and speaking of bubbles...

The most vulgar excesses of empire manifest themselves only when the empire in question is in decline. A number of historians and historical sociologists have made this observation with respect to social systems as varied as the Roman Empire and the Antebellum South. I thought of them last night at Katsuya in Hollywood. I know that sounds weird. Have you heard of Katsuya? I believe they have restaurants all over the world - Tokyo, New York, London, Berlin...even Palm Springs. The best way I can describe the place is as a Japanese restaurant that feels "very NBA." It's the kind of place, in other words, at which I could picture LeBron James arriving with his posse in a black stretch Hummer. As the doors to the limo fly open, the bass from some hellish Lil Wayne jam rattles the windows outside and a dozen or so flashbulbs pop, lighting up another round of celebrity worship. Katsuya is a place for those for whom money is no object, a place that takes the Japanese emphasis on respect and hospitality to new levels of servility and decadence...as long as they have your Visa Platinum number keeping a tab. Just keep the Cristal flowing and put it on my tab. Another three bottles of sake, please, and put it on my tab. Can we get another few plates of the yellow tail with crispy rice, and throw in a few kobe beef platters while you're at it, and put it on my tab... The wait staff is comprised of genetically perfect looking Japanese guys and dolls, and they tabulate your charges with digital pads that feed the orders back to some central nerve center that then forwards the order to the low-wage Mexican workers who assemble the food and who remain completely hidden from view throughout the entire evening. ...At one point, I ambled from our table to the Men's room, ambient techno buzzing in my ears. The women standing at the bar were all young, but not so young as to not evince a slight hint of desperation, with their their thigh-highs and low-cut-sweater-mini-dress thingamajigs. It's been unseasonably warm here in Los Angeles, but these women seem to sense that it's cold outside. They outnumber the men at Katsuya by something on the order of three-to-one. ...Katsuya strikes me as a protective bubble for the very rich, shielding them from the harshness of today's world. The weird thing is, though, that it all seems so flimsy and cheap at the same time. The marble in the bathroom isn't real marble. The walls are all adorned with artistic photographs, but look closely and you see that they're photocopies, not the real thing. The dark lighting in the place can't completely hide the fact that the fabric covering the booths is frayed and worn out. It's a teetering house of cards, a decaying, flim-flam moument to a decaying, flim-flam era. Just up the block, a few streets north of Hollywood Blvd, there are protective bubbles of a decidedly different kind, a grouping of tents that together make up a homeless encampment. The tents are also frayed and worn out, but for different reasons. Still, make no mistake about it: There is a causal relationship between the two bubbles, but the bubbles themselves help keep the relationship hidden. A relationship between people takes on the appearance of a non-relationship between things...

...I don't wanna make it seem like I didn't have a good time at Katsuya. I did. I ate. I drank. I laughed and I enjoyed myself. I tried not to think about the grossness of it all, knowing what I know, or at least what I think I know. I tried and largely succeeded to not be a downer, a dark cloud, a buzzkill. It was hard. Sometimes - maybe most times - it's better not to know.

the beginning of the end of the beginning of the end

How will historians look back on the economic era we're living through now? This is the kind of light 'n easy question I wrestle with when I'm running on the elliptical trainer at the gym… The paradox of people making history is that the real meaning of what they've done and of how they've done it can only be grasped well after the fact. So the first problem is defining a coherent period to interpret. The challenge here is that we're now only at the very beginning of a new period, so its significance isn't really knowable in a deep way… If, off the cuff, I were to draw up a schema of American economic history, I would say that the election of Reagan signified, at least symbolically, the end of the broadly based liberal consensus that resulted in the New Deal and the War on Poverty. Capitalists in the 80s began to take back a lot of the power that had been stripped from them over the previous 50 years. The capitalist gains were consolidated during the 90s as most of the Reganite assumptions became accepted truisms in mainstream American political discourse: Welfare state, bad; state spending on anything other than defense, bad; taxes, bad; collective bargaining, bad. Unregulated markets, good… Everybody wins when capitalists are free to pursue their business interests. Wall Street’s interests and Main Street’s interests are the same…

But there’s a wrinkle in all of this because the capitalist consolidation of the 80s and 90s was built on the flim-flam foundation of over-easy credit, deregulation, and rampant financialization. I say flim-flam because typically the way out of recession is to allow a Darwinian shakeout of weak firms, thereby allowing the markets to adjust back to some semblance of equilibrium. Then innovation, pent-up demand and eventually rising wages bring the economy back to life. But with a badly eroded and increasingly uncompetitive manufacturing base – or what people are talking about when they say that we don’t produce anything anymore – policymakers had to find other ways to prop up the economy. At the tail end of the first Bush’s presidency, the Federal Reserve began to pump tons of liquidity into the markets and aggressively lower interest rates in an effort to lift the economy out of recession. In lowering interest rates so dramatically after almost two decades of inflation paranoia, the Fed essentially encouraged ordinary people to use the debt markets to finance lifestyles that their otherwise stagnant incomes could not afford. Although the S&L crisis and the failure of Long-Term Capital Management were initial and largely unheeded signs of the pitfalls of the neo-laissez-faire turn in U.S. economic thinking, the policy created an unprecedented if also unsustainable boom. Throw in the commercial exploitation of the internet and the innovations of the dot-com era, and the American economy looked superficially like it would grow indefinitely. The Dow went through the roof, passing 7,000, then 8,000, then 9,000, the 10,000, the 11,000. People were talking about Dow 36,000, and they were taken seriously! I can remember watching Abbey Joseph-Cohen, one of the superstar equities traders at Goldman Sachs, talk to Louis Rukheiser on Wall Street Week about the American economy being like a freight train that could not be knocked off course. Only now do we see this for the mania that it was.



It’s clear that the Fed long ago stopped thinking about the long-term implications of monetary policy. It’s all about the political economy of the here and now. Historically low interest rates in the naughties fed a boom in the mortgage markets that took on a life of its own and acted as a temporary fix to much deeper structural problems. People not only bought houses they had no business buying, but used the artificially inflated equity in their homes re-do their kitchens, buy a few extra inches of flat screen, get nicers car, take longer vacations on Maui... And just as the internet bubble burst in 2000, the mortgage bubble burst in 2008. So now we’re at a point where there are seemingly no bubbles left to inflate, unless there's something unforeseen - something we take for granted - like water or air, that will eventually be commodified and make for a market that will act as a solution to our economic problems, even as it leaves millions of people without he most basic of necessities. I'm just thinking out loud here. The main point here is that here we are at the end of the age of Reaganism, the end of the flim-flam era, the end of the bubble era, the end of empire. It's the start of something new. But what is it, exactly? What will it be? An age of austerity and a deteriorating way of life? Will things improve, or will they continue a slow decline indefinitely. It's much too early to tell...

a holiday in the sun

I have not had much chance to write lately due to being swamped at work. But I just finished writing a big report, so I thought I’d reward myself by venting all the bitterness ‘n bile that’s been building up in my system over the last few difficult weeks. …One of the reasons I have time to write now is that today is my office's Christmas party, and rather than celebrate a holiday I hate with people I despise, I’d rather sit at my terminal at work and cleanse my soul. It’s a funny bit of business these Christmas parties. Nobody likes one another, and nobody really wants to be there, and yet we do this shit year after year. Why not just give us the day off, or at least send us home early? I don’t get it. It reminds me of what I’ve just had to endure during a week back in New York visiting with my family. It was a rocky time for me emotionally. I stayed with my parents, which is what I usually do when I go back East for visits, but it’s gotten increasingly difficult. I’ve really started to feel like I get in the way of their way of life when I’m cooped up in their cramped apartment. Over time, there’s been a kind of just-below-the-surface emotional distancing between me and my parents. They would of course be appalled to hear me say this, but only because a sober analysis of the situation – as opposed to denial and wish fulfillment – would reveal that what I’m saying is true. There’s always been distance, I think, always been an unpleasant sense on my part that they don’t really ‘get me’, don’t understand that I’m not motivated by the same things they’re motivated by, but I’ve only recently come to realize that this is perhaps not a ‘me problem.’ Don’t get me wrong, though. I have plenty of me problems, and I’m willing to accept some of the responsibility for not having a particularly nurturing relationship with my mom and dad. It’s complicated and not the kind of thing I can pick apart and explain in detail now, writing at my terminal while all the pathetic stooges I work with sit in some miserable cheap Mexican restaurant in Echo Park, pretending to like each other, and wishing they could order a few $5 margaritas to dull the painfulness and boredom. It's not like the good old days when guys 'n gals would get freaky at office parties and dance with lamp shades on their heads. Drinking during office hours is strictly verboten, at least in the public sector.

