Just hold my hand while I come ...

Via Facebook. If, like me, you love this song, you've probably thought to yourself, the only two things that could make it better are: existentialism and skulls.

On the lobster: David Foster Wallace and the B-52s

Were his preferences taken into consideration?

The last weekend of August seems the perfect time to link to David Foster Wallace's wondrous and unsettling "Consider the Lobster" -- originally published in the August 2004 issue of Gourmet, and endlessly re-readable. It starts as an account of his visit to the venerable Maine Lobster Festival, but inevitably -- this being DFW -- turns into a meditation on whether lobsters feel pain, and if they do, whether they might prefer that we not boil them alive for our gustatory pleasure -- and, given the strong possibility that they could have such a preference, whether in fact it might be not OK, morally speaking, for us to do that (ie, boil lobsters alive for our aforementioned gustatory pleasure).

The whole thing is eminently quotable, but I particularly enjoy the (thematically unrelated) footnote -- yes, of course, there are footnotes -- in which Wallace contemplates the nature of tourism:

My personal experience has not been that traveling around the country is broadening or relaxing, or that radical changes in place and context have a salutary effect, but rather that intranational tourism is radically constricting, and humbling in the hardest way—hostile to my fantasy of being a real individual, of living somehow outside and above it all.... To be a mass tourist, for me, is to become a pure late-date American: alien, ignorant, greedy for something you cannot ever have, disappointed in a way you can never admit. It is to spoil, by way of sheer ontology, the very unspoiledness you are there to experience. It is to impose yourself on places that in all noneconomic ways would be better, realer, without you. It is, in lines and gridlock and transaction after transaction, to confront a dimension of yourself that is as inescapable as it is painful: As a tourist, you become economically significant but existentially loathsome, an insect on a dead thing.

More than any of his other non-fiction pieces (all of which you should read right now, as in right this very instant), "Consider the Lobster" encapsulates everything that made DFW brilliant and exasperating: he could turn even a trip to the Maine Lobster Festival into an intense -- and utterly inconclusive -- exercise in moral self-examination. That may sound unbearable, but part of the deep and lasting pleasure of reading Wallace is observing a writer with an agile mind and an open heart trying to work his way around questions that make most of us (at the very least) profoundly ill at ease: What do I think about this?

I particularly love the way, after having thoroughly chewed over (as it were) the possibility of the lobster having its own point of view re: the whole being boiled alive thing, Wallace simply admits defeat and tosses the whole thing back into the reader's lap:

Given the (possible) moral status and (very possible) physical suffering of the animals involved, what ethical convictions do gourmets evolve that allow them not just to eat but to savor and enjoy flesh-based viands (since of course refined enjoyment, rather than just ingestion, is the whole point of gastronomy)?

I can't begin to imagine what the editors of Gourmet thought they were getting when they invited Wallace to write this piece, or how the magazine's upscale readership reacted to sentences like the one quoted above.

And finally, because I can't think of any intelligent way to end this:

 

I found a new hermeneutic, I found a new paradigm

Because the world would, obviously, be a better place if more pop bands today referenced critical theory: Scritti Politti's "Perfect Way."

The view from here: Friday, August 27

Close this door: outside Trash Place, Niagara Street, Toronto, 11:19 pm.

The view from here: Friday, August 27

International chop suey, Kingston Road, Toronto, 2:24 pm.

More Lizards

Title track from The Lounge Lizards' Big Heart/Live in Tokyo.

It could have been very, very beautiful

Tad Friend's article "Sleeping With Weapons" in the August 16/23 issue of The New Yorker tells the strange, sad story of artist and musician John Lurie, best known as leader of the Lounge Lizards, who has been living in hiding since 2008.

The story doesn't lend itself to quick summary, but basically it appears that Lurie fled into self-imposed exile after falling out with a close friend, artist John Perry. The pair had a complex, combustible relationship, and what began with a seemingly minor incident escalated rapidly into a sustained feud of bizarre proportions -- exacerbated, perhaps, by a degree of instability on both sides. Lurie, who has suffered for years from a debilitating but indeterminate illness, comes across as more than a little paranoid and obsessive. But Perry's reported actions resemble nothing so much as a campaign of deliberate harassment: creepy, insinuating and borderline stalkerish. While it's impossible to know where the truth lies, exactly, one gets the impression that the two men reinforce each other's worst tendencies.

It's saddening to note that Lurie stopped playing his saxophone nearly a decade ago, and to think that the odd spectacle of his life now will probably overshadow what was, in its time, an estimable musical career.

