Oak and Acorn 2

Posted on by Harry Ramble
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Holy Communion, May, 1970

I grew up in an apartment building in Little Ferry, New Jersey. Four rooms for the five of us in a featureless, rectangular block of a building that was, frankly, kind of a community eyesore. My father labored nights and overtime for years to get us out of it. Which he did, in 1972, when I was 10.

I can still remember the powerful smell in the halls of that building, an odor comprised of institutional floor cleaner, cooking grease, and the ineradicable olfactory wallop of coal dust from the cellar. The building had been heated by a coal furnace until at least the mid-to-late ’60s and I can remember the excitement of a coal delivery, the coal truck arriving in the rear courtyard and extending a chute into a cellar window at the side of the house, the roar of the coal as it rumbled down the chute into the dark bowels of the building. That cellar was off-limits to us kids, so of course we were obsessed with it and were forever devising new sneaky ways to gain access to it. The identical apartment building next door to ours, occupied entirely by elderly people without kids, was another frequent target of our trespassing schemes.

Us kids. That’s another thing I remember. The tenants in the other apartments were all families with kids. When you were banished from the apartment (“Go out and play! And stay out of trouble!”), you went out to the back steps or the front stoop and found your friends from the other apartments already there, loitering, trying to come up with a plan of action. “Whaddeya wanna do?” “I dunno, whadda YOU wanna do?”

When we weren’t daring each other to sneak into the cellar or the building next door, we were playing “stoop ball,” a game that involved bouncing a Spaldeen off the brick steps and into the street, where fielders were forever calling “Time out!” to let cars pass. We also played “running bases” in the alley between the apartment buildings, a game that was exactly what it sounds like: two bases and two kids throwing a ball back and forth while runners attempted to steal bases by eluding rundowns.

By the time I was eight, I was pretty much free to roam the streets of Little Ferry. There was a small municipal strip of grass up the street that we used for football, and a parking lot one block over where we’d play “box ball” or whiffle ball. Around this time, too, the tiny borough was constructing a new school and municipal hall, both of which provided endless opportunity for exploring and carting away cast-off building materials. When we were older, we rode our bikes around the streets of town. I spent a lot of time across town at the Little Ferry Public Library. Mostly though, we sat around and kept up the endless call and response: “Whaddeya wanna do?” “I dunno, whadda YOU wanna do?”

Very little of our day was supervised or organized by our parents. We had school, we had Little League in the spring, and some of us were Cub Scouts. Otherwise, we were left to our own devices. There was no notion at all of our parents structuring our activities or keeping us entertained. We were expected to “Go out and play.” At dinnertime, my mother would go out to the second floor porch of our building and call us home. On summer weekends, my father would pack us up into the family station wagon and take us west to Shepherd Lake or to Lake Hopatcong, where we owned a plot of land on which he would eventually build our house.

Holy Communion, May, 2011

Forty years later, my children are eight and eleven and neither has permission to leave our property unattended. This state of affairs is absolutely fine with them. There’s very little time for wandering around and nowhere to go, anyway. In our neighborhood, young kids aren’t roaming the streets unsupervised. They aren’t showing up at other peoples’ doors, uninvited. “Go out and play” has been largely replaced by “scheduled play dates.” My son Owen, who is eight, cannot ride a two-wheel bike. It isn’t that he doesn’t have the aptitude or opportunity (he’s already had three bikes). It’s just that there’s little utility in being able to ride a bike. Where would he go on it?

My daughter, eleven years old, has had her own stable circle of friends since pre-school daycare days. Her days are a constant parade of scheduled activities, lessons, play dates, summer camp. She has her cellphone (texting, but no Internet access). She has a facility for forming friendships within the context of her activities, and those friendships seem to last over time. Owen’s relationships with kids his own age seem less fully formed to me. He seems to get on fairly well with the kids he’s placed in social situations with (his basketball team, summer camp, his therapy groups), but those relationships are very compartmentalized. They don’t exist outside the context of that specific group or activity. It occurs to me that Owen depends, to a very large extent, on his parents for entertainment, for social interaction, for simply having something to do. Abby does, too, though she’s older and has more options.

I don’t know that all of this is a bad thing. When I was a kid, we had a lot of empty time on our hands. We got into a lot of trouble. We broke things. We fought with each other. We bullied others and were bullied back. We experimented with things (playing with fire, trespassing, stealing) that would merit full-scale teacher/parent/coach/therapist interventions these days. But we were also cast, unguided and unobserved, into situations that we had to make sense of ourselves. It was understood that there were certain things we would have to learn on our own.

There’s less of that now. Sometimes when I see Abby or Owen loitering around the house, clearly waiting for me or my wife to entertain them—to tell them what to do next—I wonder if they’re worse off for it.

Related: Oak and Acorn

 

The NFL Owners’ Lockout Lunacy

Posted on by Harry Ramble
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So this is what it has come to: The NFL now has a plan on the table for an 8-game season. If the current labor impasse lingers through the summer, the plan is to start an 8-game season in mid-November with jury-rigged rosters and unprepared players. Woo-hoo! Are you ready for some football?

 

Meanwhile, the NFL owners, who instituted the current lockout in an effort to claw back $1 billion or so in revenues off the top of the now-expired Collective Bargaining Agreement with the players, now find themselves in the comical position of suing the players for dissolving their own union, the NFLPA.

 

Usually, management and unions are dire enemies. Unions, as we know, represent socialism and gulags and the death of the All-American Free-Market Way of Life. Ask all those public school teachers in Wisconsin.

 

Not in the NFL, though. In the NFL, it’s the owners who are the socialists, instituting restrictive salary caps, a player draft, and reserve clauses on younger players. The last thing in the world the owners want to see is a lot of free-market malarkey going on, with players coming out of college and selling their services to the highest bidder in a marketplace unfettered by arbitrary spending caps. Because, you know, Matthew Stafford might not want to play in bombed-out Detroit, and Cam Newton might want to play in state-income-tax-free Dallas or sunny San Diego. Hakeem Nicks, meanwhile, might not want to be calibrating his earnings potential in terms of how much money is left over under the cap after the linebackers get paid.

 

The players’ union, it turns out, is the only thing standing between the owners and the termination of the NFL’s antitrust exemption. If the owners can point to an agreement in good standing with a players’ union, they get to keep their socialism. If the players are all free agents, bargaining individually, the owners don’t get to collude in rigging the marketplace from top to bottom.

 

So why would the owner’s risk their cozy deal? The players, after all, were content to merely keep the terms of the present Collective Bargaining Agreement, an agreement that has coincided with an unprecedented period of prosperity leaguewide, with increases in salary caps indexed to increases in team profits, as reported by the owners themselves.

 

Here’s why: Because the owners wanted that billion off the top. Why? Because they say their teams are bleeding money and in danger of bankruptcy. “Really?” say the players. “Okay, let’s see the books.”

 

“Well, we’d really rather not,” say the owners. They have that right; all the teams are privately owned except the Green Bay Packers. (The Packers, a tiny-market team publicly owned by its fans, has to show its books every year, and is doing just fine, profitwise, thanks.)

 

The rest of the owners would just as soon the players take their claims of poverty at face value, however. Hey, building stadiums is expensive, when taxpayers won’t build them for you. There’s only so much TV money, and concessions money, and licensing money to go around. Of course, if the teams were losing money (or were merely only modestly profitable) the owners would be falling all over themselves to open their books. In fact, opening those books would reveal not only that the teams are doing just fine, profitwise, but that they’re also benefiting from profit streams not subject to the Collective Bargaining Agreement.

 

Some people would (and do) argue that the NFL owners are entitled to anything they can get. It’s their league, after all. But if that’s the case, maybe it’s time those same owners tried their luck in a real unfettered free market, red in tooth and claw.

