Nixon Destroys JSA, JFK (per ad in NYT)

A couple very rich, very insane guys took out a highly-expensive two-page ad in the New York Times today, the spread just prior to the editorials, to explain the truth about the JFK assassination, with the funniest paragraph being the third from the bottom in the first column, which lists everyone you can imagine, in the first sentence, as conspirators (from LBJ to Life magazine, I kid you not) — then follows it with one short sentence saying “President Richard M. Nixon was also involved.” It’s almost as if they forgot to list him in the prior sentence.

Coincidentally, I was recently reminded that it is canon in the history of DC Comics’ fictional universe that “The Man Who Defeated the Justice Society [of America],” that is, the government bureaucrat who forced the world’s first superhero team (including Wonder Woman, the Atom, etc.) to break up for decades by pressuring them, in his capacity as a member of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, to reveal their secret identities, was none other than Richard Nixon (identified by his distinctive profile though not by name). Given that the Justice Society formed in the first place at the behest of Franklin Roosevelt, I’d say it’s safe to say that even superhero comics are part of the liberal media conspiracy, as I may one day explain in a two-page letter to the New York Times, depending on how my investments fare.

DEBATE AT LOLITA BAR: "Is Gentrification Good?" (plus music of the 80s and Seaveys of 1631 A.D.)

VS.

Punk singer Tibbie X argues that gentrification is a blessing, while acrophobic tall-building-hater Aliza Faragher tells her to get out of town.
Wednesday, August 1, at 8pm (free admission, cash bar, beloved a.c.).
Basement level of Lolita Bar at 266 Broome St. at the corner of Allen St. on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, one block south and three west of the Delancey St. F, J, M, Z subway stop.
I, Todd Seavey, shall host (AND THIS TIME WE DRINK IN HONOR OF MY BIRTHDAY) and Michel Evanchik will moderate.
The Case Against Jersey City
One town, by the way, that could perhaps use an influx of more “elite” residents is Jersey City, where dwells my girlfriend, Koli (you can read her recent comments about feminism below my “Brief Statement of Principles”). I’m not saying Koli isn’t part of the elite, but her mayor, Jerramiah Healy, by contrast, was arrested for drunkenly brawling with cops outside a bar. Healy says he was merely intervening in a fight between other patrons, but the fact that cops felt obliged to mace him — something one does to the mayor only on rare occasions — makes me wonder.
As if that weren’t enough, Jersey City is also sometimes said to have been part of the inspiration for crime-filled Gotham City from Batman comic books (though Gotham City’s name comes from a nickname for nearby — and way cooler — New York City).
And just days ago, an abandoned rocket launcher was found on a lawn in JC, causing some alarm. The big fear, of course, is Middle Eastern terrorists, but I can think of at least one Canadian worth questioning — Bruce Cockburn. I think Cockburn looks a little like a cross between Reason editor Brian Doherty and World Party lead singer Karl Wallinger, which makes a certain amount of political sense.
The Case for More 80s Music Videos
But if all that seems too political (and I notice a link to a Ron Paul video on the World Party page, coincidentally), try watching this decidedly fluffier 80s video instead — the only duet, to my knowledge, by Falco and Brigitte Nielsen. Maybe it is possible for something to be too 80s, absurd as that may sound.
Then again, I miss having Road Warrior-type goons in every other video — and on that front, let me note that I am probably the only person on the planet whose favorite Tina Turner song is the other song — not “We Don’t Need Another Hero” — that she did for the third Mad Max movie: “One of the Living” — and clearly I’m being objective (not just picking it because it was in a timeless, fantastic sci-fi movie) or else I would have picked the one song she did with the Fixx. Having recently concluded I can do a decent Geddy Lee in karaoke, it may next be time to add Tina’s “One of the Living” to the repertoire — and I mean without becoming a drag queen. As for the Fixx, repeated attempts have convinced me they don’t work well for karaoke purposes, but then, do bar crowds really want to see me acting like this onstage? And I may not have the thumbs for it anyway.
Speaking of Music and the Gentry
It is fitting perhaps, though an astonishing surprise, that a member of my favorite eighteenth-century-themed novelty rock band, the Upper Crust (you must hear “Highfalutin’” — not that I’m saying I don’t love such numbers as “Let Them Eat Rock” and “Rabble Rouser”) — whose whereabouts I was investigating online — has become the head of the history library at my college, Brown. You wouldn’t think mild-looking history Ph.D. and librarian Edward L. Widmer was also “Lord Rockingham” of the Upper Crust, but so it is (I have rarely been so pleased by rock band onstage banter as I was hearing one of his bandmates saying, “I must second Lord Rockingham’s diatribe”).
(I will have to explain more fully in October why invoking history in order to mock it for pop purposes is quintessentially Brown — that’s when I plan to begin my forty-week-long overview of the past twenty years of my politico-philosophical development, and that means entering Brown at the beginning and writing a book manuscript at the end, one that will resolve all outstanding political conflicts, including the ones mentioned in those Koli comments linked above. Stay tuned.)
Would that Brown always attracted people (like me) with a great fondness for the eighteenth century, with its combination of pomp and rationalism — and would that more rock bands would mix elements of punk and the Enlightenment (at least Adam Ant gets the idea, as in this, my favorite rock video of all time — would, finally, that I could live in this video).
Brown, Red, and Green
Instead, Brown often produces progressives and revolutionaries, including (from my era) organizing secretary of the Communist Party USA, Libero Della Piana — who was quoted recently in the New York Post, ironically enough, talking about how the West 23rd St. New York City hq of the Communist Party of New York State has become a highly valuable rental property (“Reds Earn Green,” as the Post puts it). Maybe the economy is unjust.
An ex-girlfriend of mine mentioned that she once played Monopoly with Libero back when he was at Brown (her best friend was Libero’s girlfriend at the time, as it happens), so maybe that was a portent of real estate deals to come (for other odd real estate stories, check out Diary of a Real Estate Rookie by Alison Rogers, who just happens to be married to DC Comics’ Ivan Cohen).
Seavey: Since 1631
My own (very extended) family’s claim to land in America, by the way, apparently dates back to 1631 — which, coincidentally, I have just learned was the date when William Seavey arrived in New England (where my parents, energetic ninetysomething paternal grandmother, and other relatives live today), a mere eleven years after the Pilgrims (though on this, the 400th anniversary of the founding of the explicitly capitalist settlement of Jamestown, it may be time to end once and for all this fawning devotion to those Johnny-come-latelies of 1620, the Pilgrims). William was charged with building the first church in Plymouth (prayer meetings before that having taken place in homes), apparently, and if he’d known he’d have an atheist descendant four hundred years later, he probably would have wanted that descendant put in the stocks.
But the upshot of this bit of historical trivia is that if gentrification is determined to be bad at our debate next week, and thus longtime residents have a moral right to keep out newcomers, I’m going to have to politely ask that you all get the hell out of my family’s neighborhood (except for the few of you reading this who are Native Americans, Mayflower family members, or descendants of Sasquatch).

Need to Fear: Underdog and Pop Hostility

I am not the only horrified Gen X-or-older individual who has lately been wondering “What the hell have they done to Underdog?” I was ashamed at first to admit I’d even been worrying about it, since it seems like a parody of things nerds worry about (akin to my outrage over the fact that the planet-eating giant Galactus was not slated to be fully visible in Fantastic Four: The Rise of the Silver Surfer — sufficient reason for me to boycott the movie, as indeed I have). But on the Underdog issue, I think even many normals are with me.

Underdog’s transformation, from a severely mild-mannered, mopey, humble — and rhyming — being in the original animated series into the non-rhyming, wisecracking cynic seen in the ads for the new live action/computer-animated movie, is offensive, though, not merely because it’s a betrayal of the original character (after all, isn’t Underdog too low as source material to worry about degrading?) but because it’s a glaring example of how knee-jerk cynicism is the only way Hollywood (and perhaps the broader culture) can imagine “updating” things these days. (This must be how an ex-girlfriend of mine felt about the TV-movie Muppets Wizard of Oz turning Dorothy into a fame-obsessed brat played by the singer Ashanti, in contrast to a warm-hearted girl who simply wanted to go home in the beloved original film — though I enjoyed seeing Gonzo as the Tin Man.) I suppose I should be grateful the new Underdog isn’t rhyming, since they’d probably turn him into a gangsta rapper, at which point they might as well just cast Poochie in the role. He’s got an in-your-face attitude, after all.

To give you some idea how detached I feel from most of pop culture — despite my frequent references to subsets of it — keep in mind that I stopped watching sitcoms (with a few rare exceptions) when I decided that one show I’d been watching had gotten too insult-oriented in its comedy, and that hostile, uncivil show was…Cheers, and it was about twenty years ago. Obviously, I had little idea what lay ahead: twenty years of watching the entire population convulsed on cue by nervous, mechanical, and unsatisfying laughter every time some jerk quickly retorts with a third-grade put down along the lines of “You mean like your face?” Make it stop. Make it stop. And more importantly, make real people stop imitating the sitcom characters in everyday conversation. This will come as a shock to most people living in the twenty-first century, but: being insulting really does not make you superior and arguably makes you worse. Try to wrap your mind around that now novel (but once obvious) concept.

