I Want Koo-Koo Cannonball

Father's Day weekend. Sam on the porch with Uncle Tim, Aunt Kathleen, Aunt Julie, and Uncle Mark. Unfortunately, Julie and Mark's car was rifled within a few hours of this picture. Shame on you, thieves of the lower east side.



Caleb leaps into the pool at Granny and Papa's condo. He no longer needs any help getting into or out of the pool -- a born swimmer. Or, anyways, a born cannonballer.



Again, yes -- Spider-Man Floaties.



Lunch at Granny & Papa's. All they seem to want this summer is melon.



Sam, Olin, and Caleb conspiring at Chill On The Hill. This was probably right before they split off into three separate directions in a clear attempt to shake off their embarrassing parents.

What Is And What Never Should Be

July 14, 2009. London, UK. Some alternate universe.

Last night’s hotly anticipated comeback concert, the first of 50 such concerts scheduled, left the sold-out audience in London's 02 stadium shocked, amazed, and stunned. Jackson, who had largely remained out of the public eye since his acquittal on child sexual abuse charges in 2005, revealed a blistering new stage show that included many of hits, several notable covers of his contemporaries and influences alike, and an angry obscenity-laced finale that will surely be remembered as one of the most electrically-charged and gripping performances of the singer’s career.

Amber stage lights illuminated a spare stage in the stadium's center, revealing a trio of guitar, bass, and a small drum kit, with Jackson emerging into the light to perform a rendition of Elvis Presley’s “That’s Alright, Mama.” Jackson wore a red leather suit clearly meant to remind viewers of a certain age of the black leather version worn by Presley in his 1968 comeback television special. Throughout this first song, Jackson stirred an already near-hysteric crowd with some slight Presleyan dance moves – a shaking leg, a jutting hip –built with the song’s momentum to include the full retinue of Jackson’s trademark moves. Joined by this time by a much fuller (and fully-electric) band, backup singers and dancers, “That’s Alright, Mama” slid slickly into Jackson’s own “Smooth Criminal,” complete with moon-walking, his tiptoed full-stops, and so on.

A bit of a greatest hits review followed –the Thriller album was well-represented, as were hits from the ‘70s like “Rock With You” and “I’ll Be There.” Jackson seemed to nod to President Obama by performing a kind of mash-up of James Brown’s “Funky President,” Parliament-Funkadelic’s “Chocolate City,” and elements of the Special AKA’s “Free Nelson Mandela” and the late Brenda Fassie’s “Black President,” a song composed Mandela by the South African pop singer. This song led into a stirring “Man in the Mirror,” followed by an up-tempo investigation of Elvis Costello’s 1977 song, “(The Angels Want To Wear My) Red Shoes.”

The funk icon (and similarly reclusive) Sly Stone joined Jackson on keyboards and backing vocals for three Sly & The Family Stone hits – “Sing A Simple Song” and “Stand,” versions of which Jackson had recorded along with the Jackson 5, followed by a triumphant and clearly heartfelt “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)." Stone, looking frail but funky in a paisley suit, waved to the crowd midway through this last number, leaving Jackson to complete the song alone.

In the second of three encores, Jackson dedicated a medley of songs to his father, Joe Jackson, who died just this past June 25th of cardiac arrest. Unexpectedly, the songs were in no way sentimental about the troubled relationship between father and son. Beginning with the relatively staid Gladys Knight song, “Daddy Could Swear,” Jackson later segued into material that displayed a great deal of unresolved anger and hurt with “Bloody Mother F*cking Assh*le,” as written by Martha Wainwright, then Superchunk’s punk anthem “Slack Motherf*cker.” The audience, in turn stunned and riled up with Jackson’s raw and vivid energy, hardly seemed to know what to do, except to ask for more.

In his last appearance on the stage, Jackson returned from the wings alone, holding an acoustic guitar, which he went on to play with serviceable aplomb. His final two songs, probably the closest to a confessional act as we’ll ever get from the King of Pop, was a fraught adaptation of Nick Lowe’s song “The Beast In Me,” perhaps better known from Johnny Cash’s American Recordings, followed by a strangely sad and mournful acoustic reworking of “Ben.” Jackson’s 1972 song about friendship with a fictional and telepathic killer rat seemed, in this context, to be an act of attrition towards his own thirteen-year old self, some 37 years gone.