 

Oh, and while we’re on the subject, John Mara, President of the impoverished NY Giants, has some Personal Seat Licenses he’d like to sell you. If “Coaches Club” seating ($20,000 for the PSL, then $700 per game for each actual game ticket) is a little pricy for you, you might consider a seat off in the distant, drafty reaches of Mezzanine B (just $7,500 for the PSL and a mere $400 for each game ticket). Seats are available, but hurry!

 

It’s The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)

Posted on by Harry Ramble
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It’s been so long since I’ve listened to radio that most of the preset buttons on my car radio are set to rock stations that no longer exist. Lately, though, I’ve been revisiting the airwaves, listening to 94.7 FM Family Radio on the way home from my sunset runs along the Jersey shore.

 

More often than not, the sound I hear when I tune in is that of pages being turned. The page turner is 89-year-old Harold Camping and he’s seeking out a Bible verse cited by a caller to Camping’s nightly call-in show, “Open Forum.” Each caller is allowed one question about a verse in the Bible, which Camping answers in a dry, dignified, unhurried monotone. When his answer is concluded, Camping says “Thank you for your call to Open Forum,” and another caller comes on the line.

 

Driving in my car, I’m thinking to myself, THIS is the guy who’s predicting the end of the world is at hand in a matter of days? THIS is the guy who’s putting up billboards everywhere that say “Judgment Day Will Occur May 21, 2011” and “The Bible Guarantees It”? You’d think he’d be bringing a little more urgency to bear on the subject. The first night I tuned in, I was bracing myself for some hectic, over-emoting, fire-and-brimstone, Bible-thumping scourge.

 

But Camping never raises his voice; he never changes his cadence. He addresses every caller in the same mild, scholarly tone. If a fawning fan calls to gush over Camping’s wisdom and saintliness, Camping reproves the person gently for not having a question and moves on. Outright cranks who call up to taunt Camping get the same treatment. The producers of Open Forum urge callers to stay on the line, because every call is answered, and that seems to be true. The producers don’t seem to be screening anybody out at all.

 

Camping’s approach to the Bible is very literal and, in some cases, mathematical. He never philosophizes about events or statements in the Bible. He never makes a show of trying to draw his own conclusions. He believes it is a sin to speculate about the thoughts or intentions of God. The words, he likes to say, are right there in the Bible; extra commentary is unnecessary. The programming on Family Radio reflects this mindset. You get a lot of studious, matter-of-fact content like “Beyond Intelligent Design,” “Positive Parenting,” and Camping’s own Bible Study shows. There’s very little sermonizing or inspirational showbiz on the daily schedule.

 

This mindset, combined with the May 21st End of Days theory (a theory which is based on Camping’s own mathematical computations as they relate to passages in Daniel, Revelation, Peter, and Ephesians) sometimes leads to unintentional comedy on the show. Camping steadfastly refuses to bring any drama to the impending End of Days, but still he finds that many aspects of his show are being rendered moot. Noting in an aside that callers are allowed to place just one call to the show per month, Camping pauses and then adds, “Since we have just three weeks of earthly existence left, you should make your next question an important one.” When a caller weighs in about her faithless husband and the bible’s injunction against divorce, Camping cites the relevant passage, but then can’t help but add, “With the End of Days just two weeks away, your husband will never have the opportunity to gain a legal decree of divorce.” Some callers check into Open Forum and try to offer Camping a way out. What will it mean, they ask, if the End of Days doesn’t occur on May 21st? How can we account for that? But Camping won’t take the bait. It’s a sin, he says, to even consider the question.

 

You want more certainty and less ambiguity? Camping’s your man. This may be unsurprising, I guess, from a man whose background is in civil engineering and who made his living for decades in construction. Camping is not an ordained minister of any sort. He is “a full-time volunteer employee of Family Radio, serving as President and as General Manager.” He has stated that all organized religions are apostate and must be abandoned by those who hope to be saved. This perplexes and aggravates mainstream religious leaders, who see Camping as, at best, a nut and, at worst, a charlatan of some sort, running a scam.

 

They may be right about the nut part, but if he is a nut, Camping is a very interesting and specific sort of nut. Organized religion is the province of careerists and showmen. Careerists focus on the science of keeping the collection plates moving. Showmen know that the key is to keep the show uplifting and vague on the specifics; keep the flock happy and expectantly hoping for some happy day just over the horizon out of sight. Camping’s approach negates this strategy utterly. Why pass a plate when the end is at hand … right … now?

 

It also leaves no viable exit strategy. What if Camping is wrong? He’s been wrong before, in the pre-social-networked year of 1994, when you could be wrong in relative privacy. Two strikes will most likely put a damper on his syndicated empire. It’s increasingly unusual in our hyper-media-linked world to see a public figure stake such a large bet on such an unlikely—and imminent—outcome. Everyone’s out there hedging their bets, everyone’s spinning their message, managing their image. Not Camping.

 

This is Camping’s appeal, I think, to the devout followers who call into his show and paint/decal their cars with Camping’s apocalyptic message. They tend to be working class people, people for whom there appears to be less and less future every day. People who are told that pensions, unemployment benefits, health insurance, and real wages are too expensive, too much to expect. People who are accustomed to hearing vague, open-ended promises from their politicians and ministers. Something good will happen, they’re told, but later. Not today. Be patient. In the meantime, give me your vote, your dollar.

 

Camping’s brand of religion is one that doesn’t require an ill-defined leap of faith. His truth isn’t allegorical or symbolic. You want the truth? Look out your window. It’s all happening on Saturday! For more and more people in America, living hand-to-mouth and losing the battle, another week is about all the future they can afford.

 

Cellar Dwellar Weekend

Posted on by Harry Ramble
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The first thing that strikes you is how small these college dormitory rooms are. Maybe twelve feet across by sixteen long. Two desks, two dressers, two beds gobbling up the square footage. One long partitioned closet along the back wall, a window along the front wall. Concrete block walls that I remember, even now, stored up the heat of September and the cold of February and radiated it out at you through the long nights. How did we live in such close proximity to each other in such spare rooms?

 

We seem cartoonishly large in these narrow confines, conscious of using up too much oxygen. Scott cranks open one of the tall side windows that flank the broad center window. He sits back down and we grin at each other like fools. Mike is here, a Cellar Dwellar from before my time, and Carolyn, too. She arrived with me. We’re trespassing, of course, but Bob let us in. He has worked for the university since the day he graduated from it. Later, Bob’s son Bobby, who will graduate from Rutgers next year, will stop by. It’s the Saturday before Memorial Day 2010, a few months shy of thirty years since I first arrived here at Livingston College.

 

We’re sitting in Room 3701, Bob and Scott’s old basement room. This is the room where we hung out all the time, the communal hub of our Cellar Dwellar lives. (Yes, that’s how we spelled it, -ar not -er.) Indeed, we spent so much time here that it was not all that uncommon to enter the room and find three or four people there watching TV, none of whom had seen Bob or Scott, or knew where they were. The door to 3701 was always open; somebody was always there.

 

My room, in my first year at Rutgers, was down the hall, 3704. In my second year, I moved upstairs to the first floor. I had four roommates in those two years as a Cellar Dwellar. Looking back on it now, I think, It was all too much. We were kids who knew nothing about college that we hadn’t learned in the previous year’s hit movie Animal House. I never knew any highly motivated people with real career aspirations at Livingston. I don’t think I ever knew anyone with a coherent plan. Livingston College itself was only eleven years old in 1980, a formerly experimental school founded on vaguely progressive ideals that had already fallen into disrepute amid the rise of Reagan.

