This Month in Token Gestures: A Tribute to Internet Tributes

I imagine by now you have seen "make Kony famous" or "Kony 2012" or some such derivation floating around whatever Internet feed you call your own. It's a campaign started by someone? the Invisible Children charity to shed light on Joseph Kony, who is, undoubtedly, an authentic piece of shit. The guy is a Ugandan Warlord infamous for abductions, murders, conscripting child soldiers--the full compliment of the nouveau chic African heavy. Yeah, I agree, this man, and this sort of thing, is terrible, and despite the potential ...ahem... inconsistencies in Invisible Children's facts/use of funds/point-of-view, my lingering questions have a lot more to do with the viralization of our noblest endeavors than this newly minted, Internet ready campaign.

I hadn't heard of Kony yesterday, but as of today, I can't even tally the number of shares, retweets, @, and via's which have sashayed across my eye-line. Recently it was the Susan G Komen fracas. A few weeks earlier it was SOPA and PIPA. A few weeks before that, it was Occupy this or that. All along, with every scroll, every "open in new tab", every cutting graphic, every online petition bellowed through the Internet megaphone, there was one empty, dull question on loop in my brain, "what is this accomplishing?"

Knowledge is power, and nothing quit turns up the pressure on a cause or individual quite like a meme bounced from every media outpost. But somewhere, this incessant memeing has been confused for action. Posting a video on your Facebook page is a token gesture. Tagging yourself in a photo someone took on their iPhone the afternoon you spent at you local occupy protest holding a "JOIN US" sign is an act devoid of any real meaning. These things are so much more using a cause as a magnifying glass on yourself, than an examination of the cause itself. After the video is posted, what do you do then? What is your contribution or commitment? What real devotion does this act of showing take, and the more pertinent question, how do you measure the impact of your minimal effort? In likes, or shares, or comments? A rather narrow life for such a good deed.

In Ken Kesey's "Tools from My Chest," originally published in "Last supplement to the Whole Earth Catalog," he makes a brief reference to young protesters throwing bricks through the front window of the Berkeley Bank of America as "kids playing with barbie dolls." I read this when occupy was at fever pitch, and the few words hummed in my brain like a tuning fork. In a child's imagination, these play things can be imbued with such narrative and sincere feeling, the self indulgence tied up in the act becomes lost on the participant. Today, at the rate information travels, these barbie dolls are picked up and put down at a feverish rate in a very public way. This is, to me, one of the most damning downsides of these rapidly spread and as quickly forgotten viral causes and beliefs. Each creation so meaningful, yet each creation so impotent, each proceeding bandwagon effort is in danger of being cheaper and cheaper to the people in your Internet periphery your are trying to inform in the first place. Since we're trading in cliches today, there is the well tread old saying, "If you don't stand for anything, you'll fall for everything," to which I would posit "But if you stand for everything, do you really stand for anything?"

Another consideration is how selective these outbursts can be, and the real people left behind in their wake. A few months ago there was a horrible crime committed in the community I live in. A woman's life was taken from her by a predator, and the outpouring was tremendous. So many in my immediacy took this tragedy and refashioned it as their pet cause. Instantaneously, this tragedy was taken away from the people it belonged to--her, her actual family and her friends--and transformed into a trend. Stickers and t-shirts were made, benefits were put on, strangers went and visited a stranger's graffiti mural in her honor. The suspect's poorly sketched picture was run up the flag pole. In the maelstrom, the actual human being was lost. Everyone else's "me" and "I" took her place. It all became so inverted, so self involved, it was as though this human life was reduced to the ephemera generated in the flashpoint as opposed to the spark of life it was intended to celebrate.

Less than a week after this woman's death, an older woman, a sex worker, was pulled out of a dumpster, her remains in a suitcase. No one knew her name. She got no trend on Twitter. She went overlooked. Perhaps her life choices made her seem closer to that demise, but it was still a human life thrown away in senseless and brutal sex crime. But of all the people vested in this other tragedy, all of the hammered out posts about "No more violence against women," this person was so far beneath the view of these thinking and feeling masses, so unworthy of concern, she was just another dead prostitute.

The viralization of SOPA and PIPA got those in congress to back off, and the pat-on-the-backing ensued. NDAA sneaks through unnoticed, and there was hardly a sigh of indifference. Susan G Komen rethinks its cuts in planned parenthood funding, and women's health care gets obliterated on the state level. Joseph Kony gets his slick looking 30 minute film, and the masses weep and wail and gnash their teeth, yet the people of Syria are falling in scores in a fight with their own government without as much as a half-assed demotivational poster. It's not that one issue is more or less important than the other, it's that the ideas become codified. The big picture becomes about who has the best interface and most intriguing hashtag. What's important about these issues shifts out of the realm of cause for concern, and slides into the morass of media curb appeal. It becomes a battle of who can control the story, the enemy of meaningful change, and just becomes more marketing.

I understand it's impossible to hold out for a movement or belief that is free of flaws and hypocrisies. There is no way to follow every dollar of every charitable donation. One would break their brain if they tried to keep abreast of every injustice. All altruism is, in part, an act of selfishness, but if these acts ceased, the void left would cripple an already cruel world. Instead, mine is more of a hopeful nod to reflection. I'll be the first to admit, I'm not a concerned person. I can admit it, and my indifferences are not to be commended, but I can acknowledge the smallness of my contribution. I don't need this act of showing to take place for an actual commitment to a cause or belief. Instead, I would implore people who believe they care to think of the minute power of a click versus the dividends of an act. Think about the larger issue of which an immediacy might be a mere symptom. To reassess the magnitude of a real--hands in the dirt, I dug a fucking well in Africa, I informed and empowered myself--devotion to the things which make you feel anything.

