(courtesy Mike Sterling's Progressive Ruin)

Post #100!

Actually, this is post #102, but I felt like this sustained achievement in self-absorbed blogging deserved some kind of special recognition. So today I bring you my answers to the "Proust Questionnaire," a list of questions I hand out to my students at the beginning of each semester in a misguided attempt to understand and appreciate them as human beings. I first came across the questionnaire in the pages of Vanity Fair, the magazine that has never met a millionaire it didn't like. You can read more about the origins of the questionnaire (not invented by Proust, oddly enough) here.

Sometimes, one of the bolder students will pipe up and ask why I don't provide my answers for them, so here is my latest set of responses:

What is your idea of perfect happiness?
A long, uninterrupted reading session, without pants.

What is your greatest fear?
Falling from a great height.

Which historical figure do you most identify with?
Copernicus.

Which living person do you most admire?
Stephen Hawking, William T. Vollmann, John Glenn

What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?
My susceptibility to purchasing collectibles.

What is the trait you most deplore in others?
Selfishness,willful ignorance, apathy.

What is your greatest extravagance?
The house I live in.

What is your favorite journey?
Driving up the Callifornia coast along Highway 101.

What do you consider the most overrated virtue?
Beauty.

On what occasion do you lie?
When answering questionnaires.

What do you dislike most about your appearance?
My slovenly girth.

Which living person do you most despise?
Dick Cheney.

Which talent would you most like to have?
Musical ability.

What is your current state of mind?
Kicking into "I really should get to work" mode.

If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?
New eyes with that focusing feature I've read so much about.

If you could change one thing about your family, what would it be?
Only one? Improved communication skills.

What do you consider your greatest achievement?
Getting my writing published.

If you were to die and come back as a person or thing, what do you think it would be?
A bird trapped in a cathedral or a superstore.

If you could choose what to come back as, what would it be?
A condor dropping stones on cathedrals and superstores.

What is your most treasured possession?
My teenage diaries.

What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery?
Addiction. Betrayal. Or reading my teenage diaries.

What is your favorite occupation?
Radio station DJ.

What is your most marked characteristic?
Unexpected outbursts of emotion and/or volubility.

What is the quality you most like in a man?
Emotional honesty, wit, ability to fix my machines.

What is the quality you most like in a woman?
Unashamed intelligence, willingness to laugh at my jokes.

What do you most value in your friends?
Loyalty, listening, ability to buy me drinks.

What are your favorite names?
Bisco, Alexander, Elizabeth, anyone with three names and a suffix (e.g. Charles Emerson Winchester III)

How would you like to die?
Though it's my greatest fear, I would like to die in the sky.

What is your motto?
Trust yourself.

The U.S. space program: 2006 

73.137 seconds: January 28, 1986

Musee des Beaux Arts

About suffering they were never wrong.
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Brueghel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

---W. H. Auden, 1938

She's not a girl who misses much. . . 

The "Hear Me, Leia!" Show

Looks like the campus radio station will be broadcasting online this semester, which will afford Chazzbot readers an opportunity to hear my dulcet voice on a weekly basis. My show is free-form, but generally features "college rock" and "alt.country" with smatterings of R&B, pop, and novelty records. Plus my wit and wisdom.

To hear the show, you will need to download Winamp and enter the following URL:

http://144.38.123.26:8000/thedisc-high.ogg

The title of the show derives, of course, from a pivotal scene in The Empire Strikes Back, and also relates to a joke I made to Dina when I was in hospital after a car crash.

The show will air Thursday afternoons beginning at 4:00 PM (Mountain Time), starting tomorrow (January 25). There aren't any DJs scheduled after me, so the show will run anywhere from two to three hours, depending on how much I get my swerve on.

Feel free to call in with a request! I generally bring my own music to the station with me, but there is a small library in the studio from which I can pull songs.

I started the show at Bowling Green for WBGU-FM. This will mark my fourth year on the airwaves in some capacity. Now I just need to figure out how to make a living by sitting in a studio and playing records.

Art Bell Is a Radio God

Since I've started sleeping in 45-minute bursts (whether due to my medication or my troubled subconscious or my gas-inducing dinners, I don't know), I've become a great fan of Coast to Coast AM, a nightly program of interviews and phone calls regarding the paranormal and the unexplained. Whenever I jolt awake from yet another inexplicable dream (last night, it had something to do with two unbridled horses chasing me down the freeway outside of Layton, Utah), I lean over to hit the timer button on my clock-radio and catch up on the next 25 minutes of the show.

Art Bell, the desert-dwelling DJ who created the program, is probably the show's best-known host, he of the baritone voice and the probing interviews. Bell semi-retired from the program a few years back, but still shows up on Sunday evenings and for annual specials at Halloween and New Year's Eve.

Even more than the program's content (ranging from truck drivers phoning in with UFO sightings, to recordings of the voices of the damned in Hell, to the latest news in quantum physics), I love Bell's style of hosting. He is respectful to even the most outrageous guests and has a healthy curiousity about the stories offered by his callers. He is a model of radio professionalism and one who truly knows how to engage his audience.

At the beginning of this year, Bell's wife of 15 years died from complications due to asthma. Bell understandably spent the next few weeks off the air. When he returned to the program last night, Bell offered a stunning and overwhelmingly honest account of his wife's death and his reaction to it. It was one of the most absorbing radio broadcasts I've ever heard. It had nothing to do with the paranormal--no stories of contact from beyond the grave or moving furniture. It was one man communicating to a large audience the painful experience of the death of a loved one.

