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December 23, 2011

Dispatches From a Guy Trying Unsuccessfully to Sell a Song in Nashville: Column 34: Mister Christmas by Charlie Hopper

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“They call him Mister Christmas,” the man said, smoking and leaning on a mixing board installed in his one-bedroom apartment. “We recorded most of the demos right here.”

He indicated a closet outfitted with foam soundproofing, a little window and a microphone.

I bet landlords in Nashville have to deal with this sort of re-carpentering all the time.

“You can have that CD,” he said. It was in a thin case with a peel ’n stick label. The typeface was that “Invented For Dot Matrix Printers” font.

I said, “Ah, hm! Huh… yeah,” hoping I sounded appreciative as I read the song titles: “Forever Christmas Eve,” “Christmas in New York,” “The Season For Romance,” “All I Want For Christmas Is The Saints To Win.” There were, like, twenty Christmas songs.

“He just has this ability to write a new Christmas song, and it sounds like a classic,” said the man, taking another drag on his cigarette.

“Mister Christmas,” I said, showing that I had been listening.

The man stubbed out his cigarette as he exhaled slowly, drawing it out so I could look at the CD and reflect on Mister Christmas’s talent.

It was a hot Southern summer day as we sat in the little apartment studio. Mister Christmas’s friend wanted to talk about my attempt to crack Nashville’s code and, more importantly, my job as creative director at an advertising agency.

He was a jingle writer.

He co-writes advertising jingles with Mister Christmas.

He was hoping to sell me a jingle.

Jingles.

Ugh.

In general, those of us in advertising who sit next to smart, funny, eye-rolling wives as our commercials air don’t like to use the word “jingle.” If we write a song for an advertisement, we call it “custom music” or “an original track” or “a song.” The term “jingle” has the stink of an old-fashioned huckster ploy.

“If you have nothing to say, sing it,” is an old ad agency joke from years ago.

Straight-up actual capital-M Music, of course, is as important as ever. It’s in the execution: you can make it seem like you know what year it is, or you can make it sound like Casey’s got a long-distance dedication all cued up.

Once we had a client whose phone number was 444-4444. My friends Evan, Bill, Chris and I wrote a song for them making fun of having such an easy phone number. Evan wrote a lot of the best lines: “444-4444/Just dial four till someone answers.” “444-4444/It even works if you dial it backwards.” “444-4444/Coincidentally spells hi-hi-hig.”

We did a version with a Cuban band that I wrote a special lyric for: “444-4444/En español, son muchos quatros.”

Funny, no?

I thought our song was pretty hip. Sounded good. Atypical. I’d tell people, “See? We wrote an actual song. Just because it’s an ad, it doesn’t have to be a jingle.”

“Charlie,” said Bill the co-writer one day when I was straining to make my point. “Charlie—if you sing the phone number, it’s a jingle.”

He was right. It still hurts.

I’ll never be ready to admit that I co-wrote a “jingle.”

And now smoking guy wanted to sell my agency a whole jingle package (full sing :30 and :60, :30 w/announcer bed, :60 w/announcer bed). I’m sure he knew from years of cold-calling that I would politely promise to keep him in mind.

We both knew this was simply a chance to talk a little Nashville shop. And so it was, on a summer afternoon, that the conversation turned to Mister Christmas.

I don’t know. There’s something unsettling about being able to pump out Christmas stuff.

It feels jingly.

And so what? Why am I so sensitive? What exactly is the difference between a jingle and a song, and my objection to the former?

Well, a jingle wouldn’t exist unless someone was willing to pay for it. A song might.

A jingle efficiently touches on all its sales points. A song seems interested in finding something out for itself, pursuing an idea wherever it might go.

A jingle wraps up a little too neatly in favor of an argument it was rigged to win. A song might end with a satisfying conclusion, but the singer experiences a little friction on the way.

A jingle has no friction.

All the things I enjoy watching or hearing or singing to myself in the car contain friction.

Maybe that’s what I have against modern Christmas songs. Mostly they’re too pat. They touch all their snowy, candle-lit bases without any trouble, as if those bases were “quality, value, and service from a name you can trust.”

Most of the well-known, overplayed, standard Christmas songs contain an unusual idea and a touch of friction, expressed crisply.

So does Mr. Christmas deploy friction crisply? Good question. (Thanks.) (You’re welcome.) I took a listen to “The Season For Romance,” performed by Lee Ann Womack. It has a deft opening heavy with specific imagery:

She smiles at him, he says ‘Hello’
They stand beneath the mistletoe
Embarrassed by the awkward circumstance
He asks her if she’d like a drink
She says, ‘I better not, I think
Oh, what the heck, maybe just one glass’

It all goes down easy, and obeys Nashville’s recommended formula. But the reason you haven’t heard of it, in my opinion, is it doesn’t contain any new ideas. Are you surprised that these two fall in love? That happens in a lot of the standards. But here there’s no facing unafraid the plans that they made, no corn for popping.