The Internet has become a beat up Chevy truck where everyone can slap the most vacuous, digestible, bumper sticker ready version of whatever they believe--that week anyway--and cruise down the information super highway a visible and concerned citizen. This is a vacuum where ideas are gutted of their value and transformed into parodies of themselves, and if you really believe in something, it deserves better. I understand some human being more principled than myself has every right to sneer at me and crow, "Oh, so I guess we should do nothing!"

But I would respond, free of cynicism, eyes set on theirs, "No. You should actually do something."

Near Perfect Albums: Spiderland -- Slint

Note: I would put 'editors note', but this is clearly a one man outfit. And as many grammatical and syntactic errors make it to the show room floor, this person would clearly be the worst editor ever. All that said, "Near Perfect Albums" is an ongoing series I'll be doing. The only criteria is an album has to be at least ten years old. Music is my first, and only deepest love...plus, these write-ups make great filler. 

xoxo - S&D

Spiderland, Slint's 1991 masterpiece, is the quintessential--oft overlooked, frequently invoked, over praised for the wrong reasons, wrongly criticized for misguided reasons, thousand band launch pad--album.

Part of the trouble with this album's legacy is too many are dead set on listening to the record for what it's supposed to be as opposed to what it is. Over the years, so many well coiffed, black clad, music types--so desperate to give things a name--have piled terms like "post-rock" and "math rock" and "proto-space rock" and "shoe-gaze-core" on this album. These monikers, equal parts character assassination and obfuscation, plague the stand alone marvel Spiderland represents in rock and roll's rich genealogy. Also, these terms don't sound like anything anyone would want to listen to ever, which doesn't help. A band can't determine who springs up in their wake. Just as the decade of ritualized genre music which stands between the inception of this album and Slint's current acolytes is no fair condemnation of the work offered up in these five tracks.

What astounds, and concurrently confounds, me about this record: where did it come from? These are four kids from Louisville, Kentucky in the early 90's. Louisville is by no stretch a yokel town where talking music discs were some sort of witchery, but, you know...it's goddamn Kentucky. In the 90's! This is some pre-Internet shit. Even if they were underground music devotees, an era when that was an Odyssean task, it's still hard to compile the roster that could fuel an album like Spiderland.

Originality isn't really a thing, but this feels like a group of like-minded individuals who set out to forge a fiercely original moment. Influences always exist, but these are fully digested influences instead of the millstone so many other bands tote around their necks. And perhaps perceived originality is little more than influences so well understood, so absorbed, so deeply sublimated, they are anonymous.

Maybe they had Sonic Youth's "Evol", CAN's "Monster Movie", and Gang of Four's "Entertainment!" and twenty other albums I can't name all playing at the same time in their headphones while doing takes in the studio...

Or maybe, just maybe, they are four dudes from Kentucky who owned one transistor radio that only got a lousy AM signal, unaware of their secret Alien-God-King lineage. Alien-God-Kings sent to put the weird-bad-gross on us something real good.

As the story goes, the album was recorded in a live style over a furious four day stretch. Rumors abound about the nature of the session being so serious and intense, at least one member of the band had to be institutionalized for psychiatric care. Whether there was anything so traumatic as described in the mystery that helps prop up this album, there is something very sinister that lives beneath this record.

The cover of this album speaks so much to this content; nameless, stark, and submerged in black water. A churning, chaotic mass of fragile guitar parts, squalls of distorted fuzz, and spoken-screamed-sung lyrics. The tracks build with such deliberate contemplation and then blow apart in seismic gusts of cymbal crashes and dense crunch. The album, both in tone and structure, feels like some macabre world a child infuses in his simple playthings. A scene, grim and violent, built with tedious attention to detail. Well arranged action figures and wooden block built up only to be smashed apart by its own creator. An unpredictable vengeance rained down with fury. When the moment recedes, his creation underfoot, breathless, the child surveys the moment and begins to quietly rebuild.

The immediate dynamic of tension and release, or, in gross and oversimplified terms, loud-soft-loud-soft belies the thoughtful progression of this record. The album opens with delicate harmonics plucked from the ether like the first unshuttered frame of an over-saturated silent film. From there the album growls, jerks, weeps, snarls, stumbles, soars, and falters all the way to the final wash of feedback that floats you back out to the silent sea.

This is a beginning to end record. These songs out of context, ushered on deck by shuffle, or the singular track selected to woo a new listener, lose their potency. It's like bringing a friend a woman's severed leg, all exposed sinew and six inch pump, and being like, "this chick is crazy hot, am I right?" Not to say there is some meat-mouthed narrative clutched in this album's tendrils, but it is the clutching of the tendrils that matters.   

Spiderland is meant to posses you. It drops like ink into milk. This album is a phase. This album is boarded windows and locked doors. This album is an unshakable feeling of dread. The emotional gravity--the scope of so many dangerous feelings--distilled into 39 minutes and 30 seconds is a remarkable power, and this is why when needle hits groove, none of the ancillary shit matters. The lore, the stupid genre names, the bands who assumed the mantle without a hint of the vivacity or dirty ingenuity Slint did it with, none of it. Because what shines thorough, what transcends even the notes themselves, that thing which moves me every time: the these young men gave all of themselves to this beautiful and hideous thing. And it aches. 

Mean Black Cat Blues

Mean Black Cat Blues -- Charlie Patton, 1929

It's a mean black cat, Lordy, clawin' on my door.

It's a mean black cat, Lordy, clawin' on my door.

I'm going to Louisiana, where I won't hear it whine no more.

