We Are Envious of Derrick Rose's Jumping Ability

This past Saturday number-one ranked Memphis rocked Gonzaga, and Derrick Rose nearly had a triple double (19-9-8). (He also had a ridiculous buzzer beating tip dunk off a Joey Dorsey missed lay-up to end the first half - look it up - someone must have put it on youtube by now). Rose has been the catalyst for his team all year, and let me be the first to say it: he's the reason Memphis will WIN the NCAA tournament.

He's better than O.J. Mayo, Eric Gordon, Kevin Love and Michael Beasley. He's the best freshman in America, and the first player, if we were picking, to be taken in the 2008 NBA Draft. So far, the odds are in the favor of the Miami Heat winning that ignominious distinction. Can you imagine a back court of Rose and Dwayne Wade? It would be sick, with the added bonus that they're both Chicago boys. I bet Pat Reilly wouldn't flake out on that squad.

"Be Careful, It's Dangerous" - Answers.com Creative Writing Challenge entry

The Federales pulled my brother and me over on Mexican Highway 1, just south of Tijuana, in a rented truck packed with insects, arachnids, and a violent toucan. We were accused of illegal wildlife trafficking. The insects were stacked in the back of the truck in clear plastic containers and the bird was in a rusty cage. We had just left Dr. Raoul Sirentas’s research facility after responding to his advertisement in the Los Angeles Times. He’d sold us his insects.

Dr. Sirentas was an entomologist who had developed a tragic case of melissophobia after accidentally drinking a bee that had drowned in his sugared coffee. The bee’s corpse, upon coming into contact with his throat, stung his tonsil. Sadly, in the following weeks his melissophobia snowballed into entomophobia, and soon Dr. Sirentas couldn’t get within a football field of his insect-filled laboratory without convulsing with fear. Eventually, he stopped going altogether and the Mexican government was forced to abrogate his research grant. In order to feed his wife and kids, Dr. Sirentas decided to sell his beloved, but feared, insect collection.

Around the same time five-hundred miles away, my brother’s bookie, Chuck, called my brother and offered him a tip on the fifth race at Santa Anita in exchange for a payout he owed him, quid pro quo. My brother accepted and Chuck told him about Yo-Yo Dude, a filly from Belize.

“She’s a surefire winner,” Chuck said. “I also like Rice Crispies and Prozac in that race.”

“Those are horses?” My brother asked.

“Yup,” Chuck said. “For all intents and purposes, racehorses are warm-blooded brand names.”

Twenty minutes later, my brother won $5,962 on a trifecta.

The next morning, as we ate a perfunctory breakfast in the apartment we shared, I read an article in Time about insect breeders who supply wealthy European socialites with exotic insects. Apparently, rare insects are a sign of prestige in certain social circles, and rich Europeans like to show-off their collections to other rich Europeans.

Shortly after reading the article in Time, we stumbled across Dr. Sirentas’s advertisement in the newspaper, offering his entire inventory of insects and arachnids for $4,000. It included tarantulas, African honey bees, brown recluse spiders, Mojave beetles, fire ants, and more. We viewed this - the article, the advertisement, and my brother’s recent windfall - as a can't miss money-making opportunity. So we rented a truck and on a quixotic whim headed south toward Dr. Sirentas's home in Corvalis, Mexico.

When we arrived, the transaction was quick. We forked over the money and loaded the insects into the truck. In no time, we were careening back toward the United States with our cargo and a toucan my brother purchased from a roadside vendor. As we were leaving the vendor's stand, the man said, "be careful, it's dangerous." We thought he was talking about the road.

At 2 A.M., just when we could see the glow of Tijuana through the desert’s ubiquitous quarter-moon darkness, I noticed flashing lights coming up from behind us. Soon they were directly on our bumper, and an amplified voice ordered us to pull over. I cautiously applied the breaks and we rolled to a stop.

Two uniformed men exited their car and approached our truck; they had pistols in their holsters. One asked in Spanish if we were Americans. I tried to answer the question in his native tongue, but instead of saying “Si, Es verdad…Yes, that's true,” I said “Si, Es verde…Yes, it's green.”

“You’re an idiot,” my brother said.

The Federales ordered us out of the truck and onto the ground. They opened up the back and inspected our haul. I could hear them talking to each other, amazed as they shined their flashlights into each container. When they came upon the toucan, one of the officers unlocked the cage; immediately, the toucan attacked him, stabbing him in the eye with his banana-sized beak.

Cursing us, the Federales sped off for medical help, kicking up a plume of dust. The injured officer screamed as their car disappeared into the night. My brother and I got up and quickly shut the truck’s back door. The toucan was still loose inside.