There’s no date rapist spiking her drink and wheedling, “It’s up to your knees out there.”

And as far as “complicated but intriguing ideas,” I couldn’t find anything in Mister Christmas’s oeuvre comparable to a lonely person writing Christmas cards from a place where it doesn’t snow. By the way, I counted: the convoluted premise of “White Christmas” comes across in 53 words.

Of course, you can over steer. In a quest for crispy friction, you can just be sad or obscure (like a lot of rock bands who write Christmas songs). Sometimes it works beautifully (“2,000 Miles” by Chrissie Hynde).

Sometimes not.

I wrote Christmas songs one time for our rock band’s Christmas album. It was the guitar player’s idea to do a Christmas album, and a great idea at that. I’m proud of the songs both of us wrote.

But this was before my Nashville classes; my songs are way too oblique:

Taper, taper, burning down
Faint Nat King the only sound
Neighbor’s mini-window lights blinking a-rhythmically
Apartments around mine have emptied out
It’s still and silent, inside out
Waiting in the candlelight, nobody knows about me…

Or fast-talking but low-confidence:

Well, I woke up in the morning and I knew it wasn’t autumn
The leaves had disappeared someone’d come along and got ’em
And obviously the season of giving was here…
I’m sitting at my desk and I’m getting nothing done
Drawing faces in the margins, a grin on every one
Obviously this is not a brilliant career…

Or just dissatisfied and self-defeated:

Relatives in from out of town
Big naked flakes sticking to the ground
People in sweaters gather around
To talk and talk and talk
Talk and talk and talk
Have another glass of whatever that is
Maybe I should just shut up…

Why are the flakes naked? I don’t know. I like saying it. I sort of know what it means.

Nashville smiles, clicks the CD player off before the second verse, and wishes me a merry little etc., as they prepare to record another album of worn-out standards.

Probably recording a lot of them the wrong way.

Yes, there’s right ways and wrong ways.

It’s true: I have a lot of opinions about Christmas music.

We all do, don’t we? Some from our musical taste and preferences, some from simple sentiment or childhood associations.

Into it all wades Mister Christmas.

A jingle writer.

In Nashville.

Who knows? There was a day no one knew anything about the reindeer whose nose lit up.

That “modern classic” was written by Johnny Marks, based on a Montgomery Ward Christmas promotion. As it happens, after Rudolph and “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree,” Marks was known in the songwriting biz of the fifties as “Mister Christmas.”

Is smoking man’s jingle buddy the heir to Johnny Marks’ title? Sure. Why not? Let’s give it to him.

It’s the season of that, you know.

December 19, 2011

List: Holiday Beers by Meg Pokrass

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Pop’s Alzheimer’s Lost Abbey Ale

Phoned-In Sick Too Brown

Angry Carolers Dingdong Oatmeal Stout

Pre Post-holiday Depression Winter Warmer

Jolly Holly Golly Pig Stout Lager Brew

Last Year’s XXXmas/ER Visit Pilsner

Don’t Bring The Dog This Time You Asshole Pale Ale

Dad’s Bi-Polar Disorder Porter

Totally Smoked Addiction Alcohol-Reduced 2%

A Wunderful Wut? Hard Cider

Virusbreath Barleywine

Messiah Re-Gifting Passive-Aggressive Bold

Family Supplier’s Hemp Ale

December 16, 2011

No Fear of Flying: Kamikaze Missions in Death, Sex, and Comedy: A Cure for the Human Condition by Michelle Mirsky

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Of the many fears I gladly shed in the wake of my son’s death, I miss the relentless dread of disappointment the least. Had I realized the moment the fear left me, I might have raised a glass of something aged and expensive, made a big to-do. As it happened, the terror of disappointment left me so quietly that by the time I realized it was gone all that was left was to search my recollections for the moment when I gave up the ghost and became brave and new, the border between before and after. The instant when my existence was liberated from the orbit of disappointment’s sun, came in July a few days before what would have been Lev’s 4th birthday. I’m sitting on the top step of the highest staircase in my parents’ very tall house in upstate NY, the house in which I grew up. And I’m stewing in a cold soup of disaffection.

Even though he’s been gone nearly 8 months at this point, I’ve been dreading the approach of the day Lev officially won’t get any older, the day he won’t have a cake or presents or a celebration of making it to the next buoy. That day, I think, will make it all real. I remember Lev’s 1st birthday party in the backyard of this house, co-hosted with his “best friend,” my dad, who turned 70 that same year. I think about Lev taking his first steps—at age almost-2—in the living room two stories down. I think about how it had felt the year before when Lev, then 3 and with defiant swirls of recently returned strawberry blond hair, was there in the house with me for the last time. I wouldn’t have taken this summer trip down memory lane, but for Joss, who I am delivering to his dad and grandma for a Hamptons vacation.