With forty-nine concerts left to perform in this stadium over the next year, and possible retirement beyond, one hopes that Mr. Jackson can continue to put on shows of this magnitude and spectacle – with a vitality not seen since the late 1980’s -- for a good long while to come.

Of the opening act, a tuxedoed man in a grey fedora who solemly read the lyrics to "Billie Jean" over a karoke track, the less said the better.

The Palace at 4 A.M.

Strange weather in Milwaukee lately. Earlier in the week, it rained 3/4" round-head rusted wood screws along the lakeshore, damaging some docks and pleasure craft. On Wednesday, an otherwise unnoticeable change in air pressure caused the area waterfowl to lose some of the bodily oils that allow their feathers to shed water, and so all the ducks and geese in the city sat lower in the water than normal. Last night, a midnight storm of rolling thunder towed in its wake all the lost kites and mylar balloons of last weeks' birthday parties in the south and west, a parade of color that passed through the skies largely unseen as most of us slept.

On Tuesday night, I lifted the pillows off my side of the bed to give them a fluff. Underneath them had lain a little brown beetle, a stub end of a cheap cigar but with a carapace and little round head. I thought it was dead, that it had been pushed beneath my pillows after a scrap with my wife's cats, who would do that sort of thing out of their callous disregard.

I took the flashlight I keep next to my bed for after-dark reading and which always has fading yellowy light because the kids are always messing with it, and I unscrewed the top and set that aside, along with its batteries. I scooped the beetle into the hollow body of the flashlight and took it to the bathroom, dumped the bug in the toilet, flushed, and went back to bed. Reassembled the flashlight and read some of the Bolano.

My wife came to bed, after awhile. "There's a huge beetle in the toilet," she said.

It's hard not to see a beetle under one's pillow, particularly after a weird and difficult day, as a bad omen. And it's hard not to think about Kafka.


Once you're thinking about The Metamorphosis, you're probably going to be led to recalling Nabokov's lecture on the story. Nabokov served as a curator of lepidoptery at Harvard University's Museum of Comparative Zoology in the late 1940's, and so is uniquely qualified among novelists and literature professors to speak on bugs. (Those are his notes -- and revisions -- of Kafka above.) Nabokov challenged the common conception that Gregor Samsa transforms into a cockroach:

He approaches a cockroach in only one respect: his coloration is brown. That is all. Apart from this he has a tremendous convex belly divided into segments and a hard rounded back suggestive of wing cases. In beetles these cases conceal flimsy little wings that can be expanded and then may carry the beetle for miles and miles in a blundering flight. Curiously enough, Gregor the beetle never found out that he had wings under the hard covering of his back. (This is a very nice observation on my part to be treasured all your lives. Some Gregors, some Joes and Janes, do not know that they have wings.)

Amazingly, you can watch Nabokov deliver this lecture (with great humor and strong production values) on the You Tube in two parts.

According to this site, "in many parts of Europe it is said a beetle will bring on a terrible storm." As in fact, it seems to have done. So learned are the many parts of Europe!

Popsicle of Love

Caleb, always cool in shades.  Like Miles Davis cool.  Jimmy Cliff in The Harder They Come cool.  Thomas the Mother-Shunting Tank Engine cool.

Sam, on the other hand, looks uncannily like Hunter S. Thompson.

Caleb, Sam, and Olin watch the Sea Lion show at the Milwaukee County Zoo.  This is the new obsession -- they can't stop talking about sea lions.

"The plumage don't enter into it."  This feller's looking for a mate.

Sam, Caleb, and Olin toasting with popsicles.  (And isn't it irritating to find that the "NO SUGAR ADDED" frozen fruit bars are in fact full of sugar SUBSTITUTES...)

Dressin' Like A Duck, Not Giving a ****

For reasons personal and obscure, I somehow stumbled this morning upon a March 2005 Guardian article that simply has to be shared.

