Sample Reality

Don’t Hug that Tar Baby

It’s been widely reported (and not just on the Daily Show) that new Presidential Press Secretary Mark Snow used the racist term “tar baby” in his first televised press briefing. Responding to a question about the NSA’s secret wiretapping program, Snow answered:

I am not going to stand up here and presume to declassify any kind of program. That is a decision the President has to make. I can’t confirm or deny it. The President was not confirming or denying. Again, I would take you back to the USA Today story to give you a little context. Look at the poll that appeared the following day […] something like 65% of the public was not troubled by it. Having said that, I don’t want to hug the tar baby of trying to comment on the program… the alleged program, the existence of which I can neither confirm or deny.

Just to illustrate what “tar baby” means to most people, below is a photograph of Tar Baby’s Pancakes, a restaurant in North Myrtle Beach whose logo taps into the vast reserves of racist imagery comprising our nation’s history. I snapped this photograph in July 2005, when I was in Myrtle Beach with my family. We didn’t eat at Tar Baby’s, but when I saw the sign, I had to stop and pull over. The sign left me speechless (close-up of the sign at Flickr). Finally—and sadly—I’ve found some relevance to this photograph.

Tar Baby’s (Larger Image)
Posted to Flickr by samplereality.

Evel Knievel (not dead yet)

It must be a slow news day at the Associated Press. There’s an article on Evel Knievel, who’s apparently racked with pain, not to mention short-term memory loss. Not sure if this story really is newsworthy, but at least it’s written with a sense of irony:

Evel Knievel has trouble now just walking from his condo to the pool. The ’70s cultural icon and poster boy for fast living and derring-do is 67, his body broken by years of spectacular crashes and ravaged by a multitude of serious ailments. The king of the daredevils can hardly get out of bed most days, let alone straddle a Harley.

Reminds me of a conversation I overheard in May 2002. I was in the National Air & Space Museum at the Smithsonian, oogling one of Knievel’s star-spangled jumpsuits, which was—and still is—on display there (pictured here). And I overheard a couple of kids talking about how cool Knievel was—even though he was 20 years before their time. And one of the kids says, yeah, too bad he died.

You have to ask yourself, which is worse: smashing a flaming motorcycle into a cliff wall and falling to your death, or little kids thinking that’s how you died?

A Return to Sesame Street (Fisher-Price Style)

Since Elmo was (regretably) such a success with our son, we’ve rescued a bunch of old-style Fisher-Price “Little People” from my parent’s attic, including a few Sesame Street characters. Here we’ve got Bert and Ernie (circa 1974) tooling around town in a garbage truck.

Whose garbage truck? I’m not sure. I don’t recall Oscar the Grouch actually being a sanitation worker. In fact, wouldn’t he more or less be the enemy of Sesame Street’s trashmen? I mean, I think he had rabies or something.

In any case, Niko loves the toys, and it’s weird watching him play with the very same slobber-encrusted, booger-smeared toys that I played with thirty years ago. I don’t know who was more upset when Ernie went missing for a week, Niko or me.

Puzzling over the flight home

How many passengers on a transatlantic flight play Sudoku?

Apparently all of them.

Another observation from the flight…One of the in-flight movies was The Dukes of Hazzard. I assume this movie was supposed to appeal somehow to the retro-seeking, nostalgia-desperate Gen Xers like myself, who spent many Friday nights in the eighties watching The Dukes and The Incredible Hulk. Like other attempts to create new franchises from recycled television shows, the movie was, well, I can’t say a disappointment, because I didn’t expect anything at all in the first place. But the spirit of the movie was all wrong, fundamentally misguided. Bo and Luke Duke, the good guys, were buffoons, played for laughs, while the bad guys—Boss Hogg, Roscoe—were played straight. This is the opposite of the original series.

Of course, I’m overanalyzing a movie that is obviously meant to be taken lightly. Still, I think it’s worth pointing out that this inversion of the comical and the serious seems to happen a lot in the adaptation of seventies and eighties television shows for the big screen in the new millennium. It’s as if the old shows—Incredible Hulk, Starsky and Hutch, The Dukes of Hazzard—weren’t campy enough, so the remakes have to be in camp-overdrive. Or rather, as if to prove we once took the originals seriously and didn’t conceive of them as camp at the time, we have to produce remakes with even greater camp value.

