queens Logic (1991) .... Monte
13. The Two Jakes (1990) (uncredited) .... Plainclothes Policeman

The Fisher King. Coffee and Cigarettes. The Two Jakes. Fucking Mystery Men! Even in his film career, which, I might remind you of, is his secondary career, Tom Waits has crafted an oeuvre of distinctively independent characters with distinctively unique aesthetics.

I'm tired now, but my point is this: That embracing the absurdity and ridiculousness of life is key to resisting the impulses of resentment, entitlement, and anger that lead, well, maybe not to fascism, but to the kind of attitude towards life that encourages violence and the oppression of others.

That is, that the world would be better and more full of pirates if only everyone listened to Tom Waits.


*Which I don't, really, unless it's carrot cake.
** And Crime and Punishment, although that novel, in my opinion, is lacking insofar as it is not nearly as darkly comic.
*** Blood Money is also the album I was listening to when I drove my mother's car into a tree. So, you know, score one for Tom Waits.

My Summer Reading List

The weather has finally become a bit more Summer-y this week, and we're finally supposed to hit ninety degrees on Friday. So, yes, soon that lovely cold and rainy season will become the much expected hot and muggy season, making the next three days the only "nice" weather that we'll have until September.

This meteorological shift has inspired within me a desire to get back into that old hobby of mine called "reading." I have enough time on my hands these days, God knows, and R.A. is always coming home from the bookstore/ library/ rummage sale with new books in her clutches, and so I often end up picking up the books that she has just finished, many times after she gets too frustrated trying to talk to me about something that I haven't yet read.

Therefore, without (much) further ado, and to kinda coincide with my summer movie list, I present a partial list of books that I have either read, am reading, or will read this summer:

Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri.


This is one of those aforementioned books that I read after R.A. finished it in order for us to be able to talk about it. We have seen the movie "The Namesake," based on Lahiri's novel, although I haven't read that book (yet). Interpreter of Maladies is a collection of short stories that Lahiri wrote for her M.A. thesis at Boston University and then went on to win the Pulitzer Prize in 2000. Most of the stories revolve around the lives of immigrant Indian families in the U.S., or around the tensions between generations of Indian-Americans. I really, really liked this book. I especially liked how each of these stories seemed to be a reiteration of the same story over and over again, with slight modifications in the characters and settings. It gave the book a sense of being both a complete and whole piece, while also existing in time as a work in progress. It actually made me think a little bit of Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, although I think I prefer Interpreter of Maladies because it deals with real people and not with crazy, surrealist Italian hallucinations.

Short Stories by Nikolay Gogol

Speaking of crazy, surrealist hallucinations...

So I'm reading Gogol for a couple of reasons. The first was because Lahiri's protagonist in "The Namesake" is named "Gogol," and I thought that knowing more about the Russian writer would give me some additional insight into the story. So far, it hasn't. However, the second reason is that I wanted to resurrect my tradition of reading Russian lit during the summer. From 2004-2007, I read a Dostoyevsky novel each summer (The Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, Demons.) And then, last year, because I suck, I stopped. I tried replacing Dostoyevsky with Henry James, but it too me, like, eight months to finish The Golden Bowl, and besides, stories that so often take place in London sitting rooms while everyone drinks tea and has long soliloquies about the rain outside ought to be read between January and April. On the other hand, I feel like stories about opium induced madness and suicide and about your nose leaving your body and usurping your identity are best read during the dog days of summer, as they will help with the night sweats and fever dreams.*

Wicked, by Gregory Maguire



OK, so I am probably the last person in the world to have read this book. And, even though I'm only about a quarter of the way through it, it is pretty awesome. My favorite thing about Wicked is the political intrigue; I have always been in awe of authors, especially fantasy and sci-fi authors, who can create a society that has believable and realistic political issues. On one level, Wicked makes me laugh at the absurdity of the class conflict between the Munchkinlanders and the Gillikinese and the constant debating over whether or not to expand the Yellow Brick Road. But then they become real, important issues that I care about very deeply. I think that the epitome of this kind of construction of a real and yet imaginary politics is Frank Herbert's Dune, although that series becomes so wrapped up in the theology and metaphysics of its universe that it loses sight of what makes it initially intriguing to the reader, those issues that apply categorically to all people of every class, creed, and ideology.

By which I mean fighting over water rights.

*Help in the sense of making them weirder and more terrifying.