In this moment, I’m sitting a few steps away from my childhood bedroom and thinking about how I used to get the dry heaves from nerves the night before going to summer camp (and how Joss, who’ll head to camp for the first time in a matter of days is not at all nervous; not worried in the slightest). I’m thinking about how it felt to be a lovesick teenager in this house. And how it felt to explain to my parents that I was breaking up with the first man they thought I would marry, and the next one, and the one I did marry. And I think about the men in my life now, who are making me crazy—every last one of them—and giving me little in return. And I’m trying to decide what’s next, what the fuck I’m going to do.

I’m sitting at the top of my parents’ house and I’m reading, on the tiny screen of my smart phone, these words: “Nietzsche famously said, ‘Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.’ But what he failed to stress is that it almost kills you. Disappointment stings…” The words are from Conan O’Brien’s 2010 commencement address at Dartmouth College, a year after he was forced out of his job as the host of the tonight show and replaced by Jay Leno. The key takeaway of O’Brien’s Dartmouth address was the idea that having your worst fears realized is—maybe—the best thing that could ever happen to you (except that it’s still the worst). Of everything he’d learned from his Ivy League education, in life, through the cutthroat trials of show business, this platitude from Nietzsche contained the point Conan O’Brien wanted to drive home. That and “Disappointment stings.” In addition to feeling tremendous empathy for this tortured giant ginger of a man who’d been disillusioned on a grand scale, I thought to myself: “WELL, FUCKING DUH.”

Historically, for as long as I can remember, my relationship to disappointment was something like respect rooted in terror. Disappointment was the star around which my world revolved. Like Le Petit Prince, I lived alone on my planet (whose poles were marked at one end by the fear of displeasing anyone ever and at the other by the anticipation of being let down by everyone always). The sting of disappointment was forever hot in my cheeks and cold in my soul. Over the years I learned to imagine the worst and to gird myself against the impact of my own poor showing or the failure of others to meet my expectations. I learned to aim low in the hope that by not aiming for success I could—in effect—dodge failure. To that end, I moved thousands of miles away from my family (to evade their judgment of my un-ambitious career choices and oft abandoned creative endeavors), I stayed in terrible romances to avoid the end (or worse: the beginning of something new, ripe with fresh potential for disillusionment). To put it plainly, I hid. But the years of living in the literal fishbowl of Lev’s hospital room had put me under a microscope and made the idea of controlling my image—managing others expectations of me—moot. Instead I put my head down and submitted to the next indignity.

That evening, while Joss played with my mom and his cousin, my brother and I had gone to see the documentary Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop, about what was ostensibly O’Brien’s darkest year. Although the reasons for our disenchantment were dissimilar, I felt an affinity with Conan O’Brien’s openness about how much his downfall at NBC wrecked him. And I felt a sense of solidarity with O’Brien’s decision to go bold with his next endeavor. When I got home from the movies, I ate great forkfuls of the Dartmouth speech till the plate was empty. And when I was done, I sat a bit stunned on that familiar staircase with my darkest year turning rapidly to light. I thought about what disappointment had meant for Conan O’Brien, an admittedly blessed and lucky man—a proudly self-effacing Harvard–educated comic legend. Ambitious, driven, at the top of his field, O’Brien was financially and creatively successful with a happy, robust family to love and support him. Disappointment came for him as it comes for all of us and it nearly killed his will to create. Maybe it stung worse for this man who—on the eve of his yearlong television blackout—famously urged America not to be cynical. He hadn’t spent his whole life steeling himself for failure. For all his accolades, he was sucker-punched by disappointment. Conan O’Brien’s unceremonious ouster from NBC (which, let’s be honest, amounted to a forced paid vacation with limitless possibilities) sent him into a deep depression. I think I must have realized in that instant that disappointment is the passive-aggressive cousin of death. It’s not something any one of us can avoid successfully. It will get every one of us.

I hadn’t been afraid of death for a long time. I’d resigned myself to the infinite sleep when I was a teenager. I’d spent my early adolescence calculating the odds of Reagan or Gorbachev pushing the red button at any given moment, terrorized by the inevitable end. Odd as it may seem, the tense denouement of the Cold War coupled with my atheism (and related belief that there’s nothing after this life) forced me to develop some coping skills around my own mortality. Disappointment stuck around, though, as a major driver. Given the attention I lavished on mental dry runs of every possible tragedy, I might have fancied myself prepared for Lev’s death. If not prepared, I was at least more than familiar with that particular sad ending. I’d practiced this dance before. I prepared to be without Lev before I was ever with him. When we’d gotten the first diagnosis, when I was 22 weeks pregnant, the doctor had taken us into his office and told me that the kid growing in me was a boy whose heart had formed all kinds of backwards and that if we went to Kansas, we could legally terminate the gentle kicking in my midsection and my need for designer maternity jeans. We demurred on the late-term abortion, but after that kind of halftime show, the rest of the pregnancy was your basic gallows-walk. At the end of the road was complex surgery on an organ the size of a macadamia nut. I busied myself with plucking all negative scenarios from the galaxy of possible outcomes and making peace with them long before—or if—they were real.