The single exception to this trend seems to be the Sci-Fi channel’s remarkable reimagining of Battlestar Galactica. In this series, what was once camp is now deadly serious. And that’s what makes Battlestar one of the best television shows around right now.

A lost World Trade Center poem

I recently found a poem I had written years and years ago, in July 1992, which I had absolutely, totally forgotten about. I wrote it in an undergraduate creative writing course with the astounding poet James Reiss. I’m not sure why, but Reiss generally liked my stuff. For an undergrad, I guess it was okay material. A few weeks after the class was over I was walking down the muggy streets of Oxford, Ohio, and Reiss drove by, shouting out to me, “There goes the Tungsten Wunderkind!”

Tungsten, now that I’m remembering, was one of my favorite words that summer, and Reiss knew it. The “wunderkind” was Reiss’s idea. For a while after that I fancied myself the Tungsten Wunderkind. Long after most young men give up the idea of becoming rock stars I harbored fantasies that Tungsten Wunderkind would be a great name for my first band. The one that would go on to fill stadiums around the globe, stop world hunger, meet the Pope.

How embarrasing.

But this poem here, the one I discovered in an brittle plastic binder in the back of a closet, Reiss didn’t like. I remember that too, now. Never mind the erratic meter and graceless lines, it was the closing stanza that irked Reiss. Too much like the end of The Planet of the Apes, with Charlton Heston staring aghast at the ruins of the Statue of Liberty. Reiss pointed out the unintentional allusion, and I thought it was a compliment at the time.

I think I see now what Reiss was getting at.

Yet after September 11, 2001, the poem seems different. Definitely not better, definitely not redeemed, just different. I don’t feel prescient so much as in sync with Hollywood’s darkest fantasies. It’s still a bush league poem, but it’s a bush league world we’re living in.

Baby’s First ATM

So yesterday my wife, son, and I ventured for the first time into Kids-R-Us, home of the well-behaved toddler, destination of choice for the stark raving mad parent. Our visit deserves a separate post of its own (suffice it to say that it ended with the purchase of 100 plastic balls, each the size of a grapefruit), but what really needs to be said is this: why does a child need a play ATM machine?

Here you see an image of what the proud parent ahead of me in the checkout line bought their little girl: the YOUniverse ATM toy, complete with a plastic ATM card, an alphanumeric keypad, a functioning screen, a slot that accepts bills, and Baby’s first PIN number. WTF? Seriously, a PIN number.

It’s true that many toys are nothing but thinly disguised training tools, preparing our children for the drudgery of adult labor—play kitchens, play vacuums, play tools—but I think the play banking machine is a different beast altogether.

The machine takes for granted an idea that I will go to my deathbed resisting: that our electronic lives—our database selves composed of PINs, account numbers, credit records, virtually every transaction of our day-to-day lives, stored and aggregated in corporate datawarehouses—are essentially our whole identity.

Without that PIN, we’re nothing.

I am reminded of a scene in Don DeLillo’s White Noise, in which our hero Jack Gladney visits an ATM machine:

In the morning I walked to the bank. I went to the automatic teller machine to check my balance. I inserted my card, entered my secret code, tapped out my request. The figure on the screen roughly corresponded to my independent estimate, feebly arrived at after long searches through documents, tormented arithmetic. Waves of relief and gratitude flowed over me. The system had blessed my life. I felt its support and approval….What a pleasing interaction. I sensed that something of deep personal value, but not money, not that at all, had been authenticated and confirmed. (White Noise 46)

Written over twenty years ago, this passage still seems fresh—if only we stop to think about it. Automatic Teller Machines have become such a part of our daily life that we forget. “Automatic” now describes us as much as it does the machines themselves.