It's been persistent lately. Sometimes, it's the image of me in crumpled work clothes, sheets pulled up to my neck as darkness takes hold like a tipped ink well. Someone who loved me weeps into the other end of the phone, calls out to me, but I lay unmoved . Even with so little to give, no one has wept so for me before. They could have been on the other end of the line, or it could have been some mournful dirge carved into a phonographic cylinder one thousand years before. I'm certain it's mine, but it's for someone else. He can't tell the difference.

At other moments, it is happy clamor filling my lungs like noxious gas. The jubilation seems little more than a shoddy overcoat those around me, like cowards, use to rebuff the cruel and correct winds. What I'm sure I know, what little they seem to know, punches through my guts like white hot coals. To proud to succumb to the incessant pawing, I vomit this venom as some pointless diatribe. I pound my fists on the table and scream about other hollow things--'Best picture in 2004 was a goddamn joke!!'--as it's the only way I know to keep him outside the door. 

A friend, concerned, puts his arm around me and says, "You know I love you, man." And I growl, "That just makes me sad for you."

In recent months I've made a point to double what I save from each paycheck. When the figures look right, I've decided I'll roam the earth in solitude. Because the obvious answer is where he can't find me. 

It's a mean black cat, Lordy, all around my bed.

It's a mean black cat, Lordy, all around my bed.

I'm gonna get up some mornin', kill that black cat dead.

I wake, and a terrible coldness falls in my chest. 

The floor is cluttered. Art pulled from the walls. A shattered cocktail glass. An anonymous fast food bag emptied of its contents with rapacious gluttony. The earring kept, a tenuous link with some imagined happy memory, pulled out somewhere during the course of the night. Nearby, the half shut laptop accompanied by a pathetic soiled rag. Sheets rent from their notebook with "FUCK YOU" scrawled in manic script across the pages.

This is the week. No vices. Gym five times. I'm bigger than he is. I'm stronger than he is. It will never be this way again. Never. This is the week.  

It's a mean black, Lordy. Lord it's wearin' my clothes.

It's a mean black cat, Lordy. I mean it's wearin' my clothes.

Just you put him on my levee, let that black cat go.

I'll sit in the back of my mind and watch him. My grey hood edges my periphery and my black satin jacket shimmers in the thin glow of streetlights. He moves through the night, an extension of the darkness, impervious to whatever rolls around in his belly. He whispers antagonisms to those around. Slow poison to pit them against themselves leaked in vicious glances and cruel advice. He'll start a fire to argue someone down until they believe they were holding the matches all along. He belittles and demeans and twists words until they fit in innocents mouths they way he wants them to. Drunk on malevolence, claws sharp, the shadows swallow him whole.

But somewhere in an invisible alley, the rabble of shoves and punches shatter the night. Cause black cats always find other black cats, and all that badness has to be put somewhere.

Detatched, but ever present like human theatre watched through his eyes, other people are the best players. He feeds them whatever persona they've decided on as his true self. An innocent game, he plies them with spoonful on gentle spoonful until they are intoxicated with their own fibs. Once sated, he'll look them right in the face, dab their mouth clean, and chirp through a bible salesman's smile, "You know...99% of what you believe about a person you make up yourself."

In a small way his take could be boiled down to peer admiration or an undone zipper, but his only thirst is for the thing he can't give back.

But when I'm spit out on the New Jersey Turnpike, wide awake and steeped in the ripples of remorse, I want to cry out for understanding. Forgiveness. Absolution. Punishment. I want to yell, "I mean...it's wearing my clothes!"

I don't though. Because they won't believe me. Because I don't believe me.     

First time I met you, I said you was a crook.

First time I met you, said you was a crook.

You got a new way of lovin' where ain't in no book.

It's a far off memory. Soft focus edges and authentic patina accentuate the age of these 8 millimeter memories. Spring's air was still cool in my mouth. A pungent density of mesquite and wildflowers was infused in every gulp of oxygen. Red dirt and sand ground under my tiny feet as I contemplated the diamond chain link pattern stretched across the playground backstop's pipe frame. You could feel the sun on your skin, but it wasn't warm. 

The line of children led up to the batters box where a life time of athletic and genetic superiority was to be decided with one swing of the bat.

John Garcia was a boy I knew. I can recall at least one instance of playing wall ball on the side of his brick house, or refusing to look at his father's copies of "Easy Rider Magazine"...because I was a good boy. John had the brownest arms you've ever seen come out of a pink Ocean Pacific sleeveless tee. He sauntered in from no where, and it's likely because I was next to Derek, the conduit between us, he decided to cut right in front of me.

And it was an insult to my dignity I would not abide. 

I choked on my furious blood. A coal furnace ignited behind my cheeks. I would spend a lifetime collecting adjectives to hang a meaning or identity on this feeling, and they have all fallen short. My muscles ticked beneath my little boy arms. And as I felt my fingers tighten into my palm, the reel jumps, and the next frame, clumsily spliced in, reads: "SCENE MISSING".

A crimson rivulet trickled from John's nose. His eyes wide, fearful, he shrieked. I whipped around and disassociated myself from the wailing boy behind me. Made him feel so far away, it was as though he didn't exist at all.    

As the consequences fell in around me, I was certain this was the worst thing I'd ever done. I wanted to hate this thing in me. I needed to condemn this reaction as some transient, violent specter passed through me. I manufactured all the guilt I was meant to produce.

But no matter the outward display, no matter the reassuring internal dialogue, I looked down at my right hand and saw a new hideous and powerful thing. I could close my eyes and see the blood I drew with my hand from John's stupid, cutter face. It shone so red, as red as the Roman Legion's standard,  and a sensation expanded in my chest like vulture's wings: He would never do that again.

Next time I met you, you know I made a hit.