 

My first roommate in freshman year, Rich, lasted two months. We’d grown up together in Hopatcong, but proved a spectacularly bad fit at college. Dickie moved downstairs into my basement room when Rich left. I’d also known Dickie in Hopatcong, so the transition wasn’t difficult. Dickie’s Mom and Dad would pick up Dickie and his dirty laundry every Friday at 5pm and bring him back (with clean laundry) on Sunday evening. Dickie lasted for the rest of freshman year, but he liked his privacy and applied for a single-occupancy dorm room in sophomore year. I also suspected that Dickie never entirely forgave Werner (one of our Cellar Dwellar neighbors) for an incident in which Werner locked Dickie in his own closet, then doused him with bug spray and tossed a series of lit firecrackers into the closet. This was Werner’s idea of a good joke—and Dickie was an affable, easygoing guy, slow to anger—but there are limits.

 

I roomed with JD at the beginning of sophomore year and his tenure, like Rich’s, lasted only two months. JD and I forged a friendship based on our propensity for being the only two people still up at 4am, drinking beer and looking for something to do. Once, we got into JD’s car and drove, drunk as skunks, all the way into lower Manhattan where we waylayed early-morning pedestrians—immigrant workers in the West Side garment and meat-packing districts, mostly—asking them where the after-hours parties were. No one would tell us. JD worked a night job and had some trouble at home; his academic career was a short one. He packed up his stuff and left in November, before Rutgers could throw him out.

 

I say I had four roommates in these years, but really I had five. I met Carolyn, a Middlesex County College freshman taking secretarial classes, at the Cumberland Farms store where we both worked as cashiers. After JD was gone, I would bring Carolyn up to my room, where we’d push the two beds together, open and eat various canned goods from Cumberland Farms, and generally be delighted with ourselves. Having so much privacy was a great revelation to us. This must be, we thought, how adults live.

 

Our idyll was interrupted in February, when Livingston College administration finally noticed that JD had disappeared and Conrad showed up at my door. Conrad was a Jamaican transfer student and state-champion-caliber track athlete. He was provided by the University with a series of student tutors, a different one each week, always women, who never failed to fall into bed with him before their week was out. Everything I said and did—everything anyone said or did—was a source of great merriment to Conrad. He had a great silent laugh that shook his entire enormous frame for minutes on end. On his rare visits to the Cellar, he would sit with Dickie and they would get stoned and laugh silent laughs together, then laugh at each other laughing, then laugh some more. When April rolled around, Conrad would pop cassettes of obscure dub reggae into my Soundesign shelf stereo, turn the treble knob to zero, the bass and volume knobs to ten, and point the speakers out the windows.

 

By that month of April 1982, we knew the end was at hand. Bob and Scott were fifth-year seniors, left with no option but to graduate. Werner and his roommate, Mitsuo, were graduating, too. The girls from the upper floors of House 37—Janet, Hanna, Diane, Julie, Joyce, others whose names are lost to me now—were moving off campus or transferring out of Rutgers. There were plenty of earlier Cellar Dwellars, like Mike, who were already gone before my time. And that doomed Class of 1984, all those freshmen of 1980? Well, we were a decimated bunch. By 1982, many of us had left or been thrown out. And I was next.

 

Looking back at it from this vantage point, perched on a bare mattress in Room 3704 thirty years later, it looks like a different world, one that is hard to imagine now. There were parties every weekend, usually on our floor, but sometimes elsewhere. We had a Tuesday Night Drinking Club that involved sitting around play drinking games to all hours of the night. When we weren’t drinking in the dorms, we were out at the Livingston College Pub or the Busch Campus Pub or the bars in New Brunswick—Patti’s and the Corner Tavern, the Knight Club and the Ale & Wich. On any Friday night, you could walk through the Livingston College Quads and easily spot two or three loud, raucous parties going on. It was the way we lived. No one—at least no one we knew—regarded it as unusual or wanted it any other way.

 

The biggest party of the year was Cellar Dwellar Weekend, at the end of April. It started on Friday, sometime after lunch and ended on Sunday night/Monday morning. We’d stockpile countless cases of beer, point the speakers out the windows, blast the music, and hang out in the rooms of House 37’s basement and on the grounds outside the basement floor windows. People from other floors, other houses, other campuses visited and left, visited and left, over the course of the weekend. The doors were always open, the party was ongoing. We played touch football and threw frisbees. We fought like dogs, made up magnanimously, then fought again. We played outrageous pranks on each other. We tried—and failed—to have sex with the same girls who rejected us every other weekend of the year. We organized and carried out drunken road trips for more food, more beer, more ice. On Livingston campus, noise violations were virtually nonexistent. Kegs of beer were permitted in college dorms until 1982. (When they were finally prohibited, Bob, who preferred bottled beer to kegs, made a point of bringing kegs in, just to flout the new law.) We drank beer, we fell down, we rallied, we came back for more.

 

Harry, Scott, Bob, Mike. Thirty years later.

In April of 1982, I knew I was a goner. I had survived at Livingston College via an unusual means. Every class I finished, I got an A for the term, so I was carrying about a 3.80 GPA. But I was dropping classes left and right, mostly at the absolute last-moment deadline for drop eligibility, eight weeks or so into a semester. There were few or no computers in Records Hall in those days, so if you dropped a class, a professor signed your drop slip, a clerk took it in Records Hall and dropped it into an out basket. The wheels of administration ground very slowly, and it might be an additional three weeks or more before you got a letter in your campus mailbox telling you to vacate University housing because you weren’t carrying enough class credits. But then spring break would come up and then exams and no one would actually show up to evict you. My two years on campus looked like this, creditwise: 12 credits, then 5 ½, then 13 and 4 ½. My last 1 ½ credits were for some bogus Easy-A thing called Cowboys and Indians. It was a night class, so I never showed up and never took the exam. The professor gave me a B+. Why a B+? I have no idea. It seemed like an awfully specific grade for a complete no-show.

 

Anyway, I knew it was time to either take a leave of absence or get thrown out after one more semester. By then, I had started working four hours a night for UPS. Also, I was signed up for junior year with a fifth roommate, a guy named Dave who we all called Dave the Alcoholic. Earning a nickname like Dave the Alcoholic among a cohort of guys who did nothing but drink all day was no simple task. Dave earned it by showing up at his first Cellar party with a fifth of vodka, which he proceeded to drink from as if it were a cup of beer until he passed out in the hallway one hour into the party. His drinking habits had shown little sign of abating or evolving in the months that followed. We had come to the conclusion that we would room together, during one hours-long drunken discussion in March, despite our mutually certain conviction that, if we were to room together, one or both of us would surely die.

 

So it was time to go, though I wouldn’t tell anyone of my decision until July. If I took a leave of absence, I could simply check back in after a year. If was thrown out, I’d have to reapply to get back in. In the end, I took a year and a half off and returned in January of 1984. I never lived on campus again. I would take another semester off in 1986 and graduate in December of 1987. I didn’t attend my graduation ceremony in May. By then, I was working in the marketing department of Hahne & Company and still working nights at UPS.

 

I’d be lying if I said I remembered even a tenth of what happened in those years from September of 1980 to May of 1982. But I do remember they felt magical to me. I fell in with a good crowd at a perilous juncture in my life where I really needed to fall in with a good crowd. Some of those people—Bob and Scott, JD and Carolyn and Rich—are my friends to this day. And though I screwed up plenty, I was still young enough to pick up the pieces and finish the job.

 

On Memorial Day Weekend 2010, we sat on the bare mattresses of the beds in 3701 and raised our beers—because of course we had brought beer, and plenty of it—in a toast to all the absent Cellar Dwellars, most of whom we hadn’t seen in thirty years. We talked and talked some more as the afternoon wound down and the sun set and we had to turn the rooms lights on just to see each other. We laughed our way through all the old stories, remembered who said or did what when, disagreed about the details of events large and small. I was surprised at how much I had forgotten or remembered incorrectly.