Bell made no attempt to stifle or ignore his still raw emotions. But, by the same token, he made no concessions to the audience regarding the circumstances or conditions of his wife's death. Just one man speaking of his love and his pain to an audience of millions.

After the first hour, Bell moved on to an interview with a theoretical physicist regarding parallel universes and how our own universe will end. The interview was conducted in Bell's trademark style of skepticism and fascination, but it was not hard to guess the rationale behind his interest in the possibility of multiple universes where only one event might have occured differently than in our own troubled cosmos.

If you want to hear one of the most memorable tributes to a life partner that you are ever likely to hear in a public forum (let alone on the increasingly commercialized airwaves of the radio), listen to the first hour of last night's broadcast of Coast to Coast AM.

Music Picks of the Week

If you read this blog with any regularity (let's not dwell too long on just how short that list is), you know that it's been a long time since I posted my music picks on anything remotely close to a weekly basis (Really, what do you people do without me?). So you should just assume that on the weeks I don't post my music picks, I am not listening to any new music at all. That will make it easier on both of us.

The Bad Plus: "(Theme from) Chariots of Fire"
This jazz trio is so good at covering cheesy pop numbers, I've totally ignored their original compositions. From what I've read, though, they're actually quite good. But why listen to potentially challenging original jazz when you can have a great time pondering how good this theme song could have been had the Bad Plus performed it for the original film? Of course, in that instance, the English runners would have been stumbling all over each other on that beach and totally turfing it, but at least the music would have been worth hearing.

It's actually better to hear this song if you don't know what it is first. (Guess I blew that for you, huh?) Maybe someday it will sneak up on you while you're listening to a non-commercial radio station that actually has the balls to play unclassifiably awesome jazz like this. Good luck!

Curumin: "Guerreiro"
I don't know if this song precedes Beck's latest album, Guero, or not. I don't even know if the word guerreiro has a similar meaning to guero. But whoever came up with these beats and these delightful Spanglish lyrics and this funk first is a goddamn genius.

Mark Eitzel: "Roll Away My Stone"
Eitzel has been on a bit of a downer (musically and psychologically) for the last few years, as far as I can tell. But this is his coldest song yet--a clinically harsh look at the singer's own misery and what it's going to take to get him out of it. I suppose if you're going to use Jesus metaphors to describe your crawl from the depths of self-loathing, you better be really miserable. And boy, does this song put you there. Don't put this on a road mix or you might drive yourself off a fucking cliff.

Anthony Hamilton: "Can't Let Go"
This song has been helping me with my post-Pickett funk. This guy is nowhere near as raw as Pickett--just the opposite, in fact. But that's why I'm loving this song right now. Smooth as a baby's ass, this song could have shown up anytime in the last 30 years and would have sounded exactly the same. It's waiting for you, whenever you're ready to come back into the light. Or after you change the diaper.

Diamond K: "Put Ya Leg Up"
If most club music is primarily manufactured to deliver an unforgiving beat at maximum bassy volume, then this song has already fulfilled its purpose. But if you are stranded at the bar, and you hear this come over the speakers, you will thank Diamond K for remembering that not everyone in da club is necessarily on da floor. Better yet, if you hear this come on at your favorite strip joint, and you know the words, I guarantee you will get half-off your next lapdance. And once you stop laughing, maybe you'll want to get out on da floor after all.

Juelz Santana: "I Am Crack"
I don't really know this song well enough yet to recommend it to anyone. But you have to love the title. Perhaps it was inevitable that some hip-hop gangsta would use this line soooner or later, but Juelz Santana was the first, and there will be a place in ghetto heaven for him.

Wicked: 1941-2006 

That Wicked Wicked Wicked

In March of 1993, wired from jet lag and the rush of my first day in England, I stepped into a modest pub in Canterbury and experienced two things that would change my life from that day forward. The first was a glass of Guinness ale from the tap (my first) and the second was hearing American R&B music from the late 1960's performed with unironic passion and respect by a band of white British kids.

With all the requisite curiousity of a tourist, I watched the band set up, fully expecting to hear them play raucous English punk or stilted ska. When they blasted into "Mustang Sally" as their opening number, I nearly fell to my knees. Perhaps the most amazing aspect of the band's set was that every teenager in the joint knew every word to every R&B chestnut the band played and sang along loudly and joyfully. They went on for hours. I have never forgotten that night.

I had and still have not seen anyone under the age of 35 perform or sing those songs with anything approaching the vigor and love of those teenagers in Canterbury. For me, it was as if a group of complete strangers, people I had never seen before and would likely never see again, had opened their arms and welcomed me, and more importantly, my music, into their lives.

When I heard the news of Wilson Pickett's death yesterday of a heart attack, the first thing I thought of was that pub in Canterbury. Pickett's music has a rough, sweaty, raw charge to it, unlike many of the more polished R&B stars of his day. His vocal delivery reflects the personality of a man quick to fits of rage (Pickett, at various points in time, has been charged with assault, drunk driving, and shouting death threats to the mayor of Englewood, New Jersey) and that of a man who has lived through childhood abuse, but also the personality of a sexy, driven, uncompromising artist. Pickett, in his later years of recording, was justifiably proud of the fact that his vocal performances were always recorded just as he sang them in the studio, with no overdubs, digitization, or click tracks. In an age when the vocal tracks of pretty teenagers are routinely "fixed" in the studio, Pickett was one of the true "old-school" singers who gave as good as he got, and saw no point in delivering anything but an honest, hard-working performance.