My Summer at the Movies!

Well, it's July. More importantly, it's the 4th of July weekend, which, as everybody knows, means not only that you have the patriotic duty to blow off one or more of your digits and/or limbs, but also that it's the official start of the Summer Blockbuster Season. I have yet to see any movies at all this summer, and, while many of these fine films have already been out for a month or more, it is only now that I have been getting the urge to go out and see any of them. So, without further ado, I present to you a brief list of the big Summer Sizzlers that I may or may not be enjoying this month with a ginormous tub of artificially flavored popcorn and a 64 oz. Dr Pepper:

Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen



Few film reviews have given me as much pleasure as the ones for Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen. The critics absolutely hate it, and they're being driven especially mad by the fact that it grossed over $109 million on its opening weekend. Apparently the movie just doesn't make any god-damn sense at all. Even looking at that still above, it's kind of hard to tell what's going on. As Colin Covert of the Minneapolis Star Tribune says, "I've just spent 2 1/2 hours watching a movie and another hour thinking about what I saw and I have no earthly idea what "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen" is about." I think that Mr. Covert stumbled upon a hidden truth about this movie and its appeal later in his review when he says, "The conflicts make about as much sense as sandlot battles fought by 8-year-olds wielding their Hasbro Megatrons, Starscreams and Optimus Primes." I remember playing those games as a kid, and it always made me so mad when the other kid would suddenly announce that Optimus Prime had a billion a-bombs hidden in his arms and was using them to nuke all of my guys pkkksshhhk-ABOOOM!!!! Those weren't the rules. (I would be interested in reading a study on the differences between children who establish and follow rules during playtime and those who willfully disobey them.)

But if you want to read the real nasty stuff about "Transformers 2," I suggest that you head over to Roger Ebert's column. I am one of those many people who believe that there is a special spot in Hell reserved for Micheal Bay, perhaps one where he is tied to a chair and forced to watch BBC period pieces for all of eternity, but Roger Ebert has a much more intriguing place for Bay: In history:

The day will come when "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen" will be studied in film classes and shown at cult film festivals. It will be seen, in retrospect, as marking the end of an era. Of course there will be many more CGI-based action epics, but never again one this bloated, excessive, incomprehensible, long (149 minutes) or expensive (more than $200 million). Like the dinosaurs, the species has grown too big to survive, and will be wiped out in a cataclysmic event, replaced by more compact, durable forms.

Of course, this interesting observation doesn't prevent Ebert from lashing out at the film's utter horridness. In particular, he seems constantly vexed by the repeated phenomenon of humans out-running explosions in the film.


Her hair is perfect.

Angels & Demons

On our recent California road trip, we listened to most of The Da Vinci Code on tape. I've actually listened to it before on tape, and I have seen the movie, although I have never actually read the book itself. On this time listening through, I realized a couple of things. First, Dan Brown is a pretty bad writer. He seems to think that every verb necessarily needs an adverb attached to it, so that none of his characters ever just do something, but they always do it sneakily, or bravely, or angrily, or in some other fashion completely in accord with their essential moral character. Also, he is way too into that French chick's eyes. Second - and not enough people realize this - there is no such thing as Symbology. You can't get your degree in it, you can't teach it, you can't give lectures in it. I don't quite know why Brown decided that he needed to make up an entirely new academic discipline for his books. Most of what Robert Langdon does is covered by pre-existing - or, as I like to call them, "real" - areas of study, like Art History or Anthropology.

Third, Robert Langdon is kind of a dick.

But, as for the new movie. I hear that Angels & Demons has a better plot than the Da Vinci Code. Also, I like watching Tom Hanks' haircut solve mysteries.


Does this picture look weird to anyone else? Like, Audrey Tautou has some Mona Lisa-shaped growth coming out of her head, and it's about to kill her and assume her identity? No? Just me? Hmmm... maybe I should lay off the Russian Lit for a while....

Public Enemies

Honestly, this is the only movie on this list that I would be willing to spend ten bucks to see right now. This happens everytime too; just when I think that I'm beyond Hollywood's lame marketing techniques, someone in the studio says, "I know! Johnny Depp in an old-timey gangster movie! Joel would totally pay to see that!" Damn you Hollywood!


Yes! That's it! That's what cool is!

