Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned

Photo: Tony Gutierrez/ Associated Press

It didn't make much sense to me then, what Gnut was going through, but after Pila and me had our little twins, and we put a family together, I got an understanding of how terrible love can be. You wish you hated those people, your wife and children, because you know the things the world will do to them, because you have done some of those things yourself. It's crazy-making, yet you cling to them with everything and close your eyes against the rest of it. But still you wake up late at night and lie there listening for the creak and splash of oars, the clank of steel, the sounds of men rowing toward your home.

--Wells Tower in Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned

Find the book and read it. Tower has crafted sad, beautiful and often desperate characters around prose filled with shimmering detail into what can make or break an afternoon, or an entire. I don't know why short stories don't get more love from the world of readers. Short stories are not only my quick-to-consume fixes, but also my secret love and source of envy.

Sure, the novel has the reputation of the record-setting home run slugger, or maybe more aptly, an entire baseball season. Novels are big, in both scope and cast of characters. They often play out slowly, taking long-passaged road trips and perhaps even an all-star break somewhere in the middle. Novels are the long slog, dealing with the minute details of many lives at the same time as grand conspiracies and odysseys.

The short story though, is the clutch shortstop who may not be swinging for the fences in plotted ambition, but the short story/stop has a scar under his left eye where a torrent of a grounder scorched off his glove, leaving a gash when he was fifteen. Every time he squints to field a ball, he can is aware of that momentary lapse of attention years ago. He has a secret communication with his glove, with the second-baseman, with the dryness of the dirt, so that he can elevate to acrobatic swoops after a line drive. The short story is the half-inning that ends in a miraculous double play and a toss of the ball to the the nine-year old girl behind the dugout.

Inauguration Day

I woke up early this morning, well before my alarm was set, in anticipation of a new presidency.

Let me say this first: I don't hate George W. Bush.  Granted, I am happy that, as I type this sentence, he has a little over an hour left to be President of the United States.  I don't agree with the vast majority of the man's political positions, I especially don't like the way he's molded the Executive Branch to be more powerful.  But I think that he's a good, moral man who has made decisions about the best way to help the people of this country.  I just don't agree with his means.

I went for a walk to Two Creek for some coffee.  (As an aside, I feel guilty whenever I go to Two Creek, even though it's closer.  My heart lies with Nobrow Coffee.  But practicality and convenience sometimes wins out.)

The sunrise on this new day. The Wasatch Mountains are obscured by the annual visitor, as reliable as Santa Claus, Nasty Inversion.  Always timing his arrival with the self-important folk that the Sundance Film Festival brings, Nasty Inversion makes my lungs hurt worse than cigarettes do.

Walking down South Temple I wondered, "How do the Mason's feel about Obama?  Is he a Mason?"

My excitement for President in One Hour Obama is high.  I have hope. Since he won the election he has shown himself to be extremely pragmatic and intelligent in his appointments of his cabinet - it's full of experienced Washington hands who know how to navigate power and get things done. It is not a cabinet full of 'change;' it is a cabinet that with the knowledge and experience to enact change.  Now it's just a matter of sitting back and seeing what change comes.

Here's to a new day, a new era, a new hope.  I know I'll bitch and moan, but please don't let me down, Mr. Obama.

Top Albums of 2008, 12 - 1

The final countdown.  On the final day of the year.  This time it's descending.  Deal with it.  I was hoping to post some audio links, but my free internet got turned off at home and so my internet is more limited than usual.  But on to the list.  Numbers one and two have been back and forth since I started putting this together all month, but I think Fleet Foxes have it.

12. She & Him - Volume 1

11. Deerhunter - Microcastle

10. Dr. Dog - Fate

9. Shearwater - Rook

8. Thao & The Get Down Stay Downs - We Brave Bee Stings and All 

7. TV On The Radio - Dear Science,

6. Miles Benjamin Anthony Robinson - Miles Benjamin Anthony Robinson

5. Frightened Rabbit - Midnight Organ Fight

4. Okkervil River - The Stand-Ins

3. No Age - Nouns

2. Bon Iver - For Emma, Forever Ago

1. Fleet Foxes - Fleet Foxes/Sun Giant EP

Top Albums 2008, 13 - 25

It's been a good year for music and a long time since a post.  But hey, I love lists.  Here are 13 - 25 on my favorite albums of the year list.  Stay tuned for the quorum of 12 to come. (In ascending order, don't ask why).