 

But I remember this very clearly, a perfect snapshot in time, walking along the concrete path away from the dining hall and back to the dorms on the Sunday morning of Cellar Dwellar Weekend 1982. The only store of any sort on Livingston campus was a little hole-in-the-wall shop in Tillet Hall that sold candy and soda and newspapers. I was walking hand in hand with Carolyn, we’d been up all night, we were drunk and tired and hungover and exhilarated, the Sunday paper was under my arm, we were enjoying the April morning sunshine on our faces, we were going back to House 37 where the previous night’s party was already evolving gradually into Sunday’s party, and I was thinking to myself, Look around. Look around! See all this. Remember this. You were happy here.

 

(Blogger’s Note: Many thanks to Bob and Scott for the pictures herein.)

 

 

 

No Cheers for Democracy in the Middle East

Posted on by Harry Ramble
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A funny thing happened this week in the midst of America’s 10 Year War to Bring Democracy to the Middle East. Inhabitants of an actual Middle Eastern dictatorship took to the streets, yearning to breathe free and all that stuff.

In Egypt, which has been ruled under “Emergency Law” since 1967, no one runs against President Hosni Mubarak, the rule of law is what Mubarak says it is, the Egyptian “parliament” exists to do Mubarak’s bidding, all media is state controlled, and the government has the right to arrest anyone it wishes to, for any period of time, for virtually no reason.

The response to the uprising in the US was swift, coherent, and proactive. President Obama announced that the US was in total solidarity with the protesters, who merely desired basic human rights and a truly representative government. Former President George W. Bush and former VP Dick Cheney descended on the network news shows, declaring a new Egyptian front in the War on Terrorism and characterizing the Egyptian uprisings as vindication of their efforts to gain freedom for all citizens of the Middle East. War hawks in the US Congress—patriots like Joe Leiberman who have been calling for all-out first-strike war against Iran for a decade—immediately called for sanctions against Egypt’s totalitarian rulers and demanded that the US military be put on full alert to intervene on behalf of the besieged protesters.

Ha, ha! No, wait. Just kidding.

In fact, the response of the US government—a pained silence, followed by a limp plea for order to be restored on all sides—tells you all you need to know about America’s real intentions in the region. On Thursday, laughable Vice President Joe Biden insisted on PBS’s NewsHour that Mubarak should not be forced to step down, that the protestors were “middle class folks” looking for “a little more access and a little more opportunity,” and that Mubarak was a US ally and “very responsible.” “I would not refer to him as a dictator,” Biden concluded.

Tell that to the estimated 17,000 to 30,000 Egyptians currently imprisoned for speaking their minds about Mubarak’s rule. See, Hosni Mubarak, ruler of Egypt for over 30 years, is our iron-fisted totalitarian friend. He’s not like those bad dictators in Iran, Iraq, and North Korea. Mubarak—like Saddam Hussein, back when he was our hugging buddy—has always known how to play by the rules. Make nice with the oil companies. Look the other way when Israel bulldozes villages and pens up 1.5 million people like human cattle. Buy lots and lots of US-manufactured weaponry on a yearly basis. Pay your bills on time. Retain and entertain a lot of US lobbyists in Washington to make sure your friendly intentions are well known to the likes of Senator Leiberman.

The business of America is business, and war is business, and business is good. “Democracy” is the gaily colored Christmas paper wrapping the hammer that the US uses on dictatorships that step out of line. Membership in the Axis of Evil usually means you’ve done something to piss off the American Chamber of Commerce. Thus, no one in Congress ever champions democracy for Saudi Arabia (an absolutist monarchy) despite the fact that virtually all the 9-11 hijackers were Saudis, many of whom were radicalized at Saudi-financed madrasahs. In the hours after 9-11, the US government swiftly rounded up all the members of the highly influential Bin Laden family then vacationing in the US, put them on planes, and gave them a military escort out of the US and back to Saudi Arabia. At the time, the Bin Ladens had US airspace virtually to themselves, as every US airport was still in security lockdown. The Economist’s 2010 Democracy Index lists Saudi Arabia as the 7th most repressive and authoritarian regime in the world.

Back in the USA, curmudgeonly old lefties with those anti-war “It will be a great day when our schools get all the money they need and the air force has to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber” bumper stickers on their Volvos have been waiting decades for their Democratic representatives to hobble the war machine. But it never happens. The defense budget grows unabated no matter who’s in the White House, no matter who controls either branch of Congress. President Obama loves the Afghan war even more than his predecessor, despite having much less “success” of any kind to point to. As for Iraq, well, we’re never leaving Iraq. Not until we do so at gunpoint, fleeing to the last departing helicopters hovering over the roofs of Baghdad as the oil begins to run out in 2025.

Meanwhile, opposition to the military industrial complex is being heard from a strange new quarter. Incoming Tea Party House members on the far fringe right hate all kinds of government spending, and they don’t distinguish between “good” spending ($250 million F-22 fighter planes that even the Pentagon insists it doesn’t need or want) and “bad” spending (decent affordable healthcare for all Americans). They’re big on George Washington’s warning to “avoid foreign entanglements” and John Quincy Adams’s utopian notion that the US “goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy.” This philosophy, unfortunately, puts establishment Republicans (and Democrats, too) in a bit of a bind. They’re looking to cut some stuff, and the budget for endless war, for them, is on the table. Our new freshman legislators on the right apparently haven’t heard the news about war and business.

To correct this situation, Howard P. McKeon, Republican chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, has been meeting, one-on-one, with his new Tea Party colleagues, to explain the realities of the defense budget to them.

One suspects that these “discussions” can be roughly summed up as follows: “Hi! Welcome to Congress! Love your three-cornered hat! If you’d like to keep your seat here for any length of time, we suggest that you sit down, shut up, keep your hands to yourself, eat your slice of the pie, and grin while you’re doing it.”

Kevin Smith Vs. The World

Posted on by Harry Ramble
1

Sundance Film Festival 2011 is winding down and the big news isn’t about any breakout critics’ darling or big acquisition. The buzz is all about Red State, a movie that received mixed reviews at best and didn’t earn a distribution deal at all.

To be specific, the buzz isn’t so much about Red State, an uneasy mix of horror film and political/religious diatribe, as it is about the film’s director, Kevin Smith. Has Kevin Smith gone too far this time with his fake auction stunt? Is his decision to self-distribute his new film via a whistlestop nationwide tour of personal appearances a viable model for film distribution in the social-media era? Has Kevin Smith burned his bridges? Why is he biting the indie distribution hand that has fed him for years?

The truth, of course, is that Kevin Smith is just doing what he always does. Turning chicken feathers into chicken salad. This is the genius of Kevin Smith.

Has any cultural icon every built a larger empire out of less actual content than Kevin Smith? J.D. Salinger, maybe? Snooki? Axl Rose? Brett Easton Ellis?

Kevin Smith is a media savant and provocateur, producer of comic books and bobblehead dolls, director of music videos and Coke commercials, popular stage performer, Twitter phenomenon, podcaster, and occasional scriptwriter-for-hire (Green Lantern, Superman Lives). The man is everywhere. Even when he’s not somewhere (in his seat for a Southwest Airlines flight, for instance), he makes news. In fact, pretty much the only thing capable of slowing the Kevin Smith marketing juggernaut is the occasional release of a Kevin Smith movie.

Smith has released nine movies, most of which circle inevitably back to the same jokes—fetish porn, Star Wars, lesbians, masturbation, waking and baking—told by the same characters. As a filmmaker, Smith writes a terrific wisecrack, but keeps bumping his head on his creative ceiling. He can’t create characters with believable motives, and he can’t sustain any sort of story arc. Crafting a narrative just isn’t part of his skill set.

Smith knows this, obviously. Even as his revenue streams multiply, he has tried to expand his filmmaking brand. He’s tried romantic comedy (Jersey Girl), Judd Apatow-style zeitgeist gross-out comedy (Zack and Miri Make a Porno), mainstream cop-buddy comedy (Cop Out), and now Red State, all with ever-diminishing results both creatively and financially. So when Smith preempted his own film auction by paying $20 for his own distribution rights for Red State, it seemed pretty clear he wasn’t outbidding anybody else.