...If I sound a bit out of sorts, I suppose it’s because I haven’t been able to lose the toxic fumes swirling around me in the wake of the Thanksgiving trip. Thanksgiving day was really bad. I was there, seated at the table, along with my sister and my sister's husband. We all love each other and are mutually supportive. I'm lucky to have them there. But then there’s my mom, who wears a face in a jar that she keeps by the door. She's emotionally stunted and deals with her anxiety with an eating disorder and by remaining disingenuously upbeat about everything, even in the face of the seething hostility of my older sister, who is my father’s daughter from a previous marriage, and her adopted daughter. And then there’s my dad’s older son, who's practically deaf and, so the parental line goes, dropped so much acid in the 60s that he’s just sort of spaced out. He doesn’t participate in the (stunted) conversations at the festive dinner table, but I think this has less to do with drugs and more to do with a personal choice. Can't say I balme him. His second wife is at the table with him. She’s from China and speaks very limited English, but has nevertheless gained a heavy New York accent for the words that she can speak. In itself, these minor details about her would not be all that significant, at least not until I told you that he’s 65…and she’s 25, two years older than his daughter, my niece, who is at the table, too. If all this sounds extremely fucked, that’s because it is. My niece recently graduated from Princeton but decided to marry some dude well below her station, whom no one else in my family likes...because he’s well below her station. How soon those who’ve advanced from the lower middle classes forget where they came from! My niece and her hubby got married about a year after she graduated from high school, so she did not have a typically Princeton-ish experience at Princeton. She made no friends, absorbed very little either intellectually or socially, and basically could have had the same experience at any state or even community college, and it would have been cheaper and less fraught with all the crushing expectations that come with graduating from a place as stuffy and status conscious as Princeton. My parents are furious with her husband for a long list of reasons, not the least of which is that he supposedly “ruined her life” by taking her out of the whole Princeton vibe. What makes it worse is that, now that she’s an ivy-league graduate - but, in a sense, not really an ivy-league graduate - she has no real plans to be a doctor, a lawyer, a professor, an investment banker, etc. Instead, she’s basically the administrative manager in her father’s store, a job that, truth be told, does not require more than a high school diploma. Ever seen Five Easy Pieces? …And finally, my dad is seated at the head of the table, grouchy and bossy as hell, and looking for any little thing to be aggrieved about. These days you’ve gotta walk on egg shells around him. His temper will rip the fucking face right off your skull. I love the guy so much, but my love is put to the test if I’m around him for too long at once. Funny thing is, I think the same goes for him with me. Call it a push. …So try to imagine, if you will, what the feeling is like at that Thanksgiving dinner table. Sounds really loving and warm and happy, doesn't it? And then afterwards, when everybody’s left with a belly full of food and a head locked in a vice-like grip of stress, my parents sit together and go through a detailed post-mortem, ruthlessly picking apart every flaw in every person who, only a half hour earlier, was seated at their table. My older sister is described as “angry and shallow”; her daughter “has no intellectual curiosity about anything”; my older brother is “out of it”; his daughter is “a total failure in life”; her husband is a “fucking asshole.” There's so much negativity swirling around this conversation that it's even too much for me, and I usually thrive on negativity. My parents know better than to say anything too pointed about my sister or her husband when I’m in the room, which is good. But, in the words of Robert Plant, it makes me wonder: What exactly do they say about me when I’m not there?

freedom's just another word...

Finally finished Franzen's Freedom. It took me six weeks to read it in dribs and drabs because I've been so crazy with work and just life itself. My feeling about the book is that it's very good, but it's premature to call it great or to say whether it heralds the voice of my generation. There were definitely parts of the novel that dragged in the same way that parts of The Corrections dragged, but Franzen has a great ear and eye for the world we live in today. I like the way the novel traces a historical period of about 35 years by focussing on the life of one family's odyssey, but it perhaps lacks the philosophical depth one finds in other authors who use the same storytelling device, like Tolstoy, or Mann, or Flaubert. I suppose it's ridiculously unfair to take an author to task because he's not as brilliant as Tolstoy. In any case, as I mentioned, it's too early to know the real impact and significance of Freedom. That it's beautifully written with lovingly drawn characters is not in question. But does it really have anything of sustained importance to say? Ask me again in 15 years time...

how'd we get here?

I don't pay much attention to politics these days, but I heard an interview with Michael Moore on Democracy Now last week that got me to thinking more deeply about some things. For all of the faults one can find with his movies - they tend to be rants that lack sustained coherence -he's such a sharp guy and a real hero, in my opinion. I have nothing but respect for him. Listening to him discuss the implications of the midterm elections was fascinating and steered my mind back into areas I've avoided for quite some time now. My thoughts are still pretty rough, and none of them are especially original, but the big question for me is how we've gotten to the political juncture we're at today in the US. How is it that corporate money has so completely corrupted both political parties? Why is it that President Obama seems to care so much about appeasing the right when he could not have been elected without an energized progressive coalition? The cynical answer - and, by the way, the largely correct answer - is that he's banking on progressives having nowhere else to turn when we get to the 2012 re-election campaign. But this begs another question: Why is there no real progressive alternative to the triangulations of the Democratic party? This is a variation on the question Werner Sombart posed more than 100 years ago in his classic, Why is there No Socialism in the United States? He pointed to a number of historical conditions as proximate causes - the absence of a feudal past and thus the weakness of class consciousness in American history; the availability of land on the western frontier, which turned would-be workers into independent proprietors with a stake in markets and capitalism; the divisive effects of slavery and its aftermath within the ranks of American workers; ethnic and national divisions due to the the absorption of immigrants from Europe; and so on and so forth. Sombart constructs a perfect storm in terms of the making of a relatively conservative working class. All of which is well and good, but the U.S. has nevertheless had periods of genuinely progressive upheaval in the face of crises and unsustainable social conditions. How did the Progressive Era occur starting at the end of the 19th Century as a response to the staggering inequities of the Gilded Age? How did the New Deal happen in response to the Great Depression? And if these progressive periods could occur in an American historical context that would otherwise seem to militate against them, what is preventing a similar progressive period from happening today? The conditions are certainly in place, are they not? The economy has crashed and is likely to stagnate indefinitely. Unemployment is high and showing no signs of coming back to earth. America is stuck in two unwinnable wars. Many of the largest states and municipalities in the country are more or less bankrupt. A quasi-authoritarian movement is ascendant in the form of the Tea Party. The concentration of wealth at the very top is becoming more obscene, and levels of inequality today have not been seen since the 1920s... If ever there was a time for progressives to be fired up about making fundamental societal changes, it should be right now. And yet, the left is completely disorganized and dispirited, while the right is talking about more of the same laissez faire tax cuts and deregulation that caused all the problems we face today. I've had my head in the sand for months now because looking at newspapers and watching the news on TV is just too damn depressing and scary. The level of debate and conversation is utterly infantile. It upsets me. I can't take it. I'd rather drink some wine, smoke a little doobie wah, and pretend like it's not happening. But it is happening, and it'll only get worse if people like me - educated, concerned, humane people - don't get involved. But how does one get involved? What does one do? I can't face the prospect of phone banking for MoveOn or of holding some kind of potluck at my house to raise money. I don't want those fucking people in my house, freaking out my cats, tracking their dirt all over my nice hardwood floors. Isn't there something else I can do that doesn't involve spending lots of money and/or interacting with the public? I guess there isn't, really. Maybe I'm not the right person for the job. I'd rather think in broad generalities and report my brilliance here on my blog, even though nobody reads it... So getting back to the initial question, what is missing today that existed at the turn of the 20th Century and again in the 1930s? The only answer that makes any sense to me is a strong union movement. A quick check of the facts reveals the following: In 1953, more than one-third of the American workforce (35.7%) was unionized. In 2008, only a little more than one in ten American workers were unionized. Between 1983 and 2008, the level of workforce unionization in the U.S. dropped from about 20% to 12%. There's no organized political force in place to pressure the Democratic party and hold Obama's feet to the fire. In order for anything drastic to happen, someone or something will have to encourage and facilitate unionization. I don't know who or what it will be - maybe another even more cataclysmic crash? - but it's the only way I can see things really changing in a meaningful way. ...When I was a graduate student I read a great essay by Claus Offe about one of the fundamental structural differences between capitalists and workers. Capitalists, Offe argues, have a built in means of coherent organization simply by virtue of being capitalists and being governed by nothing other than profits. The profit motive places them fundamentally at odds with workers. Workers don't have this built-in structural advantage. Their interests are at odds with those of their employers, but only to a certain degree because if capitalists don't achieve profits they shed workers. So from the point of view of the worker, which is it? Should they be anti-capitalist? Should they be pro-capitalist Or should they somehow straddle the divide? The ambiguity of working class interests necessitates voluntary organization and political struggle within the class itself. The intra-class struggle within the class struggle, as my dissertation advisor used to call it. Unions have traditionally been the organizations carrying out this dual struggle. Without unions, workers don't know what their interests are beyond doing what their told to do and keeping their jobs. This to me is the situation we find ourselves in today. There is no coherent working class in America. The political landscape, along with the culture and all other aspects of the public sphere, are completely and totally dominated by the corporations. To the extent that workers even reflect on their interests, they assume them to be identical to corporate interests. And as they become increasingly exploited and alienated and scared, there's no organization in place to help them both articulate and understand why their lives are so fucking hard. They have no real way of developing class based solidarity with other workers So they find answers to their questions in a media edifice that presents the corporate point of view as self-evident, and they find a modicum of self-esteem in religious fairy tales, gun ownership, and feelings of superiority over the Other. ...There are those who will say that voting is the way to make change, and if you don't vote you can't complain. This line of reasoning was always simplistic, but it's never been a more asinine thing to say than it is today. Voting really doesn't matter much when the choice is between two parties completely beholden to the corporations. Of course Obama has moved to the right. Should we really be surprised? There's nothing pulling him in the other direction. Voting will only matter when the workers in this country begin to get organized again, and who knows whether, when or how that will happen?