Rock critic Dave Marsh, in his book The Heart of Rock & Soul, says of Pickett: "At his most basic [he] is the most emotionally direct of all soul singers, but direct is a mild description of a singer who, at his best, was pure fist-in-the-face. . . Pickett was the personification of the bad-ass street dude. If he came along today, he'd be a rapper--with a vengeance, which is how he always sang. What he lacked in subtlety, Pickett more than made up for in vocal power."

Among the essential R&B tracks he gave us are "In the Midnight Hour," "Land of 1000 Dances," "Mustang Sally," and "Funky Broadway." He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1991.

I like to think that somewhere in Canterbury tonight, some teenage band will demonstrate to an eager crowd what many of us in the United States have somehow neglected or forgotten: the music of Wilson Pickett represents some of the best of what this country has to offer.

I'm gonna wait 'til the stars come out
See them twinkle in your eyes
I'm gonna wait 'til the midnight hour
That's when my love begins to shine

I'm gonna take you, girl, and hold you
Do all the things I told you
In the midnight hour.

Double Duty

Still enjoying the halcyon days before I start getting student papers back. It's like knowing when the world's going to end, but just resigning yourself that there's nothing you can do about it, and filling up the time you have left by indulging all your worst habits. Yay!

Watched a movie this weekend that was much more biting and witty than I'd expected it to be from reading the Netflix blurb. It's a Spanish film called Crimen Ferpecto, and concerns the misguided attempts of a department store lothario to become the executive sales manager. The lothario in question has stocked his department (ladies' wear) with a comely assortment of Latina assistants, but has neglected the yearnings of one of his more homely employees to win his attention. She later becomes an auditory witness to the "accidental" murder of his chief rival, and proceeds to blackmail him into sex and marriage. (I'm not giving away the plot--this is the setup.) Needless to say, hilarity ensues, but an hilarity of a somewhat acquired taste (one comedic scene involves the graphic complications of how to dismember a corpse effectively).

Other than the Pythonesque envelope-pushing, the film also provides some rather pointed critiques of, to list a few, consumer culture, capitalism, images of women in the media, marriage, and the fashion industry. The film serves as both an engaging physical comedy and a broad social satire, which made me feel less guilty about enjoying the physical comedy (and the naked babes).

I only mention it here because I could find only a few brief reviews of the film online and I had never heard of it before receiving an e-mail solicitation from Netflix. The director, Alex de la Iglesia, is also someone I've never heard of before, but he's been making films for the last 10 years. If you enjoy any of the qualities in comedy I've mentioned above, poke around for the film. It's well worth a rental. (I've also seen the film's title listed as Crimen Perfecto [the deliberate misspelling is a plot point] and, for those of you challenged by non-English titles, The Perfect Crime.

Another piece of fiction I came across this weekend with multiple levels of engagement was a short story by Nancy Kress (author of a fascinating trilogy regarding a group of children who have had the physical need for sleep removed from their DNA) entitled "Ej-Es." The story comes from what sounds like a rather unpromising anthology of stories based on the songs of Janis Ian (she of "At Seventeen" fame). I can't speak for the anthology because I read Kress' story in a different anthology, Year's Best SF 9, edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer.

Anyway, the story deals with a jaded anthropologist's attempts to cure a species of pre-industrial people who apparently suffer from a form of severe epilepsy that generates detailed and lengthy hallucinations. She slowly comes to realize, however, that the people regard their "illness" as religion and believe their hallucinations are communications from God. The story offers some challenging ideas on the nature of religious worship and cultural practices (the need of a scientist to solve a problem vs. the rights of a society to live as it chooses), and provides some chilling examples of both scientific and religious fervor. It is one of the best stories, SF or otherwise, that I've read in some time, and the final lines (even if they are written in an alien dialect) have haunted me for days.

Sadly, the story isn't available online as far as I've been able to tell, but I dare say it is worth the price of either one of the anthologies in which it appears. (Though I'm guessing you'd be better off going with the Best SF anthology.)

Speaking of questionable cultural practices, the NYTimes Magazine ran a fascinating and disturbing piece this Sunday on what are being called the hikikomori. These are young Japanese men and boys who, for generally unknown reasons, have retreated to their bedrooms on a rather permanent basis, living there almost exclusively for years at a time. Reclusive, withdrawn, and incommunicative, these boys have grown in numbers and have caused a great deal of concern in a culture that values social etiquette. Speaking as one who generally retreats to the basement on most weekends for long sessions of DVD-watching, CD-listening, and book-reading, I found a lot of emphathy for these hikikomori, even if I don't read much manga or play contemporary video games. Anyway, it's a well-written and sensitive piece, and it's even available online!

Finally, it looks like the tide is finally starting to rise on the presidency of George W. Bush. I haven't been very vocal on my politics lately here at Chazzbot, mainly because there are so many other bloggers who are better at it than me, but the pot, as it were, is beginning to boil. Will the American people at long last recognize the crimes and manipulations of this administration? Will this administration be held accountable, in any way, for its abuses of power? Have we seen the last presidential election in the United States?

On this day celebrating the life of a man who made the human rights abuses of the U.S. government an issue of national protest and, eventually, reform, it's high time for another wake-up call.

Spell World Backward

First day of classes went OK. Tuesdays are going to be long days this semester; my first class begins at 10:00 AM and my last class gets out at 7:20 PM. Each of my English 2010 classes are inexplicably filled with my 1010 students from last semester. Didn't they learn enough from me the first time? Having repeat students is kind of like going to a high school reunion (not that I would know what that's like; I've avoided my class reunions at all costs); you see a lot of familiar faces, and you feel like you should ask how people have been and what they've been up to, but then you realize you don't care that much and start looking for people who don't already think they know you, so you can loosen up and have a few drinks without risking a spot on your reputation. But at least it will be easier to remember their names this semester. Meh.