Given his lack of crossover appeal outside his rabid cult of fanboys, independent distribution may simply no longer make any sense for Smith. What, after all, does $20 million for prints and advertising really buy him? Ads purchased on the Spike Network and G4 reach an audience that has already been following Red State’s progress on Smith’s Twitter feed for months. Ads purchased in more mainstream media fall on deaf ears. Meanwhile $20 million borrowed is $20 million that must be repaid. If the independent distribution model no longer fits Smith and his brand, then his decision to repackage himself as the revolutionary at the gates of the indie distribution establishment is typically savvy.

Kevin Smith has already announced that his next film, Hit Somebody, will be his last. This could be yet another marketing ploy. If he’s serious, it remains to be seen whether his other revenue sources will continue to grow once he doesn’t have a “filmmaker” peg to hang them from. I wouldn’t bet against him.

Songs For Old People To Dance To: Top 15 Tracks of 2010

Posted on by Harry Ramble
3

Why 15? Because I couldn’t cut five from this list. I’m told that my blog entries are too long, and this is another long one. (I just can’t shut up.) In the old days, when I’d compose year-end mix tapes for whomever I was dating at the time, it was easy to selectively forget tracks that I’d tired of by year’s end and sub them out for edgier, less immediately accessible things that portrayed my musical taste in a more flattering light. Today, however, the iPod is a strictly literal indicator of what its user is REALLY listening to. In compiling this list, (presented here in no particular order), I’ve relied heavily on that last column in the iTunes playlist program under the subhead “Plays.” In other words, it’s all ice cream and french fries this time around. No broccoli.

The Suburbs / Arcade Fire

The Suburbs (YouTube)

I was a long time coming around to Arcade Fire (in fact, I may be walking in the front door just as everyone else is slipping out the back door), but the first single and title track off their 3rd album grabbed me by the ears and wouldn’t let go. A roadhouse piano stomper about some kind of disaster witnessed from afar by emotionally numb lovers on the run, “The Suburbs” kicks off a cycle of insightful, nuanced takes on contemporary suburban living. No small feat.

Little Wig / Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti

Little Wig (YouTube)

Critical darling Ariel Pink spends most of his time on Before Today coming on like a roughed-up, lo-fi Roxy Music or (dare I say it) 10cc. So it comes as quite a surprise when the chunky guitar blare of “Little Wig,” an extended pop-rock nugget that sounds like the Kinks, circa 1966, suddenly booms out of the speakers. I get the rest of the record, with its violins, synths, saxes, and faux-lux sheen, but I’m pretty partial to chunky guitar blare, too. Especially British Explosion chunky guitar blare that gives GBV’s Robert Pollard a run for his money.

Fame / B.o.B

Fame (YouTube)

Yes, hi there, thanks, I know. B.o.B (aka Bobby Ray Simmons Jr.) is hip-hop for white people laying over between flights in airport bars. He is to 2010 what Tone Loc was to 1989. I’m not all that partial to the big hits off The Adventures of Bobby Ray (“Airplanes,” “Magic”), although I should be, given their Gorillaz-like melding of radio-friendly alt-rock hooks and clearly enunciated rhymes. (If this were an album list, rather than a songs list, Gorillaz’s Plastic Beach would be prominently featured.) The only one that really catches my ear from B.o.B’s Adventures, however, is “Fame,” an implacably chugging and insistent mix of buried hook from the titular Bowie chestnut, plenty of woo-hooing back-up girls, and whiz-bang sound samples from what sounds like 70s-cartoon chase sequences. Also, the song’s opening and closing chant, “Pimp squad on deck!”, is exactly what I would chant if I were a 22-year-old rap superstar standing on a table with Kim Kardashian in the VIP area of Tao on New Year’s Eve.

Returnal / Oneohtrix Point Never

Returnal (YouTube)

I have to be careful with the labels I apply to bands. I don’t always match them up quite correctly. There was a time when the pastoral, reverby oceans of noise and feedback exemplified by Oneohtrix Point Never could be classified as space rock. In the ’90s, bands that brought more of a rock beat to their mesmerizing swirls of noise were classified as shoegaze. More recently, as electronica has appropriated elements of this sound, adding even more of a beat to it, the term “electrogaze” has been applied to leading lights of the scene like Ulrich Schnauss and Boards of Canada. All along, of course, there have been more purely ambient acts like Tim Hecker or Windy & Carl. Oneohtrix Point Never exists on the spectrum somewhere between Tim Hecker (or Brian Eno, for us old folks) and Ulrich Schnauss, jetting off into the ionsphere amid blue-shifted wave forms of sound. There. Does that help?

Art House Director / Broken Social Scene

Art House Director (YouTube)

For years and years, everyone’s been waiting for a follow-up to Neutral Milk Hotel’s In The Aeroplane Over The Sea. But now we don’t need Jeff Mangum to come out of exile and unpack his flugelhorns and calliopes and zu-zithers, because we have Broken Social Scene. Comprised of anywhere from six to nineteen members (depending on who’s in town at any given moment), BSS never quite indulges in Mangum’s trademark sonic mayhem. But “Art House Director,” once it’s entirely airborne with its tuba farts, trombone fanfares, whooshy strings and what-all, and has achieved full marching-band forward momentum … well, it’s quite a thing to behold.

Fuck You! / Cee-Lo Green

Fuck You! (YouTube)

This song makes me want to be experiencing a painful, failed relationship just so I can enjoy the song even more. Cee-Lo Green’s voice is an astounding force of nature. It leaps out of your iPod headphones and scares you half to death with its awesomeness. Green (the voice half of Gnarls Barkley) did this exact same thing with “Crazy” in 2006. He creates R&B songs that even avowed pop soul/R&B haters like myself cannot dismiss or deny. I’ve since heard that this song has been nominated for 5 Grammy awards. I don’t see much reality TV or listen to much contemporary radio, so as of this writing, I am blissfully unacquainted with the “clean” version of this song.

Worship You / Colleen Green

Worship You (YouTube)

Everything I know about Colleen Green I learned from track summaries of “Worship You” in Vice magazine and the music blog Altered Zones. Apparently, she’s a San Francisco musician giving away skronky lo-fi girl-group dance punk on her MySpace page and looking for a record label. This song, with its bloomping drum machine, frosty new wave buzz, and dinner-triangle guitar, sounds like Belinda Carlisle backed by Royal Trux and produced by Gary Numan. That means it’s good.

Drunk Girls / LCD Soundsystem

Drunk Girls (YouTube)

Anyone tangentially familiar with my Twitter feed will know that I am incapable of assuming any critical distance whatsoever from James Murphy. Nothing. Nada. Not an inch. “Drunk Girls,” the first single off this year’s This Is Happening, has received approximately 400,000 plays on my iPod since May. If James Murphy wanted simply to create endlessly catchy party anthems with lyric couplets like “Drunk boys, they walk like pedestrians/ Drunk girls, they wait an hour to pee,” he’d still be the finest musician working today. But he doesn’t. In fact, because he spent two decades laboring in relative musical obscurity, it turns out he has plenty to say. About relationships and fame. About nostalgia for the recent past. About your record collection. Where he once deadpanned precision-targeted zingers about club life and media aspirations, he’s now singing with surprising range, couching laments about mortality, busted relationships, and the loneliness at the top amid the grooves of punk/funk/house classic after classic. “Drunk Girls” gets the nod for this list based on its sheer number of iPod plays during innumerable summer distance runs. But really, any track on this record—“All I Want,” “I Can Change,” “Pow Pow,” “Home”—could go here.

Creep / Vega Choir

Creep (YouTube)

This one’s not available on CD, not available on iTunes, but if you’ve seen the trailer for The Social Network, you know it. I’ve never been much for Radiohead, but something about an angelic choir of girls singing Radiohead’s ode to isolation and dread just bowled me over. Vega Choir, based in Malmo, Sweden, is a choir of 25 women, ages 18 to 25, who sing classic pop and rock songs. Works for me. I still haven’t seen the movie (I have kids, I’m waiting for the DVD), but if it’s half as good as this song, I’m going to like it.