she comes in colours

I want to take a moment to rhapsodize in a free associating manner about a marvelous woman who's been helping me with my cats for a number of years now, the lovely Trudy Walker. My older cat, Polly, is a sweetheart, but she is preternaturally shy and scared, and her delicate emotional composition seems to spill over into her physical well being. A friend of mine complained once that Polly is a one-person cat. I don't really see what the problem with this is, as long as the one person is me. Without warning, however, she stops eating every few years and loses a bunch of weight. Aside from the emotional toll this takes on me - Polly and her nephew, Vito, have often felt like all I've got in this world - Polly's hunger strikes are especially vexing because doctors tend to stress her out mightily, which in turn makes it even more difficult to get her to start eating again. It's a very unpleasant cycle. I've learned over the years that Polly should only see a vet if the situation is critical. It's best for me to try and nurse her back to health myself when it's at all possible. Trudy has helped me do this on several occasions, and I would be a basket case without her. Often times the at-home care involves giving Polly subcutaneous fluids, which I would never be able to do myself because it requires sticking a needle into her scruff. I can't do that. So I end up holding Polly in my lap while Trudy applies the needle. ...Each time this refusing to eat thing has happened, my mind has traveled to my default option, i.e. the worst-case, catastrophic scenario, and I've found myself contemplating what my life will be like without my sweet Polly, the seemingly massive void her passing will leave in my life, not having her around when the world seems so crazy and fucked and the only source of comfort available to me is the tenderness I feel when she and Vito are asleep with me on my pillow, buzzing in my ears in beautiful, mesmerizing stereo... But during each of Polly's hunger strikes, Trudy has been there for me, with her kindness, her responsiveness, her empathy, and her serious know-how in matters of feline health. I know there will come a time when Polly will check out for real, and I try to prepare myself for this as best I can, but so far Trudy has managed each time to pull something out of her top hat that gets Polly back on track. Today I rushed home and met Trudy during my lunch hour so we could give Polly some fluids. Polly hasn't eaten much in the last week and she's been looking very thin and frail. Trudy brought this special food. It's extremely pungent. I don't know what the hell is in the stinky stuff, and frankly I don't want to know. Trudy suggested I try feeding some of it to Polly. I was skeptical and feeling a bit morose about the Polly's prospects, but I put the plate down next to her and looked away for a few moments.

When I looked back at her - presto magico! - she was chowing the stuff down with a furiousness that caused an overwhelming wave of relief to wash over my whole body. I felt like skipping down my block, like some Angus Young. Polly still has a long way to go. She's not out of the woods yet. But I am so grateful to Trudy for this breakthrough that I don't even know how to express what I'm feeling with words. And what's even more amazing to me is that Trudy always seems embarrassed when I pay her what she apparently thinks is too much for the inconvenience of coming to my house in the middle of the day. She doesn't realize that she could ask me for 10 times as much as I pay her and I'd still feel like I was getting a great deal. You just can't put a price on providing your pets with loving care. I told Trudy today that she is quite possibly the only person I know who is not motivated by money. It's a remarkably appealing quality for a person to have, especially in this world we live in, and in these times. I feel so lucky to have a friend like Trudy. God bless her. This is my small way of saying thanks...

an assignment

I've got this long-term homework assignment I need to do over the next year or so for a photography exhibit my mother is putting together at a museum in New York City. The theme of the exhibit is New York at Night, and she's asked me to write a piece about music. I don't know whether this is her way of throwing me a bone - surely there are better writers than me to do something like this - or whether she's genuinely interested in what I mihgt have to say about music in the context of nighttime New York. I guess it doesn't matter one way or the other. It doesn't feel like a bone because I really wouldn't care if she asked somebody else to write it. It almost feels like I'm doing this for her instead of vice versa. There would have been a time when I'd feel ashamed of doing something that might be construed the result of nepotism or whatever, but I'm so removed from my mom's professional life at this point that the only real question left for me is whether or not I want to write the piece. And I do, provided I can do it on my own terms. This is actually a big if because I'm not sure my mom is at all familiar with my writing style - my voice, as it were - at least when it comes to writing something like this. I have a sneaking suspicion that she would want me to write the kind of piece that draws attention to the confidence, well roundedness, and erudition of the writer, when, in fact, my style tends to do the exact opposite, not because I'm a sad sack or because I have some irritating need to wallow in my own frailty and misery, but rather because I find it easier and more appealing to be true to myself, as opposed to sounding like some overeducated asshole who writes for the New Yorker. At the same time, I don't want to write something that embarrasses my mom, nor do I want to recreate the mother-son dynamic I've worked so hard to eradicate from my life, wherein nothing I ever do is quite what she wanted or good enough to exist in the rarefied air she breathes on the upper Eastside of Manhattan. ...I think what I will have to do is tell her that I intend to write something that might be a bit different than what she'd expect, and she can use it or not. In the meantime, I can use the space I have here on my blog to work out my ideas. At the very least, I'll have something that I hopefully like at the end of it all. It'd be pretty cool if my mom decides to use it since there will, I assume, be a book for the show, and the piece I write could potentially be included. But that's getting way ahead of the game...

