Brook Lee and Other Catastrophes

Well hot damn it's been a little while. I see that my last post promised a exegesis on LOST -- on the occasion of the Season 5 premiere. Oops. Not gonna get into that now, other than to say, a) no, they weren't dead the whole time, and b) seriously, what did you expect -- "Holy shit, Kevin Spacey was Kaiser Soze all along!!!"?

But I digress. Here's what I came here to say: If there were any justice in the universe--

Sorry, cliche detectors just went off. Let's try again: You know how a lot of really awful, terrible people write, direct, and record a bunch of heinous bullshit that inexplicably brings them fame and wealth? And how a lot of really awesome people do amazing work that somehow never breaks through enough to let them quit their fucking day jobs? Well I'm here to say that it's high time to flip that equation on its head -- and since you asked, let me tell you where to start:


So let me tell you a bit about Brook Lee. He's been at this music thing since he was in high school, back when he was fronting a hip-hop outfit called Psychotic Twist of Rhythm (fun fact: if Brook's reading this right now, he's plotting my death for bringing that name up). By the time I met him, he was playing solo acoustic at a sushi joint in Orange County, fusing his rap-style lyrics with a folk-rock accompaniment that I'd have called "ungodly" if wasn't so damn cool.

For the last five years he's been playing with a band of ragged blues/rock/folk troubadours that dub themselves The Brook Lee Catastrophe, and for good reason: they blow the roof off of every joint they play (shit, where's that cliche detector when you need it?). They've released two albums of heart-wrenching, ass-kicking, soul-elevating songs that by all rights should already be "that song I listened to after I left her/he broke my heart/I stopped trying/I dragged myself back to my feet and decided to try again."

Why should you care? Well, first off, because you're one of the Good Guys. You've seen mediocrity celebrated while brilliance goes ignored all your life, and goddamn it, you're not going to take it anymore! But guess what? There's something in it for you, too. You get to discover a new band that's gonna be right up there on your iPod playlist (or however it is you kids do it these days) and tell your friend, "Oh yeah, I've been listening to them since forever" once they finally jump on the bandwagon.

So here's what you're gonna do: hop on over to www.thebrookleecatastrophe.com. Take a look around. Listen to some tunes. Delve into their two new albums -- the epic, genre-bending American Hotel and the deep, soul-smothering Motel Americana. Go to a show. Tell your friends. Start a fire. Bring some justice back to the universe.

And then write to Obama and tell him to stop being such a pussy. Seriously.

LOST

I've got a lot to say about it, which is actually what I was going to start doing tonight. But now it's on, so it'll have to wait.

But I do have a lot to say.

Just re-read my last post...

...though I didn't particularly want to; I felt pretty much as soon as I finished it that it was cringe-worthy, and a second look hasn't done much to dispel that feeling. Here's the thing: the past eight years have been totally eye-opening for me -- and I'm sure it's not just me who feels that way. I guess it's just that this is the first period of serious upheaval that people my age have lived through, and seeing for myself the way that people react in times of crisis makes a lot of what I've read about in history books or seen portrayed in films and literature make a lot more sense. Or not "more sense," exactly, but it all suddenly seems much more credible and relatable.

In fact, what's been most illuminating is how much all of it doesn't make sense. Or more specifically: I don't think that I truly understood, before all of this happened, the degree to which human beings are not, in a fundamental sense, rational creatures. Which from one perspective is a little weird, because I certainly act irrationally all the time. But for me, anyway, my misunderstanding probably arises from one general and two more specific factors:

General: Growing up in a relatively prosperous household in a relatively prosperous area during a relatively prosperous era (for the US, anyway). I think we all understand, to some degree, that growing up clothed/fed/unabused/etc. sets you up for a pretty different worldview than growing up poor/starving/mistreated/etc. But--for me, anyway--this makes it very, very hard to connect to how people react when they're frightened/desperate/etc. in anything other than a very abstract and intellectual way. It also hasn't helped (me) that:

Specific #1: I was raised by almost miraculously emotionally stable and rational adults who, while they no doubt have their own irrational desires and selfish needs, managed to so thoroughly sublimate those impulses in raising their children that I've still never seen a trace of them (i.e., the irrational desires and selfish needs) in them (i.e., my parents) In the world I grew up in--i.e., my parents' household--people are fundamentally good, they don't act from malevolent motives, and if it seems like do, you probably aren't trying hard enough to understand their point of view. And I know that sounds ridiculous and Leave it to Beaver-ish, but that really is the moral universe I was brought up in. No one ever believes me when I say this, but I swear to God that I've never--and I mean never--seen either of my parents do anything for purely selfish or petty motives. I know, I know, it sounds hopelessly naive and hero-worship-y. And it's not like I don't think they're flawed; but honestly, the biggest beef I ever had with them, growing up, was that they were just too damned good (i.e., and thus did not properly prepare me for the cruel world out there.) (And just BTW, I stopped being upset about this a long time ago).