13. The Devil Whale - Like Paraders

14. Vampire Weekend - Vampire Weekend

15. Apple Miner Colony - The Heat Haunted Fever

16. Department of Eagles - In Ear Park

17. MGMT - Oracular Spectacular   

18. Wolf Parade - At Mount Zoomer

19. Randy Newman - Harps & Angels

20. Bonnie 'Prince' Billy - Lie Down in the Light

21. Calexico - Carried To Dust

22. Times New Viking - Rip It Off

23. Tolchock Trio - Abalone Skeleton

24. The Dodos - Visiter

25. Drive-By Truckers - Brighter Than Creations Dark

Presidential debate play-by-play

In the spirit of keeping myself informed and sharing my observations and political acumen with the world, I took notes while watching the first Presidential debate on Friday night.  This is what I found on my laptop screen upon awakening.  I had to watch two episodes of  It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia just to get my head straight again.  

*************

Is that a flag pin Obama is wearing? I don't like pandering ... why are they wearing lapel-mikes while they are standing in front of mike stands? Obama wants to make sure the money doesn't "pad CEO bank accounts." Puts blame on 8 years of Bush economic policy. Is the middle class getting "a fair shake?" I know it's important to give a "fair shake" after using the urinal. 

McCain plays to the more liberal of the crowd by sending props out to Ted Kennedy. No flag pin. Talks about coming together as Republicans and Democrats ... coming together ... have options for loans for failed business. Brings up going back to Washington ... "the end of the beginning" if the economic package stabilizes, creates jobs, gets us independent of foreign oil.

Lehrer calls them on their bullshit, non-answers, asks again how they stand on the economic recovery plan. 

Obama isn't answering question about the plan itself ... being vague, talks about intervening - wants to find out, 'how is it that this happened?' Not so much about what are we supposed to do to fix economy, what is good/bad about plan.

Lehrer asks McCain if he is going to vote for the plan. McCain says yes, talks about responsibility ... Niels is eating leftover spaghetti? How? That Su Casa today is still expanding in my stomach. Too much rice? Maybe I shouldn't get a side of rice and beans when I get a rice and bean burrito ... McCain says something. Niels mocks him by imitating McCain - "I'm gonna kick me some butt!" Greg is calling ... dammit, I told him I was watching the debate.

Obama is talking about police officers having to take out extra debt? What did I miss? I think people laughed while I was talking to Greg. Who made a funny? Probably not Old Man John ...McCain wants to consolidate regulatory agencies. He has a "fundamental" belief. Twice over. In the American worker and the United States of America. Two ambiguously defined, encompassing fundaments. 

Lehrer highlights fundamental. We pick up on the same shit. I should have my own PBS news show ... Two texts in a row vibrating my leg. Derik wants to get sushi - dammit I'm busy and the Su Casa is still present. Joey says there's a party at Brittany's tomorrow for her birthday. They are working on a keg. Joey says he'll "buy you a drink." Must be a mass text. Joey knows I don't drink.

McCain is going to make vetos famous. Starts ripping on Obama for voting for pork-barrel spending. Name drops a website. Obama defends his earmark votes. Didn't vote on ones in his home state. Says "fundamental" in referring to differences to their approach to budget. Digs into McCain for giving tax breaks to big corporation. Barack wants to grow economy from bottom up. (Take that, trickle-down, policies!) McCain just said something about Miss Congeniality. (Don't think he won Mr. Hilarious either.) Obama keeps relating McCain to Bush policies, that he'll be the same as the past eight years. 

McCain is defending his business tax cuts, wants to keep them here instead of going to Ireland. I didn't know Ireland was a tax haven. Must look into this. Are they too drunk to send out the tax collector? John wants people to have tax cuts. He's throwing out some numbers. Damn, I'm going to have to watch this again to get the numbers straight.