DeLillo continues, “the system was invisible, which made it all the more impressive, all the more disquieting to deal with.” I think Baby’s First ATM functions as an innoculation to the more disquieting, unsettling aspects of our second, database selves. It’s not a conscious effort by the banking industry, of course (I am not that conspiracy minded). Rather, I think it’s the absurd, logical extension of the reduction of our lives to sets of data owned by corporations.

Jets! Bombs! War! A Visit to the National Air and Space Museum!

We went to the National Air and Space Museum today, thinking it’d be a lark for our 16-month old son, who loves planes and anything else that makes a lot of noise and moves through the sky.

I’d forgotten, though, exactly what the Air and Space Museum memorializes: jets, bombs, and war.

Truly, the history of flight is the history of war in the 20th century.

Political aggression and state-sanctioned bloodshed were the twin engines that powered the technological advances which made dying, death, and destruction, all wrought by aircraft, both quicker and cheaper, and ultimately, easier in the modern age. Obliteration from on high, cities reduced to blips on radar.

Even space, the final frontier, is now essentially a battlezone, a militarized nebula of satellites and payloads. This, at least, is what we learned at the museum.

Next week, no kidding, we’re seeking an antidote to all this flag-waving glorification of war, something not so exuberant and triumphant. Something a little more, uh, aware of the follies of greed and rapacity.

Maybe some Bosch at the National Gallery of Art?

The Pros and Cons of Life Hacking

I’ve been meaning to blog about Clive Thompson’s NYT Magazine article on life hacking for a week now, but, as it happens, I’ve been operating on “continuous partial attention” myself since, oh, I don’t know, weeks, months, maybe years even.

While the science Thompson describes is fascinating—when is the perfect moment to interrupt someone at work?—I tremble thinking how this science will eventually be put to use: making us more productive workers.

Taylorism was nothing compared to what the good people at Microsoft are cooking up, with their studies of attentions spans, interruption cycles, and multitasking management.

The whole idea behind the anarchic-sounding life hacking, it seems to me, is to simplify your life, not so you can enjoy it more, but so that you can increase your productivity. Even the famous hipster PDA presumes that efficiency and work are the most important things in your life.

I don’t want to hack my life so that I can work more and work better. I want to work less.

Play is an endangered species.

Disney babies are always dreaming

The following text is from the packaging of an “easy-grasp” fork and spoon set some kind, Disney-loving soul gave our son:

Playtime is filled with pixies and princesses. Bathtime overflows with pirate ships and mermaids. Meals are shared with bears who love honey. And Naps take place in castles, not cribs. So whether they are fast asleep or wide-awake, Disney babies are always Dreaming.

Well. Aside from slyly mentioning a host of Disney characters, this little piece of whimsical poetry actually makes me feel guilty for not encouraging my son to think of bathtime as an exciting Little Mermaid/Pirates of the Caribbean adventure.

Although, I do get a kick out of the idea of imagining the only Pixie I know by name—Frank Black—playing blocks with my son during playtime.

Going in for tests…

Sitting in the local coffeeshop I overheard a group of fifty-ish women having their weekly coffee clutch. Their conversation drifted toward doctors and illnesses, and one of them related how the husband of a mutual friend was “going in for tests.”

I’ve never thought much about this phrase before, but suddenly today it struck me somehow as one of the key phrases of modern American society, over-medicalized, over-diagnosed, aging as we are.

The patient—well, he wasn’t technically a patient, really, because the tests were performed on an out-patient basis—underwent a “series of tests,” a “battery of tests” and after all of them the results were inconclusive.

Again, this somehow seems like a metaphor for today’s America. Something’s wrong, but we don’t know what. The doctors are baffled, puzzled, stumped. The specialists are called in. The machines are fired up, foreign electrons pulsating through our flesh, our blood drawn, our tissues sampled, and all we have in return is a printout that’s inconclusive, too-soon-to-tell, let’s adopt a wait-and-see approach and come in again for tests in a month. Nobody can explain it to us, nobody knows, and we leave the chilled air-conditioned waiting room, walk into the bright sunwashed parking lot, a blast of hot summer air at the door, feeling Damocles sword above our head.

Reagan at Disney World, Memorial Day Fun!

