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Frey Factory

Lately I’ve acquired the habit of reading before bed. Though in the back of my mind I worry that its sedative properties signify a lack of interest, I do it anyway. My book of the week is a big, bad Gothic horror novel, Uncle Silas. I must admit it is at times a bit dull. After all, my sensibilities are 21st century, not 19th century; a book can’t be wholly exciting all the way through. But then suddenly a ghost appears and I’m trilled all over again.

Last night I made the mistake of putting my novel down and reading this article right before I turned the lights out, which was a big mistake. It bothered me so much that I laid awake for hours. It’s an exposé written by a Columbia MFA student who, along with her fellow classmates, was propositioned by the disgraced writer James Frey to write the next big YA novel. I didn’t exactly know which fact disturbed me more, the very existence of the Full Fathom Five factory or the very fact that anyone in their right minds would give their ideas away to such an opportunistic man. In the article, you’ll find its disgraced subject possesses a rather pedestrian taste in literature, especially in what he finds to be “transgressive.” He comes across as a rather cocky human being with nothing but good things to say about himself.

Most of all, it’s a sad, depressing look into the reality that writers face these days. However, it was good to have stumbled upon an alternatively hopeful message.

Wisdom from The Log Lady

“As above, so below. The human being finds himself, or herself, in the middle. There is as much space outside the human, proportionately, as inside.

Stars, moons, and planets remind us of protons, neutrons, and electrons. Is there a bigger being walking with all the stars within? Does our thinking affect what goes on outside us, and what goes on inside us? I think it does.

Where does creamed corn figure into the workings of the universe?
What really is creamed corn? Is it a symbol for something else?”

– The Log Lady

21st Century Stoicism

Part 1: Twenty-First Century Stoic — From Zen to Zeno: How I Became a Stoic
Part 2: Twenty-First Century Stoic — Insult Pacifism
Part 3: Twenty-First Century Stoic — Stoic Transformation

I have, on more than one occasion been described as being stoic. Meaning, I am able to bounce back from emotional trauma with speed. Of course this isn’t always the case. When things burn, they burn deeply inside of me and never want to let go. But for the most part, I endure many aspects of life “without hardship.”

But the above series of blog posts tells the story of one man (whose book I have yet to read…That’s going on the Wishlist this year for sure) who endeavors to “endure without hardship” the philosophy of the Stoics. He writes about three main aspects of living Stoically:

1. Negative Visualization, in which he contemplates the loss of the things in front of him. In doing so, you tend to appreciate what you have and especially who you have around you. No writing sappy songs about how you never told your loved ones how much you love them. Or, more simply, appreciate that your coffee maker made it one more day without breaking — you couldn’t say as much for the last one that died 6 months into its life.

2. Insult Pacifism, in which you don’t re-act when someone insults you. The cast of the Jersey Shore would surely fail at this one. Yet the funny thing about insult pacifism is how well it works. Your detractors will be taken far, far aback when their insults are ignored.

3. Greeting Life’s Curveballs with Glee. This one has mostly to do with #3, but is a non-social phenomenon. If we don’t react, one horrible traffic jam at a time, we’ll be better equipped to deal with genuinely bad news. (“Your headache is something a little more menacing, sir. I’m afraid we’ll have to operate.” This one might be the biggest lesson of them all.

So is it possible to live Stoically in the 21st century? William B. Irvine seems to think so. But if you follow his instructions, you may find the reactions of those around you to be a bit funny. What do you mean he doesn’t hate his beat-up ’97 Honda? Surely the author doesn’t mind these whispers. The transformations going on inside are good enough to make up for it.

Halloween at Storm King

Enter if you dare!

You amateurs and your costumes. Don’t you know that we who possess morbid imaginations can find something frightening in almost anything in “real” life? Take for instance, Storm King Art Center, a sculpture park in the Hudson Valley, disturbingly far away from the city that we love and cherish. David and I spent this Halloween afternoon there. After the jump is our story, told in pictures. Continue reading “Halloween at Storm King” →

RIP Ari Up


Though I wouldn’t have had the chance to see the original lineup of The Slits, I always heard about Ari Up’s rambunctious live shows. Allegedly she played at the Fireside Bowl in the early 2000s to a crowd of 30-odd people. This video is a preview of what I could have witness. [[[Kicks Self]]]

The energy and creativity that she put into her music was incredible. And this song goes through my head on a almost daily basis while walking down Bedford Ave. But this is not the place to comment on that. RIP, Ari Up.