Slow My Roll / Kid Rock

Slow My Roll (YouTube)

Anybody heard from Limp Bizkit or Korn recently? Yeah, me neither. The titanic rap-rock breaks and turntable scratching are a distant memory now, but Kid Rock sails on, his marketing savvy and limitless capacity for staying relentlessly “on message” rivaled only by Bruce Springsteen among his arena-rocking peers. Like Springsteen, Rock lived hand-to-mouth on the music-biz fringes for over a decade, then released a couple of non-starter LPs before hitting it big, so he had plenty of time to hone his business instincts. A lot of people who take music very seriously refuse to take Kid Rock seriously, and I can see why. Every Kid Rock record contains at least two of the worst songs released by a major-label artist in that calendar year. But that’s the thing with Rock. He hits big or misses big; there’s no middle ground with him. On Born Free, the biggest bonehead miscue is “Care,” a plea for worldwide brotherhood that would embarrass Elton John. The highlight is “Slow My Roll,” a worldly-wise country-rock loper with chugging guitar, piano, and bevy of harmony singers having a good old time going nowhere in particular.

Seasun / Delorean

Seasun (YouTube)

My fascination with this sort of hazy, smeary, euphoric, vaguely nostalgic dance pop began with 1998’s Moon Safari by Air. Air determinedly avoided remaking Moon Safari for years after its release, and by the time they gave up and tried to recapture its glory, they’d forgotten how. Fortunately, there are now dozens of bands who have latched on to its sound, none more gloriously than Delorean. Seasun is all echoey piano chords, synth twinkles, handclaps, and formless vocal vamping. The perfect thing for the zone-out that occurs between miles four and five of your early-evening run.

Programmed Cell Death / The Extra Lens

Programmed Cell Death (YouTube)

There was no Mountain Goats record this year (The Life of the World to Come arrived in October of 2009), so this collaboration with Franklin Bruno of Nothing Painted Blue is all the John Darnielle we got this year. Darnielle and Bruno have a history going back to the ’90s (including a previous record, 2002’s Martial Arts Weekend), but I’m not familiar with any of it. Undercard, the new one, offers a Mountain Goats-caliber feast of spot-on observations, gorgeous acoustic plucking, back-door epiphanies, and a haunting cover of Randy Newman’s “In Germany Before The War.” I could try to describe “Programmed Cell Death,” a rumination on the meaning of it all, situated by Darnielle in a supermarket, west of the mounds of avocados, near the Portugeuse sardines in Aisle 5, but I’ll let Darnielle do it instead. From his liner note: “Everybody remembers mitochondria, right? The powerhouse of the cell? Well it turns out that the powerthouse of the cell is in the business of sending little messages from within the powerhouse to the other discrete offices of the factory. One of these messages is ‘someday you have to kill yourself, I’ll tell you when.’ Every cell in the body you are presently using to navigate your way through the world today is thus programmed, thus prepared. It’s not that the game is rigged. It’s that the object of the game is something possibly a little removed from what you’d led yourself to believe, unless you are a goth.”

Write About Love / Belle and Sebastian

Write About Love (YouTube)

The only gem on the first disappointing Belle and Sebastian record. Stuart Murdoch’s been streamlining his B&S vehicle for maximum ’70s AM pop sheen for over a decade now, and the candid, earnest chamber pop of the ’90s records seems gone for good. I’m not sure if the decade of the ’10s needs another Cornelius Brothers & Sister Rose, but “Write About Love” is so effortlessly catchy and expertly arranged, I’m helpless to deny it.

Saviour / Teen Daze

Saviour (YouTube)

I’m told that last summer was the summer of “chillwave,” and this is a perfect example of that new genre’s luxe, woozy keyboards, stumbly drum machines, and wistful longing vocals. A digital-only release from bedroom dance-pop auteur Teen Daze, the Four More Years EP sounds all of a piece, like an early-morning-hours rave heard from inside a tent on the far side of a hill from the main stage.

Ain’t Good Enough for You / Bruce Springsteen

Ain’t Good Enough For You (YouTube)

A reissue of Darkness On The Edge Of Town? What could be easier or more obvious? Just pair a remaster of the canonical original with an official release of one of the most often-bootlegged live shows in rock history—the 9/19/78 “Passaic Night” show at the Capitol Theatre. Right? Wrong. Instead we got three watch-’em-once DVDs, a remaster, and The Promise, a collection of outtakes not so much from Darkness, but rather from Tracks, Springsteen’s already comprehensive 4-CD outtakes collection. The result is a 2-CD set that answers the question, How great would it have been if Springsteen had released a Southside Johnny and the Jukes album between Born To Run and Darkness? (Answer: Not that great.) The songs here range from redundant to decent, with Disc 2’s “Ain’t Good Enough For You” emerging as the highlight. A soulful piano-led call-and-response jumper that recalls “Sherry Darling” or “Without You” (the 5th and last cut on the now-deleted Blood Brothers CD bonus EP), “Good Enough” captures Springsteen in a joyous, utterly unaffected tone of voice that largely disappeared after The River. A fun time capsule and a good way to end this.

The End Is Near, Update and Excerpt

Posted on by Harry Ramble
1

I knew it was time to let the book go to the printer when I started changing the title. I kept it long enough to move the release date from 9/28/10 to a Tuesday (undetermined) in October.

Here’s the front cover at left, plus another excerpt below. You’ll find the full printer’s proof of the cover design at the bottom.

Now, I can start tinkering with the website. Hey, we’re getting there.

§

June 22nd, early am

I wasn’t going to do this. Leave a suicide note.

People in my position, in extremis, as it were, often delude themselves with the notion that they have something special—or necessary—to impart, at the end. As if the last moments of life were some grand stage and the mere proximity of death might confer some great wisdom.

But what is there to say, really? Not much, in most cases. Why am I killing myself? For the same reason anyone does, I guess. The less said, the better.

Tonight, though, that changed. My simple suicide has become a murder-suicide. Before I kill myself, I’m going to confront Randy Trent with his crimes of long ago. Then I’m going to kill him. I may torment him a bit in the days leading up to that confrontation.

That’s why I’m writing this tonight, instead of being dead. That’s why you’re reading this.

This journal—for it’s no mere suicide note, it’s a whole suicide journal—is intended to document my actions leading up to my death. And to present the reasoning behind them.

Note the verb. Present. Not justify. Not excuse. Because, believe me, there’s no excuse for what I’m about to do.

This journal is addressed to the Lake Lenni Lenape police, who’ll want to know how I did what I did. And it’s addressed to the family and loved ones of Randy Trent, who’ll want to know why.

So. Why have I decided to harrass and kill Randy Trent? Why did my elegantly simple suicide become a more messy and complicated murder-suicide?

It’s a long story. So I’ll start with the facts of this night and work backwards. And sideways and forward.

Here’s what happened.

I was finishing a last glass of beer in the Sail Inn. Or a next-to-last glass of beer, I hadn’t decided yet. I was raising a silent toast to a life poorly lived, a life squandered, preparatory to going back to my late mother’s derelict, barren house and snuffing myself as unobtrusively as possible.

That’s when I heard it. A voice from my past.

“Hey, Brittany! I remember when you used to love me!”

It was a distinctive voice, a raspy growl with a rough, ruined edge to it, like a starter motor stuttering ineffectually on a cold winter morning. It was a clout to the ears. It was the carefree, careless bray of the bully. The call of someone accustomed to getting his own way in everything. The voice of someone used to living at the expense of others. Used to using people up. It sent a chill up my spine, as they say in paperback thrillers. I looked up and there he was.
It was Randy Trent. He was leaning on the bar, an empty beer pitcher in his hand. He was hectoring a barmaid, calling out across the length of the bar to her.