Some random ideas to get the ball rolling... The Velvet Underground were the ultimate New York at Night band. There's very little daylight in their music. I first became aware of them in 9th grade. I had a massive crush on a 10th grade punker girl, Ingrid, who wore a Velvet Underground pin on her herringbone winter overcoat. I was still strictly a Van Halen-AC/DC-Led Zep kinda guy at this point, probably late 1982 or early 1983. I had no ready-made entry point with Ingrid, but I was obsessed with her. I liked the way she always seemed to be alone. I identified with it, and it also made her seem available. I figured buying a Velvet Underground record might be a smart investment, one that would pay dividends if I really applied myself. So I went to the Tower Records on Broadway near NYU and purchased a reissue copy of The Velvet Underground and Nico. I think I want to build the narrative from here. Whatever my initial motivations may have been, hearing The Velvet Underground and Nico marked a definite turning point in my life, one in which my ear moved away from conventional rock - today it's called Classic Rock - and towards punk rock. The VU oozed an attitude I'd never really experienced in listening to the Who, the Rolling Stones, the Beatles... It was more detached, critical, cynical and arty, but it was all these things before they became the annoying postures they are today, where there's nothing but posture, nothing, as Baudrillard says, that isn't a simulation of a simulation. They were part of a much darker milieux, the flip side of the 60s I had known via Jimi Hendrix, Crosby Stills and Nash, and the Jefferson Airplane. It's hard to believe that The Velvet Underground and Nico came out several months before the Summer of Love. I didn't really think of things in these terms when I first heard it, but I knew it was a 60s record and that it was different from the 60s I had known and reverred growing up. Heroin, be the death of me... The record made me want to explore more, learn more, and become more conversant with punk. It also made me fall more hopelessly in love with Ingrid. ...I think that's a good start. I need to tie it in with New York at night. I also want to show the VU''s 'spiritual' connection to the New York punk explosion of the 70s. This will require some research.

on freedom

There's not much additional praise I can heap on to Jonathan Franzen's Freedom. I haven't seen any bad reviews. I'm sure there'll be some kind of backlash at some point. ...I'm about half way through the book and really enjoying it. His prose is so effortlessly spot-on. I wonder, however, if his mastery of language and style perhaps masks a shallowness of thematic content. It's a hard book to put down, but it might be the equivalent of eating Twizzlers or Dorritos. You can't stop once you start, but you still feel empty and a bit out of sorts at the end. I'm not saying this is my final verdict on the book since I still have a lot of it to go. Not all literature has to be heavily thematised and deeply meaningful, but you want someone with Franzen's gifts to do something really ambitious and intellectually compelling. That's my hope for the book anyway. There's no question that he's a very smart and observant cat. But is he thoughtful? Thoughtfulness is admittedly a hard concept to pin down these days. Still, I want so badly for someone to come along in literature and be the voice of my generation... Maybe I'm setting the bar too high. Maybe it's enough that the book is entertaining the shit out of me. Let's see what he does with this thing. I hope he doesn't blow it...

a new era begins

The first thing I do when I wake up in the morning is read about five or six blogs, including a few baseball blogs, and this morning I found out that the Mets have hired Sandy Alderson to be their new GM. The move was very much expected for quite some time now. I'm cautiously optimistic, though I don't see the Mets being all that much better than they were this year until 2012 at the earliest. I know very little about Alderson except that he ran some of the successful Oakland A's teams of the 80s and 90s, including the World Series champion A's of 1988. I seem to remember him coming off as a dickhead in Howard Bryant's book about the steroid era, Juicing the Game, but being a nice guy does not necessarily translate into being a good GM. It will be a major improvement on things if he can bring some seriousness to the job and some respectability to an organization that has been in disarray since getting bounced from the NLCS in 2006 at the hands of the underdog St. Louis Cardnials. Alderson is a bit of an old fart at 62, and the game has changed a lot since the last time he was a GM, so we'll have to see whether he's able to adapt. His first move as the head of baseball operations will be to hire a new manager. I have been hoping that Wally Backman would be given the call because he's fiery, stresses fundamentals, and doesn't tolerate players who don't play hard and hustle. Backman would be a bit of a wild card with his lack of Major League managerial experience, his hair trigger temper, and his fairly recent history of off-the-field problems, all of which could be strikes against him for somebody as buttoned down as Alderson appears to be. But Backman would inject some personality into the team and would bring some fun and excitement back to Queens. On top of this, hiring Backman would be a nod to the team's history and tradition, which I think is important. My sense is that somebody vanilla like Bob Melvin is more likely to get the call. But fans should not expect miracles right away. The Mets still have horrible contracts on their books that they will have to either eat or trade in exchange for somebody else's shit. Oliver Perez, Luis Castillo, Francisco Roddriguez, and Carlos Beltran together account for roughly $50 million in salary for the coming season, which is about a third of the team's on-field payroll, and this will severely limit the kinds of moves the team can make in the near future. The good news is that all these contracts, with the possible exception of K-Rod if he meets certain vesting benchmarks, will be gone after 2011, so we will not get a full sense of Alderson's competence until this time next year. In any case, it feels good as a Met fan to see the team starting to move in the right direction, or at least I hope it's the right direction...

a clash of civilizations

I mentioned in yesterday's post that the World Series this year, pitting the Texas Rangers against the San Francisco Giants, is a nifty little metaphor for the cultural divide in the USA. To call the polarization between red and blue America a clash of civilizations, after Huffington's right-wing theory of the motive force driving contemporary geo-politics, is maybe a little extreme, but it doesn't feel that way to me living in this country at this time. Granted much of my thought process was filtered through dense clouds of pot smoke this past weekend, but when we made the passage from LA County to Kern County on Friday night, it seemed to me like we were traveling into another world.

...Bill Clinton recently told a group of Democratic fundraisers that, among his generation, those who think the 60s were a good time in America tend to be Democrats, and those who think the opposite tend to be Republicans. That seems about right even if it's oversimplified. The former are concentrated in the densely populated cities of the coasts and parts of the Midwest, the latter are everywhere else. This has been discussed to death at this point from every conceivable angle, and I can't add any additional insight. But I would like to clarify something for myself. No one to my knowledge has yet provided a satisfactory answer to the question of why poor and middle class rural and suburban whites consistently vote against their economic interests. This seems to me to be the key to so many other issues. In fact, you can broaden the issues and ask why so many people in America vote against their interests? The quick answer to the question is that they see their interests differently than I see their interests, so the question itself is based on assumptions that aren't accepted by all. But what if we grant a little latitude and pose the question as why do so many people vote against their economic interests? Why, for example, do they vote for candidates who are beholden to laws and corporations that will inevitably crush any and all possibility for upward mobility in the future? Thomas Frank's book, What's the Matter with Kansas? comes close to a satisfactory answer, but it's written more as a memoir and journalistic expose than a rigorous theory. I like my explanations to be sustained and tight, while Frank's book is loose and somewhat amorphous. The best I can do at this point is to list a number of factors that together have some bearing on the outcome in question...One factor is religion, Christianity in particular. The fascinating thing here is that, while there have always been conservative strains and sects within American Christianity, there were also progressive strains in previous periods of crisis in the United States, such as the Civil War, the Great Depression, Viet Nam... But you don't hear much about liberal Christianity these days. I know it still exists, but the loudest and most well organized bible thumpers are conservative fundamentalists and evangelicals, so that Christianity has become a deeply conservative force in the nation's politics, at least among whites. Since Nixon's Southern Strategy of the late 60s, the Republican party has been able to paint the opposition as a party of godless secularists who are coming to burn your bibles and teach your kids how to be gay.