Specific #2: Lacking any sort of drama, hardship, or conflict in my real life (at least until I became a teenager, at which point I learned how to create my own), a really unreasonable amount of my understanding of human conflict has come from watching American television and film. And of course the problem with this is that while, yes, drama is built on human failings and conflict and so forth, it's still fundamentally rational, at least in a structural sense (i.e., events occur for a purpose (i.e., they're included because they drive the plot), and conflict eventually leads to a resolution, whether for good or ill). And the problem gets seriously magnified if your drama is American drama, and even moreso if it's the brand of drama that we use for movies and television (I really do think I'd have been marginally better off if I'd been really into theater or literature--but I wasn't). And that's because American film and television is infested right down to its core with with protagonists who are fundamentally decent and moral. And I'm not talking here about the old-school John Wayne archetype, which is so thoroughly old-fashioned and antiquated that it's not even really worth commenting on.

But even for our anti-heroes--which is what most mainstream protagonists are these days anyway, at least the hip ones (i.e. Batman, every character that Vin Diesel or Jason Stratham plays, etc.) -- there are certain lines that you can't cross. By which I mean that there's
always a relatable, expressible motive that can be seen as "noble" and/or moral by some code or other. Take gangster films, for example: whether it's Michael Corleone or whoever Denzel Washington was playing in American Gangster, they're all ultimately motivated by their love for their family (or in the "gangsta" subspecies--The Fast and the Furious is what comes immediately to mind, for some reason--love for the crew/sect/gang/etc. that is their de facto family).

But what you'll pretty much never see in an American film is a character like Jonas Engström in the original Swedish version of Insomnia (played by Stellan Skarsgård): a fairly corrupt and apparently incompetent cop who accidentally shoots his own partner and then spends the rest of the movie doing anything he possibly can--including colluding with a known pedophile--to save his own ass. I mean, seriously: that's his only motive. And in the end, he succeeds--which I would argue is almost genetically impossible in an American film. The US version of the film deals with this problem by a) beefing up the part of the female detective who's on to Engström (or Will Dormer, as he's called in the American version), thus making her the "moral center" of the film (in the original, she's strictly an obstacle to be overcome), and b) not letting Dormer (played by Al Pachino) get away with it; in the US version, Pacino gets shot right at the end, and--finally realizing the error of his ways--says to the female detective, with his dying breath, "don't be like me."

I'm not saying that American films never ever try to go with a totally self-centered protagonist--American Psycho comes to mind. And to be fair, the US version of Insomnia is a pretty weak target to pick on; bottom line, it's just a crap movie. But I would argue that there are certain aspects of human nature that are damned near impossible to express in popular American culture, no matter how "edgy" or "dark"; actually, it's the fact that the "edgy" and "dark" stuff--which is, after all, what I've always been drawn to anyway--still has this in its DNA that makes a worldview formed in large part on American film and television so especially problematic.

All of which is a long ways off from the point I was originally trying to make, which is: why did my last post end up being so facile, obvious, ill-focused, and preachy? And I don't know that any of the above has illuminated that point. I mean, it has a connection in my mind, which I guess is where this whole blogging thing has gotten off to a rough start for me; for all of my thinking and talking and being pretty good at stringing words together and making them sound good, I have very little experience at making, sustaining, and substantiating any kind of argument. And what I managed to put down in the last post really didn't express at all what I was trying to say. Or at least, I don't think it expressed anything that isn't really, really obvious--and what I was trying to say wasn't. Or at least, I didn't think it was.

Also obviously: I don't seem to be doing a very good job at focusing my thoughts. And I don't know what to tell you about that, other than that I've decided to try to keep at this in the hopes that, in the process, I'll start to figure out how to do so. So: I appreciate the three of you or so who are (presumably) still reading, and hopefully at some point I'll start to pull this shit together.

A few thoughts on Obama-eve....

So we're down to the last twelve hours or so of the Bush era, and I'm certainly in the "good riddance" camp on that front. But I'd like to take a sec to look at the other side of that sentiment, just because it may be a bit before there's a good opportunity to do so.

William Kristol and Christopher Hitchens both ran columns today offering defenses of Bush and his policies. Kristol starts off with his rabbi's admonition to the congregation (BTW: is congregation the correct term, or is that strictly Christian terminology?) to offer prayers for the incoming administration and "for all who exercise just and rightful authority..." He (Kristol) then goes on to reflect on "the man who has shouldered the burdens of office for the last eight years," a man who "has exercised his just and rightful authority in a way--I believe--that deserves recognition and respect." His basic arguments on this front are that a) Bush has been "one of the greatest friends the state of Israel--and, yes, the Jewish people--have had in quite a while", and that he has been so "when he had no political incentive to do so", and b) "winning the war in Iraq, and in particular, his refusal to accept defeat when so many counseled him to do so... was an act of personal courage and of presidential leadership."