Next time I met you, you know I made a hit.

But you got a new way of lovin', where it just won't quit.

I nudge him off the porch with my foot. I smile at him while he sunbathes on the garbage cans by the back fence. I open the car door and see him, conjured from nowhere, gaze fixed on me, and I yell at him to go away. When he gets underfoot of the pizza delivery guy and almost sends him in a pile down the steps, I feel a sense of pride. When the front door yawns for too long, and he bolts inside, I grab him under his front legs and gently coo, "You know you can't come in here." When I unload groceries, and on return trip number three find him inside my trunk hidden amongst the handles of white plastic bags, I admire how much of each other we are. 

He disappears for weeks on end. Just when I feel a pang, part hope, part regret, that he might be gone forever, he peeks his little black head through the askew slats hung on the sliding glass door and winces his petulant little cat sounds. I feed him often enough for him to come around, but not so often that he thinks he belongs here. I'm not fool enough to think I control him. No one owns a cat. Yet I'm grown enough to understand he is more dangerous caged than set to roam free. 

So together we sit on the cold cement stoop. Curled up in my lap, I scratch behind the ears until his purr  reverberates in my bones. I tell him I'll have him neutered, or put to sleep, and he looks up at me for a moment, unmoved, with his big yellow eyes. Behind two heavy lids, he returns to his prone state of improbable blackness. 

Me and my mean black cat--that ugly, essential bastard--sit and watch the world go by.

The First Christmas and The Black Rider

Monochrome expanse stretched out in every direction. Horizons were imperceptible. Sky and earth fused together in muddy gradients of gainsboro, mortar, and shady lady. Save the occasional naked tree, or green sign designated to announce the presence of West Texas highway towns long enough for them to disappear behind you, winter hung about in its solemn grey cloak. 

One defiant yellow seam ran up the belly of the fragile scene as long haul trucks and anonymous sedans slid past each other on their appropriate side. Our car was white. A four door midsize whispering through the murk toward the place where our beds and clothes were, but home was a sentiment hollowed out over the last few, tumultuous months.

My sister, Mia, was the driver. A slight figure who to a passerby might seem little more than a permanent and a suede leather jacket operating a vehicle at 63.75 miles per hour. My brother Samuel was genetically predisposed to co-pilot, so I spared both of us the one-sided debate for front seat. Besides, I liked the the view of my soon-to-be-misspent youth from the back seat of cars. I was scoops of cookie dough packed in a magenta sweater, stone washed jeans, and all orthodonture from the neck up. Me and the back seat belonged together. And Sam looked so at home--his inky hair combed tight against his head, his obsidian eyes planted in his flush cherubic cheeks--staring down the miles of well rehearsed highway from shotgun. Master of his limited control panel, the volume on the stereo was adjusted just so, and the pigtail plug for the bag phone at his feet stayed out of the way, but the heater was his slave.  

Hot breath poured from the ugly, slotted mouth until the car brimmed with morbid heat. I choked as my puny lungs saturated with stale, scorched air. I longed to be of the cold natured set as my captain and her co-pilot, but instead, my belly was swollen with hundred ten degree blood. My only respite was the laminated porthole set next to my head. I pressed my exposed skin against the cold window. My forearms  quivered against the glass. My engorged ears drank the icy sweetness. I would kiss the frigid casement, because I was a young man who wanted to kiss. Greasy smudges marked where my forehead would roll back and forth until my skin had stolen the chill. Then, I would sit back as the wind fell away from the car's aerodynamic design until my fingertip cast a ghost of heat on to the glass.

No one had said anything for miles. It would be easy to implicate the Christmas left miles behind us. This "Brenda" set up to be some ready made mother, the tension filled rooms more than one person left with the entrails of tears strewn on their face, the stink of sublimated rage thick on the phone call with my mother, but these things were for the grown-ups table. These things were for show. The road simply swallows conversation after so many miles. Music, and road noise, and the heater's throaty belch aggregate into a tonal morass that's more asphyxia than silence.  

But  over the next rise, the highway held a terrible secret.

The final act of a tragedy sealed with a fatal kiss; a black motorcycle and the steel blue front end of a Buick locked in wanton embrace. A moment paralyzed in time. A white sedan crawled to a stop. An old couple staged on their marks. A black rider face down on the highway.

The asphalt was cold and bloodless, and we were the only ones who knew, the old couple and ourselves. The man in black didn't know anything. His arms were at perfect 90-degree angles, his legs crossed at the ankles, and his head laid tenderly to side. The ominous black clad reflection bent around the contours of the window as my pitiless eight-year-old face looked down on his remains laid on the blacktop cooling board. His head was shrouded in black tint, but I knew there was nothing in there. He was a prop. This was what had been left behind.  

Sam rolled down the window and the car inhaled a gelid breath...

"Oh my God! We have a phone!"

"Go! Go Away!" the old man yelled. He was perched over the black rider on hands and knees. One arm was outstretched toward us, palm open.  The old woman wore a white sweater flocked with glittered paint and plastic beads. It's stood out against the ashen winter day like an obscenity. She shielded her face with both hands. Our car limped past.

We sat motionless, rapt with stoned silence. My sister put her foot back on the gas pedal and somewhere around 30-45 MPH, she shuddered and loosed a heavy sob. Sam reached in to comfort her. Mia waved him off, shook herself free of the moment, and never broke stride back up to the speed limit.  

When we arrived home, the house was unlit. Inside, there was no Christmas tree and the porcelain manger scene had stayed boxed up in the attic. Those were the vestiges of the old regime culled from public display by our father. We didn't turn on any lights. We placed our modest luggage on the living room floor, fell into the couch, and turned on the television. The comfort of ritual, the warm flicker danced across our content faces.