Two hours later we were in a hotel parking lot in San Ysidro. When we opened the back of the truck, we discovered that the toucan had smashed each plastic container and eaten every last insect.

One-hundred miles to the south, Dr. Sirentas laid in his bed, sobbing.

The Wilco/VW pseudo-controversy

Art-folk rock from the Midwest. Automobiles from Deutschland. Together in thirty seconds of television.

It's common knowledge by now, but I'll set the stage anyway. Wilco has licensed a portion of their new album, Sky Blue Sky, to Volkswagen. The songs will appear in a series of commercials designed to sell cars, and supposedly increase the band’s listenership. According to Wilco Headquarters, “with the commercial radio airplay route getting more difficult for many bands (including Wilco); we see this as another way to get the music out there.”

The statement came as a response to the inevitable “sell out” allegations that raged on the message boards at viachicago.org, a fansite, and in blogs elsewhere. In the initial post on the subject at viachicago, the author declared “I would understand if the band all drove VWs and really, just like, really loved their cars—but I doubt that is the case. This was a crass, marketing decision.” Regardless of Wilco’s tact(lessness), the end goal of their relationship with VW is greenbacks and Benjamins. This is obvious.

In defense of the band, loyalists responded with disregard for even the idea of selling out: “So what? They have a few fucking songs in commercials. Why does that get your panties in a bunch?” Others countered by citing Wilco’s stance against Warner Bros. when the record company wanted to alter/reshape Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, the band’s critically acclaimed fourth album. Jeff Tweedy’s brother-in-law even got involved on his blog, Jew Eat Yet:

"It saddens me that these people seem to believe that the VW campaign will somehow affect Wilco's future activities or Jeff's commitment to his songwriting. From the outcries I’ve seen on several sites, you’d think Wilco had licensed “She’s a Jar” to sell Kraft mayonnaise, “Nothing’s Ever Gonna Stand In My Way” to hawk Viagra, or “I’m the Man Who Loves You” to promote the North American Man-Boy Love Association."

Danny Miller (Tweedy’s brother-in-law) seems to imply that what matters in the idea of “selling out” is the type of product with which art is used to sell. He also seems to be saying that if there’s a literal connection between song and product (She’s a Jar, mayo – NEGSIMW, Viagra) then it’s worse. That’s nonsensical. The whole controversy of “selling out” is about receiving money in order to sell a product. It doesn’t matter what company they choose to license the songs to or what product the songs are used to sell. As long as they ink a deal with a for-profit corporation, people will be up in arms. And Miller’s other personal assertions that Jeff Tweedy is truly dedicated to the music (he claims to know this BECAUSE he’s his brother-in-law) is beside the point. At the heart of “selling out” is the contentious relationship between business and art. We, the listeners, accept that the means by which art is produced and disseminated in a capitalist system requires payment. Thus we purchase music from corporations, small and large. There’s a certain purity in that transaction. As soon as we fork over the money, the “business” element fades into the background and the “art” takes over. But now, when we purchase an album like Sky Blue Sky, that product is by proxy associated with another product, and we have to endure the resurgence of the “business” element. Instead of a single transaction, the music tries to get us to purchase something else. Right now, the music on Sky Blue Sky is not just “art,” it’s an advertising tool. Understandably, some people are pissed. Others could give a shit.

In 2006, Brooklyn musician Tim Fite released his third album, Over The Counter Culture, gratis on his website and his Myspace page. This was a conscious decision similar to Wilco’s decision to stream Yankee Hotel Foxtrot after being dumped by Reprise in 2002. The only difference is that Fite has a record deal with the independent label ANTI-, and they wanted to release the album in stores across American; but Fite, who wrote the album as a response to the commercialism dominating hip hop and other genres, felt that it would’ve been hypocritical.

In what has become small scale mythology, Fite supposedly decided to record OTCC after seeing Sean Combs at the MTV Music Awards, where the rapper-mogul ended his acceptance speech by saying “don’t get mad, get money.” In an interview with The Boys ‘N Bagels, Fite said about Combs’ exclamation:

"It sounded so true. It made so much sense. I liked it. I wanted to respond - Get Money! - Get Money! - Get Money! But as quickly as it had started, it was over. Mr. Combs plugged his new record, and the commercials came on - a car ad with a hip-hop beat - Vitamin Water by 50 Cent - Dirty South Ring Tones - The Game: Sneakers by Reebok - “Don’t Get Mad...Spend Money...Don’t Get Mad...Spend Money...Don’t Get Mad...Spend Money!” I slammed my last three quarters into the laundry maching. I am mad. Fuck money.

