Dave Eggers Nominated for NBA award

           

In his NYT review of "A Hologram For The King", the British essayist Pico Iyer noted that "Dave Eggers has developed an exceptional gift for opening up the lives of others so as to offer the story of globalism as it develops and, simultaneously, to unfold a much more archetypal tale of struggle and loneliness and drift.” 

I was thrilled to hear yesterday that Dave Eggers was selected as one of the finalists for best fiction by the National Book Award committee for his latest book, "A Hologram For The King". When the title was listed on Amazon for pre-order, I signed on immediately and had it in my hands the day it was released back in June, because I felt it was going to be a very significant piece of writing that needed to be consumed and digested immediately. I was not disappointed in any measure. "Hologram" tells the story of an American businessman forced to literally cool his heels in Saudi Arabia while waiting for an opportunity to make a glitzy hi-tech business presentation to King Abdullah, in the hope that it will reverse the slow decline into failure that his life has become. Personally and professionally, everything's gone belly up, but still he endures and waits for the break that will change everything. He fills his days with futile attempts to navigate through baffling protocol and a lack of wi-fi connectivity, and his nights with illicit alcohol-fueled forays into learning about a culture he's confounded by. Sandwiched in-between are glimpses of how he's come to this time and place in his life. It's an Arabian rendition of "Waiting for Godot", where the stage floor has turned to sand, and Estragon's understudy is a savvy young limo driver named Yousef. By turns tragic and comical, this is the story of a traveller whose compass is as ever-changing as the shifting dunes that surround him.

 After the virtuosity of his last book, "Zeitoun", a nonfiction account of a Syrian-American immigrant and his extraordinary experience during Hurricane Katrina,  I became a full-time ardent admirer of Eggers' narrative style, and the generosity of his story-telling. The scope and discipline of this craft had been informed  and honed by a stunning previous work, "What Is The What", a fictionalized autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng, one of the thousands of Sudanese "Lost Boys" who in the late '80's  were forced to flee their country in the face of  ever-increasing brutality and deprivation.

In giving a voice to Valentino, Eggers found his true calling as a writer, and hasn't looked back since. He continues to push forward, shining a lamp on injustice, loneliness, alienation, and the over-arching confusion we all feel as we jostle against each other on that singular, previously darkened path. There is Dave, reassuring us that we have a lot more in common with Deng, Zeitoun and Alan Clay, the baffled businessman protagonist of "Hologram", than we ever could have figured out on our own, and that knowledge gives us comfort and strengthens us to prevail, because we are in the end not alone, after reading an Eggers book.  My praise might register as a tad hyperbolic in its enthusiasm, but know that it is rooted in the belief that Dave Eggers is one of our most important writers, and for me his work has been transformative. His influence is a big part of why I was able to start writing again.

Baby, Please Don't Go- LCD Soundsytem & SUAPTH

Panda or Dog?



Just watched the film Shut Up And Play The Hits 3 times on On Demand cable. I love LCD Soundsystem, and the movie definitely increased my love for Reggie Watts, and also piqued my interest in French Bull Dogs, but I'm having a hard time understanding James Murphy's rationale for ending the band. A band is not like a TV series- Breaking Bad, for example, where you know the end is lurking around the corner, and that knowledge informs not only your viewing, but the writer's process as well, as he works his way through to that end. It's a forgone conclusion that it ain't gonna last forever. (Unless it's SNL apparently, for better or worse).

Bands don't last forever either, but there's usually a reprieve of some sort, in the form of new alliances built on the foundation of the old, a sad but obligatory reunion tour, never-ending releases of "rare B-side material and outtakes". OK, perhaps in that sentence alone I've found the justification that I didn't get from the film. Go out at the top of your game, maintain your untarnished legacy, never get old, become redundant or god forbid, obsolete. Plausible yes, but in this instance, was the timing right?

Given the fact that there are legions of folks toiling away at the music biz for little or no reward, or at any creative endeavor for that matter, who would kill for even a modicum of LCD's success, I can't help but wonder, besides concern for the state of one's liver, or the increasing amount of gray in one's hair after each tour, (as Murphy posits in the film) what would make someone who had reached that level of creative fulfillment walk away at that particular moment? I longed for a little more disclosure regarding his decision. Perhaps at the time of filming he was still too close to the event to have sorted it out completely for himself, and maybe I missed a defining interview conducted at a later date, but it's just so flippin' weird. "Say Hello, Wave Good-bye" indeed, I thought as the credits rolled over Soft Cell's world- weary ode to a failed relationship.

