In Seattle, for example, you can see the carcasses of these shi-shi (sp?) venues all over Capitol Hill and Belltown: they're now either empty lots, or they've been replaced by darker, funkier, black- or no-tablecloth venues (lower laundry overhead?).
One of my favorite poorly-timed engagements, however, lives on: the Blue Willow Teahouse. This place has an exquisite sharpness to it: nice smooth wood tables, clay vases on wrought-iron racks, bronze statues, letterpress works from Copper Canyon Press. But it snuggles into a former industrial space: they opened one face up with windows but huge girders still crosscriss that face, cutting the view, supporting the structure.
I forgive the place its "pan-Asian" (if not Orientalist) flair (soups such as "Dawn of Eternity") because the experience is so unfamiliar and encouraging. On my first trip, I ordered the ultra-smoky Lapsang Souchong tea and produced this conversation, in cooperation with the young lad who served me:
Have you. . . had that before, sir?
Yes, I have.
So you're aware that it's. . . very smoky, sir?
Yes, I am.
Oh, I love it myself, it tastes like campfire, but many people aren't used to that.
Very good.
(waiter goes and returns)
Sir, when you have your Lapsang Souchong, how long do you normally brew it for?
Excuse me?
The Souchong brews very quickly, it gets slightly bitter if you leave it in too long.
What do you suggest?
I recommend two minutes and thirty seconds.
Very good.
(waiter goes, returns with teapot)
That's right at two minutes, thirty seconds.
Most excellent.
But, what I really love about Blue Willow is that, despite its perfectly-manicured surface, you feel you've walked in on some people who are, after all, just running a business. You hear the noises of the kitchen from somewhere just around some corner. You see the owner behind the counter, checking his email (with Outlook, alas). They take UPS deliveries through the front door, between the plate windows and the bronze statues. It feels very functional, yet somehow the grace of the place is undiminished by these mechanics.
And on further thought, that's not surprising. After all, everything functional is beautiful. The girders, the pedantic server, my awareness of the kitchen, the owner milling about between the waitstaff, the UPS man, and the email: it's a smooth system, functioning. Things are happening: I find that graceful.
]]> </p>The film is one part Stop Making Sense and three parts American Movie (which, by the way, may be the greatest document of American society yet created): it allows us to enjoy the show now and again but focuses on the depressing life of a comedian, and the process of a celebrity giving up that celebrity to start re-building a craft, bit by bit. It skirts the edge of pessimistic, showing how stupid is most of the material most comics use, how shoddily they execute it, and how cocky they can be about this dubious accomplishment. Even then, it shows how older hard-working performers are constantly fighting for their success alongside, or just mopping up for, hotshot upstarts that have hit the money.
But it plays a wisely melodious note when it shows how good comedy can get, and how good it is to be played upon (like Peter Quince's clavier) and stirred to laughter. One of the giants of our youth appears toward the end, and the patient deliberation he displays over his words shows that comedians are not all hacks, not all "players," and perhaps not all depressing.
]]> </p>But the Reader of the same name comes from a reading series they did a few years back, of then-local writers. The first story is like nothing I've ever read: raw in texture, subtly observed, cold of the world and warm of its people, weird, haunting, and skillfully balanced. There are three very different and quite good poems by one Marjorie Hogan (not the namesake, I hope, of Villa Marjorie) and lots more to be read. Every story in here seems to start with something abrasively engaging, like
WHEN I WAS BORN, I had a crooked eye. It was my right eye.(Rebecca Brown, "Learning to See")
The darling thing is edited, in part, by Rachel Kessler, who wrote those encouraging, nuanced food reviews for The Stranger before Min Liao so coarsely pushed her out, and it's published by 10th Ave E Publishing, which is also putting out the first volume of the epic poem by Grant Cogswell, scrappy good-old-boy of Capitol Hill. This little number is bound with rivets or some such thing. Mr. Cogswell first charmed me by running for city council last year, basing his entire platform on support for the monorail, and, when asked which character from the Wizard of Oz was he, answering "the flying monkeys."