...The second factor is the superior and sustained organizing efforts on the American right. Sydney Blumenthal has written a great book about this called The Rise of the Counter-Establishment. The theory in its bare essentials goes something like this: The New Deal created a consolidated liberal consensus after World War II. Eisenhower was actually more liberal in many ways than either Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton. But at the same time, a counter-establishment began organizing at the grass roots level. This counter-establishment was in the political wilderness for 25 years or so, but during that time various segments sharpened their organizing skills, learned how to manipulate the media and the terms of political discourse, and developed all kinds of think tanks and message factories, like National Review, Heritage Foundation, Cato Institute, and today Fox News. All the while, the progressive wing of the American party slept, and you really see the results of it now. Republicans are so vastly superior in getting their message out by comparison with Democrats, so much so that the Democratic party has pretty much adopted all the Republican assumptions and simply put a slightly more human face on things. I have largely tuned out politics for reasons I've described before, but I am quite amazed at how astoundingly bad and clumsy the Obama administration has been at shaping the overall level of political discourse. During the health care debate in particular, I found myself asking how the Administration could not have been more prepared for the onslaught from the right. Did they not learn anything from Monica Lewinsky? Do they not understand the nature of their opposition? Much was made during the election about the Obama campaign's deft use of new social networking technologies for the purpose of mobilizing voters. But where is the carryover? At a certain point the bullshit hope and change emails I get everyday from David Plouffe (which at this point I delete without reading) have to translate into something more forceful , something that takes on the right wing talking points and demolishes them for the drivel they are. you can't be conciliatory and compromising with an opponent that views you as a mortal enemy. But I can't completely blame the Administration because the right has had a 45-year head start in terms of organizing and manipulation of the media.

...The third factor is really two factors that intersect with one another: the decline of the labor movement and the backlash against civil rights gains. American unions began their precipitous decline in the mid 60s, at exactly the time when the civil rights movement was winning its big victories, so that working class whites felt little solidarity with working class minorities. There was no mechanism through which they could be brought together to fight for common goals, or whatever mechanism existed was weak and not very well organized. We would be living in a very different world now if the labor movement and the civil rights movement had become more coordinated and intertwined. Minorities and working class whites would be much better off today. But instead of the counter-factual scenario, what actually happened is that as the world economy went into the shitter in the 70s, there was little working class resistance to the assault on unions or to the impetus towards privatization. Likewise, there has been fairly weak resistance to the right's efforts to roll back civil rights gains. The superior organizing on the right is important to point out here as well. It's like a perfect storm for the emergence of conservative hegemony, one in which employers use race to divide workers, white workers gravitate towards their whiteness and their religion, and the seeds of Reaganism are planted in fertile soil.







The fourth and final factor I can think of, which is really an amalgam of the other four, is the weakness and incoherence of the Democratic party. I know this has been said a million times before, but there's really not much difference between the two parties when you cut through all the ideological bluster. The notion of government as the enemy is an article of faith on both sides of the aisle. Privatization good, government bad. Social spending bad, free market capitalism good. These are taken as points of departure in mainstream politics today, not as points of debate. And on the rare occasions when the assumptions are taken as points of debate, the right wing noise machine, almost 50 years in the making, is there to steer the conversation with little countervailing resistance...






It's remarkable how little things have changed since the last ten years, except that things have just gotten steadily worse. The stagnation may be unprecedented in American history given the number of catastrophes we've been through since Bush took office. The Reagan Revolution is still alive and kicking, and it continues to be propped up in part by the people it has hurt the most. It's depressing. There's a lot of anger out there. I see everyday instances of frustration and rage that feel different than anything I can remember feeling before. It's sad to think that rage and stagnation will likely be the defining concepts of our times. When I look back on this period 10, 20, 30 years from now, I think I'll remember it as the angry era. And I'm not immune to it, of course. What troubles me most is that I don't perceive any path out of the current impasse. Maybe that's why there's so much anger. I know a path will develop, but who knows whether it'll be of the democratic or authoritarian variety?

on the way home...

I'm back in LA. I couldn't make the road journal thing work. This blogging program will not let me write posts from my phone, so it all became too complicated. Oh well. ...After the misadventure with Terry's car on Friday afternoon, the rest of the trip turned out to be quite enjoyable. I broke my eating regimen all weekend long. On Friday night, we stopped at an In and Out Burger off the 5 freeway, somewhere in Kern County. I inhaled a double-double with fries like they were oxygen. I must look like a rabid dog when I'm eating. We arrived at the hotel just in time to see the Rangers finish off the Yankees. It made me very happy, but I called it wrong. I guess I'm no handicapper. A little more on this later. Terry and I were both pretty tired, so we had a quick drink at a local dive in Sunnyvale and then went to sleep around 1am. The Best Western we were staying at seemed to be some kind of weird magnet for Indians because the night person there was Indian and the whole place smelled vaguely of curry. And then at about 7 on Saturday morning that vague smell became much more powerful, nauseatingly so, as if the people in the room below us were preparing the most pungent curry ever. It felt like I had woken up in a ten-ton vat of the nasty fucking curry. We found a breakfast place and then drove to Santa Cruz for a visit with Tom's family. It's weird seeing his kids now as teenagers after having not really spent much time with them since they were little kids. It was at Tom's house where I had the insights to which I've previously alluded, about the two Americas and my quitting academia. Santa Cruz, as I said, is archetypal coastal, liberal America, the kind David Brooks describes so pompously in his book about bourgeois bohemians, what he calls Bobos. In any case, Santa Cruz is a nice place to visit for a day or two, but I think its provinciality and its smallness, in both the literal and figurative senses, would drive me crazy after awhile. ...At around 4:00 on Saturday, I drove with Tom and Terry to the Shoreline in Mountain View. First we ate killer burritos at a place near the venue called La Bamba. I'm not a big burrito eater at all - I prefer tacos if given a choice - but La Bamba's fare was out of this world. I was trying to be good, so I had chicken instead of steak in mine, but I don't think it matters because the burritos were so filled with greasy, peppery goodness that the meat was beside the point. Again, I made my food disappear in mere minutes. I was very hungry all weekend, actually, and I was very aware of how fast I was eating at meal times. ...A bone chillingly cold rain began to fall when we got to Shoreline. I could have very easily bummed out at the prospect of having to stand in the wet weather for four hours, but I chose instead to roll with it. Tom brought some Maker's Mark in a flask. It helped warm me up and made me appreciate the hot sweetness of burboun... One thing that made the night interesting was that the Giants were playing Game 6 of the NLCS at the same time, and the crowd roared when they recorded the final out against the Phillies and clinched the Pennant. ...So I was exactly backwards in my prediction for the World Series. It'll be Texas and Frisco starting Tuesday night, which seems a bit like a clash of civilizations. I don't really have a rooting interest, but I think the Rangers will win in five or six games. I've been underestimating the Giants all year, and they still don't seem like they're that good to me, but they made it this far and anything can happen in baseball. ...Most of the acts prior to Buffalo Springfield on Saturday were boring. I'm really not interested in hearing Elvis Costello sing country music, for example, and Lucinda Williams always sounds drunk and tired to me. Perhaps this is part of her appeal but it's just not my thing. One exception to an otherwise uninteresting lineup was Billy Idol. He played a half-hour set, dividing things evenly between his 80s hits and a few Generation X songs. ...The Springfield finally came on at 11pm. They were well worth the wait. I thought they might just play a few of their hits and well-known songs, but they went pretty deep into all three albums. For guys who are near 70 at this point, they sang and harmonized really well together. They did quite a few of my favorites, including On the Way Home, Do I Have to Come Right Out and Say It, Nowadays Clancy Can't Sing, Bluebird, Rock 'n Roll Woman... Richie Furay is the best preserved out of the three of them. Terry pointed out that this is no doubt the result of his 40-some-odd years of clean living. ...In spite of the bad weather and the stuff we had to deal with on Friday afternoon, the weekend was quite enjoyable. I definitely feel exhausted now, so I think this is as good a time as any for me to put my virtual pen down...

for what it's worth

Being around academics throughout much of the day today has made me so happy I opted out of academia. I will have much more to say about this when I can sit down and focus more intensively. ...We are currently on the freeway driving back to Sunnyvale. We'll freshen up at the hotel and the make the short drive to Mountain View and the Shoreline ampatheater. The weather is grey and rainy. We're gonna get wet tonight. I've definitely decided that I should avoid the fungus. Why fuck with your head so profoundly when you're predisposed to depression? It's a little thing called self knowledge, closely connected to a recognition of one's limitations, both of which fall under the rubric of wisdom...