In advance of Lev’s birth, I favored superstition. I wouldn’t sanction a baby shower. I didn’t buy a crib or arrange the nursery. I left the world alone. I thought perhaps if no one saw him coming, if I didn’t disturb anything, there would be less of a blast radius when the world exploded. As it happened, I gave birth to a perfect-looking baby and had to hand him over to be cut into pieces. When I left the hospital without him, my heart was shrapnel. And so Lev’s life began.

At the end of his life, after heart surgery and brain surgery and cancer and respite, when Lev’s disease returned with a vengeance and killed him inside of a month, my fear was the truss that restrained me when I might have reached for optimism. I made every attempt to extinguish hope where I found it as if it were contagious and might infect me. As he fought and we all fought with him, and after somehow always managing to right the flight path of the airplane in free-fall to which Lev’s life had become analogous, we lost. During our final weeks with the little lion, my ewer of disappointment reached maximum capacity. I had done everything I could to keep disappointment and death at bay. But we were beaten.

The reign of disappointment wasn’t over when the brightest star went dark. Lev’s death began a series of are you kidding me with this shit?! humbling experiences: the realization of exactly how hard it would be to be divorced, to co-parent Joss in separate houses, to move on; a real estate Sophie’s Choice, online dating (!), befriending (and defriending) awful people who did not have my back. It was, to say the least, a crushing weight.

There was a period surrounding Lev’s death when I thought perhaps I might die too. I was more or less indifferent to the thought. During Lev’s final stretch in the hospital (3 months all-told), I lost my voice for several weeks—the result of a convulsing cough. I’d somehow dropped 25 lbs without trying (at Lev’s funeral, I’d worn two jackets and a belt to disguise the fact that none of my clothes fit). Not infrequently, during this time, my heart would leap and flop in my chest and I’d feel as if I might black out. I’d go to my car, lay down till it passed. Part of me almost hoped an actual affliction had taken root and would quietly end me. My attempts to address normal activities of daily living in those weeks when I’d thought I was dying resembled that aspect of a dream when one tries to dial a phone and one’s fingers behave like leaden sponges. Bills sat unpaid, I forgot to feed the dog. Joss went to visit his grandmother in Arizona. My hair grew dirty and took on bizarre shapes. And then Lev died. And I did not die. And that was that.

The vagaries turned concrete by Lev’s death were staggering, but they were no longer terrifying question marks. I could grab these certainties by the balls and crush. I could lurch forward. Lev’s illness was the force of gravity that kept me tethered to planet Terrifying Letdown. And after he died each course correction served to erode my fear of the next shitstorm. I’d swallowed a bitter horse-sized pill of disappointment and my fever had broken. I’d let the fear of it go so completely, it took an earnest question from a wise man to bring its absence to my attention. Of course it still stings when the plan goes kablooey. But the fear is no longer an out-of-control speedboat dragging me behind as I try to water ski. In fact, it was nearly drowning in all of it that saved me, made me fearless. Turns out, Nietzsche was right. And so was Conan O’Brien.

December 16, 2011

Norse History for Bostonians: A Brief Introduction to Norse Economic Policy for Bostonians by Rowdy Geirsson

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Yah know, yah lose your job these days n’ yah have to go through this whole fuckin’ bureaucratic mess just tah get your fuckin’ unemployment check. I mean the way it wohrks is yah got to call in tah the fuckin’ cahreer centah hotline just tah even staht the fuckin’ process n’ I’ll be damned if yah even manage tah get through since yah got half the entiyah city of Boston tryin’ tah call in all at once. N’ then tah add insult tah injuhry yah gottah considah the fact that this whole mess all stahted down in New York of all fuckin’ places in the first place as though fuckin’ us ovah fah 86 years straight wasn’t a fuckin’ ‘nough. So now you’re standin’ there on fuckin’ hold till some recohrdin’ finally tells yah tah fuck off n’ call back latah but it’s already your 4th time callin’ in your allotted time slot fah the day n’ in the background you’re hearin’ Johnny Damon be a fuckin’ prick on the radio n’ it all just makes yah wannah smash the phone against the fuckin’ wall n’ pick a fuckin’ fight with the first person yah see.

So as yah can pretty much well tell, what this all basically ends up amountin’ tah is that yah got this system that pretty much fuckin’ guarantees that a real substantial paht of the population is gonnah have some serious fuckin’ tempahs flarin’ up whenevah the economy tanks n’ the funny thing ‘bout that is that these guys like Ted Kennedy n’ John Kerry who were the kinds of guys behind this whole system all based it on a model that came out of the same paht of the world that also produced some of the most wohrst-tempah’ed unemployed guys in all of fuckin’ histahry.

See, back in the late 700s the unemployment rate in Scandinavia was skyrocketin’ like the cost of a fuckin’ college education. Responsible business practices weren’t very populah in Scandinavia back in those days n’ so what yah ended up with was this unsustainable expansion of the fahmin’ industry n’ added tah that was the fact that it coincided with a population boom that made our post-war one look like a fuckin’ calamity of stillbohrns. So now yah got all these youngah sons of families lookin’ fah work on the fahm n’ not bein’ able to find any ‘cause all the jobs went tah their oldah brothahs. N’ as fah the women, well they didn’t really figyah intah the employment system any so there isn’t much tah say about them, but yah know, shit must have sucked fah them too ‘cause how could it not have.