Hell of town we live in.]]> </p>
I held the man hostage for a while (he must have forgotten the clip was empty), until Bezos, lawyer, and secretary returned. I decided to hold them hostage too. They were appalled. At one point I pointed the gun directly at Bezos, and I looked in his appalled face, thinking, "How did this come to pass? I always respected him so much. . . and now, to protect my family. . ."
It must have been the haughty international lawyer who somehow cooled the situation. I remember him giving some drawn out, complicated arguments about what would happen to me for holding up this international figure and so on. I remained stubbornly resolute. The lawyer and the prissy secretary kept complaining about the accomodations (my living room) and saying they were going to check into this or that luxury hotel as soon as they got out of there. I'm happy to note that Bezos was too cool for that line of reasoning.
Once the gun had been despatched (maybe somebody noticed it wasn't loaded), there was a lengthy standoff because there was the question of whether I'd get in trouble for taking hostage these respected figures, or whether they'd get in trouble for plotting to kill my dad. My dad, by the way, didn't seem to appear at any point in the dream, but it was somehow obvious that it was he they were trying to kill. During this standoff, my mom and I were looking furtively around the room at the vital clues—this or that christmas present, for example—and trying to signal each other, or to preserve these items without tipping off the bad guys that they were good clues.
At around this time, John Richards woke me up with some beautiful music: The Frames.
It all made sense at the time. Roommate Juraj says he's had intense dreams three days in a row, wonders if there's a gas leak somewhere?
]]> </p>Well, let my celebrants be celebrated and let my vagueness be damned. I found a trick and I'd like to share it, if you don't mind my grandstanding a bit.
I set each line as a separate paragraph, using a CSS class p.poetry with margin-top: -1em (to take out the inter-paragraph blank line), margin-left: 3pc and text-indent: -2pc. This set the typical line flush-left, one pica from the real margin of the text, and when a line of poetry wraps, it begins two picas in from the poetic ines. Let me demonstrate:
I grandstand; I contain multitudes. After all, I contain multitudes. I am grand, and I ramble.
There we were by the bivouack, watching its fitful flame. 'N stuff. "Punk rock!" I hollered, grabbing the rope that every man carries.
Next problem: my small-caps are either taller or shorter than the x-height, depending on your browser/font combinations. Can anything be done?
Post Scriptum: I see now that despite my assiduous cross-browser testing, certain obscure browsers (such as IE 6.0 on Windows) render my lines of poetry overlapping one another. Alas. Suggestions to combat this effect are welcome. In the meantime, my advice is simply not to use IE.
]]> </p>Oh yes, here it is:
Referendum
Ukraine held a referendum
on independence.
It was foggy in Paris, the weatherman
predicted a cold and cloudy day.
I was angry at myself, at my
narrow, fettered life.
The Seine was trapped between embankment walls.
Bookstores showcased
a new edition of Schopenhauer's
Douleurs du monde.
Parisians wandered through the city
hidden in warm loden coats.
Fog infiltrated lips and lungs
as if the air were sobbing,
going on about itself, about the cold dawn,
how long the night is,
and how ruthless stars can be.
I took a bus toward the Bastille,
razed two hundred years ago,
and tried to read poems
but didn't understand a thing.
What comes after will be invisible
and easy.
Whatever is hesitates between irony
and fear.
Whatever survives will be blue
as a guillotine's eye.
I quoted this poem to all my correspondents after the election last year (no—that was in 2000, two years back). It's so optimistic, and so sad. That line, "how ruthless stars can be." Yes?
And the little coda, "invisible / and easy." And, "Whatever is. . ."
I would like to say that Zagajewski is my favorite poet. But then, there's Delmore Schwartz, and A. R. Ammons, and Anne Carson, and Jeanette W., and. . . Seamus Heaney, and the Beowulf poet (are they different?) and Basho, and Aeschylus.