Early in their career as fixtures on New York's downtown scene, Lurie glibly characterized the Lounge Lizards as a "fake jazz" band. Their actual music -- influenced in roughly equal parts by Monk and Coleman, noir atmospherics, Henry Mancini and No Wave avant-clatter -- belied the label, but it stuck all the same, as these things tend to do. A lot of serious jazz fans, I'm guessing, have given the band a pass over the years, mistakenly assuming that what they'll be getting is some sort of smartass hipster parody of bebop, irony on its sleeve and head up its ass. They'd be wrong.
For those inclined to hear for themselves, I can vouch for Big Heart: Live in Tokyo, which documents the band and its most impassioned and urgent (thought the epic "Punch and Judy Tango" does meander a bit), and the self-released Voice of Chunk, which captures both their sense of humour and their lyricism. (I'll leave it for others to speculate how much John's brother Evan -- better  known these days as the guy who writes music for kiddie show The Backyardigans -- had to do with the latter. But if you're curious, his unheralded, tango-influenced 1990 solo album, Selling Water By the Side of the River, is well worth searching out.)

As for the Lizards' self-titled 1981 debut ... well, with Arto Lindsay's guitar skronking all over the place, it's perhaps a tad astringent for some tastes, but still one of the few recordings from that time and place that even halfway lives up to its legend. Listeners who appreciate Lurie's esoteric side will also want to track down the minimalist string quartet music he composed for Stranger Than Paradise, which sometimes almost kinda sorta makes me think I should get over my Jim Jarmusch issues and rent the movie. But never quite.

Not that it matters one way or the other, but Lurie was also, in his heyday, an uncommonly beautiful individual. Check out the slideshow here. Let's hope he returns from the wilderness one of these days -- and, if we're lucky, finds a reason to start making music again. He is missed.

How A Resurrection Really Feels

In honour of my suddenly-no-longer-unemployed status: "Father, can I tell your congregation how a resurrection really feels?"

The view from here: Wednesday, August 25

Baby, the rain must fall. Yonge Street near Summerhill station, 6:43 pm.

There's a storm blowing across the lake, it's late summer

Song for a rainy day in late August: Freedy Johnston, "The Mortician's Daughter." Originally from the album Can You Fly.

The view from here: Friday, August 20

Outside the LCBO at Yonge & Summerhill, Toronto, 6:18 pm.

Islamophobia run rampant

Over at Slate, Tom Scocca gets at one of the (many) offensive aspects of the Cordoba House controversy: namely, the insistence that North American Muslims have some obligation to reassure the rest of us that they're on "our" side:

This is the other way that the bigots poison the whole discussion. Over and over, since the Sept. 11 attacks, Muslim leaders have been challenged to denounce radical Islamism, and then to denounce it again, and then to denounce it some more. Prove you aren't responsible for this thing you didn't do. Are you with us or against us? Well? Are you with us or against us? When "us" includes Newt Gingrich and Orly Taitz and Pam Geller, what's a Muslim to do?

Islamophobes have, in effect, asserted the right to define what it means to be a "good" Muslim. Among other things, you're expected to speak out loudly and publicly against any terrorist act committed by any Muslim anywhere. You're expected to assent cheerfully to arbitrary profiling, to dispense with any outward display or symbol of piety, and generally to "refudiate" anything that might make some non-Muslim somewhere feel vaguely uncomfortable.

Of course, since the definition of a "good" Muslim is subject to pretty much constant change based on whatever Islamophobes happen to be freaking out about at the moment, there's no satisfying these demands. Which is sort of the point, I suppose. There's simply no way for North American Muslims to prove, definitively, that they're not bent on imposing sharia or forcing Western women into burqas. And even if they could furnish proof -- well, that would just be part of the plot.

There's nothing new or unique about the anti-Muslim bigotry that has lately been running rampant. But it is profoundly troubling that we're letting ignorant, nativist yahoos (and the opportunistic politicians who love them) dictate the terms of debate on issues such as the Cordoba House and the assimilation of immigrant communities. And it's shameful that pundits like Ross Douthat and Charles Krauthammer afford the bigots intellectual cover.

Killtacular

Nicholson Baker's feature in the August 9 issue of The New Yorker, "Painkiller Deathstreak," doesn't add anything terribly new to the ever-growing body of think pieces on video gaming, but it's an enjoyable read all the same. Baker, who by his own admission had never picked up a game controller until recently, is especially good on the culture shock experienced by the newbie who suddenly finds himself in the violent world of Grand Theft Auto or Halo:

... the first thing I learned is that video games—especially the vivid, violent ones—are ridiculously hard to play. They’re humbling. They break you down. They kill you over and over ... To begin with, you must master the controller. On the Xbox 360 controller, which looks like a catamaran, there are seventeen possible points of contact ... In order to run, crouch, aim, fire, pause, leap, speak, stab, grab, kick, dismember, unlock, climb, crawl, parry, roll, or resuscitate a fallen comrade, you must press or nudge or woggle these various buttons singly or in combination, performing tiny feats of exactitude that are different for each game. It’s a little like playing “Blue Rondo à la Turk” on the clarinet, then switching to the tenor sax, then the oboe, then back to the clarinet.

The second thing I learned about video games is that they are long. So, so long. Playing one game is not like watching one ninety-minute movie; it’s like watching one whole season of a TV show—and like watching it in a state of staring, jaw-clenched concentration.

You can listen to a podcast of Nicholson Baker talking about his video game experiences here.