uno mundo

Santa Cruz conforms to every right wing stereotype - or 'meme' - about the two Americas. It's the kind of place that makes being right wing appealing to a certain degree. Everyone here is so guarded and precious, as if everything a person says could potentially be subjected to rigorous (but also ridiculous) scrutiny. I like to throw bombs into polite conversation, and I find paradoxically that the most repressed people here are titillated by it, like 'who are you and what planet do you come from?' I made some crack about my Salvadoran cleaning lady and found that I became something of a court jester. Being a court jester is a role I've always excelled at, especially when you can poke fun at folks without them knowing that you're poking fun at them. I think I've mentioned my affinity for this before. ...The thing is, as farcical as I find places like this, I can't help thinking about how paranoid I felt last night blowing up through those conservative rural areas along the 5 freeway...

broken arrow

I did not sleep well last night as my body doesn't really function correctly in unfamiliar environments. Several things happen to me. My metabolism slows down, my sinuses clog up, and I sleep fitfully. But it's nice to be here in Sunnyvale, far away from all my responsibilities. Today we'll drive to Santa Cruz and pick up Tom for the concert tonight. We are loaded with a number of different strains, and some fungus. I'm on the fence about the fungus part of it. We'll see. This road journaling stuff is not easy. I'll have a chance to write about this stuff in much greater depth when I get back to LA. Yesterday was actually a pretty trippy day, but I need some time to process it. Never a good idea to cross over the Grapevine while you're green crossing it...

flying on the ground is wrong

Things got off to a rocky start today, but we're here in Sunnyvale, and in one piece. We had car trouble in Gorman, and then we hit some tough nasty fog as we traversed the Grapevine. A tweaky strain put us in an even more uneasy frame of mind. We were driving right into the teeth of right wing California. The bulls were out in full force. They were pulling people over all over the place. So it was uncomfortable for awhile. But we settled down, and Terry has the Beatles mono box set. I focussed on the music and found something inside myself that allowed me to relax. Is this progress?

buffalo springfield, again

Terry called me about a month ago suggesting that the two of us take a road trip up to Palo Alto this weekend for the Buffalo Springfield reunion at the Shoreline Amphitheater. The reunion is part of a large benefit concert for Neil Young's Bridge School. I was skeptical at first because, let's face it, Neil Young, Richie Furay and Steve Stills are all approaching 70 at this point, and watching them try to rock out sounds a bit pathetic. From what I understand, Young and Stills can barely stand to be in the same room with each other, and Furay is some kind of Jesus freak. So who knows what kind of chemistry these guys will have on stage. On top of this, it's an outdoor show where there will be lots of irritating people. Not my cup of tea, usually. But the more I thought about it, the more the idea appealed to me, not because of the concert necessarily, but more for the fun of getting out of town and having a nice weekend with a friend. Our mutual buddy, Tom, lives up that way, where he teaches at a local community college and his wife is a professor at UC Santa Cruz. Tom is a great guy and loves to have a good time, so there's added incentive for me take the trip. I've known their kids since they were little. They used to call me Uncle Lonely One back in the day. ...Sometimes when I leave my familiar home environment, I have trouble getting relaxed. It's that inability to 'be in the moment,' I keep referring to. I'm gonna try really hard to have fun this time around. But isn't that sad, that it takes such effort for me to enjoy myself? Some people can just let go of their inhibitions like it's second nature. For me, at least when I'm in unfamiliar territory, it takes a conscious effort. I think having Terry and Tom around will make things easier for me. Maybe that's the key to living more freely, surrounding yourself with people you love and trust, who know and accept you, and who value your eccentricities ...We leave Friday afternoon. I'm no Jack Kerouac, but I'm gonna try as best I can to keep a road journal of sorts here. We'll see how it goes...

without the beatles

I don’t watch a whole lot of TV other than baseball, but the sheer perfection of the Mad Men concept hooked me in right away. The show strikes particularly close to the bone since both my parents worked on Madison Avenue during the 60s. I like to tell friends that my dad was a mad man. And even though I’m a child of the 70s and 80s, the values of the Mad Men period, like those of the 60s more generally, persisted long afterwards and cast a long shadow over my most formative years. ...So much has already been written about the show that there’s really not much left to say except to offer my opinion that the season just ending this past Sunday night was the weakest so far. The reason I say this is that Mad Men has become less a show about the 60s, where the period itself is the star of the show, and more a character-driven soap opera that happens to be set in the 60s. Much of the social context now seems almost beside the point. This may be what most viewers want, and it may be the case that what I’m looking for is more or less a documentary about how advertising came of age in the 60s. I just hope it doesn't mean that the show has jumped the shark. ...It’s not that I won’t watch Mad Men next year or that I object on principle to the soapy direction it’s taken. There have been a number of soaps – or what TV Guide used to call ‘serials’ – that I’ve enjoyed over the years, like General Hospital, The Edge of Night, All My Children, Dallas, Falcon’s Crest, Dynasty... But none of these shows tackled the admittedly daunting task of reconstructing and projecting the zeitgeist of a historical period through the points of view of their characters. It’s most certainly not an easy thing to do, but Mad Men executed it so well over the first few seasons, and I guess I got spoiled. ...Part of the problem may be that this season focused a lot on women’s issues, which are less interesting to me than, say, music, drugs, and the commodification of cool. Some of the women’s stuff was fascinating, like they way they've dealt with pre-Roe v. Wade abortions through the character of Joan, while other stuff, like the various depictions of women's struggles in the workplace, were only mildly interesting to me. ...As the season progressed into 1965, I just kept waiting for the Beatles to show up, which they did, but only through a few scattered references. Rock ‘n roll more generally is almost entirely absent from the Mad Men scene, which is hard to believe since ad men would presumably have had their finger on the pulse of what was arguably the most important cultural force of the times. Where are the people at the firm who are hip to the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, the Beach Boys...? Maybe my periodization is off here. Maybe ad men didn’t figure out what a potent market force rock 'n roll could be until well after it became a mass cultural force. But I rather doubt it. I think advertising played a key role in making rock so forceful. The Beatles had already made two movies by mid 1965, played the first of their two shows at Shea Stadium (which was alluded to on the show, but only in what felt like an afterthought), and played The Ed Sullivan Show twice. ...So from this point of view, I was quite disappointed. I'll have to ask my parents how they experienced things. Perhaps my expectations were misplaced. I'm remembering just now that my mother, who was a copywriter in the mold of Peggy, gets a great deal of pleasure in telling people that the 60s just passed her by, that she didn't even notice they were happening. She was too busy building her career to notice any social or cultural upheaval. But I think she's an anomaly in this regard, and I also think that her notion that the era passed her by is bunk insofar as she was a career oriented women and a divorcee who married a second time. She may not have noticed the 60s, but the changes were happening to her in a pretty forceful way. ...I know my father noticed things just by remembering his record collection, which featured plenty of mid-60s classics, like the Rolling Stones' Aftermath, Bob Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited, and plenty of Beatles LPs, including Rubber Soul, and the one I liked best as a little kid...

Part of the problem here is that I'm so obsessed with everything Beatles, and I expect everybody else to be the same way. When I think of what it would have been like to be 13 years old in 1965, I imagine myself breathing, eating and dreaming Beatles. But maybe that's just tunnel vision on my part. On the other hand, perhaps this season of Mad Men was just a bridge that sets the stage for what will be an explosive fifth season. I hope so, but we won't know for nine months.

a rainy sunday with roy harper and black peter

The rains have come early this year, confirming my conviction that this is going to be a very wet winter here in the Southland. The rain depresses me, but there's always music to guide me through the darkness. This afternoon, I made a nice stew for myself and played some great rainy-day music. ...I have only come to appreciate Roy Harper in the last ten years or so. His voice comforts me when I need it most...