Lest I sound like a typical clean-up-the-filth-on-TV guy, let me add that one of the reasons I could never take politicians’ crusades against TV and movie decadence seriously is that they so rarely attack the things people are likely to imitate — such as banter they find funny — preferring instead to attack things virtually no one will imitate, such as decapitating cyborgs from the future, but then, political efforts to quantify these problems are always ham-handed, as I was reminded once back in the 90s when a congressional report listed the most-offensive and least-offensive shows on television, and the list, compiled using very objective criteria such as counting the number of intentionally-inflicted injuries and gunshots on each show, ended up declaring Star Trek: The Next Generation one of the most wholesome shows and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine one of the most offensive, though any fan knows that the two shows had virtually the same underlying ethos, as have all manifestations of Star Trek. Sometimes the phasers just get used more.

Context matters in art, I realize, so people should not judge shows, as Congress did in that study, by simply counting nipples or explosions, and I would certainly not make some pronouncement as sweeping as “All insult comedy is bad” (witness Triumph), but I’ll happily say “Most insult comedy is all too easy and much too coarsening to be worth wasting one’s precious finite life on.” A trickier question is what to think about boxing, which is, after all, a crowd cheering on two guys punching each other in the face. On that I have no strong opinion, though I know it’s not my idea of a good time — or is it, given my fondness for superhero stories, which are largely concerned with guys in costumes assaulting each other? Perhaps I should attend the event that (past Lolita Bar debater) Stephen Davis is organizing tonight, where you can be regaled by a speaker who went fifteen rounds with the legendary Muhammad Ali.

If you ask him a question, please be polite for a change.

Book Selection of the Month: "I Am a Strange Loop" by Douglas Hofstadter

ToddSeavey.com Book Selection of the Month (July 2007):

Many people simply refuse to accept the world as described by science, convinced that a fully material world would somehow be less satisfying than one full of ghosts, gods, or psychic powers. A particularly thickheaded strain of conservative even goes so far as to suggest that a world of molecules and electromagnetism could not be a world with art and love and minds in it (though it certainly appears we live in such a universe). One book I read recently is a reminder that the world described by science is thoroughly strange and exciting, not that the universe is under some obligation to entertain you, as some people who believe in the supernatural appear inclined to think (and to think they call materialist atheists self-centered!).

I Am a Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter is the antidote to the sort of reductionist anti-reductionist arguments that say that meat and molecules can’t lead to self-awareness, laughter, and joy (such as Dinesh D’Souza’s vicious, vile, petty, and obscenely-timed argument that atheists can’t meaningfully respond to horrors such as the massacre at Virginia Tech [where, as it happens, my girlfriend Koli was an undergrad two decades ago]). While most of the human race has for millennia envisioned mind and body as two completely different substances (able thereby to intuitively grasp the otherwise unsettling fact that a person is gone even when a dead body remains), Hofstadter, quite reasonably I think, suggests that minds are better thought of as complex patterns — self-reflexive (thus looplike) ones — in the atoms of our brains, much as a traffic jam is a higher-order phenomenon composed of cars or Hamlet is a complex pattern made up of what would seem like mundane words taken individually.

We have no rational reason to believe that the sensation of being conscious is anything more than what it feels like to be such a self-reflexive pattern — and intriguingly, this raises the possibility (perhaps oversold a bit by Hofstadter) that in a very real sense your mind exists a little bit inside the minds of others who come to know you very well and thereby think like you, adopting your mental patterns.

Hofstadter addressed this idea most beautifully in an older book, Le Ton beau de Marot, in which he showed how some of the same questions about what constitutes an accurate replica come up in the translation of poetry, the efforts to create artificial intelligence, and the mingling of lovers’ minds. The book was made all the more poignant by the fact that his wife — with whom he shared love, wordgames, and talk of his work as an artificial intelligence researcher — died during its writing, leaving him wondering, for both personal and philosophical reasons, whether some tiny portion of his wife’s mind lives on in his, each time he laughs at something exactly as she would have or knows precisely what she would have said in a given situation.

It’s funny that D’Souza should dismiss such atheistic, materialist musings as useless in the face of tragedy and death, since it was precisely Le Ton beau de Marot I had in mind when delivering my maternal grandfather Earl Geer’s eulogy, reminding my assembled relatives that Grandpa had been a storyteller with a very distinctive personality and that in some sense he’d live on each time we imagined how he’d react to a situation and what he’d say (including a lot of low-key, mellowness-fostering axioms such as “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” a concept that helps keeps me in my usual non-frantic, contented, easily-pleased state of mind to this day). Grandpa Geer is one of only two people I promised shortly before their deaths to mention in my writing, and I expect I’ll have more to say about his eight decades living on the same old-fashioned farm when I address the important topic of tradition — and its sometimes-useful opposition to dynamic, unfettered progress — at greater length in the future (though I’ve alluded before to the fact that spending time on that farm as a child probably helps keep me sane by reminding me that there are rhythms to live by decidedly different from New York City’s).

Perhaps D’Souza’s thoughts when he reflects on his dead relatives are orders of magnitude more rich and satisfying than Hofstadter’s or my own, but somehow I doubt it — and I doubt we need recourse to invisible, supernatural substances (soulstuff? ectoplasm? ghosts?) to describe the real world. It’s complex enough as is.

P.S. The one other person to ask me to write something for him shortly before he died, by the way, was fellow Brown student Dan Shuster, who committed suicide in 1990 shortly after asking me to write a screenplay about a man as fed up with the modern world as Dan turned out to be who, in the imagined opening scene, finally snaps during a particularly bad traffic jam and goes on a shooting rampage for the rest of the film. I’m going to let myself off the hook on writing up that one, though, since a mere three years later Falling Down with Michael Douglas began exactly as Dan wanted — though Dan was basically a frustrated, angry Buddhist, while the Falling Down character was an expression of paleoconservative rage — long before most people had ever heard the term “paleoconservative” — right down to his objection to foreign trade and bland franchise stores, his loss of purpose after the Cold War, his flirtation with militia-style racism, and his resentment of encroaching New Age religiosity. Strange that the screenwriters had diagnosed a movement and turned it into a film so long before the impact of that movement (most visibly represented by Pat Buchanan) had really been felt on the national stage.

Robosaurus and the War on Terror (with 2008 movies preview)

Our debate last night at Lolita Bar — part of an ongoing debate series I host that was recently mentioned by USA Today thanks to cute pop culture columnist Whitney Matheson and cute interviewee Nichelle Stephens — was about how to balance deference to the past with hope for the future, one of my favorite topics. I did not expect, however, that the most glorious embodiment of the retro-futurist fusion of yesterday and tomorrow that I learned about last night would be something not mentioned during the debate itself. I speak, of course, of Robosaurus.

One of last night’s panelists was L.B. Deyo, who hosts a similar debate series, sister to our own, down in Austin, TX. L.B. explained after the debate that another of his hosting duties in Austin recently — timed to coincide with the opening there of the giant-robot movie Transformers — was the emceeing of an appearance by Robosaurus, an actual, fire-breathing, car-rending-and-eating, mechanical, forty-foot-tall dinosaur. YouTube, thank goodness, has an amazing clip of Robosaurus doing its thing (this is much cooler than the car I saw transform into a big robot at a monster truck show in Madison Square Garden about fourteen years ago — that robot lectured the audience about the importance of avoiding unhealthy drug use and the creation of pollution, while it pumped thick, cough-inducing fumes into the enclosed Garden).

I mention Robosaurus not merely because it’s cool, nor even because it was the cause of AintItCool.com editor Harry Knowles declaring L.B. a “genus” [sic] after seeing his unique emcee skills, but because I think Robosaurus may be the key (at this troubling juncture) to winning the War on Terror. You see, my friend Meredith Kapushion (who created the blog Pieces of Flair) learned while traveling in the Middle East that the place is rife with nonsensical conspiracy theories, most of them dealing with the Jews and/or Americans, since Arabs tend to live under totalitarian regimes with state-run media they don’t trust but no reliable alternate sources of information. And one man she met (in Egypt, as I recall) told her he was concerned because he knew that “Americans are building dinosaurs to eat Arabs.” Really.

My first instinct, as a professional critic of unproven claims, was to think “We have to debunk these sorts of absurd claims!” But that may be a hopeless, never-ending task, especially without access to the state-run media of these squalid Middle-Eastern hellholes (if you can’t even convince brainy Western academics that democratic Israelis are to be preferred to their homicidally-deranged, propaganda-spewing, hate-fueled Muslim neighbors, who’ve been trying to kill or exile Jews since long before the U.N. started spitting out its chronic ritual denunciations of Israeli land grabs, what hope is there of mollifying the Arabs themselves?). Perhaps the path of least resistance, then, is to encourage belief in the conspiracy theories most conducive to our victory in the clash of civilizations. “Leak” to Al Jazeera footage of L.B., as eloquent a spokesman for American values as ever I have known, intoning about the might of the indomitable U.S. military, while behind him, Robosaurus does his thing, striking fear into enemy hearts and testifying in twisted steel and burning rubber to the true value of our superior civilization (I’m told Stephen Colbert has already praised Robosaurus, which is a start).