The sight of him, the sound of him, triggered a fight-or-flee response in me so long dormant, I’d forgotten it existed. It was like a genetic marker, lodged deep in my DNA, emerged from some long benign dormancy to give my heart a good, swift kick. I hadn’t seen Randy Trent, hadn’t cringed at the sight of him, in more than twenty years.

The past has been much on my mind these days, since my mother died—a week ago this morning—and I returned to tidy up her house, the house I grew up in, for the realtors. I’d like to say that I wouldn’t have recognized Randy Trent so instantly in a different setting, out of the context of this shitty bar in this shitty town we both grew up in. But I don’t think that would be true. Some people make a mark on you, for better or for worse, and you don’t forget.

“In your dreams, Trent. In your dreams.” Brittany the barmaid took the pitcher and went to fill it at the tap.

So I didn’t have long to second- and third-guess my initial impression. It was confirmed right away. I was looking at Randy Trent.

After Brittany exchanged his empty pitcher for a full one, Randy Trent turned from the bar and his hard gray eyes fell on me, stopped by what must have been an odd expression on my face.

“Yeah?” Randy Trent said. “You got a problem?”

Twenty-some years is a long time. People change. I don’t think I look anything like the pale, slight, narrow-shouldered, long-faced boy I once was. Two decades and more of mostly sedentary pursuits have caused me to grow redder, riper, and rounder, like a berry, while stress and bad habits have pulped and tenderized every square inch of my surface.

But Randy? He looks very much the same to me. It may be that his physical attributes are elemental like prime numbers or fractions reduced to their lowest terms. He was always this way: long-jawed, heavy-browed, with big hands and feet. Pale with deep-set eyes. There’s something stiff about his face that resists warmth or expressiveness. His ears have no lobes; the lower planes of his ears line up directly with the lines of his jaw, giving him a simian quality. His nose has two distinct facets—out, then down—vaguely Native American in aspect. He’s big, over six feet tall. Even as a teen, he seemed a man among boys. His features seemed already set, with nowhere else to go. Today, his belly might be a little bigger, his eyelids a little fleshier, his hair grayer and shorter. That’s about it.

Cold. That’s the first word that always comes to mind when I think of Randy Trent.

“No,” I said, and then, “Not me. I’ve got a smile for everybody I meet.” And I smiled.

I don’t know what I expected from Randy. Surprise, anger, contempt. Something. At the very least, I expected him to recognize me.

But he didn’t. Instead, he watched my big, goofy grin grow wider, a cross, put-upon expression settling on his own face. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing,” I had to say. And it was true. He didn’t remember me at all.

Randy grunted and carried his pitcher of beer back to the table he was sharing with two women and another guy. Back to his unexamined, untroubled, unshadowed life. The easy life of the bully.

And that set me to thinking.

About things, and why they are the way they are.

About the unfortunate irony of encountering Randy Trent, of all people, on the last night of my life. About how utterly unsurprising—how fitting, even—it was, that I should be killing myself against the backdrop of another prosperous, carefree day in Randy Trent’s life. Killing myself—discreetly, unobtrusively—even as Randy Trent, the architect of my childhood despair and mortification, lifted another beer with his plainly admiring friends.

I watched Randy Trent for a while. Randy looked happy. So did his friends. The girl Randy Trent was with looked happy to be with him. She was very pretty. She was of some Asian descent, her cheekbones high, her blunt haircut sleek and shimmery and black, her eyes large and lively above a tiny lipsticked mouth, her laugh a sudden, surprised-sounding bark. She might have been thirty or so, maybe less. She seemed too solicitous of his regard, too self-consciously aware of his presence, to have known him for long. She looked like a girl on the make.

And why not be desirous of making Randy Trent? If this Randy Trent was much like the Randy Trent I knew twenty-some years ago, he had a lot going for him. An easy, offhand way of breaking things, of breaking people. A rough and charming sadism. A simple happiness derived from humbling the weak, the shy, the fearful. There’s something in a man who knows that life is unfair and shabby and demeaning and brutal, and delights in it, that women find reassuring, attractive. I know, I’ve seen it myself. All my life.

I watched Randy for quite a while. I watched myself in the mirror behind the bar, huddled, alone, over my last beer.

And that was it. That’s when I stopped playing by the rules. How do they say it now? I “went over to the dark side.” I became a “rogue operative.” See? Even the language is sexy.

That’s when I decided to harrass and kill Randy Trent.

I mean, why not? What had reason and civility, fair play and good manners, empathy and restraint ever done for me? Nothing, that’s what.

Why should I die alone? Why should I die like a sheep, while this brutal thug lifts a glass of cheer with his adoring friends? Why shouldn’t I take this bully with me? This bully whose reign of terror cast a shadow over my youthful life that—let’s be honest—exists to this day?

Why not? I’ll never have a better chance.

Oh, don’t worry, loved ones of Randy Trent. I don’t expect you to understand. That’s not the purpose of this communication.

Blame me, of course, for what’s about to happen to him. Blame Fate, too. With a capital F. For surely Fate must have had something dire in mind for your beloved Randy, when she swept him into my path at such a perilous juncture, mere moments before I would have sheepishly pulled the plug on myself.

Tough luck, indeed.

I’ve given myself an eight-day stay of execution. I’ve given myself a reprieve until June 30th, my birthday. I’ve made a new plan.

And I want to clarify something here. I’m no old hand at harassment. I’ve never stalked anyone before. I’ve never tormented anyone. Unlike Randy Trent, I’ve never made someone’s life miserable just for the sheer sport of it. I’ve certainly never killed anyone before. These are all first-time additions to my job jar.

Read on, officers of the law, loved ones of Randy Trent.

Read on in these journal pages and you’ll find my reasons for everything I’m about to do.

Maybe you won’t like my reasons. I’m prepared to accept that. But I can promise you this. My reasons for killing Randy Trent will be at least as good, at least as valid, as his reasons for tormenting me, all those years ago.

And now, to get things started, I’ll give you a reason. My first reason.

It’s a reason the Randy Trent I once knew would surely have understood and appreciated. Here it is.

Because I can. That’s why.

Because I can.

§

Ferrell vs. Pitt

Posted on by Harry Ramble
1

The movie poster at left is an excellent indicator of the degree to which Hollywood has its head stuck up its own ass.

As a father of a ten-year-old and a seven-year-old, I see a lot of big-budget Hollywood cartoons. Sometimes, as is the case with the recent “Despicable Me,” I have to see them twice. It was during the second trip to “Despicable Me” that I saw this poster for “MegaMind.”

Take a look at the poster and tell me what’s wrong with it. No, go ahead. Take a minute. If you’re a parent of young children, it didn’t take you more than a second.

My kids don’t give a rat’s ass who “Ferrell” and “Pitt” are. They care about mad scientists and plucky heroines in trouble and superheroes with weird powers. They care about earnest sponges with a can-do spirit and whiz-bang gadget inventors. They like explosions and narrow escapes.

You know who cares about “Ferrell” and “Pitt?” Hollywood super-agents and movie studio executives. As far as I can tell from the thumbnail description of the film, Brad Pitt’s superhero isn’t even all that central to the movie’s premise. He gets killed off early on so that Ferrell’s mad scientist can create another superhero (voiced by Jonah Hill) who the mad scientist then has to kill off as part of his inevitable third-act redemption. I guess Jonah Hill isn’t sexy enough for the movie poster.

Now look at the only other descriptive line on the poster. “The Superhero Movie Will Never Be The Same.” That’s not a summation of the film, or even a teaser. It’s a pitch. It’s not even a good pitch. It’s a lazy, generic pitch about a pre-sold commodity. It tells kids—and parents—nothing about the movie.