In honor of Memorial Day, I’m taking a break from my Danger in Suburbia series, and am digging into the archives for this Memorial Day-related post.

Twenty years ago, on May 23, 1985, the LA Times ran this article, reporting on President Reagan’s plans for Memorial Day. The headline reads “President to Honor Unknown Soldier, Visit Disney World.” This paratactical pairing—Honor Unknown Soldier, Visit Disney—is surely one of the greatest juxtapositions to ever occur, ironically or not, in newsprint in the free world.

Yet somehow, it’s very fitting, very Reaganesque.

Both the Tomb of the Unknowns in Arlington Cemetary and Disney World theme park in Orlando are products of the same cultural impulses: ritualized nostalgia and the allure of fantastic (an anonymous soldier who dies so that we may live, whose death, because it is no single, identifiable soldier’s sacrifice, memorializes all soldiers’ deaths…how different is that from the idea of a Magic Kingdom whose monorail whisks individuals away from their lives in the parking lots into a world of talking mice and space mountains?

Well, okay, quite a bit different…but I still think both concepts represent two key cultural phenomenon which define America. And Reagan, as always, embodies both at once. War and entertainment, patriotism and consumerism, memory and fiction.

Killer Robots!!!

From the archives: one of my students dug up a report by the United Auto Workers which details the history of death-by-robot in the auto industry. As the report warns us, “Robot injuries are one of the best-kept secrets.” The best-kept secrets where, I’m dying to ask, and I’m hoping they mean “in the industry” and not “in the universe.”

I hate to be sanguine about such a deadly issue, but I have to say that the report has a sardonic tone to it. Some of it almost seems like poetry. Consider these lines:

Japan

1981 Robot pushed repairman into grinder.
Robot squeezed person against conveyor.
Robot crushed person against a planer.
Robot pushed person into weld positioner.

It’s poetry in motion. Or at least, poetry in automotion:

Pushed, squeezed, crushed, pushed
Grinder, conveyor, planer, positioner
Robot, Robot, Robot, Robot.

More liberty from the liberty-loving Liberty Baptist Church

Yesterday I focused on the bag I received, like manna from heaven, except it wasn’t the desert and it wasn’t edible, and it wasn’t from God either, from the Liberty Baptist Church. Now I’d like to share, because that’s WWJD, what was in the shiny, plastic, shopping bag from what I like to think of as God’s grocery store.

You can see below the “Response Card” that I’m presumably supposed to fill out and presumably supposed to return to Liberty Baptist Church. Because I am, after all, of course, going to rush out this weekend and attend services there.

The front of the card is straight-forward enough. Name, email, phone, address, my kids and their birthdates. Keep expanding that database! Sell it to the Family Research Council! Sell it to Karl Rove! Because that’s WWJD.

It’s the back of the card that really attracts my attention. There, with a simple checkmark, I can select a box that says, “I’m committing my life to Christ.”

That’s it? It’s that easy? I just check the box? With my pencil? And that’s that? I’m saved? My life of sin, gone? The iniquities and depravities? The feeding tube business? Wiped away? This box here, right here? I check it? And I’m saved? My soul cleansed in the cleansing cleanser of Liberty? And what, no signature required? No photo id?

It’s like Salvation for Dummies. It’s like Redemption for Idiots.

But wait, it can’t be that simple, can it?

Ah-ha, I see it…There’s a trick to it, a test. For beyond the checkbox, temptation lies…Just a few lines down I have the opportunity of requesting more information. Among the things “I’d like information on” are “Couples,” “Men,” and “Women.” So, like, if I’m into wife-swapping, that’s what they’re asking? Or looking to hit on some young pure Southern ladies? I sign up here? What if I check the box for more information on men, will I be reported to the Gay Squad? It’s a trick!!! Entrapment, I tell you!! Don’t check any of these! Just check to commit your life to Christ and get the hell out of there!!

Liberty Baptist Church Wants Me!!!