According to the article, Dutch researcher Kees Moeliker authored a paper -- the Guardian can't resist calling it "seminal" -- titled "The First Case of Homosexual Necrophilia in the Mallard Anas Platyrhynchos." The Guardian sets the scene:

He was in his office in the Natuurmuseum Rotterdam, when he was alerted by a bang to the fact a bird had crashed into the glass facade of the building. "I went downstairs immediately to see if the window was damaged, and saw a drake mallard (anas platyrhynchos) lying motionless on its belly in the sand, two metres outside the facade. The unfortunate duck apparently had hit the building in full flight at a height of about three metres from the ground. Next to the obviously dead duck, another male mallard (in full adult plumage without any visible traces of moult) was present. He forcibly picked into the back, the base of the bill and mostly into the back of the head of the dead mallard for about two minutes, then mounted the corpse and started to copulate, with great force, almost continuously picking the side of the head.

"Rather startled, I watched this scene from close quarters behind the window until 19.10 hours during which time (75 minutes) I made some photographs and the mallard almost continuously copulated his dead congener. He dismounted only twice, stayed near the dead duck and picked the neck and the side of the head before mounting again. The first break (at 18.29 hours) lasted three minutes and the second break (at 18.45 hours) lasted less than a minute. At 19.12 hours, I disturbed this cruel scene. The necrophilic mallard only reluctantly left his 'mate': when I had approached him to about five metres, he did not fly away but simply walked off a few metres, weakly uttering a series of two-note 'raeb-raeb' calls (the 'conversation-call' of Lorentz 1953). I secured the dead duck and left the museum at 19.25 hours. The mallard was still present at the site, calling 'raeb-raeb' and apparently looking for his victim (who, by then, was in the freezer)."

Moeliker looked into whether this was a common experience among British ducks, but results seem inconclusive. However, the Guardian offers this coda:

Mr Moeliker was informed of an American case involving a squirrel and a dead partner, although in this case it is not known whether the necrophilia observed was homosexual or not as the victim had been run over by a truck shortly before the incident.

Probably these events are the source of the adage, "If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck and engages in gay sex with a corpse like a duck, it's a duck."

And Ted And Alice

Two sets of twins -- Sam & Caleb and Leo & Cooper -- out to see the U.S.A. in their Chevrolet.

Sometimes I Wonder What I'ma Gonna Do

Summertime is here, and the weather will follow. We've been galavanting around the city, behaving as if it's 80 degrees and sunny in the hopes that the universe will follow suit. (In Prague Spring, the Czechs gained freedoms by behaving as if they were already free.)

At the Kite Festival, Caleb and Sam and Olin share fruit.  I was in California at the time, but I've seen the pictures of strange giant squid flying over Milwaukee.

At the Model Train Show in Kenosha.  Caleb found the coolest set-up early, and refused to leave this room.  This one featured G-sized tracks and trains, with one diesel and two steam locomotives on the track.  (I judge a model train set-up by it's Easter eggs, and this one featured cleverly hidden pin-up girls flashing the trains as they passed.  Not quite as erudite as the set I once saw that recreated classic comedy bits from the Keystone Cops and Harold Lloyd movies, but how much can one demand of Kenosha, WI?)

Sam, Caleb, and Olin working with Play-Do.  They feel that of all the arts, sculpture is the only one in which the form of the art lies latent within the medium.  "One applies brush and paint," Sam said, "or one employs the camera, but within the Play-Do itself lies the final form the sculpture will take.  One must only find it there, and coax it out."  They made a fish, some snakes, and several blobs.

Three men in a tub.  In no particular order: the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker.

Kirsten likes to take these kind of shots of the boys coming through the tubes.   I'm no Freudian analyst, so I'm just going to appreciate them for what they are.

At chase.

Sam's been practicing the drums lately.  We went to see Paul Cebar play the Chill on the Hill season opener in Bayview's Humbolt Park this past Tuesday, and Sam stood in the middle of a bush with two sticks and made like Neil Pert, playing Kiss covers beautiful and stoned.