Obama says that if you make less than $250,000 a year you won't see a tax increase. That gets me in my class-warrior g-spot. Ah, massage that Barack. Yeah, that feels good. Ooh, now he's onto closing tax loopholes. God yes! Oh! that's it! A little higher ... oh yeah! Now he's talking about regulation. Flaccidity ensues...

McCain just cut off Lehrer to talk about Christmas ornaments. I think he's saying that their voting records are hanging off a pine. Has this pine been cut? Is it out in a forest with squirrels running down the trunk, birds nesting and nursing in its branches? Nah, probably in a lot in Tuscon, Arizona. Or at least, if it was December it would be ... take note, Christmas pine - your time is coming!

McCain makes a joke and laughs at it himself. He won't stop smiling when Obama is talking. I wonder if he's going to call him a 'c--t' like he did his wife on the Straight(read: verbal gaffe)Talk Express. I want to YouTube that video ...

Official question: What is going to be cut to pay for this corporate bailout? ... Niels has sunflower seeds out. I want to dip ... I don't think that's a flag pin Obama has on. It's too horizantally-shaped. Or is it? What would it be?

... McCain is telling us that Obama has the most liberal voting record in the Senate. I'm okay with that, but wasn't it the National Review who came up with that? And they change their criteria every year to fit the parameter's of their target's voting record? I loathe the National Review. Rich Lowry is a smug hair-part with a fifth-grade smile. McCain says that he can't reach that far across the aisle to reach Obama. I wonder if he's humming "The Space Between" in his head. So far the only talk of foreign policy are vague references to foreign oil and those drunken scrawls on Irish napkins that somehow become tax law.

Obama says he's not that liberal, it's just trying to fix Bush's "wrong-headed" policies. Obama works with Tom Coburn? He's a right-wing M.D. pro-lifer Baptist. Take that, distance across the aisle!

McCain wants a spending freeze except for veteran care and national defense. Obama doesn't want to freeze early child education, Medicare. Iraq has a surplus so why are we spending money there? Not a bad point.

McCain is tired of giving money to countries that don't like the U.S. He also wants nuclear power. I can dig, but the off-shore drilling thing makes me want to adjust my underwear.

Lehrer is trying, but can't keep them on-track ... I like Obama's tie better than McCain's. But I wouldn't buy either of them. Now McCain is playing the socialized-healthcare-will-destroy-God-and-leave-you-with-a-nephrectomy-scar-and-no-recollection-of-the-weekend card. Yeah, families should make the decision - but what about the HMO's? I guess they are family now. They probably have similar outlooks on paying for tattoo removal.

McCain wants to bring spending into control. Has plans to eliminate wasteful spending. Vague threats to government workers - implies that they are lazy and wasting money. I worked for a municipal government once and can verify this assertion. Obama says he supported the President 90% of the time, whose spending went out-of-control over that time. McCain brought up not being elected Miss Congeniality again. Is there a Sandra Bullock demographic that he's trying to reach?

McCain gloats that he is a maverick and has a partner that is a maverick. She makes me very very scared, on intellectual, rational and stomach levels. I would rather have Mel Gibson's Maverick than Palin. Not Gibson himself, but his character, Bret Maverick. He got it on with Jodi Foster. 

McCain is talking about Iraq, changing the strategy. I'll give him credit on that. He called for the surge long before it was seriously considered. We're finally talking about foreign policy. Forty minutes into it. McCain doesn't want to leave Iraq. Wants to come home in victory, not defeat. 

Obama opposed Iraq from the beginning, notes that Iraq was a distraction that allowed the U.S. to screw up the Afghani war. Links McCain to Bush again (zing!) Talking about lives lost and wounded. (Heartstring tug tug). We took our "eye off the ball" and links Iraq to the fact that our country has a lot of problems right now because of it. McCain shrugs off the fact about whether we should be in Iraq and says the future is deciding when to leave, when not to leave. Rips on Obama for not supporting the surge, but saying it was "wildly successful." Also chides him for not meeting with General Petraeus. Obama retorts with the fact that Biden is his inside man on foreign policy and says that those duties don't go through his committee. Praises Petraeus, but then says all the surge did was fix four years of mismanagement. Rips McCain for his pre-war assumptions (welcomed as liberators, no history of violence between Shi'ites and Sunnis, that it would be short and quick). McCain says Obama doesn't know the difference between tactics and strategy (slam! you with no foreign policy experience, My VP choice can see Russia from her backyard!). McCain is accusing Obama for opposing funding of troops. Obama says he opposed funding on a mission without a time-table. 