I suggested all this to L.B., and he courageously and patriotically offered to go my plan one better. Via e-mail, he said:

Leaking the video to Al Jazeera would be good. Better, by far, would be for me to ride Robosaurus right into the field of battle, roaring Arabic curses into the microphone. This is our nation’s last, best chance.

This is, if not the stuff of legend, at least the stuff of monster movies, and that reminds me that on another mighty-beast note, Lost co-creator (and creator of next year’s movie re-launch of Star Trek, with Matt Damon as Kirk, Adrien Brody as Spock, and Gary Sinise as McCoy [UPDATE 7/27/07: Nope, the guy who plays serial killer Sylar on Heroes will be Spock -- and a fine choice he is, though it suggests the earlier casting rumors should be ignored -- oh, and Leonard Nimoy is confirmed for a framing sequence, which I for one hope will confirm that in his old age he eventually helped the Vulcans and Romulans reunify, the way they would have if I'd gotten around to writing that Star Trek novel trilogy I once planned between jobs]) J.J. Abrams appears to be directing a Lovecraft-influenced giant-monster movie with a viral marketing campaign so coy that even the trailer (being shown prior to Transformers) does not give away the name of the movie — but it looks cool.

It also kicks off (on January 18, 2008) what will be the most nerd-blockbuster-packed year yet in human history (and I say this remembering full well how good 1999 and 2003 were). If all goes as scheduled, 2008 will bring to theatres — brace yourself — all of the following:

•Iron Man (starring Robert Downey Jr. and Gwyneth Paltrow) 5/2
•The Day the Earth Stood Still 5/9
•Speed Racer (by the Wachowski Brothers of Matrix and V for Vendetta fame) 5/9
•The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian (since they’re skipping The Horse and His Boy, this’ll be the last entry in the series before it starts turning into a really weird — but fun — cross between Christianity and a Salvador Dali painting, I might add) 5/16
•Indiana Jones and the City of the Gods (Indy vs. commies for ancient-astronaut artifacts) 5/22
•The Incredible Hulk (with Ed Norton replacing Eric Bana and Liv Tyler replacing Jennifer Connelly) 6/13
•Batman: The Dark Knight (with Maggie Gyllenhaal replacing Katie Holmes — not to mention Heath Ledger as the Joker and Thank You for Smoking star Aaron Eckhart perfectly cast as Two-Face) 7/18
•Hellboy II: The Golden Army (once more from the man who brought us Pan’s Labyrinth) 8/1
•Sherlock Holmes [summer]
•Whiteout (based on a great crime comic about a female cop in Antarctica) [summer]
•Wolverine (starring Hugh Jackman and directed by the man behind Live Free or Die Hard and the Underworld movies — and the first Underworld movie has one of the most beautiful opening sequences in nerd-film history, I think, not to mention a lead character who’s clearly a rip-off of the vampire character also named Selene from the X-Men comics, but apparently Marvel doesn’t hold a grudge against him for it, nor perhaps against James Cameron for seemingly getting the plot of Terminator from the X-Men comics story “Days of Future Past” — but then, they’re in no position to complain, since the X-Men writer Chris Claremont clearly lifted a plotline about eyepatch-wearing gangleader Callisto lusting after, capturing, and crucifying Angel right out of the movie Barbarella, in which Anita Pallenberg plays the [at one point] eyepatch-wearing gangleader who crucifies Barbarella’s angel sidekick Pygar — what goes around comes around [UPDATE: Nope, now it appears Gavin Hood, director of the Oscar-winning film Tsotsi, will direct Wolverine.]) [summer]
•James Bond 22 (featuring the boyfriend-turned-terrorist mentioned in Casino Royale) 11/7
•Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (6 of 7 because by now you’ve seen 5 twice already) 11/21
•Star Trek (It makes sense to start over. Each series just stuck people on another ship that usually had the same name anyway.) 12/25

And I’m not even listing tons of other geek fare — which may also be good films but that given my personal predilections I will likely skip just because with a year this bountiful one has to draw the line somewhere — such as remakes, sequels, or adaptations of Get Smart, Horton Hears a Who, The Italian Job, Escape from New York, The Mummy, Death Race, Where the Wild Things Are, The Wolf Man, and so on. When will we find time to hold debates in bars, defeat terrorism, and elect another president?

P.S. Special thanks to Louise Julier and Jonathan Funke, who delivered last night’s projector (for Kevin Walsh’s building slides) in spite of getting in a fender-bender only minutes earlier — and big up yasself, girlfriend Koli, for supplying and operating the associated laptop.

7/7/7 = Jamaica! (or Al Gore)

DON’T PANIC if you have trouble contacting me in the days preceding our July 9 debate, since girlfriend Koli and I (seen above) will be in Montego Bay, Jamaica July 5-8 for the wedding of my friends Maria Gray and Allan Cohen (to be followed next month by the weddings of my friend-since-kindergarten Paul Taylor — who’s already been bachelor-partying here in NYC all weekend — and New York Post film critic and newly-minted blogger Kyle Smith, who didn’t like 300, so don’t get him the DVD as a wedding gift). I can’t find a picture of Maria and Allan at the moment, so the picture at left of Maria and two typical friends of Maria will have to suffice.

VS.

It was either attend this event or go to one of Al Gore’s 7/7/07 Live Earth concerts, but Jamaica’s a cheaper flight than going to the special concert area Gore’s reportedly set up in Antarctica, so I guess I’ll attend the wedding, perhaps pausing at some point Saturday to think about what a problem warm weather can be, what with the minuscule sea-level rises and people being forced to wear bikinis and everything. Like DC Comics, Al Gore does not use the word “crisis” lightly.

USE YOUR OWN JUDGMENT IN MY ABSENCE, AND ABOVE ALL, DON’T FREAK OUT, even if you’re a debater who has to cancel or someone with a projector who has to call the bar directly to ask about extension cords.

Some calming things you might want to do while I’m away drinking rum: (a) reflect on the true meaning of Independence Day, (b) see Live Free or Die Hard and ask yourself whether you would fight for freedom as effectively as Bruce Willis’s character does, or (c) see the Transformers movie (opening July 4) and ask yourself whether there’s any point fighting for anything when, inevitably, as L.B. Deyo will argue on the 9th, the robots are destined to win in the end…

…unless magic saves us, like in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (out on the 11th), but I’ll write a few articles and a couple blog entries when I get back from Jamaica about why that’s a lot less likely than the aforementioned robot revolution.

DEBATE AT LOLITA BAR: "Should America Have More Respect for Its History?"

Instead of the usual first Wednesday of the month (when you’ll be celebrating the anniversary of the Declaration of Independence and the start of the world’s first regime based explicitly on limited government and individual rights), join us on MONDAY, JULY 9th (at 8pm) for a three-man panel discussion on the delicate balancing act between respect for the past and hunger for the future, featuring:

–JOHN CARNEY, lawyer, writer, and advocate of traditionalism
–KEVIN WALSH, building preservation advocate and Forgotten-NY.com editor
–L.B. DEYO, Jinx and Dionysium co-founder, Intergalactic Nemesis star (see it next week!), and prophet of the transformative cyborg future

Moderated by Michel Evanchik and hosted by me, Todd Seavey.

At: Lolita Bar, 266 Broome St., at the corner of Allen St. on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, one block south and three west of the Delancey St. F, J, M, Z subway stop. Free admission, cash bar, and an air conditioner.

SPECIAL PLEA: Is there anyone out there who can bring a computer and/or projector capable of showing a disc, which Walsh will bring, of PowerPoint slides of old buildings? The first volunteer who offers to do so and actually follows through drinks on me all night July 9.

Thar He Blows: Moby Attended Our Debate Last Night

Or so says Gawker.

Here’s hoping our debate on history and futurism next month brings out David Bowie, my choice for the one guy to put in the space capsule if Earth is finally doomed (he’d get along with the alien civilization that eventually rescued him, for one thing).

The Zero-Child Policy

I should say a bit more about the zero-child policy — the desire not to have kids — alluded to in my prior post, to the ongoing bafflement, apparently, of most of the human race and to a few of my past girlfriends, all of them warned at an early stage about my desire to avoid kids. (It has caused a few break-ups, perhaps meaning it’s the sort of deal-breaker that will be discussed at Lolita Bar this Wednesday in the Rev. Jen vs. Katherine Taylor clash.)

First of all, let me say that there are over six billion unique sets of human preferences on this planet, yet rare indeed, it seems, are people capable of understanding that their own preferences are not necessarily shared by those around them — which is one important reason there are so few libertarians (most people don’t even see forcing others to pay for, say, a solid-gold monument to the state’s first governor as force since everyone [meaning, in fact, the person speaking and a few others who think much like the person speaking] wants a solid-gold monument to the state’s first governor).

And even on the rare occasions when people are able to understand that preferences vary, it’s usually because they’ve been hammered by the general culture into feeling severe shame if they don’t acknowledge diversity in one specific variable — say, sexual orientation — but not because they have in any way generalized the idea of diversity to arrive at the realization that a great many sorts of preferences might vary. So, particularly in New York City, you’re quite likely to hear people who in one breath will say they cannot imagine anyone being so narrow-minded as to fail to understand gays (good, good, that’s a start, almost there) and in the next breath say they cannot imagine someone not wanting kids or liking football or, say, loving Crosby, Stills, and Nash — alas, the imagination apparently has its limits, and in most brains they really aren’t very far away.