Hitchens offers that "I still do not wish that Al Gore had beaten George W. Bush in 2000 or that John Kerry had emerged the victor in 2004." The point of Hitchens' column is harder to pin down than Kristol's; he spends a bit of time mocking the left-wing obsession with Bush's supposed character flaws, pointing out that Oliver Stone's W contains "an unnoticed omission, or rather there is an event that does not occur on-screen: the crashing of two airliners into two large skyscrapers...This cannot be because it wouldn't have been of any help in making Bush look bad." So why would it be omitted? "The answer, I am reasonably certain, is that it is the events of Sept. 11, 2001, explain the transformation of George Bush from a rather lazy small-government conservative into an interventionist, in almost every sense, politician. The unfortunate thing about this analysis, from the liberal point of view, is that it leaves such little room for speculation about his Oedipal relationship with his father, his thwarted revenge fantasies about Saddam Hussein, his dry-drunk alcoholism, and all the rest of it." (The preceding has been edited (by me) for style and grammar, by the way, because the editors over at Slate apparently can't be bothered). Hitchens is fairly liberal by most measures, but he's been unapologetically fanatical in his opposition to what he terms Islamofascism, and he takes as a given that taking up arms against it is an unambiguously just cause.

I bring this up now because I think that one of the big, massive flaws in the thinking of left-wing types over the last eight years has been that Bush and everyone in his camp have pursued their agenda out strictly for base, cynically self-serving motives. If you know the kind of people I know--and if you're reading this, I'm pretty sure you do--you hear it all the time: this was all about oil, this was all about enriching business interests, this was all about oppressing the poor, etc. etc. And the thing that I've always gotten from Kristol and his ilk, the thing that I think Hitchens is trying to get at (in his airbaggy and off-point way), the thing that I've always thought is true of Bush himself, is: these people really believe this stuff. They really do believe that they've struck a blow for individual freedom and liberty and democracy and all of that stuff that you believe in too.

And why this is important is: you don't have a prayer of changing these people's minds if you don't grant them that--however (in my opinion) disastrously misguided their approach--(most of) their intentions are, if nothing else, sincere. That's not to say that there aren't other motives mixed up in there (but ask yourself--no, I mean seriously ask yourself--if your don't have a few competing agendas in your own life), but at least grant them that they take the approach that they do for what they think are righteous motives. Because the standard party line of "these people are just out for money/power/influence and nothing else" is just the left-wing version of "liberals hate America."

This shit is way, way more complicated than what I've just written. But I think it's something to keep in mind nonetheless.

And here's another good quote...

...from the same book. This one's from a 60s-era Polish student activist, Eugeniusz Smolar. Apparently there were a lot of university protests in communist Poland during 1968 (that's kind of the thesis of Kurlansky's book, that there was quote-unquote something in the air that year, with intergenerational clashes going on everywhere from Poland to Czechoslovakia to Spain). Much like the campus protesters in the US, the Polish kids were from their society's equivalent of the middle- and upper middle class, and in fact Smolar's father was an important member of Poland's Communist party. 

Anyway, the primary tool that the Polish government used against the students were these "worker's militias": blue-collar types who were bussed in by the truckload to "talk" to the demonstrators -- which of course quickly degenerated into them beating the protesters. Basically, the government's line on this (i.e., what they were telling the "workers") was that these were a bunch of privileged rich kids who summered in Paris, etc. -- which was basically true -- and here they were causing unrest and undermining the government -- which in communist ideology, after all, exists explicitly for the purpose of looking out for the interests of workers like themselves. Which the kids also understood; the whole point of their protest was that the communist system -- just like the capitalist/democratic system that the US kids were agitating against -- wasn't living up to its own ideology.

So anyway, the protesting kids figured that the workers would be on their side, and were apparently marching through the streets yelling things like "Long live the workers of Poznan [a city in Poland]."  But the workers beat them up anyway. Which brings me to Smolar's quote, which I think encapsulates a lot of the distance between idealistic middle-class types (like myself) and the poor/oppressed/etc. people whose causes these types like to champion:

"In 1968, students had a motto: 'There is no bread without freedom.' Workers thought this a ridiculous slogan--there is no freedom without bread. Bread always comes first. Most of us had never gone without bread. We didn't understand each other."  

Just became a fan of Paul Simon...