Grateful Dead music comforts me under any number of conditions, but Black Peter really helps me when it's rainy and grey out...

I don't know where I'd be without music.

the goldman sachs of baseball

The Yankees are going to win the World Series this year. Again. What's worse, they'll be playing the Phillies. Again. Wake me up when it's over. It's a nightmare for us Met fans. The two teams we hate the most playing for the whole burrito. Wouldn't it be great if they could both lose, or if the weather was so bad for such an extended period of time that it had to end in a draw? ...Nah. that's not the way the game works, alas. One of them has to be the victor, and I think the Yankees just have a knack for knowing how to win. I hate the term 'Yankee mystique,' but only because there's something to it, something that makes me wanna throw up. The Phillies are younger and their rotation is stronger, but the relentlessness of the Yankee offensive attack will eventually find a chink in Philadelphia's armour. Joe Blanton will hang a curveball to A-Roid at a pivotal moment, or Jimmy Rollins' hamstring issues will get the better of him at some point when the Phils absolutely need a double-play. I would love to be wrong, but I have that sinking feeling that the Yanks will find a way to get it done. Of course, both teams still have to make it through their respective Championship Series...

The Texas Rangers are the most likable of the four teams left in the playoffs. I would love to see them get hot, pull an upset over the Yankee behemoth, and then power their way past the Phillies in the World Series. They have a great group of guys. Vlad Guerrero, the former Angel, has discovered the fountain of youth. I've always loved his free wheeling approach at the plate. He'll swing at anything, and he can hit any type of pitch hard and a very long way. A few years ago, I saw him hit a walk off home run on a pitch that bounced in front of him, a la Yogi Berra. ...Ian Kinsler, who is Jewish, plays a very steady second base for the Rangers, and he has the kind of upper-cut swing that's exactly what you're not supposed to do when you make a pass at a ball, but somehow he always seems to be in the thick of things. ...Michael Young, their third baseman, is a great player to watch on both sides of the ball. And then you've got Josh Hamilton. Oy vey. He's a recovering alcoholic cum Born Again Christian Jesus freak, which automatically makes me hate him, but I grudgingly admire what a great ballplayer he is. He entered the playoffs with several cracked ribs and did not hit well in the ALDS against the Rays, but he's a five-tool player, and he's absolutely fearless. Even with the rib injury, he's running into walls and sliding head-first into second base... Another former Angel playing for the Rangers now is catcher Bengie Molina, a very shrewd midseason acquisition for Rangers GM Nolan Ryan. ...One other position player on the club that I really like for sentimental reasons is former Met Jeff Francoeur, aka 'Frenchy.' He was pretty terrible with the Mets, but a good guy in the clubhouse. He strikes out a lot, but he can jack the ball out of the yard. Usually there's one guy in the playoffs, an unsung hero who flies in under the radar and does something huge. It'd be great to see Frenchy come off the bench and hit a big home run or gun somebody out at the plate. He has arguably the best outfield arm in the game. ...The Ranger rotation is good but not great. The biggest weapon they have is lefty superstar and future Yankee Cliff Lee, who my compatriot Paul Lebowitz calls the Stone Cold Killer, which is just about right. He has uncanny command of all his pitches and almost never walks batters. If the series with the Yankees goes seven games with Lee pitching in Game 7, which would take place in Texas, the Yankees will be toast. He loves the big stage and is pitching not only for a championship but also for what will undoubtedly be the huge contract he'll command as a free agent when the season is over. Unfortunately for the Rangers, Lee had to pitch in Game five of the ALDS, so he will not be ready to go until Game 3 of the ALCS. The Game 1 starter for the Rangers will be CJ Wilson, who has what baseball people like to call 'electric stuff,' but he can be wild, and guys who are wild often wilt under the bright lights of playoff baseball. The serviceable Colby Lewis is slated to start Game 2...

If there's one thing that could derail the Yankees, it's their age. Guys like Mark Teixeira, Robinson Cano, and CC Sabathia are each in their prime, but Derek Jeter is getting old. He has lost a lot of range at shortstop, and he had a down year offensively. Still, he's Derek Jeter - Mr. Fucking Wonderful - and he has the experience and the know-how to rise to the occasion. A-Rod is still a huge threat, but we don't know if he'll be the hero he was in 2009, or the choking goat he's been in all previous playoff appearances. He's been hampered by a bad hip, which I think is the result of having juiced for so many years prior to PED testing, but you can never take the guy lightly, even at age 35. Jorge Posada can still hit, but he's old and a defensive liability behind the dish. If the Rangers are to have any hope of winning, they'll need to get on base and exploit Posada's inability to throw runners out. Manager Joe Girardi may opt to use Posada as a DH and have Francisco Cervelli catch, but then the Yanks would not be able to use Lance Berkman as their DH, and, quite frankly, without even having the numbers in front of me, my gut tells me that I'd rather pitch to Posada than Berkman. ...In addition to Sabathia, the Yankee rotation will consist of Andy Petite, probably the greatest big-game pitcher of all time, Phil Hughes, and A.J Burnett. So it's a good balance of lefty, lefty, righty, righty. Hughes has had an excellent year but he's thrown more innings than in any other season up to now. Burnett has not been good this year, especially given his enormous contract, and the guy's a head case, but he still has one of the most devastating curve balls in the game and could rediscover his dominant stuff at any time, so don't rule him out. ...The Yankees have a better bullpen than the Rangers, with Kerry Wood setting up for Mariano Rivera and that ridiculous cut fastball that no one can hit. Rivera has lost about 4 or 5 mph in velocity over the last few years, but he's still as close to a sure thing as there is in baseball. It's cliche at this point, but Rivera turns baseball into an eight-inning game when the opposition is trailing. The Ranger closer, Neftali Feliz, is quite good but can get rattled easily. ...I'll be rooting hard for the Rangers, but look for the Yankees to put them to sleep in five games.

The NLCS will pit the Phils against the Giants. I hate most things from San Francisco, notwithstanding my love of the Grateful Dead and the Jefferson Airplane, but I'm pulling for the Giants. Unfortunately, I just don't think they have enough to get it done. They have no offense to speak of other than catcher and probable NL Rookie of the Year, Buster Posey. Their strength is in their pitching, with righty Tim Lincecum, lefty Jonathan Sanchez, and righty Matt Cain. Sanchez and Cain would easily be aces on any number of other teams, but Lincecum is off the charts. I love the tork he generates with his stick-figure body. It's almost painful to watch his delivery, and I can't imagine what it's like to have to stand in against him. I'd love to do a few bong rips with the guy, though. ...The Giants have great pitching, but the Phils have great pitching and a very good offensive attack, with Ryan Howard, Chase Utley, Jimmy Rollins, Shane Victorino, Raul Ibanez, and the mercurial Jayson Werth. What will kill the Giants, I think, is that the Phillies' rotation is every bit as dominant, featuring Doc Halladay, he of the Church of Latter-Day Saints, Roy Oswalt, and Cole Hammels, plus Joe Blanton, who’s ok if a fourth starter becomes necessary. All of these guys are innings eaters, and with closer Brad Lidge regaining most of his 2008 form, I just don’t see the Giants getting it done. All the games will be close and low scoring in the NLCS, which I love, but I think the Phillies will close this one out in four or five games.