I take the photos of the family suddenly emerging from the ends of slides.  Again, I'm no Freudian analyst.

Sam and Caleb at their gymnastics class.  I forget what this move was called when Reginald "The Crusher" Lisowski did this to Mad Dog Vachon.

One Who Hides What He Don't Know To Begin With

Two books, to cover the last two weeks.

Martha A. Sandweiss' Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line enticed me from the bookstore, combining on its cover many of my personal touchstones: the late nineteenth century, sepia-tone photographs of the Brooklyn Bridge, and the inescapable issue of race in America. This is a story of the secret double life of Clarence King, a notable geologist and friend of both John Hay and Henry Adams. For at least the last 13 years of his life, the (Caucasian) King lived part of the time as (African-American) train porter James Todd, marrying Ada Copeland, a New York City nursemaid and former slave.

Unfortunately, one of the problems with secret lives is that they depend on, well, secrets, so much of Sandweiss' exploration of the relation ship of King/Todd and Copeland relies on speculation. In that way, this is a non-fiction book that would have benefited from more of the tools of fiction -- presumption, redirection, suggestion -- to keep it engrossing and to perhaps suggest aspects of this secret life that the book, and capital-T researched Truth can't reveal. It's an interesting book, but it ultimately is less compelling and less salacious than this particular reader was expecting. What is mysterious and unknowable about this relationship in the book's jacket copy is just as mysterious and unknowable at it's conclusion.

David Hajdu's Positively 4th Street covers the brief convergence of the lives of Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Mimi Baez Farina, and Richard Farina. Roughly, this corresponds to the same time period as what Martin Mull refers to as the Great Folk Music Scare of 1961-1965, or the time between Dylan's first appearance at the Newport Folk Festival (as a duet partner with Baez) and his first stab at "going electric" as a folk superstar four years on.

It's a fun read, particularly as it makes stars out of two people (Richard and Mimi) I wasn't familiar with, and people out of the two stars (Bob and Joan) with whom I was. Even if you're not a Dylan fan, I think this book is worth reading just to discover the character of Richard Farina, who claimed that he had a metal plate in his head, that he was a Cuban militant, that he'd once single-handedly sunk a British submarine on behalf of the Irish Republican Army. Farina was both a novelist and a songwriter, and seems to have been fairly accomplished at both, but died young in a 1966 motorcycle crash that oddly echoes Dylan's own (non-fatal) crash a few months later.

There's plenty of pithy and acerbic comments from the late and lamented Dave Van Ronk in the book, as well as frank talk from the Baez sisters and other old folkies. And fun abounds: the marriage of Richard and Mimi was attended by Joan Baez as maid of honor and Thomas Pynchon as best man, the latter in what Hajdu describes as "a moustache so big, it looks like a costume-shop disguise (and may well have been)." Dylan and Richard Farina shoot pool at Henry Miller's house while Miller puts the moves on the Baezes. All the requisite oddballs and opportunists of Greenwich Village appear, some of whom were last seen in Van Ronk's book, The Mayor Of MacDougal Street.

I Keep Tearing Apart These Pictures Of You

I had no idea this was still on the internets.

American-Lit.com was a project I developed over the summer of 1999 while in a Multimedia Production class at Harvard. (The Office of Career Services there paid for that class for me -- and provided me the time away from work -- so that I would have the knowledge I would need to revamp the office website.) I spent the class trying to think of ways to merge nascent web design with fiction (see Pulse) and the study of American literature. I really dug the class, and spent incredibly long hours in the media lab trying to teach myself Flash and Shockwave. I worked right through July 4th -- completely spacing out on dinner plans with my aunt and uncle.

Many of the students in that course were either foriegn nationals or art students, all of us somewhat older than typical college age, all of us working on multimedia projects. There were parties, some of them on rooftops or warehouses. A Cypriot gave me a can of Red Bull (newly available), complaining that it was weaker than the European version. Everybody was listening to the Buena Vista Social Club. The whole experience made me wonder whether I should have pursued an advanced degree in web design or web development rather than pretty-story writing.