Nevertheless, the movie was a superb chronicle of an amazing send-off. The cinematography and tight, yet fluid editing of the concert footage manages to convey what I sensed was a fairly accurate depiction of what both the attendees and participants experienced that night, along with a glimpse of the bittersweet emotional toll it took as the show moved towards its conclusion. In the best Irish tradition, the solemnity of a wake is always leavened with humor, however dark and possibly booz-infused it might be. And so we got our LCD-style graveside moment at the end, watching a concert-goer glimpsed earlier with his similarly-dressed exuberant friends, now alone and wiping away the tears with a soggy paw as they flowed over the fur of his white panda/dog costume.

The Luck of James Wolcott

I took a "well day" off yesterday and spent a good part of my stolen free time devouring James Wolcott's book, "Lucking Out", which came out in paperback this week. The deeper I got into his recounting of the time he spent working for the Village Voice in the 70's, hanging out with Pauline Kael, and patronizing CBGB's, where he witnessed the birth of The Ramones, Television, Talking Heads and Patti Smith, among other vanguard groups and personalities of the time, the more I found my own memories of that time coming back in ever-sharpening focus. It was a wonderful recollection, long pushed to the back of my mind, but oh so pleasureable to recall and re-live. That music, those movies, those books that filled our lives during the 70's and early 80's! Wolcott brings them back to life, and in doing so reminds us it was all so good, so alive, and not all fraught with merely disco posturing, as some would have you believe.

On the strength of a recommendation letter from Norman Mailer, written to Dan Wolf, then the managing editor of the Voice, Wolcott found himself propelled into a life, a time, and a career path that had more of everything than a college dropout from Frostburg College could ever have imagined for himself. Dirt poor, moving from one crappy studio sublet to another, and after being relieved of his original "desk duties" Wolcott eventually found himself in the position of regularly contributing to the Voice, Creem, Esquire, The New York Review of Books, and other leading publications of the day. He discovered the wonders of the New York ballet scene, and participated in post-mortem film critiques at the famed Algonquin with the various "Paulettes"  who always accompanied Ms. Kael.

The book goes a long way in describing the cultural scene and zeitgeist of the 70's in New York, the momentum of which eventually and inevitably spilled westward, allowing me to see what Wolcott experienced, albeit in the marginally less grimy college town of Columbus, Ohio. Patti, The Heads, et al, eventually found their way to our neighborhood, and reading Wolcott's description of their performances, I was transported back to a time of high energy and high expectations. Music was being reinvented right before our pogo-ing, bobbing heads and eyes.

 On the night of December 10, 1980 Wolcott and Kael share a taxi ride downtown, and learn of the death of John Lennon earlier in the evening. It is in that cab where the book ends, and in 1997, when Wolcott writes a piece called "Waiting For Godard", containing criticism of his fellow "Paulettes", citing somewhat unkindly their lack of originality and slavish devotion to Kael, their friendship ends. It was also in the 90's when Wolcott would leave his post at the New Yorker, opting instead to take a place within the newly re-imagined Vanity Fair as a contributing editor, a position he holds to this day.

Another Important Discovery

Over the past year I've become engaged in the process of the ritualistic and time-consuming process of making jewelry for a shop that my boyfriend and I opened on June 2, 2011. It's called Rudely Elegant, and it's located in Ybor City which is part of Tampa, Florida. I can't exactly remember when I started crafting these things- which is strange. I've always been involved in making art, but my projects were always more along the lines of constructing things like boxes and collages. Perhaps I just wandered down the wrong aisle at Jo Ann's one day.
Nevertheless, I'm hard at it now, and to my amazement, people like and buy my creations.

Here's a few examples:

                                                                                                                                                                         

Why you can finally view this blog!

A French and American duo that developed techniques to study the interplay between light and matter on the smallest and most intimate imaginable scale won the Nobel Prize in Physics Tuesday.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/10/science/french-and-us-scientists-win-nobel-physics-prize.html?smid=pl-share

Schrödinger proposed a scenario with a cat in a sealed box, wherein the cat's life or death depended on the state of a subatomic particle. According to Schrödinger, the Copenhagen interpretation implies that the cat remains both alive and dead (to the universe outside the box) until the box is opened. Schrödinger did not wish to promote the idea of dead-and-alive cats as a serious possibility; quite the reverse, the paradox is a classic reductio ad absurdum. The thought experiment illustrates quantum mechanics and the mathematics necessary to describe quantum states. Intended as a critique of just the Copenhagen interpretation (the prevailing orthodoxy in 1935), the Schrödinger cat thought experiment remains a typical touchstone for limited interpretations of quantum mechanics. Physicists often use the way each interpretation deals with Schrödinger's cat as a way of illustrating and comparing the particular features, strengths, and weaknesses of each interpretation.

So what are the implications of this thought experiment as they pertain to this blog? My thoughts, are as always, half in and half out of the box; both living and dead. Living as I think them, dead unless viewed and shared. They can exist in both states, confined as they are within this "web-box", until you turn an eye towards them.  I hope that you will.