But the real reason why I'm listing it here is that I have a personal reason to go see it, too. One morning, about a year ago, I was leaving my friend's apartment in Lincoln Park after a good night of drunken debauchery*, and decided to stop by the CVS to buy a pack of cigarettes. I turned on the corner of Lincoln and Fullerton, and suddenly came upon this scene:



This is a picture from the set of Public Enemies outside of the Biograph Theater on Lincoln. I had unknowingly wandered on the set, surrounded by people dressed in 1930's outfits, driving 1930's cars, standing outside of 1930's buildings. I'm pretty sure that no one was filming, because I went unhassled for over five minutes. Then I realized that the entrance to the CVS had been blocked, and that the CVS had been changed into a "National Food Store and Pharmacy." Thwarted, hungover, and confused, I gave up, walked back through the time warp, and boarded the Red Line home.

* R.A. thinks that I don't need to add "drunken" here, because that's implied by the term "debauchery." I told her that the alliteration of "drunken debauchery" makes my brain happy. Then she said that the Romans considered alliteration to be the lowest form of poetry. I told her that's because they were writing in Latin. Then she said that rhyming in Latin was for idiot children.

Notes From the West Coast

I'm sorry about the long delay. R.A. and I got back last night from a ten-day trip to the West Coast, which included San Francisco, a wedding in Bodega Bay, two days and a Shakespeare play in Ashland, two nights in Bend to do the laundry, a visit to my sister and brother-in-law (and dog) in Hood River, and then a morning flight out of PDX. Pretty whirlwind, actually, and I probably could have done with a little less time in the back of the truck. But we got to see a lot of California via car, which is my favorite way to see it, and we even got to see the Sacramento Bird and Wildlife Refuge.

Throughout the entire trip, R.A. and I kept coming up with fantasy scenarios for our future. We'll move to San Francisco, start up a small publishing company, publish the works of all our friends and other obscure poets and Wittgensteinians. R.A. will get her Ph.D. at Berkeley, and I'll help raise money for the local nonprofit dance and ballet scene. We'll buy a ranch outside of Sebastapol, buy some llamas and raise and breed corgies to pay the mortgage. We'll rent an old cottage on the outskirts of Ashland, attract a following of young university students and teach them all a new religion that contains elements of Voodoo Catholicism, the mythology of the Shasta-Achomoawi Indian tribes, and A Midsummer Night's Dream. At night, we'll go out and rob graves in order to open a portal to the underworld and undo all bonds forever.

Probably shouldn't have told you that last one.

"The Owl Doctor":

The prairie falcon made war on the northerners and was killed. Coyote claimed to be a medicine man and was the first to doctor him. He was merely a pretender who wanted to obtain pay. Then others, all owls, doctored him. Hihina, the large owl, sodut, the white owl, wedjiji, the ground owl, and hihimcha, the small owl, were the ones who doctored him. It was the white owl that cured him.

Hawk is skeptical of this plan.

We Should Invade Indiana

I am such a dork. I think that this ad, by Nike, is the coolest thing ever:



It combines my appreciation for baseball, crazy-made up maps, and early American history. I especially love how most of the West - including Eastern Oregon - is still "unincorporated territory." Also that the White Sox country is completely surrounded by the Cubs. (But since when did the Cubs colors include orange?)

Sadly, with the Lakers up 2-0 now, I have turned my full attention to baseball. Of course, that hasn't been much better for me, with the ChiSox playing like a bunch of lollygaggers so far this season.

And even the early promise of a Kansas City - Pittsburgh World Series has faded, with the Yankees, Red Sox, Dodgers and Phillies all rising to the top of their respective divisi0ns. I am probably in the minority when I say that a Royals-Bucs final would be good for Major League Baseball: Two older franchises, with strong histories but who haven't won in a while, two struggling, mid-west cities that could use the marketing and economic attention, etc. But, no. Everyone in the front offices at the MLB just want the big money match-ups. Thinking about it, I think the following is the ideal situation for MLB in terms of viewership:

NLDS: Mets vs. Cubs, Dodgers vs. Phillies
ALDS: Yankees vs. Angels, Red Sox vs. White Sox
NLCS: Cubs vs. Dodgers
ALCS: Yankees vs. Red Sox
WS: Yankees vs. Dodgers

Of course, I'm sure they wouldn't mind a Cubs-Red Sox Series. But with NY-LA, you're guaranteed to get that West Coast viewing market.