...via this quote (in Mark Kurlansky's "1968: The Year that Rocked the World"):

"...the lyrics of pop songs are so banal that if you show a spark of intelligence, they call you a poet. If you say you're not a poet, then people think you're putting yourself down. But the people who call you a poet are people who never read poetry. Like poetry was something defined by Bob Dylan."

Heroes?

So, a commercial airliner went down in the Hudson river this afternoon about forty blocks from my building. I'm on the tenth floor, with west-facing windows in the inner offices, so we all rushed into to the copy room to see what we could see. Not much, as it turned out; the taller buildings uptown completely obscured our sightline to the river. But there was an interesting little mini-drama to observe, as we watched a series of helicopters make their way back and forth from (presumably) the accident site back to (presumably) Saint Vincent's Hospital down on 7th & 12th. 

It was a welcome respite from an otherwise drudgingly slow day (which I can say without sounding like too much of a heartless bastard because it seems that everyone survived).  But it did lead to a little disagreement between myself and a colleague, as he read aloud from the initial news reports describing the "heroic" actions of the pilots, and I said something along the lines of "I don't know about heroic."  It just came out automatically; I wasn't trying to make a big point; in fact, I think I was trying to make a bit of a joke by pointing out what struck me as an obvious (and typically news-media-ish) absurdity. But my coworker looked at me like I was insane: "What are you talking about? They just saved all those people." I explained my reasoning to him, which he clearly didn't agree with at all, so I let the issue drop. But it did get me thinking about why what I'd said seemed so obvious to me, and why it didn't to him.

Like most people, I get a bit antsy when I fly. And I think the reason for that fear -- which is totally irrational, probability-wise -- is pretty much what everyone says it is: lack of control. The difference between being a passenger in an airplane and a driver in a car (a way riskier proposition, statistically speaking) is that when you're behind the wheel, you're in control. In an airplane, you're entirely at the mercy of the pilot -- if he/she fucks up, there's not a damn thing you can do about it. So when I'm in a plane and we start taking off, the thing I keep reminding myself is, a) the pilots don't want to crash any more than I do, and b) they have a realistic and functional understanding of how to prevent that from happening (it's my doubts about b that prevent the same logic from assuaging my fears when I'm a passenger in certain people's cars). 

But so here's where I came to my objection to the use of the word "hero" in this case.  My understanding of the definition of a "hero" is, roughly, "someone who puts him- or herself in harm's way for the benefit of other people." But in this case, the saving of the passengers is really just a byproduct of the pilots saving themselves.  It's a known phenomenon that you'll have the highest probability of surviving a catastrophic airline crash if you're seated at the rear of the plane; this is just simple physics (i.e., the design of an airplane is such that it "wants" to go down nose-first). So, realistically, there aren't many scenarios in which the pilots survive a crash and the passengers don't (unless there are some sort of ejector seats in the cockpit that the pilot's union has kept under wraps). 

And I don't know how much these semantic distinctions really matter; I'd certainly agree that the pilots are to be admired for their competence and apparent calm in extremely difficult circumstances. But I don't think that the watering down of these sorts of terms does us any favors -- and in fact, it seems to me that letting them pass unremarked upon kind of nurtures the environment that allows way more dangerous misuses of language. The (maybe too) obvious thing that springs to mind is 9/11, and the continued (in some quarters) references to the people who died in the World Trade Center as "heroes." Umm... how so? I'm not really a betting man, but I'd be willing to wager a substantial amount that most anyone who was given the option, on their way to work that morning, to die a hero or go home a (based on this logic, there's no getting around it) coward would have taken the day off. 

But more than that, it's worth keeping in mind that most any political figure that you might consider a "hero" (Obama most definitely included) is exercising their "heroism" in the pursuit of very self-serving goals (i.e., the gathering of personal power). Not to say that they're not also maybe helping a bunch of other people out, too. But the fact that there's another motive at work there should at the very least make you realize that your best chance of benefitting from any residual "heroism" is to put your interests in alignment with theirs; and, more importantly, that they may be turn out to be a whole lot less "heroic" if you decide to go a different way. And I'd put that on a rather different plane than, say, a Marine who puts himself in front of bullet while his buddies retreat. I just think that people who do things like that (and there are plenty of less-dramatic examples -- kidney donors come to mind for some reason) ought to have their own name. And we shouldn't just go passing it out like party favors. 

ADDENDUM 1/17:

So obviously the crash was all over the New York Times yesterday. I gotta say, the whole thing is pretty miraculous, which is a nice change of pace these days. And also, in light of the above I'd be kind of a dick for not pointing out the following bit of information from the article: "The plane's pilot [Chesley B. Sullenberger] walked the isles of the cabin twice to ensure no one was left behind before he exited." 

See, now that's heroic.