Baker's writing for an audience that probably doesn't know much about gaming, and he makes no claims to expertise. He approaches gaming with an open but critical mind, and a novelist's keen eye for detail. Most important, he engages with the medium on its own terms, rather than taking games to task for all the things they're not. He understands what's good (Uncharted 2) and what's not (God of War III) and makes an honest if ultimately unsuccessful attempt to fathom the unfathomable (online multiplayer).

The article doesn't bother to address the tiresome and ultimately irrelevant question of whether video games are -- or can ever be -- "art." I know there are deep thinkers who share Roger Ebert's view on this, and many passionate gamers and game creators who believe Ebert is full of shit. My own thoughtful, carefully considered position on the issue is: who cares? If you think games are art -- and if thinking that makes you feel better about spending all weekend playing Red Dead Redemption -- then fine, games are art.

The more important question to be asking, at this point in the medium's evolution, is: how can games be better -- not just technically, but in terms of narrative, characterization, and emotional engagement. That's why I'm glad to see a Serious Writer like Baker immersing himself in the gaming world -- and why I hope more novelists, filmmakers and television creators start to take games seriously. Wouldn't you want to play a game scripted by Joss Whedon? Or Jonathan Lethem?

Which leads us, finally, to today's skill-testing question. True or False: Novelist Martin Amis once wrote a book about video games.

True.

We're plastic but we'll still have fun

So this month's Vanity Fair cover story is about Lady Gaga. Perhaps you've heard of her? I don't know about this girl. Sometimes she gives the impression of wanting to be, you know, famous or something.

There are about a million and a half reasons to be thoroughly sick of her by now, but for some reason I just can't get with the haters. I mean yeah, she's got the whole surrealist-space-ninja-meets-robotic-Muppet-dominatrix thing going on -- like a Gaultier runway show that's evolved independent consciousness, learned to play the piano and started granting interviews. And yeah, I could do without all of the triumphalist "little monsters" Twitter posts.

But for all the relentlessness of her ambition, there's something oddly endearing about 24-year-old Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta. It's the playfulness of her act: the sense that -- however calculated the grand strategy -- she's mostly just making this shit up as she goes along. She loves cannonballing into the MTV Awards or the New York Yankees' clubhouse just to see how big the splash will be.

In this, she stands in refreshing contrast to Beyonce, Rihanna, Christina, the hapless American Idol kids, and just about every other major corporate pop artist of the last decade. Bearing down on the business of stardom with the anxious intensity of junior high honour students cramming for a geography final, they're exhausting to watch. Children, it's pop music. It's supposed to be fun. Gaga, to her credit, seems to get this, and to revel in playacting new variations on her Ziggy Stardust-meets-Evita persona. Behind the poker face, she's laughing her ass off.

And also this: the music. What other major artist of the last, say, 30 years has delivered Grade A hit singles with such consistency? Only Madonna comes to mind. (And Madge never seemed to be having that much fun doing it.)

It confounds me that so many commentators dismiss Gaga's songs as an afterthought.  I mean, have you listened to The Fame Monster? In its deluxe version, a repackage that combines her 2008 debut and follow-up EP, it's a near-perfect pop record: big beats and shiny hooks that sustain for nearly 85 minutes. (The convincer, for me, is the strength of its second half: it keeps coming on strong, long after most other dance-pop albums have wandered off in search of the afterbar.) Among major label acts, only The Black Eyed Peas released a better, more consistently pleasurable product last year -- and earned as little critical love for their pains.

Mostly what I love about her music is the hint of vulnerability beneath the big-bam-boom of her widescreen sound. There's a real, breakable heart in there somewhere -- or at least a convincing simulacrum: like a killer android that's been programmed to believe it's human. Poignant.

Plus: her brassiere shoots fire. How fucking awesome is that?

The view from here: Tuesday, August 17

Bloor Street West near Christie station, 12:40 pm.

The view from here: Sunday, August 15

Yonge subway, Wellesley station, 7:26 pm

If your life had a face

As Dave Weigel tweeted earlier, between Amy Pond, Knives Chau and Ramona Flowers, 2010 is shaping up as "a banner year for nerd fantasy girls." If there's any common thread, it's that all of these women are far more compelling than the male characters at the centre of their respective tales.

Also: Knives Chau is seventeen years old, apparently.

You made me realise

Seeing My Bloody Valentine in concert is like standing next to a jet engine while the universe cracks apart over your head: it's a bit loud. I've come across a few videos from MBV's 2008 concert at Toronto's Koolhaus, which my bleeding ears and I attended. But this brief fan video from a gig in London earlier that same year captures the essence of the experience nicely.

The infinite sadness

This blog, incidentally, borrows its name from David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest. For a thoughtful consideration of Wallace's work and its importance, I recommend Wyatt Mason's piece from The New York Review of Books.

The photo used in the title bar was taken on a visit to the Paris Catacombs two years ago. And because hey, skulls.

It begins

After nearly 10 years, my position in the dynamic and fun-filled world of broadcasting has fallen victim to something called "post-acquisition restructuring" -- known colloquially as "layoffs." And so: blogging!

We'll see how this works out.