After what was collectively deemed far too long, the other car arrived with a clamor of doors and muffled voices. The back door flew open. 

"Goddamnit. Mia, who put all those smudges on the back window of your car?" Dad asked one foot inside the door. Mia shrugged. Dad huffed and placed his hanging bag on the old blue recliner. Our family was home. 

Soon our house buzzed with the sort of activity seven people pump into a four bedroom single family dwelling. The din of children freed from a four hour car ride and the murmur of some terrible accident on the road bounced off the walls until my father's stentorian voice reconvened order.

"All right, everybody gather round."

Dad collected his horde of five children around the wooden table in the kitchen. We sat anxious and uncertain as Dad and Brenda disappeared into their bedroom. They returned with an oversized pink sack as stuffed with innuendo as it was holiday bounty. Brenda strapped a vague smile across her face. Dad stuck his hand in the bag and said, "Merry Christmas guys…Oh, and thank your stepmom. I wasn’t going to do presents this year."

He plucked the first unwrapped gift from the bag. He turned it toward him, looked at it befuddled, then displayed it to his children and said, "Okay...whose is this?"

The presents were issued one by one without a modicum of ceremony. Brenda, still just a vassal to my father and not yet a mother, stood on. Already the outsider, so anxious to please, a look of shame and disgust took her face as the paperless Christmas was doled out.

I didn't care at all. My gift--the piece of plastic pulled from it's cardboard packaging that would complete me--was in my covetous hands. It was a mechanized mouse set on two feet, part of a larger collection of toys.  He had a peg stuck out from his side used to wind him up. On a full turn, he would march and clomp his grey plastic jaw open and shut. He couldn't stay upright on the carpet, so I used his box as a flat plane. Even still, the weave in the carpet would tilt the surface too far this way or that, so I used the piano bench in the living room instead.

I would twist the peg at least a half-turn past the point it wouldn't go any further. I wound it six times, and on the seventh it broke.

So I wept. I cried horrible, dime-sized tears.

A Gavin to a Phillip, and the Space Between

"I don't know if we're going to let her date..."

This is my life. Conversations like this have import and involve players that are flesh and blood humans who will forever seem to me like dark eyed six year olds. I can even remember being the thirteen year old boy who was all grabby hands and Clinton sex scandal. I pined for the thirteen year old girl whose asshole parents wouldn't let her date. Feeling so grown up then, and realizing how much of a child I still am today, I couldn't imagine having any relationships now, especially not at 13. How much of an adult does this make me? Well, not much of one. It isn't some sense of these children overreaching their maturity, instead, to me, it's cartoonish. It's the proverbial monkey at a typewriter, but in this case, the monkey is certain she is hammering out...oh...I dunno...what are the kids calling "genius" these days. Chabon, or...who is the one guy with all the footnotes who killed himself? Anyway, I think you get it.

As a testament to pulling out and emotional unavailability, I've no kids of my own. This is my friends kid. She's 13, and totally unconscious of how awesome she'll be once adolescence falls away like the crummy exoskeleton hiding one's more fully-formed personage it is. Adolescence wouldn't be any fun if you knew how great you were going to be someday. 13 should be overblown dramas you have zero perspective on and much anticipated hand holding with your "boy/girlfriend". Puberty is intended to be an open assault on everything you know that your dumbass parents don't. Their life lessons should be stultified cliches, and your feelings should be the biggest and realest feelings ever. If not, what growth will you be set-up for when all of those cliches turn out to be hurtful truths and those feelings unravel in your 20's as an exercise in by rote human being-ness? That's the arc of a decent person, anyway, and my friend's kid is gonna be the realness. 

She's going to be the college freshman who has seen every relevant cinema classic on the big screen and wreck classrooms full of mouth agape, half assed film students. When semesters abroad become some not-so-distant fall semester's most fashionable accessory, she'll get to casually mention the six weeks she already spent in the UK...without her parents. I think I might be cheating how much vicarious "this is my daughter" I have wrapped up in this thing, but this might be the closest I get to having a kid. [kicks at adolescent exoskeleton still attached to leg]

But for right now, she's kind of an asshole. She has no understanding of how heavy the blow will be when she understands how good her parents are to her and the sacrifices they've made to allow her life to happen. So basically, she's perfect, and poised to be a member of the shrinking guild of good people.

And after all of that, the table is set for this..."Gavin" situation.

For a moment, I have to step back and lay a little groundwork so this story moves in the Jacob's Ladder-esque concentric circles that mortar all of my ill-conceived analogies together. This girl is not my friend's flesh and blood. Her biological father and her mother were an ovule and an anther and the honey bee between. He's never been around, and it seems for the best. My friend, this 13 year old's real father, happened upon the other part of himself, and she came with a child. He got two people to love unconditionally in one fell swoop, and as stories about love so defiant in the face of a world where it seems impossible go, he had more love than the two of them could take, so they added another child of their own.

It's a family, and as patresfamilias go, he's a pretty kick ass dad. He's a published novelist, a filmmaker with an actual film made, and weirdly successful in his soul obliterating day job. There have been family trips to places like a dude ranch, and Stax Records, and the Renaissance Faire. Telephone conversations with his wife are painful and cloying, but unconcerned, he mucks around in them like a happy, fat pig. This summer, we had a spirited debate about whether or not this 13 year old was ready to watch The Shining. They watched it together, and in a well placed reference--the magic of which cannot be transferred anecdotally--he scared the shit out of her afterwards. This is the expanse of protection and exposure he wants for his daughters. This is the life he wants for himself, because as the life shared with the ones you love goes, there is no other life but this one.