Anyway, here are some items of interest from my recent web voyages:

I don't know how much longer this link will be active; I'm guessing at least until late Saturday. I was tempted to just copy and paste this onto the blog; I liked it that much. But you should read this short essay when you get a chance. It's a short excerpt from a forthcoming memoir by Bernard Cooper. It brilliantly mixes the humour and poignance of watching a parent grow old. The last paragraph gives me chills every time I read it.

If you live in the western United States, this weekend offers a rare opportunity to witness the descent of a returning spacecraft. The Stardust mission will be returning collected samples from a comet and barrelling back into the Earth's atmosphere faster than any previous spacecraft. Should be quite a show. In the Mountain Time Zone, the descent will occur just before 3:00 AM on January 15. You'll want to get away from city lights, but I imagine the re-entry trail will be very bright and visible just about anywhere in the viewing area with a clear horizon. Go here to see if you are in range to see the descent.

Eerily enough, the Stardust's path of descent will take it directly over my hometown of Crescent City, California. It occured to me while I was reading about Stardust that I now live in an area where I could have seen the final descent of the space shuttle Columbia. Had I been living here at the time, I'm sure I would have gone outside to look for it. But in hindsight, I'm not sure how I would have dealt with witnessing the bright bursts of light as the orbiter was breaking apart. I never thought I would see another shuttle disaster on that scale in my lifetime.

Apparently, the FAA is taking steps to prevent any potential terrorists from boarding a spacecraft anytime soon, so we can all rest on that count. Seems like most terrorists worth the name would be more interested in blowing up a rocket on the ground while it was still full of fuel and, you know, near lots of potential victims (like that creepy religious extremist in Carl Sagan's novel, Contact). Plus, why would a terrorist fork over all that money for an orbital flight when there are plenty of nuclear power plants with unlocked doors near major cities all over the U.S.? You gotta hand it to the FAA, though. They are all about insuring their own job security and making us feel like the skies (and now, orbital trajectories) are safe for everyone. Nope, you will never see any more terrorists wearing space helmets! Take that, Ted Turner!

Finally, it's nice to see that Larry Miller is preserving Utah's well-established reputation as a state full of fag-hating bigots and movie-going shitheads who don't like having their values challenged by seeing films that might actually contain a new idea or two. Personally, I'm looking forward to seeing how CleanFlicks deals with Brokeback Mountain. Maybe this?

Books I'm (Not) Reading

My brother has already read two full novels this year, which makes me feel like I'm slacking. My casual reading has really taken a nosedive since I started pursuing what folks in the industry like to call a "terminal" degree. My brother's 2-book lead on me also reminds me that tomorrow begins yet another semester of teaching, another thing that really takes the piss out of my reading plans.

But I did manage to start a few books over the break, and, with any luck, I may even finish a few of them. So here are the books I'll be trying to finish between now and late spring:

Books I Will Likely Finish Reading Quite Soon:

Jack Cole and Plastic Man by Art Spiegelman & Chip Kidd
This is more of an extended essay on Cole with a lot of reprinted stories from the classic era of Plastic Man, one of the seminal comic-book heroes of the Golden Age. The design of this book is insane--panels and half-panels strewn everywhere in glorious four-color dot print. The essay isn't bad either, though Cole's life doesn't end happily.

The Dark Tower IV: Wizard and Glass by Stephen King
The novels in this series get progressively more ludicrous. At the beginning of this volume, the heroes of the story are trapped on a monorail train travelling at hundreds of miles an hour through a barren wasteland. The helpless passengers are engaged in a riddle game with the monorail (named "Blaine") in an attempt to save their lives by stumping the train with a riddle it hasn't heard before. (The references to Bilbo's game with Gollum are constant throughout this section of the book. At one point, Blaine even shouts in frustration, "We hate you forever!") When the game is won by the passengers, they find themselves in the Topeka, Kansas of King's The Stand, one of his less ludicrous novels.

As ridiculous as this book is so far, I find reading King's pop-centric writing style is kind of like playing around with those candy cigarettes as a kid. At first, they are very amusing and seem daring, but after a while you are ready for a real smoke. I speed through these books because they only require my brain to process a simply narrative while keeping my eyes open and moist.

Low by Hugo Wilcken
Another in the fabulous 33 1/3 book series, each volume of which features a long essay on an important album in popular music. This one focuses on David Bowie and, I believe, is the 24th or 25th book in the series. I've enjoyed every one of these, and usually get through about one book a month. There is no end in sight to the series, and I've noticed more bookstores starting to stock them. Well worth a look.

The Sopranos on the Couch by Maurice Yacowar
Sort of a glorified episode guide written by a popular culture professor, so it really counts as dissertation reading, not as part of my obsessive fascination with all things Tony Soprano (who ranks just below Andy Sipowicz as the TV character I will most resemble, physically and mentally, in 15 years).

Books That Will Likely Take Me a Bit Longer to Finish:

The Beatles: The Biography by Bob Spitz
This sucker is over 900 pages long, but even in the first 100 pages or so, I've been surprised by the extent of Spitz' research. I know a lot about the Beatles, but Spitz delves into the early biographies of each of the boys and traces the roots of their musical and cultural innovations. It's clear that Spitz favors Lennon as the leader and driving force behind the band, but that's no huge revelation. What is enlightening is how each of the boys were conditioned to become Beatles by the circumstances of their early childhoods. I haven't even got to the part where they all play together for the first time, and this is already the best book on the Beatles I've ever read.