To help you imagine how someone who doesn’t want kids might look at them, first recognize that much of what seems universally-desired seems so because of instinct and cultural habituation — but that these things can sometimes be overcome, ignored, or for whatever quirky hormonal/environmental reasons simply absent in some people. Some people can’t look at skis without feeling, as if by ancient and nigh-universal instinct, a compulsion to get on them and go hurtling into the future — while others, like my manga-selling friend Ali Kokmen, react to skis by saying, “I sort of feel like just by walking I’m going fast enough already.” Some people look at kids — and by people I mainly mean women, since I have successfully refuted feminism in an earlier blog entry and am thus allowed to speak in gendered terms, though preferences of course vary — and feel a deep, visceral need to go grab them, marvel at their cuteness, squeeze their cheeks, ask how old they are, and dream up ways to get one just like that inside their wombs as quickly as possible.

I look at kids, especially the young ones, and think, roughly: “I have an IQ of about 150. I am horrorstruck anew with almost every day that I walk through this tragic world at how stupid, vicious, ignorant, parasitic, irrational, and lacking in emotional self-discipline even the adults are. Indeed, every time I walk around New York City, I find myself wondering, metaphorically speaking, Where are the adults? since almost every overheard conversation seems like the inane, gossipy, cruel, vapid, amoral, shallow natterings of mental defectives and emotionally-stunted pseudo-children. Thank goodness I do not have to deal with people who are still worse, such as people who drool on themselves, expect me to feed them because they can’t figure out how to do so themselves, or emit ear-splitting shrieks like alarmed monkeys when they are distressed. And yet — and yet! — there are people among us who indeed do drool and shriek, who demand toys, know next to nothing of this world that might provide conversation fodder fit to relieve the general tedium, drain precious time and energy like vampires from those around them, and continually drag those around them down to something resembling their paltry and rudimentary intellectual level, so that even the geniuses in their presence, like defeated and enslaved beings, must now spend most of their waking hours talking about poop, blocks, why not everything with fur is a cat, and how if you be good and stop the ear-splitting shrieking for just a few minutes maybe we’ll go look at the horsey (or what have you). What an unmitigated disaster. What a nightmare. I would sooner be tortured to death by terrorists or some Latin American death squad, since at least then the pain would end soon enough, than endure this mentally-stunted worst-case scenario for years on end, as if having voluntarily lobotomized myself — and at great expense, while so many of the projects of far greater interest on my to-do list remain tragically unfulfilled. It’s hard enough to find adults worthy of the label, why intentionally interact with people who — admittedly through no fault of their own — are years away from embodying the qualities of mind I most admire and want to be around, such as being articulate, well-informed, rational, and self-sufficient? Children are, in short, a catastrophe.”

And yet I can understand and sympathize with those who think they’re interesting and cute enough to endure — more power to you, parents of America! I would not try to stop you from doing your jobs as parents — the most important jobs in the world, really, and if I wanted to do it, believe me, I’d want to do it well. There can be no greater moral responsibility in everyday life than raising a child well — which is all the more reason I choose not to do it. I mean, I don’t wake up in the morning and think, “You know, today might be a good day — but it’d be better if I were shackled to a midget who was completely dependent on me for all his needs and indeed his very life! That’d make things more pleasant and special!” Few seek out such situations (though again, if you’re one of those people, by all means, go for it!).

In fact, fewer people reproduce in large numbers as societies become more modern, so there’s a sense in which people’s preferences are subtly “coming around to my way of thinking” — as people find more things to do, women have more options (there’s something useful about feminism — I didn’t say it had no useful facets at all), and the necessity of youthful farm labor retreats into history, they tend to have fewer kids, such that the eco-doomsday warnings of a population explosion so common a mere generation ago have now turned (like ice age warnings into global warming warnings) into dour analyses of the “birth dearth” — with places like Italy and Japan already falling below replacement level (slightly fewer than two kids per two parents, statistically speaking) so that if current trends hold (though they never do), Italy and Japan will cease to exist in the not too distant future.

And while I don’t expect the human race to cease to exist, I am not morally alarmed by the idea of it shrinking considerably (that would mean fewer jerks walking around), something that is in any case still generations off, if it ever comes to pass (at which point environmentalists, if they have not simply forgotten or consciously obscured their population-shrinking intellectual lineage by that point, will have reason to celebrate). In any case, in the long run, I expect much of the population will be either immortal or replaced by robots, or both, but I’ll discuss that topic more in two weeks (as preparation for our July Debate at Lolita Bar, on history and the future).

So to sum up: you may like kids, but please understand that some of us have a long list of other things to do and just don’t see the big appeal in jettisoning lots of those things in order to spend an inordinate amount of time hanging around with needy dwarfs. As I once said, in a joke that found its way into Kyle Smith’s novel Love Monkey and that may (come to think of it) have been the inspiration for an Alien-themed baby shower I went to, we are accustomed to seeing people have kids, but if you somehow reached adulthood without hearing about it and then saw the process for the first time with unbiased eyes, you might think it was like something out of a horror movie, this creature bursting out of the woman with blood and screams, taking over the lives of those around it. No thanks. What part of “Gah, gah, bah, guggle, SHRIEEEEEK SHRIEEEEEK WAAAAAAAAHHH!! SHRIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEK!!!! SHRIEEEEEEEEEEK!!” don’t you understand?

That Personal Ad and the 6/20 Break-Ups Debate

With less than a week to go before our big Debate at Lolita Bar on the question “Is It More Painful to Get Dumped or to Do the Dumping?” (between Rev. Jen and Rules for Saying Goodbye author Katherine Taylor), it might be worth unveiling my girlfriend Koli’s reaction (written without any urging from me) to our differences and to my own mammoth, undiplomatic personal ad:

Hi. I’m Todd’s new girlfriend. Luckily I met him in “real life,” where he is a sweet, considerate guy who respects a thoughtful argument even if its conclusion is completely opposed to everything he believes in. If he wasn’t, I doubt we’d be together.

I am a left-leaning liberal and a feminist. I think of labor protective laws not as “unfair” burdens on business, but as legitimate ways to secure a public benefit. I believe the environment is in serious trouble — to a large degree caused by human activity. Todd is concerned that science funded by government or non-profit organizations is compromised by the scientists’ incentives to falsify or slant the research, but for some reason doesn’t suspect the same when it comes to research funded by industries that could make or lose money based on their findings [Editor's note: False, obviously -- learn more at HealthFactsAndFears.com, which I edit]. Needless to say (since I framed it in that almost inflammatory way), I disagree with him.

I don’t think the “free market” would solve all our problems if governments only went way. While I do believe government should be limited and mostly decentralized, I think that there should be strong public regulatory mechanisms to monitor economic activities, mechanisms based on something other than self-interest. The other historical name for self-interest is “greed.” I think unmitigated greed has not historically proven itself to yield great public good and free societies. It has always been the liberty to pursue your greed (as one aspect of broad personal freedoms) within a democratic structure (i.e., non-economic collective decision-making) that has led to free societies.

Given my beliefs, it is very fortunate that I met Todd in “real life.” Had I encountered him on his blog without knowing him, you can understand why I wouldn’t have had high hopes for our compatibility. You can, right?

Also, politics aside, I would never have answered his personal ad, except to congratulate him for being truly funny and maybe to offer some friendly advice on how to make himself sound like an actual human being with any human characteristics worth warming up to (as opposed to a self-important jackass).

I suspect he isn’t completely unaware of this, because he asked me rather earnestly not to read any of this before I got to know him a little better.

He was even more urgent in requesting that I not read his antifeminist post until I got to know him a little better. This gave me pause. The discovery that he actually has an “antifeminist post” made me think twice about agreeing to get to know him at all. But he seemed to be a good guy and a thoughtful guy, so I said to myself: what the hell?

He’s fun to talk to, remembers (and likes) R.E.M., smiles indulgently when I spontaneously burst into songs in an East Indian language he doesn’t understand, and shares my annoyance at the widespread misuse (and consequent loss of meaning) of the once useful technical phrase “to beg the question.”

Do I wish he was a feminist or at least a non-antifeminist? Sure, but, what are you gonna do? I’ll humor him and not read the rant yet. OK, I shouldn’t assume it’s a “rant” but it probably is [Editor's note: After writing this, she read the antifeminist entry and responded to it in another entry -- hey, cool, Donovan's "Season of the Witch" is playing as I type this, and owning that makes me a hippie, right?]

Interestingly, I think I plainly fail to meet a number of his criteria as outlined in his ad, and he knew about them before he decided he liked me (I’m anything but reticent about expressing my views).

Examples:

I have indeed found myself saying, “Why does everything have to be rational all the time?” Todd knew this about me within an hour of knowing me. Formerly a self-proclaimed “hardcore rationalist,” I no longer think rationality is the only cognitive tool at our disposal. It is an epistemic device and a very good one for many, many things. But there is no basis for assuming it’s the only one.