Enter Gavin, a 14 year old born in 1997 when Bush was in between Razor Blade Suitcase and The Science of Things, Sixteen Stone a distant memory, so it's certain he's not even named after good Gavin Rossdale. (Oh? You named him Gavin because you're "Irish"? I just thought it was because you're tasteless white trash who did too much Special K while listening to 'Machine Head' on loop in the summer of 1995) Gavin dated my friend's daughter's best-friend. Gavin and Best Friend went bust as relationships between teenagers are wont to do, and as soon as the school year got in full swing, he decided he wanted to bf/gf with my friend's daughter.

The rest is a by the numbers teen tragedy. The Daughter wants to date Gavin because he's pungent with teenage alpha brooding. I mean...his f*cking name is Gavin. What, was 'Tristan' already taken? Best Friend is over eager in her endorsement of their relationship. Mom and Dad, who don't want her to date anyway, take the "you'll destroy your friendship with Best Friend" angle. After some consternation, Daughter decides to not date Gavin. Overtly anyway... Gavin, Daughter, and Best Friend are all just gonna be one cozy little hormonal quorum. Daughter tells Best Friend, and through a tearful confession, Best Friend concedes she didn't want them to date at all, and she's soooo happy. Everyone is happy. For now.

As we all know, this will ultimately come to a head. I've got summer between 9th and 10th grade circled in my sports book, but I think a savvy bettor would take the under. Several irrelevant and predictable bullets we're dodged, hell, they were never loaded or fired, but this all wraps itself up in a nice tidy thirty minute episode of The Secret Life of the American Teen. We all learned a little about love, and friendship, and family, and most importantly, we walk away unscathed. But it's the byline buried deep in this story where these 2000+ words found a foothold.

As with all 13 year old girls worth their salt, there is a wide eyed male friend sitting on the sidelines in an advisory position. His desperate love for her apparent, a tempest brewing inside a teapot shaped like an awkward teenaged boy. As my friend recounted the details about the rise and fall of Daughter and Gavin, he added this throw-a-way moment:

"And Man, she has this friend named Phillip who is totally in love with her. And Wife was like 'why doesn't she want to date Phillip' and I was like 'would you have dated Phillip at 13?'"

His wife stammered and stuttered and parried with "It's very awkward for you to ask me who I would date at 13."

Phillip's and Gavin's are the spectrum bookends. It's a movable feast as in some cases one person's Phillip is another person's Gavin, but this is the width and breadth. The narrative isn't any more complex than one being traded in for the other as the circumstances dictate, but instead the implication of Phillips and Gavins is what makes this thing disco.

Phillips are a curious case as they write the story. The trait that defines Phillips is unwavering dedication and laser like focus. These circumstances yield a man who has never had intimate companionship come with ease, and as a result they are typically nerds with a lot of time on their hands. With women like some distant mirage not there to siphon off your time and energy, images get carved in cave walls, sonnets get penned, novels get written, screenplays get made, sitcoms get green-lit. These men have had centuries to mythologize female companionship, and as a result have managed to embed two distinct Phillip plot lines in to the cultural identity. One; I'm pathetic, but I love you so much, eventually you will concede the Gavin in your life, and end up with me. Or two; when the false promise of you wanting me instead of a Gavin collapses in on itself, you leave me. In my misguided attempt to regain your affection, I find a lady Phillip. I may not see it at first, but love finds a way. In the climactic scene, you return to me, but wiser and having found my mirror, I eschew your favor for Lady Phillip who sees me for how great I am. She becomes the person who needs me like I once needed you.

Gavins, on the other hand, live the story. It's all finger banging, and women after you like some tedious task as Phillips stare on envious, determined to prove how undeserving Gavins are. Gavins often have the benefit of base level animal nature to win the day. These are the strong and fast and pheromone thick machos who have ruled tribal societies longer than Phillips have spun their romantic notions. A tincture of a Gavin's sweat can make a brothel's worth of snooches moist. One of the most provocative wrinkles in Gavin-dom is that quarterbacks and devastatingly handsome drug dealers make up this same ilk, but are pitted as opposition. Phillips tend to find strength in numbers where Gavins can only deepens their stranglehold via open warfare with other Gavins. Wether you're a prep or a soc, there is certain type that will descend in droves because it's the same cloth, just different sides.

These are the caricatured extremes, as most dudes will occupy the space in between. A Gavin who doesn't want to end up with two children from two different women--none of whom are one of the two wives who have divorced him--has swallowed some tough doses of Phillip over the years. Some are lucky enough to be just on the high side of Gavin with a strong Phillip undercurrent. Those are the dudes who work at impressive architecture firms and have already married super hot, and equally cool, mom replacements. (No, that's not about someone I know. And no, I'm not crazy jealous). The inverse is a Phillip just close enough to the Gavin's Maginot Line to toughen up a bit and woo some of the weaker Gavin devotees to his side of the fence. This might be the ideal position on the spectrum. Near-Gavins-Mostly-Phillips get all the theatre, band, and choir chicks who blossom into the deeply desirable women after so much needed hotness and character is coaxed out of them via "insert token life experience".

It seems counter-intuitive, but the absolute worst spot to be is smack dab in the middle. There is small stretch of ground cordoned off with razor wire where two hopeless cases live. One, a variety I have little sympathy compounded with an alarming amount of schadenfreude for, is the emasculated Gavin. It's a rare case, but there are Lady Gavins out there who will leave even the staunchest of Gavins as little more than scorched earth in their wake. I've found this particular scenario easier to rebound from than the opposite. These are the guys that eventually get back in to shape, and run a marathon. Confidence renewed, they bang some almost-hot-twenty-something from the steno pool, the culmination of a pitch perfect midlife crisis slow cooked in the resentment crock pot. After all, it's hard to keep a good alpha down.