Butterfly Stories by William T. Vollmann
I've now added Vollmann to my mental list of Authors Who Can Do No Wrong, Even If I Can't Always Figure Out What the Hell They Are Talking About. Also on this list: Harlan Ellison, Samuel Delaney, William Faulkner. Not to be confused with the list of Authors Who Consistently Piss Me Off But Who I Read Anyway: Harlan Ellison, Orson Scott Card, Stephen King.

Can't Stop, Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation by Jeff Chang
I just bought this a week ago, and I haven't got past the author's bibliography, which consists of Words, Images, and Sound. Hip-hop scholarship seems woefully inadequate at this point, and Chang's social history is a welcome addition the the genre. Doesn't have very many pictures, though.

And If I Get Really Ambitious I May Even Read:

Algeria: 1830-2000 by Benjamin Stora
I became fascinated with Algerian history after seeing the Criterion DVD of The Battle of Algiers, a film I taught with last semester.

The Thomas Covenant Trilogy by Stephen R. Donaldson
I finally forced myself to finish the first book in this series, even though it was poorly written. But now I feel compelled by my OCD to read the other, what? Six books?

Fuck that, man. Don't I have a stack of papers to grade?

The Wit & Wisdom of Hot or Not

A few years ago, when I was still enjoying the novelty of having an office with my own computer in it, I became obsessed with the Hot or Not website. So many people needing so much personal feedback! What was/is even more hilarious than the photos on the site, however, were/are the comments people write about themselves in order (I presume) to generate more "Yes" clicks on their personal info.

At one point, I thought it might be fun to create a "found" poem out of some random comments from the site, but I could never generate a collection of lines that sounded "poetic" to me. But last night I came across the notes I had taken from the site, and I present them to you now in all their unedited glory. See if you can do something with them!

(Fun game: Try to figure out if the author is male or female.)

Could it be you?

i will talk to N E one as long as they dont judge me. i am very friendly.

I am a GEEK!

I am visiting the state and I am here for business and pleasure but mostly pleasure and if you are lonely than e-mail me

I like to eat tofu ice cream, yum, and to listen to screamy bands.

looking for a guy that has bad pickup lines and pretends to like the beach and loves to talk :) i like my computer

I'm a pretty 21 year old goth boy in Manhattan, KS.

Hey! . . . I am not your typical gal.

someone let me know where to go!

Click "yes" for friendship!

Come on I am telling you i am a prince, look into my eyes, would i lie to you?

Hello, I like to do anythings that is fun and makes me happy.

hey, maybe you'll see me on TV.

My brother put me up to submitting my picture on here . . . So I did it to humor myself.

If your looking for a killer time, your going to want to press yes!

I just like to be me.

i hope to meet other males around here who are in need of someone also

Not looking for love

When I was little I flushed $100 down the toilet.

I love all kinds a fun shit.

i love relaxing because im an athlete and don't get much time

just say yes and we can go from there!

I guess I'll reply to every msg from just everyone.

I love making new friends on the net!

Show me straight men of any age.

10 Books That Changed My Life (continued)

6. The Executioner's Song by Norman Mailer
One day in yet another junior high English class, I was mouthing off in front of my teacher, one Mr. Denhalter. For some reason, the subject of the death penalty had come up; I think this was around the time that one of the Hi-Fi killers was up for an appeal. Anyway, Denhalter had become infamous among both the students and faculty for nearly beating a student out of his desk one day, and since that time he had become, shall we say, more tolerant of student opinions. I took great advantage of this, especially since Denhalter seemed to like me, or at least tolerate me, more so than most of the other students. So I felt free, on this particular occasion, to spout off all kinds of bloodthirsty creeds, voicing my hope that the killer soon to die would experience all manner of suffering. At some point during this tirade, Denhalter turned his evil eye to me. "So you're in favor of the death penalty?" he asked, with a withering glance at his favorite student. The room chilled. Would I be the next to be knocked out of his seat by Denhalter's back hand?

"Have you ever read The Executioner's Song?" he asked. Why he thought a geeky 8th-grader would be well-versed with the latest Norman Mailer novel is anybody's guess. "No," I said as arrogantly as possible. But Denhalter had already dismissed me. "Read it," he said, turning away in contempt. "It will change your mind."

I'm not sure what the bookstore clerk thought of the geeky 8th-grader asking for Mailer's 1000+ page "true novel," ("There but for the grace of God," perhaps) but a few months later, long after I had moved on to the next English teacher, Denhalter's work was done. Not only did The Executioner's Song change my mind about the death penalty in America, it opened my eyes to the dominance of the Mormon faith in Utah, and the often contradictory and harmful practices of its followers. It's a truly disturbing book, on multiple levels. But the miserable existence of Gary Gilmore, the murderer whose story Mailer chronicles, will put to shame any bombastic proponent of government-sanctioned murder, such as myself at 13 years of age.

7. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
My education as a budding liberal was taken up another notch after reading this treatise (it's only really half a novel, the rest is polemic). I think I first read it for a book report assignment in high school; I chose it off a mimeographed list distributed by the teacher. (Yes, I attended high school in the era before photocopiers.) It probably wasn't until I read it again some years later that it made its full impact on me. I remember finishing it late at night and sobbing. Even though Steinbeck's editorializing can grow tiresome, it is still among the most humane of novels in its depiction of completely unwarranted suffering. It's a hard book to shake off, but I will never understand why it is so often assigned to high school students who can have no full appreciation of what it means (see also Moby Dick, The Great Gatsby, etc.).