Yes, "optimistic." Yes, hypocrite lecteur.
I have gauze curtains. I spent tonight at Linda's with a couple. I walked home barefoot, on wet pavement.
"But didn't understand a thing."
P. S. I would love to know how to get poetry in HTML to
be properly indented—I want the continuation of a line to be indented a bit
further, regardless of where the line breaks.
Do you know?
Thanks much! Figured it out!
For those of you not following along in your hymnals, some background might be apropos. I didn't know the Dream Songs before that summer I spent in Boston at the house called Big Yellow; there was a gal living there who was mysterious, inscrutable (good sense of humor). One morning between brewing coffee and falling back asleep I caught her red-markered, copying #14 onto the message board which thereunto had held such mundane missives as CLEAN YOUR FUCKING DISHES and "Chs, yr ftr spleen rcpnt cld—wants to know abt any angr ctrl prblms". The first months after arriving Seattle, it took me only a glance at the Space Needle and the words, "I concede I am heavy bored," might plod through my mind.
But, as all tough sailors do (when they're far away at sea), I finagled my way into a community of pensive men and rowdy barmaids, forging a glorious community in Seattle. Friends, I admit I am heavy glad.]]> </p>
He drives alone. His car is spacious without being large, and it lets in lots of light without being hot. He has a variety of unusual hobbies, none of which require much capital (not sky-diving or anything like that). He has a number of loving relationships, little knots of people with whom he shares his thoughts and for whom he is a good listener. He has changed jobs every few years, never quite having a specific career, but always tending to find things which are both challenging and yet not too stressful—not more stressful than what he can stand, anyway. He has done manual labor and he has done counselling; he has done creative work and he has done mechanical things. Each fall, he thinks of a new small seasonal activity: pressing leaves in wax paper, or cultivating bonsai, or learning to kayak. He built his own toolshed, and hopes to someday build a house.
Probably a recent girlfriend left him, because she was moving to Australia, and he was sad but accepting. He has met a few women recently whom he is excited to get to know, and there are one or two men in his life that he might be interested in knowing romantically. He is concerned about national politics but not despairing; he is active in local government and has considered running for city council, declining for what he sees as his lack of charisma (though there is a woman who is secretly very charmed and wishes she could get him to run).
He drives alone.
]]> </p>You know that light, deep poem by moody, broody Phillip Larkin where he compares his youngers' libertine sexuality with his own English generation's religious liberation?
When I see a couple of kids
And think he's fucking her and she's
Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm
I know this is paradise
Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives—
Bonds and gestures pushed to one side
Like an outdated combine harvester,
And everyone young going down the long slide
To happiness, endlessly. I wonder if
Anyone looked at me, forty years back,
And thought, That'll be the life;
No God any more, or sweating in the dark
About hell and that, or having to hide
What you think of the priest. He
And his lot will all go down the long slide
Like free bloody birds. And immediately
Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:
The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.
I've started to wonder if the loss of religion is not just a liberation, but is also meant to be a loss of faith (in the sense of optimism), or of comfort, and if the loss of sexual mores is a similarly tragic fall?
]]> </p>For those who might have missed it, this was a remarkably astute article about what draws capitalists to capitalism. Rather than blithely pro-market, like The NYer's Financial Page, or stubbornly anti-, this article started with a sober account of what makes capitalism effective, and then went on to detail the history of executive stock options and why they should help the interests of the ordinary punter, and why instead the great industrial captains are making out like bandits at the expense of everyone else.