McCain is still smiling. Who is he looking at? He looks up and smiles, baring teeth. Is he trying not to look pissed off? Or just to condescend what Obama is saying? He looks like he wishes he could bitch-slap Barack.

We're still talking about withdrawal. I've always heard that early withdrawal doesn't always work - there can still be leakage enough to inseminate ... Something about Afghanistan. Are we pulling out early there too? I hope we've got a rubber on ... two children from two mothers would be rough to deal with. But W. doesn't believe in teaching birth control so we're probably have three other kids in other countries that we don't even know about yet.

Barack is talking about how we need to deal with Afghanistan - make them deal with the insurgents there, get rid of the poppy trade (They're legitimate farmers! let's get a Poppy Aid concert together. I don't think Neil Young would be down with that cause, though). We can't ignore this issue, McCain says. Doesn't want to threaten Pakistan. Says he wouldn't say that out loud but .. "if you have to do things, you have to do things." Yeah, covertly. That stuff always works out well in the long run for good foreign relations ... Pakistani people are intermarried with the Taliban and al-Qaeda? Filthy, incestuous, Short Creekian accusations!

... Apparently General Petraeus is a god. He could probably heal Fanny Mae and Freddie Mack ...

McCain just looked surpised at someone in the audience. Barack makes fun at him for singing songs about bombing Iran. (Slam! No Bob Zimmerman are you, Senator McCain!) Oh wow, yawn. Am I going to be up for this party tonight? And my bike is at work with a flat tire. What a pain to have to go back there to pump it up ... McCain admires Reagan. That makes up for singing about bombing Iran? Him and Ahmadinejad should get together and write a musical. An odd-couple sort of thing. Kim Jong-Il could be the wacky neighbor who always comes over and eats their food and sleeps with strange women on their couch.

I feel bad for families with lost soldiers, but we can't stay in a war until victory just so they didn't die in vain. How many lives should be lost so that a child who was killed in a war didn't "die in vain" ... Barack says no soldier ever dies in vain because they are carrying out the orders of the commander-in-chief. (Exactly.) He keeps pointing out that McCain has gotten distracted over Iraq and let the Taliban and al-Qaeda flourish because of it.

McCain thinks we need new strategy in Afghanistan. (Uh, yeah. Like actually pay attention to it instead of being distracted by ridiculous wars brought up by false-pretenses?)

Whoa, McCain just said something about a second Holocaust. Really? ... we're going there? Wants to form a League of Democracies. Okay, cool, but what is a democracy? So many definitions, so little time to really figure it out. There aren't many truly free, fair, competitive democracies in the world. Would Russia get in as a little oops!-we're-sorry-we-formed-NATO-to-dismantle-your-power conciliatory hand job?

Obama says that he reserves the right, as President, to meet with anyone at anytime if it is in this country's best interest. McCain laces into him for it for a couple of minutes. (Though talking might be a good idea, seeing what bombing and sanctions has done to help thus far) ... McCain says Obama's approach is dangerous. Lots of arguing back and forth about Kissenger's true meanings and intentions ... Russia now. Ah Russia. I love Russia. I should learn Russian. I'm going to make Elina and Lyuba speak some Russian to me tonight. Oh, it's sexy to hear a woman speak Russian.

Whoa ... dozed off for a minutes. I need to get more sleep. But I can't sleep in to tomorrow because we have to do a survey about this debate, which means I have to be there to check the numbers. Blah. I probably wouldn't be able to sleep past nine anyway, but was really looking forward to a day off. 

McCain won't be quiet when his time is up and it's time to move on. Grumpy old man. Obama is more of a gentleman. I think I'll just close my eyes for the end of this.