8. The Autobiography of Malcolm X
I started to read this book on three separate occasions, but each time I literally threw it down in disgust at what I perceived as Malcolm's intolerance and contempt for the white man. It wasn't until this book was assigned to me in a class on Black History (yes, I attended college in the era before political correctness) that I was forced to read through it all the way. It was only then that I realized what an incredible asshole I had been. Malcolm's conversion to Islam and his own realization that all men are equal under the sight of God is, of course, the whole point of the book, but I couldn't get past the initial stages of his argument, probably because I was more like Malcolm in his youth than I cared to admit.

If you pinned me down, I would have to say--because this book not only delivers a powerful and beautiful message, but managed to open my eyes to my own impatience and intolerance--that this is probably the greatest book I have ever read. Not because it reinforced feelings I already had, but because it showed me how far I was from my own ideals.

9. Paradise Lost by John Milton
Yet another book I probably would have never completed on my own had it not been assigned to me in a course. Milton's epic poem interested me not so much for his subject matter (though it is, I'm certain, the most entertaining version of the Book of Genesis, other than The Wrath of Khan), but for his conception of the Universe. There's little doubt that Milton was a pretty fucked-up guy--blind, a radical liberal (for his time), and a clear victim of OCD, among other hang-ups--but it is often just these sorts of fuck-ups who see the Universe in completely unique ways.

This book was responsible for several major events in my life. Reading it made me realize that I wanted to study literature. Delivering an oral presentation (complete with self-absorbed diagrams drawn on the blackboard) on the book made me realize that I might like teaching. And the completely geeky and self-absorbed manner in which I delivered the presentation first brought me to the attention of a blonde girl in the back of the room who later became my wife.

I really can't recommend Milton to you, unless you are in need of a different way of looking at how the Universe is structured, or you are prepared to abandon your life as you have known it, which, I suppose, work out to be about the same thing.

10. Reservation Blues by Sherman Alexie
I've always liked Alexie's work because he is such a non-bullshit kind of writer. He can be overly sentimental or lazy, but he always seems honest. For that reason, I thought this novel would appeal to a group of Job Corps students for whom I was attempting to teach an introductory class on literature. These kids had been in the shit, and had little patience for yet another by-the-book jackass who was going to make them write 10-page reports. They had been abused, they had been abandoned, they had been raped, they had been beaten, they had been addicts, they had been suicidal. They didn't need me. But they did need college credits. College credits would give some of them a ticket out of the pit that is Job Corps and help them figure out where to go with their lives.

So I abandoned my goal of teaching out of The Norton Anthology and started giving them stuff to read that they might recognize. Drunk Native Americans they knew. Frustrated musicians they knew. The promises of faith they knew. I had to become, for the first time as a teacher, a disciplinarian. They had to read so many pages a week so we could discuss the book as a whole. They had to take quizzes and stay focused. It was like teaching a bunch of unruly high school students, and that's really what they were, even though they were enrolled in a college course. They were just dumb, unlucky kids, but once we got through the fucking book, they started talking to me. Not the platitudes or attention-grabbing stunts they had been pulling while we read through Norton, but stories of their lives, of the shit they had been through, and what they wanted to achieve in life.

It was the hardest class I have ever taught, but I loved those kids more than any other students I have ever had. I think a lot of that feeling had to do with my realization that, had I not had books in my life and the wits to read them, I could have been one of those Job Corps losers. So when they would repeat one of Alexie's lines and laugh at his profanity, or say, "That dude's just like my dad!" or "What does blues music sound like?" or "That shit's fucked up," I felt like I had finally done something worthwhile in my life. I had shown those miserable fucks the door.

Chronicle West

Before we get back to my top 10 list, I want to take a moment to direct your attention to a great new blog from a former colleague and drinking buddy of mine. Brandon is not only one of the funniest storytellers I know, he's also a guy who has conquered the realm of academia without becoming a complete twit. Brandon, to me, is everything you could ask for in an educated man who enjoys getting his swerve on (I don't actually know what that means). And he writes like a fiend; he's some perverse mix of Chuck Klosterman, Edward Abbey, and Hunter S. Thompson. It's a wonder more people don't hate him.

Anyway, he has a blog up that's full of hell and damnation against the purveyors of environmental degradation and political stupidity (redundant?) in the Western United States, but also takes the time for reading recommendations and top 11 lists.

As a sort of preface to surfing on over to Brandon's site, I offer this quote from David Foster Wallace. Wallace is a guy whose fiction seems mainly geared toward fans of postmodernist experimentation and is, therefore, completely unreadable. However, my brother recently loaned me [heh] his copy of Wallace's A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, which contains an essay entitled, "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction." This is an incredibly prescient essay written in 1993 regarding the effects of the boob tube on fiction writers and readers. (I looked for a copy online, but all the copies I could find were on library databases. You should look it up and read it in its entirety.) I'm going to quote the last paragraph out of context because it reminds me of Brandon's writing:

The next real literary "rebels" in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels, born oglers who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles. Who treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and hip fatigue. These anti-rebels would be outdated, of course, before they even started. Dead on the page. Too sincere. Clearly repressed. Backward, quaint, naive, anachronistic. Maybe that'll be the point. Maybe that's why they'll be the next real rebels. Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk disapproval. The old postmodern insurgents risked the gasp and squeal: shock, disgust, outrage, censorship, accusations of socialism, anarchism, nihilism. Today's risks are different. The new rebels might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the "Oh how banal." To risk accusations of sentimentality, melodrama. Of overcredulity. Of softness. Of willingness to be suckered by a world of lurkers and starers who fear gaze and ridicule above imprisonment without law. Who knows?