It is experiences like this that provoked me to record Over The Counter Culture. Experiences where I saw hip-hop culture (or any revolutionary sub-culture for that matter) being co-opted by commercialism and tricked out in an effort to disguise the hidden agenda of economic, intellectual and spiritual degradation that we have come to know fondly as popular culture."

What this “hidden agenda…of degradation” is, exactly, Fite doesn’t define. What Fife does make explicit is that, in his opinion, the merger of “business” and “art” has weakened art’s revolutionary qualities and consequently affirmed the status quo. Unfortunately, Wilco’s not thinking in those terms. It seems that after twenty years of making music Tweedy has decided “fuck it, if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.”

But does it matter? Would Wilco be better off if they adopted Fite’s anti-consumerism ideology? Would they be better off if they didn’t want to line their pockets with greenbacks and Benjamins?

In the early 1990s, The Flaming Lips appeared in an episode of Beverly Hills 90210. A brouhaha similar to the Wilco-VW situation occurred and fans and critics alike hurled accusations of selling out at Wayne Coyne and company. At this point, as we near the completion of the first decade of the 21st century, does anyone remember The Flaming Lips for their appearance on that show? Is the Peach Pit their legacy? Did their career suffer?

No.

So what matters then?

I’ll let Dave Eggers, who has been oft-accused of selling out himself, bring it home:

"What matters is that you do good work. What matters is that you produce things that are true and will stand. What matters is that the Flaming Lips's [Wilco’s] new album is ravishing and I've listened to it a thousand times already, sometimes for days on end, and it enriches me and makes me want to save people. What matters is that it will stand forever, long after any narrow-hearted curmudgeons have forgotten their appearance on goddamn 90210 [VW commercials]. What matters is not the perception, nor the fashion, not who's up and who's down, but what someone has done and if they meant it. What matters is that you want to see and make and do, on as grand a scale as you want, regardless of what the tiny voices of tiny people say…It is a fuckload of work to be open-minded and generous and understanding and forgiving and accepting, but Christ, that is what matters. What matters is saying yes."

With the VW advertisements, Wilco has said yes to an increased listenership, a new way of marketing records, and thousands of dollars. The move is worth it if one person discovers Wilco’s music via the advertisements. The move is worth it if they give even a portion of that money to charity. The move is worth it if in some small way these advertisements facilitate another Wilco album.

That's what really matters.

Teacher Man

The Self-Referential Opener

I finished Frank McCourt’s memoir Teacher Man two weeks ago. It’s a quick read, about 220 pages, and for those unfamiliar with McCourt, he wrote the Pulitzer Prize winning memoir Angela’s Ashes (1996).

Admittedly, this book scared me. I first heard about it from Nicolette’s teacher-friends who were emailing around a presale excerpt. Once I’d read the teaser, I realized that the entire book might make me want to be a teacher, again.

Individual profundity dislodges my ambitions.

Strangely, McCourt doesn’t portray his career as profound or even glamorous; instead, he grounds it in both his teaching foibles and his personal struggle to reconcile his occupation with his place in the world. The book is strange in that way: it focuses on a highly success teaching career but it lacks the power to inspire one to pursue teaching.

Instead, it inspires one to write.

In prologue of Teacher Man, McCourt employs the oft-used F. Scott Fitzgerald quote: “there are no second acts in American lives,” and then evidences himself as the counterargument to Fitzgerald’s proclamation: he was 66 when he wrote Angela’s Ashes. The first book McCourt published, written after his retirement as an NYC public school teacher, won the Pulitzer Prize. Regardless of anything, that’s fucking amazing.

(Sidenote: Many people disagree with Fitzgerald. See here and here and here.)

I also must admit that I’ve never read Angela Ashes, or seen the movie for that matter. But it’s on the infinite list.

My justification for reading Teacher Man is four-fold: 1) mental siesta: I needed to recuperate from Faulkner; 2) I saw McCourt on The Colbert Report, and Colbert shockingly let him tell stories the entire time instead of harassing him with faux-Conservative rhetoric; 3) McCourt was an excellent storyteller on the show and he spoke with an Irish brogue, so I put 1 and 1 together and assumed that he was a good writer; and 4) Nicolette bought a discounted copy of Teacher Man at Target.