Anyway, the point I’m tryin’ tah make here is that there wasn’t any sohrt of safety net so all these poor outtah worhk bastahds were basically like, “Fuck, what do we do now?” Well what they decided to do was tah legislate a Scandinavian economic stimulant package by rapin’ n’ pillagin’ the fuck outtah Europe fah the next 300 years. N’ the thing that was really fuckin’ unique about this stimulant package was that it actually stimulated the fuckin’ economy, yah know as opposed tah bankruptin’ the coffahs by siphonin’ off huge sums of govuhnment funds tah bailout n’ pay off businesses n’ individuals who have no real chance or hope of evah payin’ it back.

Now there are some guys out there who would say that the Scandinavian economic model of the late first millennium was pretty fuckin’ discriminatahry. N’ yah know, I suppose they got a point ‘cause if yah lived in England or Ireland or France or pretty much any fuckin’ where outside of Sweden, Nahway, n’ Denmahk in those days, odds were the Scandinavians were probably gonnah try not just tah unfairly tax your ass but also sell it into fuckin’ slavery. Sure, this might have been ‘bout as fair as Bobby Orr takin’ a shot against a kid who’s nevah even been on skates befohr n’ there were protests tah this sorht of economic imbalance n’ all, but usually they just ended in massacre n’ the Vikings just kept on doin’ shit howevah they so fuckin’ pleased.

But the one othah intriguin’ thing about these Scandinavian guys was that they actually had this “lagom” attitude meanin’ that even though they had no qualm ovah exploitin’ the fuck out of othahs, they still all tried tah treat each othah pretty fuckin’ equally n’ that included, yah know, tryin’ tah share their profits equally with each othah as well. N’ now if yah live in Cambridge or Brookline or one these othah hahdcore intellectual type places then I guess yah might want tah try tah connect that tah modern wealth redistribution or top-level corporate bonus schemes, yah know, whatevah gets yah blood flowin’.

But anyway, tah get back tah what we were talkin’ ‘bout, aftah completin’ one of these international business trips the Scandinavian guys would usually just head on back home tah one of their Nohrdic hahbahs with shit-tons of silvah, gold, n’ slaves n’ then they’d set up shop tah do some fuckin’ trade. N’ they’d probably give some of their gold tah the local king too just as a gift just so as tah stay in good favah with that guy ‘cause one thing you sure as fuck didn’t want back then was fah the king tah come ovah n’ staht fuckin’ around with your business like he thinks he’s the fuckin’ IRS or somethin’, but even with that bizarre voluntahry/mandahtahry tax lots of times a good numbah of these guys would still have enough left ovah tah buy their own fahm or boat or whatevah n’ then they’d hire a bunch of new guys tah work fah them n’ if that right there isn’t proof of a stimulant tah the economy then I don’t know what the fuck is.

December 15, 2011

Really funny jokes-Facebook Addiction

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If you are on Facebook, I am sure you will find this hilarious.

The 76-year-old woman walked down the hallway of Clearview Addictions Clinic, searching for the right department. She passed signs for the “Heroin Addiction Department (HAD),” the “Smoking Addiction Department (SAD)” and the “Bingo Addiction Department (BAD).” Then she spotted the department she was looking for: “Facebook Addiction Department (FAD).”

It was the busiest department in the clinic, with about three dozen people filling the waiting room, most of them staring blankly into their Blackberries and iPhones. A middle-aged man with unkempt hair was pacing the room, muttering,”I need to milk my cows. I need to milk my cows.”

A twenty-something man was prone on the floor, his face buried in his hands, while a curly-haired woman comforted him.

“Don’t worry. It’ll be all right.”

“I just don’t understand it. I thought my update was LOL-worthy, but none of my friends even clicked the ‘like’ button.”

“How long has it been?”

“Almost five minutes. That’s like five months in the real world.”

The 76-year-old woman waited until her name was called, then followed the receptionist into the office of Alfred Zulu, Facebook Addiction Counselor.

“Please have a seat, Edna,” he said with a warm smile. “And tell me how it all started.”

“Well, it’s all my grandson’s fault. He sent me an invitation to join Facebook. I had never heard of Facebook before, but I thought it was something for me, because I usually have my face in a book.”

“How soon were you hooked?”

“Faster than you can say ‘create a profile.’ I found myself on Facebook at least eight times each day — and more times at night. Sometimes I’d wake up in the middle of the night to check it, just in case there was an update from one of my new friends in India . My husband didn’t like that. He said that friendship is a precious thing and should never be outsourced.”

“What do you like most about Facebook?”

“It makes me feel like I have a life. In the real world, I have only five or six friends, but on Facebook, I have 674. I’m even friends with Juan Carlos Montoya.”