I am open to the idea of a spiritual dimension to understanding ourselves and our world. That’s not the same as saying “creationism” or other elaborate religious theories of the world are just as valid as science in explaining the world or that they need to be given equal weight. All I’m saying is that to dismiss the possibility of any valid spiritual (or other non-rational) epistemology is to impoverish the whole process of knowing. It’s the kind of mindset that gives rise to dogma (and yes, even science has fallen prey to dogma throughout history).

I do think “just because something is logical doesn’t necessarily mean it’s right.” An argument can be constructed perfectly “logically” but still be untrue because it starts from the wrong premise or it fails to incorporate certain relevant variables. Of course, it can be argued that this kind of failure is a “logical” failure (making the original point “illogical”). But that isn’t necessarily the case. Sometimes the disagreement about a premise or the “relevant variables” is a function of values, not “logic.” I am not saying values are somehow supra-rational (at least not invariably). I am saying that no matter how axiomatic they are to you, they may still be debatable; or worse, an entirely different value may seem axiomatic to me. In fact, see Todd’s rule #8.

I also believe that it is perfectly acceptable to defer judgment when you see the “logic” in someone’s argument but have not been persuaded at the instinctive or “gut” level because you have a “hunch” that something is missing. It’s perfectly OK to admit that and take time for reflection/research. To pretend you are persuaded when you aren’t is just as intellectually dishonest as arguing in bad faith.

I hear voices in my head, courtesy of my iPod. Some of them are truly divine.

I’ve had times that could be characterized as “really confusing emotionally.” In fact, I suspect anyone who hasn’t experienced (or even felt overwhelmed by) emotional confusion has probably lacked emotional richness in his/her life. Life is messy — stripping away the mess eviscerates it, in my opinion.

Yet, Todd seems to like me despite all of this. That’s pretty cool. And he’s a really, really great guy. Have I said that already?

Oh, and I want kids. I love them. So, this thing with Todd (as wonderful as he is) will probably not last. Sad. But true.

Well, there you have it. Is it any wonder I love her? As for the tragic tendency of women to want kids, despite their ignorance and ear-splitting shrieks — I will address that problem in another entry in the next few days and explain my hope that the robots will eventually overcome it. And remember, we can also discuss all this relationship stuff at Lolita Bar at 8pm on June 20.

Pigs, Politicians, Punks

You’ll be relieved to hear that I finally saw Babe: Pig in the City, which — as Daniel Radosh and some of his friends promised me years ago — may be the darkest kids’ movie I’ve ever seen (as one might expect from the director who brought us not just Babe but Mad Max, the Road Warrior). As The Empire Strikes Back did for the original Star Wars movie, this gives us a grimmer turn to our heroes’ story — a turn so grim that my friend Laura Braunstein, a Dartmouth librarian, says she’s seen an academic paper likening Babe: Pig in the City to Dante’s Inferno. By the time you reach the moment where the grim, Gandalf-like narrator is explaining that Babe’s “brief life” is flashing before his eyes as he faces (in slow motion) the apparent “moment of his annihilation” at the jaws of a pit bull, you’ll be laughing out loud at how perverse the whole thing is, and if you have children, they’ll be in tears.

Indeed, one of Radosh’s pals said he actually called Universal, in his capacity as a teacher, to ask what they were thinking in releasing such a dark children’s film, to which someone at the studio, he claims, confessed that since the whole movie was shot in New Zealand and Australia, it was pretty much a done deal before the execs back in the U.S. had much of a chance to reconsider releasing it or ask for substantial rewrites.

(I suppose the dark humor about a good-hearted rural character in the frightening big city also bears some resemblance to the sorts of Holly Golightly-type narratives I mentioned last week when I reviewed Rules for Saying Goodbye, so you might consider watching the movie as a supplement to your attendance at the June 20 Debate at Lolita Bar featuring that book’s author — and speaking of that, I have one more thing to say about the culture of the Upper East Side: this area’s sometimes considered the Republican-friendly part of Manhattan, yet here, last Tuesday, the Republican candidate in a special election for the state legislature — a fortysomething former prosecutor who was pro-choice, pro-gay, anti-gun, pseudo-environmentalist enough to oppose a garbage facility in the neighborhood, and endorsed by the left-leaning New York Times — still lost, to the Democratic candidate, an openly bisexual twenty-eight year-old with cerebral palsy who vows to be an advocate for the disabled — and who got 64% of the vote. Yeah, it’s like rural Alabama here on the Upper East Side. Watch out! We kill hippies!)

—

And speaking of an unexpected darkness from New Zealand, rumor reportedly has it that Elijah “Frodo Baggins” Wood’s next role will be…Iggy Pop, in a biographical film about that wild, shirtless, drug-abusing, self-mutilating proto-punk (who says he once decided to check himself into rehab after waking up amid garbage bags on the Bowery, having allowed himself to be beaten by his former bandmates from the Stooges, dressed as Nazis, as part of a drug-addled piece of performance art he did at CBGB’s that literally ended with him being thrown out with the trash — on the bright side, you can sink pretty low, then, without sinking as low as Iggy Pop, and he’s still considered a success). The only similarity I can think of between mild Frodo and wild Iggy is height, since Iggy is, as he sings, “Five Foot One.”

(On another punk note, I recently stumbled across a piece of visually-weak but aurally-OK footage of what has to be one of the gothiest moments in history: Peter Murphy, formerly of Bauhaus [best known for the song "Bela Lugosi's Dead" from the opening scene of the vampire movie The Hunger], singing guest vocals for Nine Inch Nails as they cover the Joy Division song “Dead Souls,” which NIN previously covered on the soundtrack of The Crow — any gothier and this clip would be dead. On a more beautiful note, though, here’s Peter Murphy solo — and looking pretty vampiric himself — doing his best song, and arguably the best song of the 1980s, “Cuts You Up.”)

—

P.S. To get back to cute-animal movies, though, I just want to note that regardless of what the people from the pound say (and they never know for sure with the mutts in their possession), I still say my parents’ late, great dog, Uber, seems to have had some Tibetan terrier in her, and by way of further evidence, here’s footage of two Tibetan terriers frolicking, and I think anyone out there who met Uber will see the resemblance (mainly the grayish one):

http://youtube.com/watch?v=nwMvYnMbhOo

P.P.S. Word reaches me that relativist philosopher Richard Rorty is dead. I guess whether that’s a good or a bad thing is a matter of linguistic convention, though. (UPDATE: My friend Jacob Levy, more capable than I of summoning enthusiasm for a philosophical foe’s sheer academic and performance skills, has written a somewhat more detailed farewell to Rorty — scroll way down past the postmodernly blank white space.)

DEBATE AT LOLITA BAR: "Is It More Painful to Get Dumped or to Do the Dumping?"

VS.
NOT this Wednesday (as would normally be the case) but rather on Wednesday, June 20 (8pm):

Downtown performance artist, art star, and nerd “Rev. Jen” Miller throws down with (formerly) Upper East Side author, sometime bartender, and libertarian Katherine Taylor (whose new novel is Rules for Saying Goodbye) on the gut-wrenching topic of romantic break-ups.

At: Lolita Bar, 266 Broome St., at the corner of Allen St. on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, one block south and three west of the Delancey St. F, J, M, Z subway stop. Free admission, cash bar, and an air conditioner.

Luckily for me, Rev. Jen, who likes Budweiser, was drinking not too long after being dumped when I asked her to participate in this debate, while her opponent, Katherine, has just released a memoir/novel that climaxes with her then-fiance wracked by nightmares, sweat, and rashes at the growing realization he can’t go through with the ceremony.

If this debate doesn’t end in tears, I’m not doing my job as host right, or Michel Evanchik is moderating improperly. Come watch the trainwreck, man — this is going to be epic (and since it’s later in the month than usual, this once I’ll promise to give you a brief reminder).

P.S. Speaking of “tainted love,” these three versions of the song by that name leave me unable to decide which decade has been the most depraved…

…the 80s (as represented by Soft Cell)?

http://youtube.com/watch?v=oEh5pWjcWCg&mode=related&search=

…the 90s, though this was actually released in ’01 (care of Republican rocker Marilyn Manson)?

http://youtube.com/watch?v=nzE6yhrLfwk&mode=related&search=

…or the 00s (in the form of…Pussycat Dolls)?

http://youtube.com/watch?v=w37thYX6aYM&mode=related&search=

In this, as with so many other questions, I think I’m gonna have to say: the 80s, with things trending toward wholesomeness since then, at least by this admittedly unscientific measure. But what else would you expect from the decade that gave us “Hot for Teacher”?

http://youtube.com/watch?v=hSdCPUoMAmQ

P.P.S. The 80s in turn reminds me of Reagan and the fumbling search for an inspiring president. Let me just say, if you aren’t rooting for Ron Paul in the presidential race, you’re part of the problem. What do you mean, which problem? All of them.

Book Selection of the Month: "Rules for Saying Goodbye" by Katherine Taylor (Plus: New-Zipcode Bombshell)

ToddSeavey.com Book Selection of the Month (June 2007):

Rules for Saying Goodbye by Katherine Taylor

I will help future literary historians (not to mention present-day reviewers facing imminent deadlines) by revealing one of the most important things about the just-released novel Rules for Saying Goodbye: Every word of it is true.