So with that in mind, I proudly present the worst possible match-ups:

NLDS: Rockies vs. Reds, Pirates vs. Nationals
ALDS: Mariners vs. Rays, Royals vs. Orioles
NLCS: Rockies vs. Pirates
ALCS: Rays vs. Royals
WS: Rockies vs. Royals

(Sigh) A boy can dream, can't he?

I Want to be a Paperback Writer

Every now and then, when I'm roaming the aisles of a Borders or a Barnes & Noble, I come across one of those promotional aisles for new fiction. They're usually prominently displayed, and are arranged in a style of "if you liked X, then you'll love Y!" Most recently, these shelves have been stocked with various Twilight ripoffs, like Chosen: A House of Night Novel:

Or Frostbite: A Vampire Academy Novel:

These kind of generic brand drugs are sure to be able to ride the coattails of the Twilight books just enough to sell oh-so-many copies as to be profitable. This kind of false branding is as old as advertising itself*, but it's only been since the Harry Potter books that I began to notice it in publishing. But this model of book-making isn't nearly as exciting as what I like to call the "Frankenstein" method of book writing. For example, I just now came across an internet ad for the new bestseller, The Last Patriot, by Brad Thor.

On its Amazon.com product description, The Last Patriot describes itself as follows:

In a pulse-pounding, adrenaline-charged tour de force, Navy SEAL turned covert Homeland Security operative Scot Harvath must race to locate an ancient secret that has the power to stop militant Islam dead in its tracks.

This is awesome. It's like writing your best-seller along the lines of Mad Libs. It's like cobbling together your own book out of the used parts of a John Grisham novel, The Da Vinci Code, and the inside of Glenn Beck's mind.**

I mean, just try it yourself:

In a (adjective), (adjective) (noun), (profession) turned (adjective) (profession) (name) must race to (verb) an ancient (noun) that has the (noun) to (verb) (adjective) (noun) in its (plural noun).

Try this:

In an intelligent, lucid thriller, water polo player turned famed symbiologist Robert Langdon must race to break an ancient code that has the potential to ensnare the corrupt Catholic Church in its lies.

or:

In a brilliant, breathtaking conclusion, orphan turned heroic wizard Harry Potter must race to recover an ancient artifact that has the ability to defeat the evil Death-Eaters in their final conflict.

or:

In a sexy, swashbuckling adventure, ne'er-do-well turned captain Edward Reynolds must race to recover an ancient rod that has the potency to endow the bloodthirsty pirate Stagnetti with the largest saber in the Caribbean.

See? It works for everything.

* And not just in advertising products. In 2004, pro-Russian factions in Ukraine ran Viktor Yanukovych in the Presidential election, partly because his pro-West opponent was named Viktor Yushchenko. The politicians were hoping that the similarity of the two candidates names would confuse voters, and cause many of them to mistakenly vote for Yanukovych instead of Yushchenko.

** I'm not kidding, either. Here is the transcript of an interview between Beck and Thor. (Which, if it had been a conversation between the 90's alternative rocker and the ancient Norse god of thunder, would have been awesome.)

Late-Night Jungian Personality Test

I do this every once in a while. I think it's interesting how it changes over time; five years ago I used to be considerably higher in "judging" and lower in "perceiving."

Extroverted (E) 69.44% Introverted (I) 30.56%
Intuitive (N) 75% Sensing (S) 25%
Thinking (T) 56.41% Feeling (F) 43.59%
Perceiving (P) 63.64% Judging (J) 36.36%

ENTP - "Inventor". Enthusiastic interest in everything and always sensitive to possibilities. Non-conformist and innovative. 3.2% of the total population.

Free Jung Personality Test (similar to Myers-Briggs/MBTI)

I also think it's interesting how big Jung is lately. At Open Court, we receive dozens of unsolicited manuscripts a month on Jung, about how he secretly predicted the end of the world, about how we're all coming towards a singularity in consciousness, about how Jungian psychoanalysis can make sense of Biblical texts, etc. I like Jung, don't get me wrong, but I guess I feel like he lends himself to being appropriated by kooks* and conspiracy-theorists a little too easily. Like those people behind "The Secret" and whatnot.

And Joseph Campbell. I feel like he is coming up all the time lately. Enough already with the archetypes! I get it! Neo is Jesus is Luke Skywalker!

* I initially wrote that as "cooks." Damn those cooks and conspiracy-theorists!