“Who’s he?”

“I don’t know, but he’s got 4,000 friends, so he must be famous.”

“Facebook has helped you make some connections, I see.”

“Oh yes. I’ve even connected with some of the gals from high school — I still call them ‘gals.’ I hadn’t heard from some of them in ages, so it was exciting to look at their profiles and figure out who’s retired, who’s still working, and who’s had some work done. I love browsing their photos and reading their updates. I know where they’ve been on vacation, which movies they’ve watched, and whether they hang their toilet paper over or under. I’ve also been playing a game with some of them.”

“Let me guess. Farmville?”

“No, Mafia Wars. I’m a Hitman. No one messes with Edna.”

“Wouldn’t you rather meet some of your friends in person?”

“No, not really. It’s so much easier on Facebook. We don’t need to gussy ourselves up. We don’t need to take baths or wear perfume or use mouthwash. That’s the best thing about Facebook — you can’t smell anyone. Everyone is attractive, because everyone has picked a good profile pic. One of the gals is using a profile pic that was taken, I’m pretty certain, during the Eisenhower Administration. “

“What pic are you using?”

“Well, I spent five hours searching for a profile pic, but couldn’t find one I really liked. So I decided to visit the local beauty salon.”

“To make yourself look prettier?”

“No, to take a pic of one of the young ladies there. That’s what I’m using.”

“Didn’t your friends notice that you look different?”

“Some of them did, but I just told them I’ve been doing lots of yoga.”

“When did you realize that your Facebooking might be a problem?”

“I realized it last Sunday night, when I was on Facebook and saw a message on my wall from my husband: ‘I moved out of the house five days ago. Just thought you should know.’”

“What did you do?”

“What else? I unfriended him of course!”

December 14, 2011

The Jims Organic Smut Acid Story by Matthew Duverne Hutchinson

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Why organic smut acid?

In 1893, my great-grandfather James set out to destroy an obscene painting at the Chicago World’s Fair. At the time, very few resources existed for people like my great granddad—simple folks with a simple passion for destroying pornographic imagery and satanic idols. Back in those days, if you were lucky enough to track down a strong enough acid for the job, chances are it wasn’t very good for your body or the planet, as great granddad soon found out. After settling for a second-rate hydrochloric that left the painting mostly intact and his eyeballs badly burned, Jim set out on his life’s mission: create the world’s first hypoallergenic, all-organic acid for throwing on immoral things.

A commitment to quality

Great Grandpa Jim always believed that going organic didn’t have to mean sacrificing quality. Today, our family’s continuing passion for great acid insures your family a perfect smut burn time after time. Over the last century, we’ve refined our signature acid blend one ingredient at a time. The sulfur used in Jim’s Organic Smut Acid is always cultivated the old-fashioned way—lovingly unearthed in small batches from our cooperatively-owned volcanic salt domes. We do it that way not because it’s easy, but because it’s right.

Though times may have changed, our family’s commitment to making the world’s finest organic smut acid hasn’t. And as immorality has evolved, so have our products. Have you (through no fault of your own) encountered offensive imagery on the internet? Our two gallon Earth’s Way Acid Bucket is perfect for dumping on desktop computers, while our Pocket Sunshine Pack is just the right amount of acid for throwing on your smart phone. Your acid, your way.

Fact: whether you want to or not, you are going to encounter graphic, decadent smut in today’s world. Pictures of men and women doing things to each other that no decent human being should ever see. And it can be difficult to look away. Extremely difficult. There was that one video that was getting e-mailed around—you know, that one with the twins on the shrimping boat? For months, I couldn’t get it out of my head. Even now, I’ll be at JCPenny trying on some work slacks, and the A/C vent happens to be directed just the right way up my pant leg and there I am on the deck of that boat again. The smell of foamy brine in my nose. The strange and unfamiliar sounds of those twins in my ears. And it is precisely at times like these that I’m so grateful to have a wholesome, pesticide-free acid to throw on that A/C vent.

Stewardship for a changing planet

Let’s cut the crap. Is running a family-owned throwing acid business going to make us rich? No. Does the increasingly litigious nature of our society make it difficult to stay in the acid business? Certainly. Are we aware of the allegations made against our company by both privately organized citizens’ advocacy groups and the federal government? Yes. Do we believe they are founded on anything more than jealousy and a patent misunderstanding of our way of life? No. Will we start paying taxes on what we rightly believe is our sovereign territory high in the mountains of West Virginia? No. Because that’s the way great granddad Jim would have wanted it. I know this because I have spoken to his ghost.

At the end of the day, at Jim’s Organic Smut Acid, we still believe that a healthy body begins with a balanced lifestyle: exercise, diet, laughter, protecting the borders of the land deeded to you by the archangel Uriel, and throwing acid on anything that makes you sexually aroused. Simple values. Simple results. From our family to yours, we hope you enjoy using our acid products as much as we’ve enjoyed creating them for you.