The other state, a point of view from which few men can mend, is the Phillip who has tried to transform himself into a Gavin. Part of the magic of a Phillip is the near blinding heart light that leads them to so much hurt, and eventual story book happiness. Once that heart light is shuttered like a 19th Century oil lamp, it is hard to rekindle the flame. The years of posturing, and the resentment over who they haven't gotten is like poison in the ground water. It turns into this insatiable hunger for who else they could or should have. Each new love eventually dissolves into a gnawing disappointment. The vagaries of who didn't want you, or who should have wanted you, or how little being a good guy seems to have won them dims the once unfettered ability to give love. What's left is a half-formed creature, never fooling the cult of Gavins and being too far gone for those looking for their Phillip. To revisit some broad strokes, girls like bad boys, and women want a good guy, and Phillips who have betrayed their inherent Phillip-ness occupy the no man's land in between. My arms are empty in the most meaningless way... Not that I would know anything about that.

How does this elaborate carousel of Phillips and Gavins fit into our lives? In my cynicism, it seems as such: Gavins are the emblem of what is truly desirable, but unattainable. You cut your teeth and offer up your virginity like a sacrifice to the order of Gavins. Hot breath and racing heart make up the genital engorging memories of long forgotten Gavins. But, as life continues to happen, and the wounds left from Gavins salacious incisors cut so deep, the want of desire finally gives way. Tail betwixt legs, this wounded heart backslides to the open arms of whatever Phillip will serve as the bedrock for a comfortable, predictable middle class existence. No lust, no hunger, just the acceptance that what we want is no replacement for what we need.

Though buried underneath all of those hurt feelings and inability to forgive, is a quiet ember. It's the irrational hope that maybe, just on the perhaps, after a gamut of Gavins, there is a revelation. Instead of these monoliths of carnality, irresistible to weak willed women, these Gavins are revealed as an illusion. An emotionally illiterate child incapable of giving anything bigger than what they can pull out of their pants. It's no fault of their own, instead it's a challenge never laid at their feet. It was never asked or demanded of them, and it will be to their own demise if they can't learn from the Phillips across the isle. Now, instead of some concession, the Phillip is revealed as the prize. A beacon of pure love with care and concern and kindness enough no to just make love, but sustain love.

I tend to believe this all sort of grades out to the middle, but it's pretty to think so. Some will never cut the cord with Gavins other will scorn the Phillips from their lives, but life shouldn't be as idyllic as the words we can string together. No matter your current standing, embrace it. Hug your Phillip or tongue-kiss your Gavin, because without Gavins and Phillips and the spaces between to color this tapestry, love isn't worth the four hollow letters it's printed on.

To revisit my friend, his wife, their daughter, and the suitors that prop up this tale:

"Would you have dated Phillip when you were 13?"

Of course not, and my friend knows it. As a Phillip in full--a man who found his place inside the fearless love he gives and gets in return--he knows he owes a lot to all the Gavins which had to come before him. And the rest of the story tells itself...

Pawn Stars: the most real, fake-real reality show on television.

As far as real reality television goes, nothing even comes close to The First 48. Crime is grim and senseless, and the things brought to light during the course of any given episode are often too real. The next tier down is the "can you believe how effin' crazy my job is?!" sub-set of reality TV. As cool as it is to watch people drive trucks on ice roads, or fish for crabs, or dig through crazy people's piles of crazy person stuff (either American Pickers or Hoarders--your call), Pawn Stars is king of the shitheap. The ratings don't lie. #1 show on cable many times over. And if the measure of a shows worth is the strength of its spin-offs, American Restorations is the Colbert Report to Pawn Stars' Daily Show.

The show is highly consumable. Lots of great reality conventions--money, arguing, deal making, likable "regular guys"--but the beauty is these conventions are balanced with one foot in a passable reality. Pawn shops are actual things. It's an ingrained part of our society rich with cultural cache and connotation. What is the moment like when you look a loved one in the face and say "I pawned it"? We're post-Craigslist now, and selling stuff in a matter of days, or even hours, takes Internet-level effort. A pawn shop is for when you need money now. Not now, like thirty minutes ago. Then you take that model, add Vegas, and set-up cameras. I know, this should be the most despicable and sneering drama on television, but filtered through History Channel's production sieve, she shines like a goddamn dime.

The items featured are the pillar of the show. Both a platform for impromptu history lessons, and catalyst for steamy doses of old school haggling, the variety of items passed in front of the guys never ceases to absolutely stun me. For every "who ever even heard of such a thing?" moment, the Pawn Stars seem to have some anecdote or factoid to validate any bizarre item's existence. For those things even deeper still in the cut, the Pawn Stars have a brood of experts at their disposal. You name a specific type of nerdery, Rick and company will find you a nerd. When the gun expert, Clark county museum guy, or chin-bearded historical auctions guy rolls in, brace for an elite level knowledge drop.

Tangible history lives in each item placed on the counter. The Pawn Stars and their experts exorcise the context from a relic, weave a magic shroud of historical import, and then slap a figure on it worth half of what they'll sell it for. It's the best parts of Antiques Roadshow, but instead of some sepcualtive auction value, these people walk out with a handful of cash into skeezy ass Las Vegas. As far as a central idea to grip the viewer goes, it's air tight, but no matter the fake-real sheen used to coat each episode, the second, and more compelling story still teems beneath the surface.