Rachel Zoe is pregnant!

Last night I made the acquaintance of a reality TV producer. He told me the story of his ascent to the big time in a rather “Southern” way. That is to say, he told it with the utmost in confidence that what he was saying was of interest to me, the listener. I don’t mean that to be insulting; I find Southerners to be enrapturing speakers, raised by a tradition of patient storytelling. As a point of comparison, many Midwesterners find the need to communicate that which might be of use to the listener. Out of humility, we tend to keep our life stories to ourselves. But it has been my experience that when given an open ear, the Southerner will take it as an opportunity to tell his or her life story with passion. Buying a quart of 2% milk can sound interesting from the mouth of a Southerner.

The problem is, I don’t watch TV, so I was in a sense, a dispassionate listener. In fact, the consumption of more than 1.5 hours of TV makes me feel exhausted. As much as white people love to brag that they don’t even own one, I honestly can say that I don’t care about those people I see on the cover of those magazines you buy in the impulse aisle of the supermarket. I know some of their names (Snookie? Kim Kardashian?) but I don’t know their stories because I don’t watch their shows. They have, in a sense occupied our brains with their lives. “They’re just like us!” we observe.

I imagine an imaginative storyteller having an experience while picking up a quart of 2% milk at the supermarket. They might see an elderly woman struggling to get around a group of babbling hipsters (“These people these days are so rude!”). Or maybe the imaginer talks to a pregnant woman and finds out that they are neighbors (“Oh, this sweet little lady lives right down the street from us!”). Inspired (or angered), they go to the checkout counter with their quart of milk and they see the new US Weekly. The cover story: Rachel Zoe is pregnant! The story inside the magazine: Watch Rachel Zoe at the supermarket! She’s just like you!

Somehow Rachel Zoe becomes just as important as the pregnant neighbor, or just as sympathetic as the elderly woman. In the eyes of the storyteller, she is a “friend” of his, being “just like him.” So instead of telling his own story, he simply lives vicariously through his favorite reality TV star. She has, in a sense, taken over his imagination. Of course I’m not giving the shopper enough credit. He may go home and tell both stories, but my fear that it is that Rachel Zoe’s that has become the more compelling of the two. And, of course, her story is more compelling, being a glamorous fashion person to the stars or whatever.

The value judgment here is that TV requires little to no imagination. I know that’s not true, with Shows White People Like such as Mad Men and, um, Mad Men. There is “great writing” out there, somewhere. Maybe I simply have not bothered to find out about it. One of these days people are going to start to realize that our reality binge is getting old and we’d rather see a sitcom about an alien that’s landed in a living room in Los Angeles and decides to become a fashion consultant to the stars. Or maybe a family of aliens that fight over whose baby daddy slept with who. After getting too ridiculous, TV will then go back to Rachel Zoe Redux. Until then, we’re stuck with part one.

The Hanged Dog Owner

This morning I picked The Hanged Man card. The keywords of The Hanged Man are “Sacrifice”, “Halt”, “Not Choosing”, “To Wait”, “To Delay”, “Suspension”. Normally I would invite such activities. I find reflection and meditation to be important towards my health and well being. The problem? David and I are going to the Meet the Breeds dog show at the Javits Center today. There will be 160 breeds of dog all in one place.

If you know me, you know that I’m preoccupied with owning a dog. My parents always thought that the big city of Peoria, Illinois was no place for one, in spite of the fact that we owned a huge (albeit unfenced) backyard. I wanted a Golden Retriever. I wanted one so badly that at one point I cut and pasted photos from a Zillions exposé on dog adoption to the bulletin board in our kitchen. There were photos of dogs with captions from kids saying “I felt good that I was saving an animal’s life.” I attempted to give them the silent treatment so that they would take me to the kennel. But to no avail; “The city’s no place for dogs, Brad.” Cruelly, they gifted some sort of dog paraphernalia every year for my birthday until they knew I had given up my begging: a statue of a Golden Retriever, a card with a Golden Retriever on it, a book about Golden Retrievers… But never an actual Golden Retriever.