It's way too early to start talking about the World Series, but I'm as certain as I can be that it'll be the Yankees and Phillies, with the Yanks winning it in six games. A lot can and will happen between now and then, so my predictions are fluid, but I'm reminded of Joe E. Lewis' famous quip - I think he said it amidst the Yankee dynasty of the 1920s - that rooting for the Yankees is like rooting for U.S. Steel. It's still true today, except that we should update things and say that rooting for the Yankees is like rooting for Goldman Sachs. Both corporations, the Yankees and GS, maximize their massive financial might in their respective fields of endeavor. Each is a perfect symbol of greed American style and and the obscene concentration of wealth that's allowed to take place in USA, Inc. They also both happen to be very, very good at what they do, especially when it counts most. Their victory is our defeat. The beat goes on...

groupthink

Wednesday night is group therapy night for me. I'm not sure yet whether it's helping. I feel less anxious than when I started a few months ago, so that's a good sign...unless it's just coincidence. The group features an All Male Cast. It's actually billed as a 'men's group', and it's a strange mix of personalities. The other guys are quite a bit older than me, so there's a definite degree to which I feel I have little in common with them. Then again, I don't feel like I have much in common with anybody, regardless of how old or young they are. This is one of the main reasons I decided to do group therapy, to find some avenue through which I might be able to balance out my tendency towards isolation. But the net effect so far has been to create yet another circular process for me. My life is full of circularity, so much so that I might even be tempted to say that it's all one big circle for me, and not in a Joni Mitchell kind of way, but rather in the sense of a dog chasing its tail... You're supposed talk about all this shit in the group, which I do, but then the ensuing conversation leaves me feeling like it's not so bad for me to be on my own after all. Perhaps this is positive. The group makes me feel like less of a weirdo, though it strikes me as being an inadvertent benefit, one I derive in spite of the group. I tell the group I'm comfortable being alone --> They tell me that too much aloneness is unhealthy --> But I have almost nothing in common with these people trying to talk me out of the lone wolf existence I lead, and so what they say ends up making the lone wolf existence all the more attractive to me. Welcome to my world.

Normally I relate well to older people, or I should say that I prefer older people to younger people. Always have. But whether they're older or younger, there are certain types of freaky personalities I just can't abide. One guy in the group is extremely annoying in a way that only intensely jewy people can be. I feel I'm allowed to say this since I'm a M.O.T.T. myself. I have lots of experience with his type of personality in my own family. But this guy's jewiness by itself is not what gets to me. It's the jewiness combined with the fact that he's a hoarder. He can't throw anything away. The problem has completely wrecked his life. His wife and kids left him long ago because of it, and yet he doesn't seem able to grasp that he has a problem that could reasonably be expected to drive them away. He insists his wife is at fault, and he does it in a pushy, jewy way that makes my whole body tighten up with anger. He reminds me of my grandfather's second wife, who I absolutely couldn't stand. I wanted to dance the Lindy hop on her grave when she died. I threw in an extra shovel full of dirt at her funeral, just to make sure she'd stay the fuck underground.

The hoarder guy annoys me in the same way she did. The County's child protective services agency would not allow his kids to even visit him at the house after his wife left him because the place was such a goddamn pigsty. The biggest issue for him is an accumulation of seltzer bottles. He cannot bring himself to throw the empties away or even recycle them, so the house is apparently a mountain of glass. All he ever talks about are those fucking seltzer bottles. It just doesn't interest me in the slightest. You're supposed to say what you're feeling when you participate in a therapy group, but I can't do it with Mr. Seltzer Bottle without violating the rules of conduct and mutual respect. Picture it, if you will: Lose the bottles, you fucking moron! What the fuck's the matter with you? Are the bottles really that important to you? Is being right, even when you're obviously wrong, so fundamentally critical to your ridiculous self-concept that you can't just be a grown up for once in your pathetic life and get rid of the bottles? And when are we gonna arrive at the point where we don't have to hear about these stupid fucking bottles anymore? It bores me. YOU bore me, and you sicken me. Grow up. ...I actually usually have sympathy for hoarders and pack rats. My parents are pack rats, and I believe it's symptomatic of a larger constipated state of mind. I often feel like they hold back something they want to let go because they don't know how to express it. When I call my dad, just to say hello and see how he's doing, he always tells me he's cleaning up the house and throwing things away. But each time I go back to New York to visit them, their apartment seems ever more cluttered with junk and paper and crystallized memories. It makes me sad in a strange way. Maybe the sadness I feel about hoarding turns to anger when it's refracted through Mr. Seltzer Bottles' personality?

There’s another guy in the group who’s an out-of-work actor, which is to say he’s a limo driver. I refer to him privately as Nat West. You'll come across a lot of Nat Wests out here in Los Angeles, of course. It’s pathetic and sad when they’re 20-somethings, but when they’re 50-somethings it’s just irritating. Again, I find myself holding back... It ain’t gonna happen, dude. Repeat after me: It. Ain’t. Gonna. Happen. It was never gonna happen. Look at how much of your life you've wasted chasing nothingness. I don’t care that George Clooney was nice to you when you drove him from LAX to the Paramount lot. It doesn’t mean shit. It doesn’t mean that he thinks you’d be a good fit for his next feature. How could you possibly be so damn delusional? When you start sentences with the words, “my agent,” you need to know that people tune out the rest of what you have to say. Your so-called “agent” is a 24-year-old kid who plays X-Box and does bong rips in the middle of the workday. You’re a limo driver. Maybe it's not what you pictured for yourself, but it’s not the worst thing in the world. It’s a skill other people can actually use. I know you think you did a great job in your walk-on on Murder She Wrote back in the fucking 80s, but nobody noticed it, nobody remembers it, nobody cares. I certainly don’t care, and no, I don’t want to see the head shot you have stored on your iPhone. I really don’t...

A third guy in the group owns a telemarketing business. But this isn’t the worst thing about him, although it is admittedly pretty bad. The worst thing about him is that he’s bald and wears his neck hair in a ponytail. Cut that fucking thing off before I yank on it like the bell for Lurch on the Addam’s Family... You rang? Why yes, I did ring. I wanted to be sure to tell you in no uncertain terms that you need to lose that stupid necktail, you dumb fuckwad. Steve Cropper can get away with a necktail because (a) he’s not nearly as bald as you are, Mr. Cue Ball, and (b) he’s Steve Fucking Cropper. You’re you, and you’re not allowed to wear a goddamn necktail. You’re just not. Why can't you understand that when people meet you, learn that you’re a telemarketer, and see your necktail, the effect is the same as if you were wearing a bumper sticker that said ‘I’m a scumbag and, oh by the way, did I mention that I’m a scumbag’? And if none of this is enough to convince you to take a scissors to that thing, I would simply ask you this: Aren’t you ashamed of yourself, on the wrong side of 60, to be walking around with a fucking necktail? I mean, really…

Well, I guess one thing is crystal clear: Being in this group has put me in touch with what an angry, nasty, mean, unfeeling motherfucker I can be, even though I can’t really outwardly express what I’m thinking. I should say that there’s one guy in the group, an animator, whom I like and respect a great deal. He’s very smart and says things, often in passing, that suggest to me that we’re similarly wired. I get the sense he’s got a lot of anger as well, but he’s also got a soft side, which he reserves for the small handful of people he likes. A lot of this is projection on my part, but sometimes he flashes me a passing look that lets me know – or I think it lets me know – that we’re thinking the same thing. I find those passing glances very gratifying. It’s too bad the rules of the group prevent us from becoming friends. I was dismayed a few weeks back when he announced that he might be leaving the group. That would be bad because then I’d be stuck with Seltzer Bottles, Nat West, and a god knows what else in terms of who might join the group to fill the vacancy. I made a joke – one with a huge kernel of truth – about how his leaving would tap into my abandonment issues, which he thought was funny, but everybody else just stared at me blankly. He hasn’t left yet, so maybe he’s reconsidering things. Maybe the joke I cracked worked its passive-aggressive magic. Abra cadabra! Or maybe I’ll just arrive at the group one week and find that he’s quit for good. I almost wish the group was just the two of us. On the other hand, perhaps it’s good for me to deal with people I don’t like or respect. Maybe it’s revealing something for me that will help me as I try to branch out a little. Maybe the anger and exasperation I feel so often in the group is part of a larger set of personal issues and complexes that tend to derail my attempts to branch out. Or maybe it all just means that the world is full of people who are even more fucked up than I am, and that branching out is overrated, one of those things I feel I should do because other people tell me I should do it, and not because I really want to... That's a lot of maybes. But there’s one thing for certain: No amount of therapy, whether in a one-on-one format or in a group, will ever make me more open-minded or forgiving about bald guys with necktails.