Autumnal Infatuation

Last night, as I sat among a haze of cigarette smoke and people adorned with flowers that were plucked selectively from a bride’s bouquet, I received a text from my brother. It described, the weather, complimenting fall as his “favorite season so far.”  I’m not sure what exactly that meant - so far in his life, or in the year of 2008? - but his awakening to the impenetrable brilliance of autumn brought a little smile inside of me, as I felt that perhaps he could understand me a bit more, as this season has been my favorite for as long as I can remember (though technically, and if I’ve done my math right, the season doesn’t begin until tomorrow at 8:40 in the a.m. here in the MST zone).

Autumn means lazy, chilled haze brought by sundown, as if there is a campfire burning just over the horizon, accentuated by the precisely constructed smell of wood stove plume that permeates the valley from their still-life poses in the air.  It is a season of light jackets and sweaters faintly carrying the detritus of acoustic-driven rock and touchdown passes.  Shaving of the face begins to be attended to in a more haphazard manner as bodies populate the late-evenings with a determined huzzah to fight against the frozen stillness that is to come. Leaves and fruit gift the world with sweet melodies of decay - a final reminder to the world that they indeed once lived among it.

There is no better time to be infatuated with another person than in autumn.  Perhaps this cannot be said about being in love, because the lingering devotion and oscillating degrees of understanding that comes with love can transform and have effect on any season.  Infatuation though, has a bearing that is perfectly aligned with the parameters of autumn.  The careful deconstruction of preconceived ideas asserting what desire and the ideal are tailored for the vulnerability and open-mindedness that allows infatuation to eclipse the ideal, become more inclusive and accepting of possibility.  (The ideal is what summer supposedly encapsulates - manufactured to unrealizable levels of zen perfection that in actuality is brought earthbound with overbearing heat, too many scheduling conflicts revolving around barbecues and out-of-town visitors, and the confusion and dissonance among people that the lack of properly controlled and interpreted intentions brings.  As for spring and winter, the former is dominated by a hormonally-driven level of desire that is difficult to rationally control while the latter is brought about by desperation for comfort with too much vulnerability on display.) 

Given that infatuation is all about possibility before reality must be fully considered, the ability to adapt one’s preconceived notions of ideal make the actual experience of romantic infatuation more intense.

-------------------------------------------

A random six-pack of songs I've been listening to lately:

Neutral Milk Hotel - A Baby For Pree

Cub Country - Leaving The Bar

Devendra Banhart - This Is The Way

Nico - The Fairest of the Seasons

The Devil Whale - Butter For Burns

Gillian Welch - Red Clay Halo

I would highly recommend checking out The Devil Whale (whose album Like Paraders was released in the last few months and will be touring soon) and Cub Country, a couple of bands out of good ol' Salt Lake City.  

Farewell, David Foster Wallace

I am still trying to collect the ways that David Foster Wallace has changed my perspective on life and the way I approach my storytelling.  As he has been a rather recent discovery, I can't do justice, but all I know is that I can't remember a time that a figure whom I didn't know died that has left me so profoundly sad and unsettled.  He apparently hanged himself in his home.

The first writing of his I read was his May 21, 2005 Kenyon Commencement address.  I recently read his short story collection, Brief Interviews With Hideous Men and have been poking through his last published book, Oblivion, and his essays, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, since I received them through the mail last week.  It feels as though a conversation with someone stopped abruptly, like there was a pause mid-sentence and then he was dead.  But at least I can continue to read.  

In the short spurts of time I've had in front of the computer today, I've written a couple thousand words in an attempt at gratitude for his work, what it has meant to me, the understanding it has brought to me.  But thus far, it is jumbled, bloated and ineloquent.  Perhaps it is enough for now to say that I am sad, but it seems wrong to say when there are family and loved ones of his who no doubt feel a much greater loss.

An excerpt from the above commencement speech:

This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually 

expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental 

that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot 

themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth 

is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull 

the trigger.  

And I submit that this is what the real, no bullshit value of your liberal 

arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through 

your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, 

a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely,

 completely, imperially alone day in and day out. That may sound like 

hyperbole, or abstract nonsense. Let's get concrete. The plain fact is that 

you graduating seniors do not yet have any clue what "day in day out" 

really means. There happen to be whole, large parts of adult American 

life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part 

involves boredom, routine, and petty frustration. The parents and older 

folks here will know all too well what I'm talking about.