"In a well-regulated system, greed keeps the economy expanding," says John Cassidy. At first reading, my ear heard this: "In a well-regulated system, greed keeps feeding wealth to the rich," but that's not what he meant. For an economy to expand is for people to be doing more stuff. If we look at the economy not as the circulation of money, but rather as the determination for what people do, the study of that economy becomes very important, even for the not-rich. During the recent boom years, hundreds of thousands of people suddenly got to do something for a living that they enjoyed, more than what they were doing before. Why should this be so? Because having a good economy essentially means capital is ready to hand. The rich are loose with their money: they let you borrow it easily, to do your projects. If you're like me, what's important is not the money, but the project. Start a quirky restaurant or a theatre company; dabble with new technologies; try something that's never been done before. In a boom time, the rich (who possess free capital) catch on to what the humans (who have creative ideas) are doing and they want to be a part of it. When a recession comes, rich people clam up, and the only things you can get paid for are the trustworthy essentials: food, clothes, lodging; sometimes not even those. After the stock crash of 1929, rank and file citizens didn't trust the institutions that held their wealth, and ran to take their cash out of the bank. Poppy the Plant Manager preferred to keep it under his mattress, where it did nothing, than to let Ellis Entrepreneur borrow it and make her dreams come true. This meant that no one's dreams were coming true and everyone had a little cash under their mattress.
Even though everyone had cash, nobody was happy, because the cash wasn't circulating. Cash circulates when people are getting what they want: a cup of coffee, a storefront renovation, an hour of drumming by Art Blakey, the right to print copies of a novel. A thousand pounds of radishes.
Ideally, every activity would be its own reward; but in life, some things just aren't fun, and nobody wants to do them. Pulling radishes out of the ground, for example. Who wants to do that? I don't. If greed keeps the economy expanding, it's as an incentive for ambitious dilettantes to fill these needs. Our dilettante can garner some capital (s/he doesn't need to possess any—so long as investors are loose) and put it to use making people's lives better, perhaps in small ways. The opportunity for that ambitious dilettante to jump into the emerging toilet paper dispenser industry and perhaps to retire comfortably, with all the (hollow?) fruits the modern material world can offer is such an incentive. This means that, as consumers, we have those trinkets available, and that as workers, we have something to do, even if we're not interested in quirky restaurants, theatre companies, or web consulting.
Perhaps it's a bit inequitable that such dilettanterie should be so well rewarded in our society, when anyone can see how much harder the workers toil. But consider also that capitalism has niches for different lifestyles. Whereas a heavily socialist society might have a couple of roles (worker and party administrator) and everyone would be expected to output and receive the same, a capitalist system allows us to choose our own adventure. For the ambitious dilettante, there is the roulette spin at a chance to be materially rich. For the conservative bourgeois, you can trade the chance at riches for stability and comfort; persistence and a bit of hard work will be rewarded with a comfortable home, a comfortable car, a good insurance policy, and a large-screen TV with surround-sound. For the outright lazy, there is a place as well. No one is required to work at an "average" or even a "minimum" pace: if you are willing to consume less, you can set your pace. There are smaller homes, there are Greyhound buses. There are also soup kitchens and homeless shelters, there are countless people who give change to panhandlers. Capitalism, American style, offers a home for the lazy.
Of course, if you have a rich parent, you can be lazy and still bathe in material wealth. This is something of an injustice—and is actually contrary to the ideals of capitalism, but it's endemic to the principles of family, property, and heritage (which are much, much older than capitalism).
But all of this is background for an article about stock options, which have an interesting history. As Cassidy tells it, managers of the big companies of the 50s through the 70s were rewarded for the wrong things: they poured lots of money into plush executive offices, corporate jets, company parties, etc., because they could. By bringing in more profits, they could make their jobs more comfortable. But as economists began pointing out during the 70s, they were using other people's money to do so. A CEO is (supposed to be) nothing more than a lackey—one who executes—for the interests of another group, the stockholders, who might include some spoiled day-traders, but also include lots of joes. A machinist at Boeing, for example, has entrusted that scintilla of excess income that the capitalist captains have offered him (in homage to his back-breaking labor) to a 401(k) plan that manages his money in a pool with Rockefeller's grandkids. The toilet-paper-dispenser company turns hard work into material reward, but depends on this free capital, which comes, in part, from the Boeing machinists, and those Boeing machinists deserve to share in the budding fruits of this ever-expanding economy. It is a testament to our system that a worker can buy a share of stock as easily as a rich investor can. When formal stock in a venture was first sold to investors, in the 1600s, it was done through a true old-boys' network; an explorer wanting to mount an expedition would ask a couple of well-known money-hogs if they wanted to give him something, and share in any profits he might bring back. Today, our market has institutionalized open access to ownership of these enterprises, and buying a share in a venture is not much harder than buying a piece of furniture or finding a book in a library.