Style: Pre-Inebriation Pubspeak

McCourt writes simples sentences, small and clear, with a manageable vocabulary, which marks him as an anomaly in my experience with Irish writers (although I do like big words and Merriam Webster). To me, McCourt falls under the category of grandfather storyteller, and I don't mean that he's as old as a grandfather (he is), but rather that he writes in that ruminating kind of way; the stories he writes seem as though he has just recalled them from the darkened halls of his mind, and its easy for me, as a reader, to imagine him telling them over a breakfast of eggs and hash.

When I was younger, my grandfather used to tell stories like McCourt. I would go over to my grandparents house for dinner and with a little prodding, he would launch into an account of the time he slipped out of his house to play soccer by moonlight, or how and his brother started their own tool and dye business in his father's garage. But as he grew older and eventually semi-retired, he would talk about his profession: machinist, foreman, inventor, owner - in a style similar McCourt's account of his time as a teacher. The musing on a life's work: they all don't have the same style, but they have a similar feel - the grandfather storyteller feel.

For dialogue - this fits right into the grandfather storyteller categorization - he doesn’t use quotations marks; instead, he incorporates many conversations into the narrative by using new and indented lines, and he often sets the conversation apart in a sentence by capitalizing the first word where the dialogue begins: “After my interview she was already in the hallway, knotting her scarf under my chin, telling me, That was a breeze” (51).

Eras

The book itself is divided into three different Parts, “It’s a Long Road to Pedagogy,” “Donkey on a Thistle,” and “Coming Alive in Room 205.” Each Part is made up of a different number of chapters (each of which is its own vignette), and each chapter flows throughout the work in numerical and chronological order. In the dedication, McCourt thanks his editor, Nan Graham (who is also DeLillo’s editor), for sculpting his words until they became a book. Honestly, I could see Graham's hand pretty easily in the ordering and break up of the chapters. I sensed a bit of randomness to the vignettes, and there isn’t a rhyme or reason for the jumps in time. Granted, most of the chapters tell a story that significantly affected McCourt as he evolved as a teacher.

The vignettes themselves focus more on McCourt’s humorous failings than they do his triumphs, and with the exception of a few encounters, the book maintains a self-depreciative tone that constantly lowers McCourt to the level of “the average teacher.” It's clear that he doesn’t want to presume that he is a better educator than anybody else, probably because he knows that a large number of his readers are teachers, and also because it’s likely that McCourt wasn’t the greatest teacher himself and he doesn’t want to come off with an air of pedagogical superiority, especially after his surprise success with Angela’s Ashes. In McCourt’s eyes, his newly acquired literary currency doesn’t raise him above what he was for all those years in the NYC public education system. He acknowledges that he does not retroactively become a great teacher of writing because he became a great writer after he quit teaching. In a sense, McCourt is trying to be true to history (there's a statement), and he gives the students the benefit of the doubt in terms of their recollection and subsequent evaluation of him before he became a literary star. In short, it appears that McCourt doesn’t let fame alter what he thinks of himself.

There is, however, the problem of the picture opposite the title page. The caption reads: “America’s Teacher of the Year”. The picture that accompanies the caption is of McCourt with a deadly serious look and a shopping bag on his head. I can’t tell if McCourt really was teacher of the year, or if this was something put together in cut-and-paste style by some witty kids for their favorite teacher, and that it was included in an effort to set the self-depreciative tone of the prose. I assume that the editors of the book wouldn’t include something like this if it wasn’t true, but who knows. While I was reading, I kept waiting for McCourt to talk about his nomination and eventual acceptance of the “Teacher of the Year” award, and when it never came, I was left feeling slightly short-changed. Here were all these tales of a man struggling in life for vindication, and he finally gets it when he wins the Teacher of the Year award, or so I assumed. I’d love hear McCourt’s account of that. Part of me thinks the vignette wasn’t included because the “Teacher of the Year” awards are bullshit to begin with. Of course the best high school (NY's Stuyvesant HS, where McCourt taught) would have the teacher of the year. It’s too perfect and too rigged. What about those teacher’s who are struggling in the below-average school districts, paid far less than the average teacher, and who deal with far more? One can’t forget that the students at Stuyvesant are the supposedly the brightest; they must be of a certain intelligence level (according to a test) in order to enroll in the school.

Portrait

At its root, the memoir is about McCourt’s unorthodox classroom perspective and his struggles as a teacher. Always on the periphery of his life are the occurrences that made him into the Pulitzer Prize wining author he became: his rough childhood, his misadeventures with women, his cultural liminality, and his constant “examination of his consciousness.” This is a book about what the artist was doing before he became the artist. It’s the normative first act that's just as important as the the second act, and it should give confidence to any young writer who can’t find the courage to move beyond the blank white page. Teacher Man is really Portrait of the Artist as a Middle-Aged Man.