Yesterday I had the good fortune of receiving, on my front porch, a gift bag from Liberty Baptist Church in nearby Mooresville (“Race City U.S.A.”). At left is this fabulous surprise, which made my day (click the image for a larger photograph). How ironic that just moments before finding the bag, I had been pondering my near certain eternal stay in Hell, roasting like a puffy white marshmallow in the fiery depths of infernal damnation. I wasn’t sure which mortal sin would be the one to ultimately land me there, but I’m sure it had something to do with feeding tubes.

Liberty Baptist is, as the pamphlet inside the bag assured me, an “old fashioned, missionary” church, just like the ones I see on TV!!! None of that New Age feel-good stuff. We’re talking Baptist, pure and simple and God-fearing and Footloose free.

But what really draws me to the church is the name itself: Liberty.

Man, am I a sucker for liberty. It’s right up there with freedom. I mean, liberty, that rocks. And if liberty weren’t enough all by itself, the name is actually sanctioned by the Bible!

In this detail from the photograph of the bag, you can see that “Where the spirit of the Lord is there is liberty” (II Corinthians 3:17). True, true.

But I wondered what else the Bible has to say about my favorite word, liberty. Well, in the King James Bible there’s a great book called Wisdom of Jesus Son of Sirach (i.e. Not That Jesus). In Sirach the good prophet tell us, “Give the water no passage; neither a wicked woman liberty to gad abroad” (Sir. 25:25). Cool, “gad” in the King James Bible! And yes, I agree—keep those wicked woman home to gad.

And in Sirach 26:10, “If thy daughter be shameless, keep her in straitly, lest she abuse herself through overmuch liberty.” Whoa, not just liberty but overmuch liberty? That’s heavy. Like, I’m thinking, and I’m probably wrong here, but “overmuch” kind of means “too”? As in too much liberty? Hell, yes, when you’re talking about women!! If there’s one thing the Bible teaches us again and again, it’s that shameless women and liberty don’t mix. Give a woman an inch and she’ll take a mile, or whatever distance it takes to get her abroad, where she can gad about all she wants.

Tomorrow: what else is inside my bag from Liberty Baptist Church?

Poetry from Row 16A on US Airways #952 (the trip home)

Poetry from Row 11A on US Airways #730

Memory is not a Document (Ronald Reagan Lives on in our hearts and envelopes)

Today for the first time I had the pleasure of mailing Ronald Reagan’s face through the U.S. postal system. Three times, in fact. Appropriately enough, the stamped envelopes contained rebate forms for my 2004 TurboTax software. Very supply-side economics. Let the rebates come trickling on down!

Reagan—who was arguably an amnesiac even before he had Alzheimer’s—makes for an odd stamp. I was reminded of one of the sidebars in Douglas Coupland’s Generation X: Memory is not a document.

Meaning, it’s not permanent. It’s not evidence. It’s not even there. Reagan exemplified this. The whole thing is very Pynchonesque. A Reagan stamp, that is. Like there’s this vast underground postal empire giving these stamps a meaning that exists above their actual 37 cent value. W.A.S.T.E.

I remember in the early nineties when the Elvis stamp came out, there was a debate whether it should depict the young hip rocker Elvis or the older sequined Elvis (younger won out). If we had a debate about the Reagan stamp, what would the two alternative versions be? Obviously the presidential version. But what about the young homoerotic Kings Row Drake “Where’s the rest of me?” McHugh? Which would be more appropriate?

Cognitive Dissonance Moment of the Day

I’m a huge fan of Lost—airplane crashes, polar bears, a non-Hodgkins-lymphoma-free Jack, aka Charlie Salinger—I mean, what’s not to like? So somebody suggested I check out Alias, another show by the creator of Lost, J.J. Abrams.

Months, I guess, later I finally watch the first episode of the first season of Alias. And here’s where the cog dis kicks in: as Sidney (Jennifer Garner) is telling her fiancee about her secret life in the CIA, Cat Stevens’s song “Trouble” begins playing on the soundtrack.

I’m sorry, but there’s only one set of visual images that I could ever possibly associate with “Trouble” and that’s Harold’s last fake suicide in Harold and Maude as he drives his jaguar hearse over a cliff, escaping from the car at the last moment. It’s one of the most poignant cinematic moments from the seventies.