Ladies and gentlemen, go read Chronicle West.

2005: A Busy Year for Latter-day Saints

The headline for this entry is taken directly from the Cedar City Review, a weekly rag that shows up in my mailbox on Thursdays. The full-page story in this week's issue largely dwells on a challenge issued by Gordon B. Hinckley to members of the LDS Church to finish reading the Book of Mormon by the end of the year. The article goes on to interview several Cedar City residents (many of whom oddly choose to remain anonymous) about the "project."

Aside from familiarizing wayward members with the primary text of their faith, what other motivation could President Hinckley have for issuing such a challenge? The CC Review relates the following information:

According to a story in the Dec. 27 Deseret Morning News, Covenant Communications saw a significant increase in Book of Mormon product sales--including the Book of Mormon on tape, CD, DVD, VHS, Book of Mormon Heritage Edition, and the Book of Mormon in triple combination on CD and MP3--between August and December, from approximately 11,000
last year to 28,000 this year. A DVD narrated by Rex Campbell was an especially hot item, but "sales of the book on CD [were] 10 times higher than the same quarter last year at the church's main Distribution Center.

Kris Bahr, manager of Mountain West Books in Cedar City, said she also saw an increase in sales for Book of Mormon-related items. CDs and cassettes were the most popular, especially in October through December as people started their Christmas shopping. The big illustrated
editions of the book were also best-sellers.

Aside from the lucrative endorsement of the LDS president for local Mormon retailers, there is another shocking aspect to this story. Isn't it cheating to rely on CD, DVD, and VHS adaptations of a holy book? If your leader and prophet asks you to read your sacred text, shouldn't you, you know, read it? Surely you people read, don't you?

I suppose it's all part of the upcoming celebration for the 200th birthday of LDS founder Joseph Smith, Jr. who, according to most historical accounts, had only a third-grade education at best, but was most likely illiterate.

10 Books That Changed My Life

How do you like that heading? Isn't it portentous? Doesn't it ring of smugness? This is why I love blogging: because it's my blog and I can do whatever I want. The idea for this entry came to me a few nights ago when I woke up around 4:00 AM after a particularly weird dream scenario which I won't bore you with here (hey, maybe we can pick that up in a future entry!) and couldn't get back to sleep.

These are not necessarily the best books I've ever read, although I'm very fond of many of the books on this list, but the books that, upon reflection, seem to have had the greatest influence on me. I list them in roughly the order I first read and/or became aware of them.

1. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William L. Shirer
I've never actually managed to read this thing all the way through. But when I was very young, I remember seeing it on the bookshelf in our family's living room and feeling strangely drawn toward it. I think this was less because of my fascist leanings than it was the thickness of the book itself. "Who could ever read a book that big?" I remember thinking. There was also something about the spine of the book jacket itself, depicting, as you might guess, a large, stark, black & white swastika, that I found compelling. I had no idea what the symbol was or even what it was used for, but it carried (and still does, I suppose) an inherent totemic power. Note to marketers: swastikas sell books!

Anyway, I think the start of my life as a reader relates in no small way to the challenge of reading a book that large. I guess I'm still working up to it.

2. Frank L. Baum's Oz series
I don't remember when I first started reading these, or even if I saw the movie or read the book first (more likely, The Wizard of Oz was first read to me by my mother), but I do remember that, by the age of 9 or 10, I was familiar enough with the characters and scenarios of this series that I carried them around in my head and was able to draw them out frequently for imaginary playtime. I would walk around talking to the characters as if they were standing next to me and we were engaged on some grand adventure. (Tik-Tok, the mechanical man, was probably my best friend for quite a while. Yes, I was a lonely child.) It's probably a good thing that RPGs weren't around back then. There would have been no further need for me to interact with humans.

3. Peanuts Classics by Charles M. Schulz
I still have the copy of this book that I grew up with, which is pretty amazing, since I took it with me everywhere for a number of years. On one occasion, in the back of my dad's pick-up, I smashed a mosquito with it and the remains of the insect are still preserved on the pages. I don't know when I got this--I'm guessing it was a gift from my parents--but it has a 1970 copyright (when I was 3 years old). Like the Oz books, I remember this book being an important interactive tool. I would read the comic strips aloud, creating different voices for each of the characters. Lucy was one of my favorites because she was always shouting. I remember sitting in a neighborhood playground once and getting yelled at from someone in a neighboring apartment because I was shouting "Real estate!" at a high volume. (I pronounced "estate" with an accent on the first syllable. What the fuck did I know about real estate?)

Probably the best thing about this book, aside from its sheer sentimental value, is that I can pick it up anytime and get practically the same amount of enjoyment from it as I did when I first read it. It's become a sort of scrapbook and now holds Schulz' obituary and the last Peanuts strip as it appeared in the newspaper.

4. The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury
This was part of a stack of books given to me by my Aunt Shirley, probably the single most important influence on my literary life. One day, while expressing my boredom with the world and all it offered, Shirley took me to a closet in her house. The closet was stacked high with books and magazines of all varieties. She pulled out a stack of four similarly designed volumes, along with a few copies of some SF magazines. This was my introduction to science fiction. The four books (which I still have) included Bradbury's, Walter Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz, Alfred Bester's The Demolished Man, and A.E. Van Vogt's Slan. Of these four, most of which I had a hard time understanding, Bradbury's was easily my favorite for its simplicity, its imaginary depth, and its moralistic tone. After reading this, I started to seek out every book I could find with either Mars or a green alien on the cover (I soon came across the Edgar Rice Burroughs Mars series), and then anything with a spaceship on the cover, and then I was hooked for life.