Well, OK, not every single word — in real life, the analogue of the protagonist’s best friend Clarissa may merely have had a psychosomatic illness, for example (now she’s more interested in the welfare of her child, and blogging quite wittily about it) — but the book’s at least as close to autobiography as, say, Purple Rain was.

Indeed, I can’t help wondering how the author, a friend of mine for years, decided to use her real name and her mother’s (for the protagonist and the protagonist’s mother), while changing her brothers’ names, but that’s a trivial detail — and something you can ask her yourself if you attend the June 20 session of the Debates at Lolita Bar I host, since Katherine will be one of the two debaters, the other being downtown performance-humorist-nerd “Rev. Jen” Miller, on the question “Is It More Painful to Get Dumped or to Do the Dumping?”

Judging by the book, it’s a question to which Katherine has already given a great deal of thought, since each of the book’s four sections focuses on a break-up of one sort or another: moving away from home to boarding school, breaking up with British boyfriend #1, breaking up with the Italian boyfriend, and breaking up with British boyfriend #2. In between (and during) those incidents, a lot of alcohol is consumed, much of it just a few blocks south of me on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. The fact that Katherine will be arguing on June 20 that it’s more painful to do the dumping is impressive, considering that, as she recounts in the book, she was once so distraught about being dumped herself that she immediately vomited, right there on the spot.

Saying Things Just to Hear What They Sound Like

I don’t know if such vignettes form what someone as stodgy as Aristotle or Tolkien would call a plot, but as with Prince, the important thing here is poetic language more than either verisimilitude or narrative drive. And Katherine probably uses language more effectively than anyone else I know: gently assembling delicate, empirical bits of information in the form of carefully-placed, efficient little phrases, sort of like a more girly, tentative, and ironic version of Hemingway. Comparing one’s own prose to Katherine’s is bound to make one feel like a slob, even if one is ostensibly a professional writer (all those people who don’t know that quotes within quotes take single quote marks [perhaps thinking that single quote marks are simply for any short phrases], who use a single open quote at the beginning of ’07 when they should use an apostrophe [some of them, alas, in charge of writing auto-correction software for Microsoft], who think “begs the question” means “forces us to ask the question” instead of “assumes what is ostensibly to be proven,” who leave commas out of song titles so that they look like “Back Off Man,” or who continue using Buffy-inspired “Slayer slang” such as the phrase “um, not so much” long after it has outlived any imaginable comedic purpose, should probably not even be allowed to read Katherine’s work). Here’s just one paragraph, from the chapter that lists for us the actual Rules for Saying Goodbye (that is, rules for managing a breakup with a boyfriend), explaining to women Rule #5:

Flirt with his mother. If his mother is not available, his sister or aunt will do. Flirt mercilessly until she adores you. If you do not smoke, take it up in order to share furtive cigarettes with her in the guest bathroom. Always carry very nice cigarettes, but not overly nice — Nat Sherman, for example, but not Cartier gold-tipped. If you have not already done it by the time you decide to leave, knit a scarf that matches her eyes. When she admires it, take it off your neck and give it to her. It will be easier for her to wear later if she doesn’t think you knitted it specifically for her, and throughout the winter and next fall, the scarf itself will remind him how gracious you were.

That’s funny and quite sad at the same time — though I am obliged to tell you, in keeping with my day job, that you should not in fact take up smoking. Katherine, a libertarian who worked as a bartender in Manhattan, was none too happy about the initial crimp in business caused by the smoking ban here — a development referred to in the novel — and was somewhat displeased that I wasn’t as outraged by the new regulation as I am by all the other regulations, though I was still against it — I’m an anarchist, after all. She has also never been too pleased with my philosophical opposition to some of the views of her friend Dr. Jeffrey Schaler and his mentor, Dr. Thomas Szasz, who more or less contend that there is no such thing as mental illness. As the novel makes clear, though, Katherine has enough eccentric or neurotic acquaintances — and is conscious enough of her own neuroses — to have a legitimate fear that a lot of people in her social circle would be at risk of involuntary confinement if standards of sanity were to get too high.

Pretending They’re All Dead

Many of those acquaintances show up, thinly disguised, for amusing cameos, most of them being dissipated idle-rich sorts but one, “Albert,” being the combative communist writer-publisher through whom, oddly enough, I first met the founders of the Debates at Lolita Bar (and who has complained in an interview about libertarians not being revolutionaries so much as thinly disguised Upper East Side Republicans). And I must say, even though I of all people should be philosophically inclined to root for the protagonist and her rich-kid pals and against Albert, and even though I know how these vignettes actually end, seeing all the self-indulgent behavior of this vampiric overclass is almost enough to make me root at times for Albert to strangle them all or at least threaten to put them all up against the wall when the revolution comes. Rules for Saying Goodbye is not, in short, good propaganda for convincing people that New York is a city full of responsible, hard-working, dynamic young adults building a brighter future. More like a city full of cocaine, sex in bathrooms, very unwise career decisions, complete assholes who know celebrities, assholes who actually are celebrities (David Byrne’s bad tipping at bars is noted even while his musical genius is acknowledged), and lots of expensive restaurants.

But whether you’re seeing that with your own eyes or reading about it in this novel, the perverse, seductive thing is, it’s hard to decide whether it’s altogether bad. And ambivalence is a lot like depression, a point made — deliberately or not — over and over again in Rules for Saying Goodbye, and a point that ought to seem familiar to a lot of New Yorkers. If you’re miserable, hard-working, and poor now but have a 15% chance of fantastic wealth in four years, are you in some sense leading the good life? What if you have no mate but have been to sixteen parties full of the most beautiful people on the planet in just the past month? Are you happy? Wretched? If you pick “wretched,” are you a whiner amidst plenty, in the grand historical scheme of things? If you don’t pick wretched, are you a shallow jerk?

There’s a bit of the girl-from-mundane-origins thrust headlong-into-excess-urban-glamour motif in the novel, a dash of Holly Golightly that reminds me of the all too typical first new friend (or seeming-friend) I made when I moved to this city right after college and miraculously — despite four years at Brown — still possessed fairly simple, smalltown assumptions about how people behaved, which was basically: nicely if you’re nice to them, meanly if you’re mean to them, unless they’re criminals, Soviet agents, or axe-murderers. This first new New York acquaintance wasn’t quite that straightforward. She’d been author-to-be Katie Roiphe’s friend at Harvard, and whereas Roiphe kept a portrait of herself from her years as a teenage anorexic at her bedside to remind herself not to become emaciated again, my initially fat and rural-Kentucky-spawned quasi-friend had deliberately slimmed down, smoked, and drunk as much as possible, in a deliberate campaign, as she explained it in Manhattan a few years after she graduated, to become socially intimidating so that she could lie and manipulate the people around her — and when she said this was still her ambition as an adult, I mistakenly assumed she was joking or had some sort of Oscar Wilde-influenced cynical philosophy I wasn’t quite understanding. I mean, people just don’t get that bad, unless they’re Soviet agents or axe-murderers, right? Who wants to be bad, I thought?

This non-friend cut off contact with me once it became clear I wasn’t able to add sufficiently to the amoral glamour of her nightlife (really, she told me so quite frankly), but I did leave her one message years later encouraging her to see a revival of the Golightly-esque play As Bees in Honey Drown, about a rural woman turned big-city sophisticate who enjoys sadistically manipulating a nice-guy writer she meets, in part to prove she’s become more powerful than she was as a bumpkin. Stories like that happen here a lot, I think.

I, by contrast, arrived here such a good-hearted naif that I recall in late 1991 still considering “schmoozing” an immoral activity — and being horrified when I realized that one of my co-workers at St. Martin’s Press was inviting an editor to a party not because he was a friend — or even likable — but because he was “important.” Doing that doesn’t sound like a big deal now, after a decade and a half of occasionally glimpsing wheeler-dealers, but I was aghast at the time, and surely I’ve lost a little something in the interim.

The Best of Places, the Worst of Places: 10021 No More

For the protagonist of Rules for Saying Goodbye — who remains a decent person throughout, making only the rarest and most half-hearted attempts to misbehave — much of the allure of the big city and its decadent inhabitants comes from a specific desire to escape Fresno, CA, culturally and psychologically. Whether or not she ends up in a better place psychologically is debatable, but we get to follow her on a tour of some pretty glamorous geography in the process, including Brussels, Rome, London, and Manhattan’s richest zip code, 10021, where Katherine lived for ten years and where I have now lived for ten years but no longer will — not because I’m moving, mind you, but because they’re breaking it up into three separate zipcodes, with the richest chunk (where Katherine lived) remaining 10021 (average income $85,000 according to the New York Times; home to conservative icons William F. Buckley and Bill Cosby), the second-richest chunk becoming 10065 (average income $82,000; home to David Rockefeller and Spike Lee), and bums like me relegated as of the end of the month (NOTE IT IN YOUR ADDRESS BOOKS) to 10075 (average income, which I am below, $74,000; home to the governor, the mayor, and one of my biggest influences — not that it necessarily shows — Tom Wolfe).

Katherine, who may in some ways be a victim of the view (parodied so ably by Kyle Smith in a December ToddSeavey.com Book Selection) that fashion and glamour actually matter (but then, how else can the existence of some of the people in this book be justified?) skewers pretensions and social-climbing obsessions wittily, though without making it clear whether she’s really capable of leaving all those petty concerns behind once and for all, crucial though that would seem (from reading the book) to her future happiness and stability.