And now that the moment has arrived for my childhood dreams to come true, I pick The Hanged Man card. Naturally my mind asks, “What does this mean?” Surely I should think long and hard about the responsibilities of owning a dog, but I already have. I realize that I’ll have to sacrifice a few happy hours in order to get home to let the little friend get some exercise. I get that part of it. Maybe it means that I’ll fall in love with a Pekingese or a Chihuahua in spite of finding small dogs annoying? Or maybe a cat is really the way to go? Maybe I’m more of a cat person? Given that New York City apartment rules are much kinder on cat owners, I may find it easier.

But of course The Hanged Man card has another meaning. In the familial drama of the major arcana, he symbolizes the son, suspended in air, waiting to be born. In my case, The Dog Lover, waiting to finally get what he’s always wanted. I knew there was a reason I pulled it.

Vengeance will be yours, 12-year-old Bradley, or, When I realized that it had gotten better

“I think people need it — trouble… I think people need trouble, fret, a little frustration, to sharpen the spirit or toughen it. Artists do; I don’t mean you have to live in a rathole or gutter, but they have to learn fortitude, endurance; only vegetables are happy.” – William Faulkner, 1950

—

With all of the publicity out there regarding teen bullying, I thought that I couldn’t let this moment pass without sharing how and why I discovered that it had in fact, gotten better.

Though my teenage years were mercifully bully-free, I did receive my fair share of taunts in or around the 6th and 7th grades. I went to a middle-upper class Catholic school comfortably situated on Peoria, Illinois’ north side. For the most part our school didn’t perform well athletically, but that didn’t stop kids from participating, soccer being the sport of choice. I made an attempt at joining them, really not out of desire to fit in or even out of any vague interest, but just because that was what you did. Being a rather “full” kid myself, I was always put in the position of fullback, making sure that the quicker, skinnier kids didn’t get past (what I had been brainwashed to be told to have been) my large shadow. Painfully shy about my body, I was, during one especially traumatic practice, forced to play on the “skins” team. It was that moment that I decided to give up sports for the rest of my childhood, promising myself that I’d never be forced into such a humiliating situation again.

Once the other boys started realizing what gender norms were all about, they must have started to notice that I didn’t talk, act and walk like them. Though I was adequately smart, I was not exceptionally so. Besides, being smart at my school wasn’t a strike against you. That I was rather “expressive” that must have caught them off guard. I liked playing with the girls much better, and while it provided me with a shield from bullying for a time (“Oh, Brad’s such a pimp!”), after awhile they started to catch on. But no one in my grade ever seemed to bother me; it was the older kids who would call me names.

“Faggot”, “Big Boy”, “Fag”, etc, were all the exceptionally creative names that they called me. And there was one bully in particular who seemed to have been the leader of the pack. Let’s call him Bob. Bob was the class clown. Everyone thought that Bob was just the funniest person on the planet, including, as I painfully observed, some of my best friends. One morning I arrived late to a school assembly after auditioning for the solo of “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” in the spring musical. Without looking at where I was sitting in the full auditorium, I took a seat right in front. Much to my chagrin, I was sitting right in front of Bob and his cronies. Throughout the entire assembly, they flicked the side of my back, saying “Hey guys! It jiggles!” They talked to me in that effeminate voice that they always used when calling me by the name that they had given me — Big Boy. (It’s OK to laugh, I understand the dark comedy of it all.)

After that class had graduated, most of the bullying had stopped. Thankfully, Bob had gone to a different high school. High school was a remarkable place — no one seemed to care about anyone else. Though I do remember during the Freshman mixer, a future friend of mine (and, it turned out, a fellow astrology enthusiast) found himself to have been the object of a taunting version of “Y.M.C.A.” with the lyrics altered as they were at a Yankee’s game in 2006 — “Why are you gay?!” Upon reflection, I realize that many of the taunts are the kids “acting” as if they are gay, in a rather, well, gay fashion. Bob would act gay so as to tease me, but, seen psychoanalytically, I would say that he was in fact acting out a fantasy, one where he were the gay one.

So, as per zeitgeist, I would tell my bullied self that it does, in fact get better. Thankfully, I never wanted to kill myself as a kid, but if I were to tell my 12-year-old self anything I would share two future antidotes:

1. At the age of 19, you will meet one of Bob’s ex girlfriends (with Bob…this will make your blood boil) outside of a Death Cab for Cutie show in Chicago. You will then learn some news that will erase all the pain that he’s ever caused you: He never wanted to have sex with her. She concluded that he was “probably gay.”