December 14, 2011

The Long Walk: A Column About Washington: The Ballad of Thom Moore by Alec Bings

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The first thing you might notice is the silence. It’s not an empty office; people hover amid cluttered desks and gray cubicle walls and piles upon piles of unclaimed campaign paraphernalia. But the low-ceilinged, fluorescent-lit space prickles in its muted hum—and with nothing to drown it out, a laptop’s thin audio draws attention. That audio is the focus of a huddled few, and their moods are darkening.

It’s December 3rd, and this small group—cloistered in Herman Cain’s campaign headquarters in Urbandale, Iowa—is learning of their boss’ exit from the race via streaming video. It’s shocking, certainly, as yet-unaware staff members elsewhere in the building are still moving furniture to make room for staff from the national operation arriving to prepare for the caucuses next month. Volunteer sign-up sheets hanging on the wall indicate names slotted to work through the upcoming week.

Reporters on hand to witness these last official moments from within Cain HQ describe only tempered grief from paid staffers. But it’s a different story amid the volunteers. One woman who had supported Cain since January is described as “overcome with emotion” and her son, Thom Moore, speaks to a reporter with tears welling in his eyes.

“I feel like I’ve lost my best friend,” Thom says.

“I lost control of any capacity that I had,” Thom says.

“It’s taking everything in me not to fall apart,” Thom says.

This hyper-emo gut-reaction to a campaign’s end is distressing but hardly atypical. Certainly the fact that Thom’s heartache comes thanks to handsy dimwit Herman Cain doesn’t make for reduced pain. If anything, the rending of garments in Iowa and elsewhere gives Cain’s semiserious ego-cruise an air of tragic grandeur it never frankly deserved. But the passion it apparently created in his devotees is instructive.

Campaigns make for rough business. When people find themselves shoving their life’s priorities down a notch to work for free on behalf of a stranger, it triggers something approaching sacramental. With campaigns in a constant battle against time, volunteers often take on consistently greater commitments than they ever expected in a kind of Peter Principle of emotional availability. These true believers often don’t talk about anything save the campaign. Their near-pathological devotion causes them to live in an endless loop of Panglossian daydreams exploding with possible paths to glorious victory. And yet, at the end of all that energy and all that effort, just about everyone’s political messiah steps up to a microphone, waves, and admits that it was all for nothing, sorry. In the peak of a campaign, true believers can feel awfully alone; on the day their raison d’être goes extinct, that desolation becomes self-consuming.

In our modern political era, campaigns for president tend to emanate from the candidate—one who is either rich or charismatic, but usually both. These contests base themselves around the virtues of the person, and policy platforms simply follow along. This is true for the brief candidacy of Herman Cain—the man literally works as a motivational speaker—but also for success stories à la the movement around then Sen. Barack Obama. A candidate’s enthusiasts are obsessives of the individual first and foremost—and for these diehards, a loss is a drastic outcome akin to a death.

That brand of interminable, personal agony is a far cry from life among Washington’s federal employees. Working in this city offers up a more pragmatic milieu; once you’re in the suck, you can see the world for what it is. There are greater causes, bigger fights to be waged. Staffers move from congressmen to higher-ranking congressmen or from federal agencies to the White House and back, all striving for the same goal. It’s a thousand-year war that was here before we arrived and it will outlive our short stay. Which is all to point out that the world of national politics stands in pretty stark contrast from the individualized crusades found in your quadrennial primaries and caucuses. Look, we’re used to failure. Wizened D.C. staffers have a habit of locking their shoulders on the “shrug” setting. It doesn’t matter which party you belong to—amid all the compromised wins and temporary fixes, there is inescapable disappointment in D.C. But it is rare for Washington lifers to respond to disastrous outcomes in the manner of young Thom Moore. We’re frustrated like everyone else—more really, the inanity is truly terrifying up close—but our balled-up fists are directed more toward the rancid system than some toppling of a personal hero who promised to change the world.

To put it another way, we’re constantly approaching tragedy here—let me check my calendar for the next scheduled government shutdown—and we’ve learned to roll with it. Think about most folks’ virginal experience with national politics. They usually get their first bite at the apple working on, or at least caring about, a campaign. “I was never interested in politics until Candidate X came along,” they say. And, inevitably, as the more quixotic candidates start falling by the wayside, fanatics with their fervency-coated beliefs are destroyed by the loss. Sure, that feeling doesn’t go away; even hardened political operatives suffer badly after defeats. But for the uninitiated, the devastation seems to demand a force majeure clause to free them from emotional liability. For most defeated candidates, their exultant season on the national stage is gone. That moment for their volunteers is also past. In the end, it’s necrophilistic to spend too much time there.