5. The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
I first read this as an assigned text in a junior high English class. I seem to remember most of the students in class remarking that it was "too weird" or "hard to understand," but most of these people wouldn't think of hanging out with me anyway. With a background in Oz and Mars, it didn't take long for me to realize that The Hobbit was set in a world as fully-realized as those of Burroughs and Baum. I thought it was the greatest thing I had ever read, and I spent the following summer reading The Lord of the Rings on family camping trips. And this signified the Point of No Return in terms of my development--I was, and would forever remain, a Geek.

More later.

"Hear with your heart/And you won't hear a sound" 

Chuck's Place: 1955-1974

Spent most of the first afternoon of the New Year wandering through my dad's records (which he unloaded on me over Xmas). I arranged them all chronologically (because, even though I'm not a drunk, I am compulsive) and prepared the first of what I'm sure will be several compilation CDs chronicling my early musical education.

The first 23 track CD I completed will give you a good idea of the kind of music I was exposed to as a child--everything from jazz to girl groups to Nashville country to R&B and pop (lots of pop). This is the music that played in the background in the years before my brother was born, the music that I fell asleep to as my parents listened in the evenings, the music that was as ephemeral as the sounds created by wind chimes on the porch and the twittering parakeet my mom used to keep.

As I played through these records, most of which I hadn't heard for at least a decade, and some I hadn't heard for more than 20 years, I was surprised to find how well I remembered either the melodies or the lyrics to the songs. In some cases, I could sing the entire song after hearing either the opening line or the instrumental intro.

I was also rather pleased to note how well this music sounded on vinyl. The youngest of these records is still more than 30 years old, but my father, if nothing else, took care of his music collection. At worst, the records were dusty, but none were scratched or marred beyond playability. And they sound great--it's true what they say about analog vs. digital. The cleanest records were more dynamic than any CD I've played on my stereo.

Here, then, is the track list for the first of these CDs. The collection extends up into the early 80's (when cassettes became my dad's format of choice), and with my penchant for burning multiple tracks from a single album onto a CD, I could be doing this for quite a while longer. Anyway, here are the tracks:

1. Louis Armstrong & His All-Stars, "Muskrat Ramble" (from a 1955 concert recording)
2. The Angels, "My Boyfriend's Back"
3. The Righteous Brothers, "Just Once in My Life"
4. Sam the Sham & the Pharaohs, "Li'l Red Riding Hood" (one of my childhood favorites)
5. Bobbie Gentry, "Mississippi Delta"
6. Booker T. & the MG's, "Time Is Tight"
7. Louis Armstrong & His All-Stars, "West End Blues"
8. The Angels, "Thank You and Goodnight"
9. The Righteous Brothers, "See That Girl"
10. Carpenters, "We've Only Just Begun"
11. Bobbie Gentry, "I Saw an Angel Die"
12. Booker T. & the MG's, "Run Tank Run"
13. Tony Orlando & Dawn, "Candida" (another childhood favorite)
14. Three Dog Night, "One Man Band"
15. The Who, "Young Man Blues" (live)
16. Carpenters, "(They Long to Be) Close to You"
17. Olivia Newton-John, "Let Me Be There"
18. Charlie Rich, "Behind Closed Doors"
19. Tony Orlando & Dawn, "What Are You Doing Sunday"
20. Three Dog Night, "Can't Get Enough of It"
21. Captain & Tennille,"Love Will Keep Us Together"
22. Carpenters, "Maybe It's You"
23. Olivia Newton-John, "Banks of the Ohio"

That last track by ONJ was quite a surprise--it's a peppy little sing-along, but also a rather morbid little murder ballad. The singer basically asks her lover to walk with her along the banks of the Ohio River, then stabs him in the heart so that he will stay "forever" hers in the waters of the river. I've never heard ONJ sing anything quite so delightfully bloodthirsty before (well, I guess I had heard it before, but as a child I never picked up on the storyline of the song) and in such a charming manner (literally--the song's final chorus features a back-up group singing "la la la"). We'd have to wait till Grease to hear her become as ballsy again.

Another surprise came while I listened to Captain & Tennille--I started crying. It certainly had nothing to do with the content of the song, other than my associations with it. The C&T album features a lyric sheet, and I distinctly remember combing through these records to find the ones with lyrics that I could follow along with and, later, sing. I would do this, most frequently, when I was by myself or when I was pretty sure I wouldn't get caught rifling through my dad's records. I spent hours listening to crap like Captain & Tennille, just because they printed their lyrics on the record sleeve.

But additionally, I suppose that record, which came out in 1974, also signifies for me the last of a more-or-less innocent period in my life. Shortly thereafter, my family descended into a long, dark tunnel from which it has never really managed to crawl back out of. The later records in the collection reflect this period--Alice Cooper going to hell, lots of rowdy country drinking songs, and the mournful melancholia of the Eagles, which my dad would turn up loudly to cover the sounds of his violent attacks on his family from the upstairs neighbors.

So I suppose there is some kind of twisted irony to the sequence of the last 3 tracks on this compilation--"Love Will Keep Us Together" followed by the doubt of "Maybe It's You," and concluding with a very pleasant song about the murder of a lover.

Only one afternoon into this collection, and I've already managed to unearth the roots of both my lifelong obsession with schmaltzy pop music and the grim realization that, no matter what else I do with my life, I will never be able to completely escape the associations this music brings, nor the all-too vivid memories it invokes of a family about to be swallowed by a darkness blacker than any vinyl.

It began only a year after the last song on my compilation was released, a song of murder I know by heart, even without having heard it in over 20 years.