Big-budget Hollywood movies suck ass. We all know this. But parents know that big-budget Hollywood animated movies suck even more ass. Regular Hollywood movies suck ass because the people who make them care only about which big names are attached to them. This has been the case for decades, but it wasn’t always the case with animated full-length features. As recently as 1991, Disney could make “Beauty and the Beast” with no high-powered A-list Hollywood talent at all. The Beast was frigging Robby Benson, for god’s sake. And he was great. So was Paige O’Hara as Belle. Their voices were suited to their characters. They weren’t distractions.

This started to change just one year later when the same studio, Disney, allowed Robin Williams to crap all over “Aladdin.” This was a perfectly decent re-telling of the “Arabian Nights” tale that ground to a complete halt every time Robin Williams showed up as the genie, speed-jiving some anachronistic topical shit lifted from his sweaty, cocaine-hangover HBO stand-up routines. This wretched performance should have stopped the whole A-list voice talent thing in its tracks. Instead things have only gotten worse. Much worse.

Exhibit A? “MegaMind.” What’s “MegaMind” about? It’s about Will Ferrell with a big head. And Brad Pitt. He’s a pompous and deluded superhero. Like, you know, a tabloid movie star. Tina Fey’s in it, too. She’s playing Tina Fey.

Now I’m not one of those guys who insist that Hollywood stopped making good animated movies after “Fantasia.” Sometimes A-list voice talent is perfectly suited to a character. There are probably few people on earth who can say “Hey! Howdy! Hey!” as convincingly as Tom Hanks. One of the best parts of “Despicable Me” is Steve Carell’s sputtering, consonant-cluttered take on Gru, the Cold War Russian-inspired bad guy. He makes the character funny and believable without going off all Chris Rock all over it.

For the most part, however, top-tier A-list voice talent is either A) bland or B) distracting. Brad Pitt is an excellent example of the former case. His voice isn’t distinctive in any way. His affectless, lusterless Every Joe voice consistently undermined “Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas,” an otherwise entertaining adventure that tanked at the box office in 2003. Why was Pitt cast as Sinbad? Because, umm, he’s dashing and handsome. Unfortunately, all he provided for Sinbad was his flat voice. Same deal with Julia Roberts. Why is Julia Roberts and her utterly unremarkable voice cast in cartoon features like “Charlotte’s Web” or “The Ant Bully?” Got me.

On the other side of the spectrum is the distracting voice. Never mind the fact that you can’t get an animated feature into production anymore unless you have Chris Rock in it as a wise-cracking antelope or zebra. Even well-intended A-list voiceovers sometimes torpedo the movie in which they’re featured. In “The Fantastic Mr. Fox,” George Clooney’s Mr. Fox is so George Clooney that he overshadows the character and every scene he’s in. Dreamworks, the same outfit that gives us Eddie Murphy as Donkey and Chris Rock as everybody else, once blew up its own “Shark Tale” by voice-casting Will Smith and Angelina Jolie, plus Robert DeNiro and Martin Scorsese in it. Martin Scorsese? Really? Does that make sense to anyone other than some utterly isolated studio exec?

You know what kids like? A good story. But they’re never going to get it from some crap like “MegaMind,” which budgets millions of dollars for Brad Pitt’s vocal cords and millions more for the right to emblazon the trailer with the words “Will” and “Ferrell,” while setting aside a paltry few grand for a story consisting of wink-wink insider jokes about the voice cast.

Oh, and don’t even get me started about this whole 3D thing.

Ray Bradbury at 90

Posted on by Harry Ramble
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When Ray Bradbury misses, he misses by a mile. This propensity springs, in large part, from the man’s amazing productivity. Ray Bradbury has been writing every day, at the pace of roughly a completed story per week, since 1932. He has never been the kind of guy who agonizes over revisions or censors his worst impulses. He writes stories, sets them free to sink or sail, and moves on. Some of the tales that proved seaworthy are among the greatest stories ever written in English.

In the beginning, he wrote this way because he wrote to eat. His earliest stories filled the pages of a self-published fanzine called Futuria Fantasia (which he produced in print runs of 100 or less and sold on street corners). Later, he started placing his stories in pulp story digests like Super Science Stories, Dime Mystery, and Weird Tales. In the 1940s, his stories were being anthologized, and in 1950 his first collection, The Martian Chronicles, was published. Ray had arrived.

But he never changed the way he wrote. The decades passed, the demands on his time multiplied exponentially, and Bradbury still wrote every day, still wrapped up a story more or less every week. This approach to writing is anathema to mainstream fiction writers today, who are taught to obsess over every participle and pronoun. Top-tier MFA programs teach writers to re-write and re-write and re-write, to workshop those results, and then re-write some more. The inevitable result of all this relentless fine-tuning and focus-grouping is a marketplace full of novels that all read the same.

Bradbury never sands the rough edges off his fiction. He is never dour or difficult or obscene for art’s sake. He never shies away from topics or themes that his more jaded contemporaries might deem too sentimental or maudlin. Even his worst stories convey the sense of an author who is absolutely unafraid of taking chances or of looking foolish. His stories always sound like Ray Bradbury and no one else.

That’s not what made him great, however. All of his best stories use a fantasy or science fiction context to get at the real matter at hand—the desire for something that’s gone or something that can never be. Thus, “The Fog Horn,” in which a lighthouse calls up a dinosaur from the depths of the sea, is really about the heart-rending loneliness inherent in being the last creature of your kind. “There Will Come Soft Rains” sums up all of the colossal tragic stupidity of mankind in the comical Rube-Goldberg-machine-like collapse of an empty house after the apocalypse. “The Last Night Of The World” accomplishes the same trick in the opposite way—by presenting the apocalypse in the context of a husband and wife quietly and simply tucking their children into bed.

“The Rocket Man” is defined, not by his exploits in space, but as an absence in his son’s life, an unknowable figure in a stark black head-to-toe uniform, empty as space itself. “The Sound Of Thunder,” ostensibly time-travel suspense about an encounter with a Tyrannosaurus Rex, is really a story of lost innocennce. (Yes, I know, I saw the movie, too. Go read the story.) “The Million-Year Picnic” is a story about Martians with no Martians in it—just the reflections of Mom and Dad and their children, staring up at them from the surface of a canal. The concept of Mars and Martians crops up all the time in Bradbury’s fiction, but you hardly ever encounter an actual Martian. Abandoned cities, buildings like empty skulls and dusty chess pieces, dry canals, discarded masks and scarves, half-heard whispers—that’s all you get. For Bradbury, Martians stand in for an unremembered past and an unrealized future; they’re about everything that’s been lost. In each case, and dozens upon dozens more, Bradbury’s stories are diligent explications of the workings of the human heart, dressed up as gee-whiz sci-fi.

All this summer, on clear nights, I’ve been taking my enormous Everyman’s Library copy of The Stories of Ray Bradbury out into the backyard. I lift the ribbon bookmark out of it, read a story or two before darkness falls, and then close it up again. One hundred stories, one-thousand-plus pages. I’m about halfway through it now, and I’ll set aside the second half of the book for next year. It’s mid-August now and summer is best for Bradbury.

I’ve heard it said that Ray Bradbury is for younger readers, that he’s something you outgrow as your tastes evolve. To me, Ray Bradbury seems like a writer you’d outgrow only as you become more cynical and world-weary, and your capacity for wonder withers away. I’ve been reading and re-reading him all my life; I make a point of re-reading Dandelion Wine and The Martian Chronicles every five or seven years or so.

Ray is still with us, still writing. The last of the great writers of science fiction’s golden age of the 1950s, he’s never driven a car and was never much impressed by computers. He has even less use for the Internet, which he characterizes as “distracting” and “meaningless.” He’ll probably never weigh in with an opinion on the viral YouTube video for Rachel Bloom’s “Fuck Me, Ray Bradbury.” I imagine that, somewhere in California, he’s putting the finishing touches on another story. He’ll be 90 years old on August 22, 2010. Happy 90th, Ray!