In the meantime, though, she’s got the glamorous thing down pat, (1) being praised by Time Out New York (kudos to her brother Russel on his photos of her, by the way, which certainly don’t hurt the cause), (2) having her amusing literary feud with Bejamin Kunkel (founder of the New-York-yuppie-leftist lit journal n+1) egged on by Gawker.com (he suggested her work shouldn’t be taken seriously, as retaliation for her brief description of one of his novels as “simple” when New York Observer interviewed her), and perhaps best of all (3) having MediaBistro.com include her on their list of memoirists they consider sexier than Ayaan Hirsi-Ali (much as I hate to see even Katherine upstage a heroic opponent of Islamic fundamentalism who was driven out of Europe).

Two final thoughts:

(1) Thanks to brother Russel’s photographic skills (and nature), the Observer spent a surprising chunk of their profile marveling at Katherine’s chest — a reminder that the buttocks of one of our previous Lolita Bar debaters, Dawn Eden, were also praised in the pages of that paper, perhaps part of a pattern.

(2) Contra Kunkel, I wouldn’t call Katherine’s style unserious so much as witty-but-fragile — but, hey, I’ve forgotten most of what I learned as an English major (while retaining a lot of what I learned as a philosophy major), so what do I know?

P.S. I am also, thanks in part to the influence not only of my parents but people like my farmer grandfather and his recently-deceased brother, Milt Geer, something of a simple rural guy at heart myself, and perhaps saner and less wracked by status-anxiety because of it than some of the unhappy souls chronicled in Rules for Saying Goodbye. On the other hand, much as I love trees and animals, next month’s Book Selections will be all about cyborgs and the like, so please keep reading — and in the interim, join Katherine, Rev. Jen, moderator Michel Evanchik, and me at Lolita Bar on June 20 (8pm), and read Rules for Saying Goodbye so you can see the highlife and the horror for yourself.

Banana Splits vs. Bob Marley

Koli and I are going to a wedding in Jamaica next month (Maria Gray and Allan Cohen’s), but a conversation we had yesterday reveals that one of us may not be easily assimilated into the island’s culture (and suggests a great idea for a mash-up, for someone more musically and technically competent than myself — are you reading this, DJ Lunchboy?):

TODD: Were you just humming the Banana Splits themesong?

KOLI: Banana Splits?!

TODD: Weren’t you just going “la la-la, la la-la la, la la la-la”?

KOLI: Yeah, that’s “Buffalo Soldier” by Bob Marley: “Woy yoy-yoy, woy yoy-yoy yoy, woy yoy yoy yoy, yoy yoy-yoy yoy!”

In related news, a band I mentioned in the previous blog entry, My Favorite, startled me yesterday by having, I noticed, a track called “Le Monster vs. Chuck Blake.” “I don’t even remember My Favorite meeting Chuck, much less seeing him battle a monster,” I thought, “though I could see Chuck doing that” — but the title refers (via the recently-fashionable use of the “vs.” conjunction to denote a guest singer or in this case producer) to the music producer who remixed that version of their “Le Monster,” not to the man by the same name who I’ve known since high school and who criticized climate-change theories at our February debate.

Music can be confusing — like the time I met the lead singer of the Arrows, who sang the original “I Love Rock n’ Roll” and let slip the fact that I thought Slade had done the original (the source of my confusion: Slade did the original “Cum on Feel the Noize,” which isn’t quite the same thing). But I can tell the difference between the Fixx and Frozen Ghost, which is the important thing.

Men, Women, Again

A very special guest-blogger (with whom I’ll be at Niagara Falls over the weekend, so debate politely in our absence) weighs in on the comments of Peter the “seduction community” member who commented so intriguingly in the long thread resulting from my earlier post on feminism (I should say that while I stand by pretty much everything I said in that entry, I acknowledge that this is a vast terrain of never-ending debate, and I emphasized the select areas I felt were being overlooked, often annoyingly so — but, hey, my account of things is arguably far more nuanced than, say, MenAreBetterThanWomen.com):

Peter,

First, the thing about earnestness being less effective in sexual/romantic success than deception: it’s insane to me that you think it’s just WOMEN who respond to deception. Much to the chagrin of earnest feminists like me, there are tons of workshops and self-help books telling women to stop being so damn earnest and essentially training them to manipulate unsuspecting men into relationships and marriages. Apparently, these “systems” are enormously successful, too. Just to be extra clear, I’m not here to celebrate the deception just because it goes both ways. I find the “how to make him fall in love with you” crap just as depressing as your “seduction community.” I wish there was more honest, good-faith communication between the sexes. Maybe Todd is right, most people are just stupid. But I am not ready to give up hope….

Second, I think what’s interesting about your complaint that women expect you to “cut them more slack” than men is that women say exactly that about men. Like many straight women, I have often felt that men expect to be accommodated and to get their way all the time, at my expense. But just because I “felt” it, I don’t assume I am correct. I don’t think you’re correct about women either. And I don’t think that means one or both of us is irrational. I just think it’s a perception gap.

I suspect gender differences play into this, to a considerable degree. That means we respond to some things differently from you. It doesn’t mean we’re asking for “more slack” — at least no more slack than YOU ask of us (unwittingly, I’m sure). Take for example, Todd’s assertion that women cry as an “emotional manipulation” strategy. Similarly, a lot of women think men become withdrawn and unresponsive in the middle of a conversation (“it’s like hitting my head against a brick wall”) as a bullying tactic. I am sure there are examples where both of these things are intentionally employed as tactics. But for the most part, women aren’t trying to manipulate you when they cry and men aren’t trying to bully us when they shut down. We just respond to frustration differently.

But I don’t think it’s JUST the gender differences. I’ve had lots of male friends and lots of mixed-gender friend circles, so I can tell you that men and women who are platonic friends don’t generally have the same complaints about each other that they do about people they date. I wonder if certain complex needs, emotions, conflicts, etc. aren’t simply inherent in sexual/romantic relationships, regardless of gender. Just ask any gay couple — they seem to have many of the same problems. People have to accommodate mates in ways they don’t need to accommodate friends. These relationships have a different quality of intimacy and trust that seems to require more understanding (“slack” if you will). My friends are extremely important to me and when necessary, I am perfectly willing to cut them a lot of slack, but they generally don’t need it as much (or as regularly) as any of my boyfriends have needed. And the boyfriends could probably say something equivalent about me. (The exception, so far, is my current boyfriend, Todd Seavey — yes, I’m Todd’s liberal, feminist girlfriend — because we seem to share an almost identical joy of hashing out all our differences earnestly. But, if and when the need arises, I’ll be more than happy to cut him some slack, because I trust his good intentions).

Like I said, there seems to be a perception gap between the sexes, which is exacerbated by the existence of assholes (on both sides) and by people’s tendencies to lash out and think the worst others. Those of us who end up being able to relate to the opposite sex without condescending to them, despite having been seriously exasperated by them, do so as a result of some self awareness, a genuine openness to the other’s point of view and a little patience.

If someone — a woman-was really patient with you and open to hearing you out, I think you would feel differently about women and be able to discern the neurotic assholes from the rest of us. But, it’s hard to be open to you when you’ve decided that we’re all irrational and not worth engaging in good faith. Just like women who accuse all men of being misogynists and potential rapists can’t reasonably expect men to sympathize with their position. I understand that your venom comes from bad experiences with women. Believe me, most of male bashing also grows out of the bashers’ personal wounds, dealt (or perceived to have been dealt) by men. These are not good reasons to advocate cutting off the conversation, although I am in no way callous about the scars that you (and the male bashers) have obviously sustained. I hope you will all find ways to heal from them. I’m a romantic, so I also hope all of you will fall in love with someone wonderful any day now!

As far as the “seduction community,” I’m glad to hear that their methods are at least getting you laid, although they have failed to help you with the full relationship you had obviously hoped to find. But I wonder, if this is really working, even just for sex, then why do you have to be grateful for prostitution and porn?

In any case, I’ll take you at your word that your “porking” success rate has improved since you got seduction training. In the same spirit, I trust you will take my word that I have a large circle of women friends who easily are 9s and 10s, are constantly hit on by men, and none of them accept the advances of guys who treat them with disrespect, already have girlfriends, or are full of themselves (confidence and arrogance are not the same thing). And no, my friends aren’t lying to me. I KNOW their dates, boyfriends and husbands. They are the kindest, most decent men you’ll ever meet.

I won’t try to put a number on my own hotness, but I must be passably attractive, since I usually don’t want for male attention (at least when I feel confident and good about myself) and yet — and now I’m asking you to take MY word for it — I have always chosen to be with guys who are good human beings. Certainly, I like a guy who is also “confident and feels good about himself” and is — preferably — some combination of good looking, smart, interesting and funny, AS WELL AS a nice guy. (why do people say “nice guys” when they really mean unattractive, insecure, boring guys who have nothing to recommend them except their alleged “niceness”?) I don’t see how any of my criteria are “irrational” just because they don’t begin and end with “nice.” And no, I’m not just “steering” my sexuality consciously. I’m telling you about my visceral reactions to different kinds of men. An attractive (even a moderately attractive) guy, who is really smart, and genuinely kind and seems to sincerely like and admire me, is a HUGE turn on for me. Arrogant, self-centered men simply turn me off even if they are hunky, smart etc. A whiney, insecure guy doesn’t turn me off quite the same way, but he will never turn me on just by being “nice”. Being nice is a threshold requirement of decent human interaction, not some amazing virtue deserving of special rewards. Most women don’t expect to be rewarded with tons of romantic attention just for being “nice” people.