I saw an episode with a polite minute or two on a solidly grey, khaki wearing, reform hippie out to sell his collection of concert posters. He had a stack of vintage psychedelic San Francisco prints with Summer of Love cliches beaming from each sheet. The bands and venues featured were pantheon and the condition was impressive. Bear in mind, this guy was out getting weird on the scene in 1967 San Fran. He still had the presence of mind to not only collect these posters, but get them home from what ever crash-pad/love-in he might stagger out of come daybreak. That alone is worth a thousand bucks.

Already knowing retail was $8000, he wanted $3500. He left with $2125. The twenty-five, a token of hollow victory. Knocked down to half of his asking price, resigned to concede, he pushed for a tiny amount more just to have the last word.

The deal done, they interviewed the aging Hippie outside. A thin smile found its way out from his mustache. Eyes tight behind his glasses, he said "I'm gonna be sad to leave 'em here...but I am moving on with my life." I am moving on with my life? Those are words rife with implication. Is he finally sober, the selling of the posters a symbolic funeral for  his rock'n'roll life time and cocaine sweet tooth? Perhaps it's some shrewd third wife intent to break a man of something he loves just to assert her station. Maybe he's terminally ill, and the ephemeral nature of things we carry with us revealed, he's shoring up his resources to disappear into a beautiful, far-off place. Any which way, the potential for realness is hard to quantify.

The up against it guy, yelping outside the store, his antique pistol worth a fraction of what he paid. The woman selling her grandmother's jewelry, and stumbling head-long into a small fortune. The waitress given a turquoise and silver dancing Indian statue by an elderly regular. The guy who rubs his hands together and says "I already got plans for this $6500," like it's a ten spot he found in an old suit jacket. The scope of circumstance leading up to the sale, and the labyrinthine web of possibilities opened up after, is downright provocative. It's the sort of reality so pungent, the fake-real construct in this case is not to manufacture reality, but to dilute it.

Pre-Camp, or Future-Camp

Real Steel finally comes out this weekend. Even today, I feel tremors from the rush of zeal as the trailer bludgeoned me and I thought "this is a thing that actually exists." This will very quietly be my favorite movie of the summer not named Drive. The trailer promises not only some sort of high stakes robot fighting league, but both pieces of dialogue "You got nothin' left," and "You're a bad bet," delivered with the hyper sincerity that makes my crap sensor tingle. And Hugh Jackman is gonna make good with some kid? Forget about it.

So sure...I work a little material now and again, and I delivered the above diatribe to a film loving friend the other day. He leaned back for a moment, cocked his eyebrows and asked, "Are you being ironic?" Yeah, a little, but sometimes I like a movie that knows it's just a movie. Maybe it's low brow, and my ticket stub goes toward the ever reverberating pablum machine that makes Hollywood great, but...I love crap. I watch a Statham film with the reverence one invokes when they visit the Hagia Sophia. I would trade in a hectare of moody indie dramas for one more installment of Final Destination.

You can't make a B-movie on purpose. A B-movie has nothing to do with budget or cast or genre, it has something more to do with ingenuity, irrational confidence, pervasive good-badness, and a lack of execution. There are still bad movies--tons of em--and great films, but B-movies fill some slight space in between. Sometimes it's a great idea brought to life with meat hands. Sometimes it's one masterful sequence or unforgettable visual effect. In this case, it's the "He was in what...and it was about what?" moment forty years removed from an actors relevance. These movies serve as a quiet bedrock of modern cinema's identity. B-movies are the corpses harvested to make great films. Ask Quentin Tarantino and the mountain of money stuffed in old VHS cassette covers he sleeps on every night. I bet it's with chicks, too...hot ones. At least hot-ish.

Old B-movies enjoy the benefit of nostalgia's allure. The throw back poster art and over the top story lines excuse the shoddy craftsmanship and clumsy narratives. Badness becomes the new measuring stick of quality. The film becomes its flaws. Take the 1968 Otto Preminger crapsterpiece Skidoo. Skidoo is...oh man...it is not good, but Jackie Gleason--yes, that Jackie Gleason--takes LSD. Harry Nilsson does the soundtrack. Mobsters and Hippies intermingle. There's a rape joke. Oh, and the movie also happens to be Groucho Marx's last film...let that wash over you. She's a deuce all the way around, but aren't you curious? Aren't you glad Skidoo exists?

In the moment, in 1968, the movie is despicable. A tragic, unfunny film with a bunch of washed up Hollywood memories trying to pose as a hip counter culture drug romp. This is a year that boasts films like 2001: A Space Odyssey and Rosemary's Baby. India was in a cinematic golden age, and Europe and Japan were rippin' shit on the reg. In the winter of '68, I believe I would have deplored this movie. On principle. I can't prove it, but my gut--and my need to make my pointless argument--say otherwise.

40 years later, the first time I saw the film, things were different. As I said to my self, "Jackie Gleason was in what...and it's about what?" the film earned its pass. Skidoo was charming and some far away emblem of another era's misguided notions. Shades of Hollywood long gone in a film so absurd it takes on an endearing, almost naive, quality. What was once born from a bloated Studio flop, came out on the other side of nostalgia as must-see-movie-nerd-cool. Time's elixir can transform even the steamiest turd into campy, kitschy fun, but what of that freshly laid dook?

Well, this is my hope for Real Steel. I want to witness the pre-camp/future-camp flash point. The film could be just good enough to be forgettable. It could be just bad enough to be terrible (I'm looking crazy hard at you ROTPOTA...like I wanna punch you in your face). But, if the feel good hokum is strung taught, the cliches visible from the first five minutes, and the visual effects set to be the blue screen and stop motion laughable to a future era, it could be just bad enough to be great. A relic for tomorrow's cinefiles to gleefully accept for what it is, crap. It remains to be seen if this picture has stuff enough to rise into the cannon of B-movies, but I'll lay a ticket stub on that chance.