At some point, the stockholder became the most important person in any public company. To create profits and spend them was no longer acceptable. Executives should return profits to the shareholders, some of whom live in Peoria, IL, and some of whom are hoping to buy their children a bicycle for Christmas. How then to motivate CEOs to maximize shareholders' value, rather than expense perks for themselves? The answer of the 80s and 90s was to issue stock options.
But although options do give CEOs an incentive to optimize the market value of the stock, they also have a more nefarious effect. Because our stock is, alas, traded on an open market, which is open continuously seven hours a day, and which responds radically in a matter of minutes to public statements, and because the value of a share of stock is not solely the current profits of the organization but also all speculation on future value—and in fact because its value is mostly speculation (by a factor of 20- and sometimes 30-to-1 in today's market), and further because CEOs' option packages are so bloody enormous (Larry Ellison cashed in some 700 million dollars worth of options in 2000, according to the article), these fine gentlemen have an enormous incentive, not just to create value, but also to exaggerate it, and to create bookkeeping strategies that keep everyone in the dark about how valuable the company is.
Read the article. You'll enjoy it.
]]> </p>Unlike distance which is measured between here and there, let's measure closeness from the opposite end of the universe to the desired object. If I am six inches from your thick eyelids, which trap thoughts as quick as a candle's flame, I am only a hundred million light-years away from the opposite edge of space (less six inches).
To be twice as close all I need is move a hundred million light-years closer.
Less six inches.
]]> </p>This grandstanding is in the name of "dialogue," of letting the audience speak and refusing to let any one voice hold the podium for too long—all good things. But an hour later after each person has spoken, how often do we notice if no dialogue has actually occurred, no response has been given to anyone's remarks? Liberal politics, resistance politics, rebellious politics, that politics associated with the people (with individual persons, it is assumed, or else with the people as a collective): these tend almost always into a cacophony of distinct voices, without the requisite synthesis that is supposed to be produced. It tends all too often not to ask itself (we tend not to ask ourselves—each other—) a difficult question that would teach us something about our subject, that would help us make crucial distinctions, that would allow our action tomorrow to be different from our action today. It repeats, it repeats, it repeats. What it doesn't do is affirm, dismiss, compare, or demand.
The speaker speaks on the concept of surrealism as a radical political device. A fellow in the audience pipes up with his example of a "surreal event": "One day I was walking through this maze, lost, trying to get out, and I looked up and I saw some graffiti that said, "Rescue Me."
]]> </p>It was a dear friend who said, about our mutual friends, "It's because they made each other, you see? They love each other because they made each other." We were a grand set of gents and gals who came of age together, mutually defining each others' cool. It's true: I was one of them, or I grew in their shadow, and my own petrous sense of self couldn't help but be quaked open by their ways: their cosmopolitan engagement, their sarcastic detachment, their giddy sense of humor, their joie de vivre.
This sense of cool, which we learned from one another as we weaved it, is a dignified one. It allows me to persevere against the inconsideration of these arena-rock crowds, it buoys me from the shallows of despair, and it sweetens my ponderment, dulling its geekier edges. We couldn't help but love each other, not because we were perfect, but because we were perfect to each other; we were made in each others' image.
And these other yap-hounds, they just couldn't stop complaining about the traffic.
]]> </p>