Yes, there are women out there who are cock-whipped by arrogant, self-centered males, but there are also plenty of guys who are pussy-whipped by arrogant, self-centered females -so this doesn’t really say anything meaningful about the “mating drives” of either sex. (On a related note: Peter claims that women “won’t come to grips” with their mating drives, as opposed to men, who know what they are looking for, which is simply “looks and loyalty.” Really? Care to check out Todd’s “Personal Ad”? Also, if “looks and loyalty” are all Peter is looking for, then, what’s his problem? Why does it matter to him if women are “rational”?)

Of course, there is also the type of woman who just won’t care what kind of person you are or if you are already in a relationship; she’ll want you just because you turn her on sexually. Well, given that MEN behave this way much more regularly — and even brag about it — than women, I find it puzzling that you see this as an example of FEMALE irrationality.

If I may offer a suggestion to Peter and other men who feel the same way, consider this: when you bemoan the fact that “women” are irrational, unresponsive to kindness, and whatever other complaint you have, are you really sampling from the general population of women in your acquaintance? Or do you start with the 9s and 10s (scored that way based on characteristics completely unrelated to the things you are complaining about)? In other words what do you screen for FIRST? If you start by pre-selecting the hottest women around and then lament the low occurrence among them of all those other qualities you seek -well, that’s not really the most “rational” way to go about things, is it? I’m not saying beautiful women can’t be smart, sane, kind and earnest. I’m just saying if your selection criteria are prioritized to place the highest value on X, then your results will be skewed toward more X, and the co-incidence of Y, Z and W will be much more random.

By the way, I checked out (briefly) the two seduction sites that Peter linked to. Of course, the focus of these are ultimately manipulative and therefore distasteful to me, and we (at least the women) have no way of verifying their claims — they have a product to sell to desperate people (just like fad diets that “work”). Still, even assuming the veracity of their claims about results, when you see the type of specific advice that apparently has actually succeeded, it does not seem to support Peter’s conclusion that they work because women are “inherently irrational”.

I have four general areas of observation:

1. One bottom line principle behind these seduction techniques is that you have to (comfortably) exude some sexuality (i.e. flirt) in order for women to respond to you sexually. Well, no shit! Where is the “irrationality” in this? How is someone supposed to find you sexual if you don’t exhibit any sign of it? Interestingly, I found this principle set forth in an entry about the old “nice guy v. jerks” debate. Ladies, you will be relieved to hear that even these seductionist cads admit, very clearly, that women don’t pick “jerk” qualities (rudeness, arrogance, boorishness etc.) over “nice guy” qualities, but rather, that this misunderstanding comes from the fact that the self-proclaimed nice –guys are confusing “niceness” with androgyny and asexuality. My own 2 cents: if you can’t be sexual without being rude, arrogant or boorish, then maybe you’re not such a “nice” guy.

But I’m really not suggesting that all guys with the “nice guy” complaint are latent boors. Some just lack other things women want. And others have honestly come to believe that all sexual behavior they initiate will be somehow offensive to women. I have to lay some of the responsibility for this on certain of my fellow feminists, who have promoted this idea of associating any expression of male sexuality with “violence” and “aggression” and led some good men (like Peter, perhaps) to internalize the notion that flirting is “disrespectful”. I (and a lot of other feminists) summarily reject this notion, but many feminists do endorse it — and I think they are rightly criticized for it.

Incidentally, there’s a pretty widespread belief among a sizable minority of women — usually not feminists — who bemoan the scarcity of “good men”: that men don’t appreciate a good, loyal woman; that it’s those narcissistic, selfish, bitchy women that get all the guys; that to get a man to be loyal and treat you well, you have to be cruel and treat him like crap and keep him insecure about your relationship. In other words “nice girls finish last.” I think these perceptions, just like the “nice guy” problem have less to do with reality than with resentful interpretations of reality.

2. Another key insight shared on the seduction sites is that women find confidence attractive. What’s “irrational” about that? Unless you are confusing confidence with arrogance, rudeness, or boorishness?

By the way, men respond to confidence in women too. Men and women are socialized (or perhaps biologically wired) to convey it differently, but it’s important for both to have it. Notice the way Peter describes the behavior of the “10″ — that’s some serious alpha-female shit! And frankly, in these discussions, when men say “women” they completely leave out of the equation all those mousy, insecure, “nice” women who are sitting in a corner (or at home), pining away for some Mr. Nice Guy to come rescue them. The women these men are “gaming” are the ones that are out there, confident in their sexuality, laughing, dancing, flirting, acting like they own the world. Yes, men are visual, and one of the most important visual cues they respond to is confident body language. The hot girl who also knows she’s hot will get the most guys. Of course confidence doesn’t quite make up for being ugly, but NOT having confidence will doom a mousy girl to be overlooked forever, even if she is technically “pretty.” A girl who is less pretty will be noticed and actually will be considered “hotter” if she cultivates a sense of self or at least a certain look, posture and stride.

I’ve gone through periods of insecurity in my own life -for reasons unrelated to men or sex-but during those periods, suddenly it seemed nobody was attracted to me. As soon as I snapped out of it, stopped caring what anyone thought and went about being myself and rediscovering my joie de vivre, the men came back out of the woodwork trying to get me to notice them. Even though I looked exactly the same. (disclaimer: I belong to a special subspecies of humans, called “nerds” –our mating rituals may be a little different from the rest. Still, I think we can draw parallels).

3. Another general approach of seduction seems to be that instead of complimenting a woman, you make fun of her a little. The claim is that women respond to being demeaned and having their confidence eroded. But lets look at how the specific tactics worked, at least in the video examples I saw. One guy went up and started insulting women. No woman responded well to him. They couldn’t get away from him fast enough. Another guy went up to a really hot girl and said her teeth were cute, like “bugs bunny”. She found him endearing. But note that he was smiling, his body language was friendly and just a little suggestive without being threatening. His comment charmed because it was unexpected (and funny) and seemed unrehearsed. Part of the reason it’s funny is precisely that it seems like an utterly ridiculous pick up strategy. Like George Costanza telling women he’s unemployed and lives with his mother. It has a novelty. And women like guys who are willing to expose themselves that way. Of course, the unemployed-lives-with-mother line will only work if it’s obviously a joke! And I think “bugs bunny” knew she was being joshed with and not insulted for real. To think a gorgeous woman with no dearth of male attention will have her sexual confidence “eroded” based on a stupid comment from a stranger is laughable. Maybe a guy who needs seduction training to find a date has a self image flimsy enough to be swayed this way, but the 9 or 10 he’s “gaming” is probably more secure than that.

4. Some of the other suggestions on the seduction sites are simply manipulation and deception tactics. They have nothing to do with women’s “mating drives.” If you misrepresent who you are and I buy it, that just means I am trusting or gullible. It doesn’t mean I enjoy being deceived or that the fact of being deceived is what I am responding to.

For example, one piece of advice was to lull a woman into a false sense of bonding with you by pretending to be a platonic friend while you get her to talk about her sexual fantasies. Apparently this works.

One reason that a woman may respond to this (and for argument’s sake lets grant that some women do) is that she notices how comfortable she is with you. In other words, she is being turned on by a nice-guy quality. To her, you’re a nice, “easy to talk to” guy who is not asexual and the talk is sexually charged. The fact that this turns her on should make you reject (or at least question) the notion that she is looking for a jerk to demean her. If you choose to think that it’s the fact that you’re actually a deceiver pretending to be a friend that’s the real turn on (as opposed to the sexy talk and the comfortable rapport with you) then it’s your interpretation that’s irrational. Not the chick.

Another reasonable interpretation is that she is turned on by her own sexual thoughts, but the object of her fantasy isn’t available, so she’ll act out her lust on you, as you happen to be around. I don’t see why this should be derision-worthy. If anything, men should identify with this kind of behavior. After all, it’s fairly common for men to admit that when they are horny, they will have sex with any available female, regardless of who they are actually fantasizing about.

One last note about seduction: women have always very successfully used “feminine wiles” and insincere seduction tricks on men too, does that mean men are “inherently irrational”?

–Koli

And Todd here again, with a concluding note: another issue of dating symmetry and asymmetry will be hashed out in the next of our Debates at Lolita Bar (266 Broome St. at Allen St. on Manhattan’s Lower East Side) at 8pm on Wednesday, June 20, when “Rev. Jen” Miller and Rules for Saying Goodbye author Katherine Taylor (who’s also a libertarian — maybe she’s voting for Ron Paul in the primaries, too!) ask “Is It More Painful to Get Dumped or to Do the Dumping?” I’ll host (and Michel Evanchik will moderate), so by all means come by and debate all these interrelated topics if you like.