It's kind of fun to see how nineties my little abandoned web project looks these days, framed for giant boxy monitors and laid out with old skool html skillz. I had high hopes that the site would grow and get contributions from folks around the nation. I worked really hard on making the logo look type-written and Liquid Paper'd, and I worked tremendously hard on a cartoon about Marianne Moore and the Edsel that seems to no longer be functional. And it's all been just sitting out there for nearly a decade. There's also a comic strip about O. Henry and short short stories/ mini-biographies about Philip K. Dick and Sherwood Anderson. (It seems the actual domain name off http://www.american-lit.com/ no longer belongs to me -- I think I only bought a liscence for three years -- but the content seems to be housed on some Mac mainframe somewhere out there...)

Good speed into e-blivion, American-lit! Two thousand zero zero, party over, oops, out of time.

Down in the Tube Station at Midnight

A Russian zoologist found that stray Muscovite dogs had adjusted to post-Soviet urban life by commuting from the suburbs on trains. The dogs, who prefer the front- and rearmost cars and occasionally miss their stops when they fall asleep, have also learned to obey traffic lights in spite of their color blindness.

-- "Findings," Harper’s Magazine, June 2009.

The ПЯТЬ ЧЕТЫРЕ ВОСЕМЬ

Baikal lapped up a second Salty Dog and saw by the clock that he had missed the express. He would get the local – the five-forty-eight. When he left the bar the sky still held its gray; it was still raining. He looked carefully up and down the street and saw that the Borzoi bitch had moved on. He worked again at remembering her name – Miss Iska or Miss Kiska or Nistishka – and he was surprised to find that he could not remember it, although he was proud of the reach and retention of his memory and it had only been three-and-a-half dog years ago.

He’d first seen her on Poklonnaya Hill, sniffing demurely around the statue of St. George. She had a curvy brown topcoat that gave way to a white and fuzzy undercoating which seemed to be making its first show of the season. She was unadorned but for a simple collar of simple red nylon – or maybe green – which suggested she’d once belonged somewhere, a girl of the city who’d since been left to roam. As he got to know her better, Baikal came to feel that she was oversensitive and, as a consequence, lonely. She would often speak to him of what she imagined of his life – suburban lawns, a roaming pack of friends that would meet at dusk, bowls of kibble at the back door – and he felt her interest in all this spoke to a preoccupation with her own fallen status. It was not pity he felt for her but compassion. He led her behind the Red Army Memorial and sniffed suggestively at her hind quarters.

This was just dogs being dogs, two individuals seeking comfort in the moment, and she ought to have known that. When he trotted away, he made no effort to discern whether her whines indicated begging or sadness. He was a dog, but he’d never suggested otherwise.

The local was less than half full when he boarded it, and he leapt up to a seat on the river side and shook out his coat. He was no show dog – a typical, if slender, Samoyed, his tail curled nicely over his back, but he kept pride in keeping his coat clean and silvery-white. Other dogs, curled up sleeping or staring out the windows in vain attempts to discern the colors of the traffic lights, brought out in the coach the smells of hunger and wet fur. After his brush with danger, these odors seemed comforting and safe to him.

The train traveled from the imperial parts of the city into the surrounding slums, perhaps the very neighborhood that once had housed the Bozoi. He tried to shake her out of his thoughts, turning to watch the landscape – industrial and sad, full of foundries and radio towers blinking lights of indeterminate hue. “Is this seat taken?” someone said. It was the Borzoi. She was standing there, her head bent up at him with that quizzical and pointed look that called to mind the greyhounds in her family tree. “Do you mind if I sit?

“I guess not.” He remembered her name now – Miss Kiska. He’d been frightened when he first looked down at her, but her timid voice and the whatever-color bow at her neck reassured him. He scuttled over to make room on the seat for her, smelling her damp and musty coat. It wasn’t until she was full settled beside him that he noticed the butt of the pistol in her handbag.

------

(In case it's not clear, the above is kind of a cover version of John Cheever's "The Five-Forty-Eight," a great mid-20th century story of commuting and adultery. My version has Russia and dogs. Cheers!)