And here the song is, hijacked for a spy story, bearing no relation to the narrative, the characters, or anything else on my television screen for that matter.

Trouble, oh trouble, can’t you see, you’re eating my heart away and there’s nothing much left of me. Except secret agents and double-lives and lipstick GPS units.

Starbucks Delocator

From Boing Boing via Stay Free, news of the Starbucks Delocator, a database which offers up the nearest non-Starbucks coffeehouse or cafe near any given location. My own local hangout—Summit Coffee—wasn’t in the database yet, so I’ve added it. You have to love Summit—I wrote most of my dissertatation there it seems.

Again, that’s the Starbucks Delocator. Get the google on and add a link to the Starbucks Delocator on your own blog.

Cops!

Damn, the longer I go without posting, the harder it is to get back to posting…Good thing this isn’t my full-time job.

But here’s a thought that I did want to get out there: last night I watched the classic 1976 film Network, and the movie doesn’t seem like satire of the television industry so much as an uncanny prediction of where things are heading.

Network news divisions being driven by entertainment value? Already done. Laughable, undeniably biased newscasters? No problem. Crazy newscasters? Been there, done that.

And what about reality TV? In Network the network airs the “Mao Tse Tung Television Hour,” showing real-life footage of bank robberies, kidnappings, assassinations, and so on. How different is this from what we have now? America’s Most Dangerous Car Chases. When Animals Attacks. And the mother of them all: COPS.

Oddly, as John Langley, the creator and executive producer of COPS, admits in an interview on Court TV: Talk, he used to be an “academic.” Is this my future, I wonder?…

Is Bob the Builder Gay?

Recently I was stuck in a slow-moving checkout line in Lowe’s. To pass the time I began reading—and finished—five different Bob the Builder books, which were in the rack next to the register. I had never really paid much attention to the phenomenon, but I knew my toddler nephews were huge Bob fans.

After reading all the books, I realized that, without a doubt, Bob the Builder is gay. Sure, he has that sexy business partner, Wendy, but I think it’s safe to say that their relationship is strictly platonic. There’s not even a hint of electricity between the two of them. And how many big strong construction workers have a pet cat—one that’s named Pilchard? One of the books shows Bob relaxing at home after a hard day on the job, in a neat little bungalow, sipping tea. Very butch, indeed. Actually, with that flannel shirt and all those tools, very Village People.

After poking around online I discovered that I’m not the only one who’s made this connection. Ananova reports that in Britain (Bob’s home country) Bob has become a gay icon.

No news reports of that happening in the U.S. yet…

I’m not dead

Just a quick post, a placeholder, really, to say that I’m still alive. July was crazy and August looks to be crazy too. More on why later…

In the meantime, for your viewing pleasure and in honor of my nephew, who may or may not soon appear in a nationally-televised Cheerios commercial, please enjoy this classic Cheerios advertisement.

Today in LA

Today in LA I talked to a city engineer. The palm trees here, he says they’re infested with rats. Up in the dead fronds the rats build nests and at night you can see silhouettes scurrying up and down the trunks. So there on Rodeo Drive, high up above the shoppers and tourists and stars, a pack of rats look down from their palm tree homes, lording over the city of angels.

The Other Day

The other day: from my hotel in Rosslyn, Virginia, there is a spectacular view of Washington, DC. It’s just across the river. Nothing to do in Rosslyn itself though, so I watch some television. The local NBC affiliate closes the 11 o’clock news with a feature on Anthony Edwards, whose last appearance on ER was Thursday night. I guess he took a long time leaving? Apparently dragged out over several episodes? One of the anchors asks the reporter, So, is he really gone now? We keep thinking he’s left the show, but there he is again.

Another anchor chimed in then, part of the wrap-up banter every news show must end with, “Yeah, just like Franco.” And then the entire group of newscasters—the playfully flirty male and female anchors, the enthusiastic sports anchor, and even the blonde weatherman, they all laugh. As if they were thinking the exact same thing themselves, “Yeah, just like Franco.”