2. At the age of 27, you will have signed up for this new invention called Facebook. In a rather masochistic moment, you will search for Bob to see if any of your friends are friends with him (mostly to see if he’s either gay or fat, if you have gotten your vengeance). You will then find that, out of profound self-realization, Bob decided to go as Hitler for Halloween last year.

Dolly Mixture

I have started to notice life here in New York is beginning to come full circle. People are beginning to crop up that I haven’t spoken to since 2005 (not on Facebook, in real life). A company that I used to work for solicited David for his business at work. And now the soundtrack of my later college years gets a reissue…

I first discovered Dolly Mixture in a flurry of classic post-punk self-education. I had long since consumed anything with the descriptors “jangly” and/or “girly” in a manner nothing short of voracious, but Dolly Mixture had somehow escaped from notice. I know now that they held their 1983 record Demonstration Tapes in obscurity as the holy grail of post-punk records (there were only 2,000 copies of this double album pressed, hand-signed by all three band members). I was told that Demonstration Tapes would go for hundreds on eBay, a fact that appealed to their sense of rarity. Though I had the record collector bug in me for about 5 months of 2004, I hadn’t much interest in hunting down a copy.

So I did what any 21st century music geek would do: I went on SoulSeek and downloaded it. Once I copied it to CD-R, it hardly ever left my discman. The songs were immediate, infectious. The songwriting was of extraordinary quality, nearly matching that of the record that it modeled itself after. The fact that Demonstration Tapes was never a hit struck me as an impossibility. And if you ever received a mix CD from me during that time, surely you heard “Will He Kiss Me Tonight?”, a song that I later learned to have been a cover. And with time I learned more things about the band: a St. Etienne connection, a band called Birdie, whose record I bought during my aforementioned Twee Period and enjoyed immensely. The fact that I couldn’t connect the vocalist escapes me. But then again, I can be pretty oblivious.

But much to my delight, the soundtrack of the years 2003-2005 has come back to me. (With bonus tracks!) And what strikes me for the first time are the the lyrics. I always loved the line “I know my way down the side streets now / Away from the places that you walk.” Who doesn’t have a Side Street route? But now: “So many moments gone / Lost in days that pass so carelessly / If each one had a song / Hear the first few notes and suddenly / I could remember things recorded until now / Reach out and catch the sound / Before the world has turned around and taken it away.”

And of course, I’m glad they recorded them.

[Nahh!] Boo Kov

This weekend I finished my first Nabokov book. I suppose my mental loins were never fired up due to a certain disinterest in anything too “exposed,” or anything that my peers held in too great of an esteem: every 20 year old seemed to love Nabokov. This I took as a sure-fire indication that he was “easy” to read, therefore beneath my intellectual standards. I have become much lighter in my old age, and while I’m not quite at this point yet, I do find that my snobbery has largely waned. I will, as it stands, read almost anything.

So the Top 100 Readers’ Favorite Books table at The Strand is fair game. And Lolita beat out The Sound and the Fury as the book that I wanted to stop saying that I had never read (along with a glowing review from a friend whose opinion I hold in high regard). So, I started and finished it with an eagerness and obsession that I can only summarize as one that, as you gather, has inspired me to start a new blog. “So good it’s bloggable” may be the correct modern expression. It’s filled with beautifully obsessive language that asks its reader to consume obsessively. Accessible? Sure, but I imagine most readers missing the point back when it was published, much like many people miss the point of my favorite movies. It’s a case of the artist being understandably mis-marketed. After all, why wouldn’t the publisher find it lurid, pornographic and morally depraved? Humbert Humbert was, of course, a sick man. A spade’s a spade. And my pretensions of it being “easy” were completely unfounded. This book is among the best literature I’ve ever read.

Besides walking around Park Slope with my ailing beau, I also helped a friend out by being an extra in her movie. The shoot was all the way uptown near Columbia University. Trekking from Park Slope to Morningside Heights is no easy feat. But it does enable one thing — undisturbed reading time. As I made the journey up, I was fully aware of the power that my book could have in keeping people away from me: antisocial behavior that Humbert Humbert surely would have approved of (if he had seen his “self” as precious as his dear Lolita). But no one thought much of me and my book. Surely they’re aware of the significance?

But, I realized, no one notices anyone on a crowded train here in New York City. A thought that used to somehow comfort me I now find unnerving. But on I went, finishing my book in relative peace. And yes, I will be reading more in the future.