At least, that’s how Washington works. To care too greatly about a loss or a disappointment or some specific renegade asshole in a position of power is an intensively seriocomic gesture. The world of campaigns is the place for idealist purity, as perhaps it should be. Yet the dirty secret of presidential politics holds that no matter which Republican wins the nomination, their governance—should they win the White House—would be essentially identical to each others’. (For the purposes of this discussion I am not factoring in a President Ron Paul, as I’m not sure but I think there’s a decent chance America would revert to a barter economy.) With any GOP win, party honchos will fill the administration with the same members of their establishment, put the same Supreme Court justice nominees on the bench, etc.—kind of like President Obama surrounding himself with the Clinton alumni network. And as Republican nominees abandon their hopes over the upcoming year, their followers will move closer to the cognitive restructuring they have coming their way, a melancholic drifting from differentiated perfection toward an inevitable systemic conformity. And in that sense, I sympathize with Iowa’s Thom Moore and his rapturous agony. Welcome to hell, kid.

December 12, 2011

Superman jokes

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Superman’s been wearing that one outfit for over half a century.

He’s strong–and a little gamy, I think! Now I know why Superman left Krypton.
Earth was the only place where he could get steroids!

Lois Lane is Crazy about Superman.
On Valentine’s Day, she sends a card to the phone company!

Because of his X-ray vision, Superman is unable to pass an eye test.
When he looks at an eye-chart, he sees through it to a billboard in the next county!

As mild-mannered Clark Kent, Superman is afraid of girls.
He’s worried that he’ll run into the one he stole the red and blue suit from!

Superman can fly across the country in ten minutes.
A little longer, if he’s on stand-by!

Superman used to fly across the country much faster.
Now he has to go by way of Atlanta!

I think Superman would be cooler if he was the Man of Reinforced Plexiglass.
Bullets would still bounce off, but we’d get the added bonus of seeing real superhero internal organs.

December 7, 2011

Fading the Vig: A Gamblers Guide to Life: $100 Hand of Blackjack, Foxwoods Casino by David Hill

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I met Anthony in a poker game at the Diamond Club in New York City. He was fairly nondescript, just a normal everyday thirty-something white guy, business casual, head-down and putting-in-work in the pot-limit game. We were having a conversation around the table about blackjack. I had just made a comment about card counting when his head shot up.

“You count cards?” he asked me.

“A little,” I responded. I had no idea how to count cards. “Do you?”

“Do I!” He laughed.

It turns out Anthony, a finance industry flunky by day, had a small crew that hit Atlantic City and Foxwoods on the weekends and counted cards. He said a typical weekend haul was “nothing serious, maybe twenty or thirty grand.” It just so happened they were looking for some new talent and would I like to go to Foxwoods with them for the weekend and give it a shot? It sounded like an adventure. The fact that I had no idea how to count cards never entered in to my mind before I enthusiastically agreed.

Card counting isn’t mathematically very complicated. You keep a running tally in your head of the high cards versus the low cards. Low cards add to the tally, high cards subtract from it. The higher the number the more favorable the conditions for betting; the idea being that a shoe with a high concentration of high cards in it will deal out more winning hands than a shoe with low cards. There’s more complexity to it than this, but that’s the basic gist. I went to the bookstore and bought a book on counting called “Blackjack for Blood.” I practiced on decks of cards at home. I thought I had it down. I felt like I was ready. Once again my overconfidence was not only unfounded but about to get me in to trouble.

- – -

Overconfidence, both founded and otherwise, runs in my family. My mother is one of these people who is always coming up with new business ideas and trying to make them work. It is one of the traits I picked up from her that I’m most proud of, the proclivity to not just talk about something but to go ahead and do it. My sister, too, has always been what we call back home “too big for her britches.”

I’m three years older than my sister, which means that we only went to school together one year, my senior year. It was uniquely humiliating to be known throughout my senior year as “Jamie Hill’s brother.” I had been there for three whole years before Jamie showed up, yet almost as soon as she arrived she made her mark on the place. She was popular and outgoing, she was loud and brave, she was domineering and aggressive, and she loved attention almost as much as she loved getting her way. As long as I could remember she had always been that way.

We grew up as close as two kids of different ages and genders could. With one parent working on the road and the other one working full-time, we spent a lot of our childhood together being shuttled between school, day care, and grandma’s house. I tried to look after her, to be the protective big brother, but it wasn’t always so easy. One of the consequences of being in the middle of everything all the time meant that whenever there was trouble, you were in the middle of that, too.

One of my earliest memories of not being able to protect my sister from danger came around the age of nine. My sister and I were at daycare and all of the children were playing outside. Despite my protestations Jamie insisted on playing with the bigger kids who were roughhousing and chasing each other, rather with the other little kids, who were playing with toys. I’m not sure if my motives for wanting to stop her were more that I didn’t want my “baby sister” cramping my nine-year-old style or if I was truly concerned for her safety, but it didn’t matter. She did what she wanted. And on this particular day while she was chasing some of those big kids in the yard, she tripped on a stone, flew through the air, and ate dirt face-first into the yard. At first everyone laughed, myself included. But when she stood up all of the kids stood in horrified silence. Her face was covered in dirt, her mouth was filled with blood. It poured out over her bottom lip like a faucet. Her teeth were knocked in every direction. She wailed like no six-year-old should ever have to. I froze in fear.

- – -

Anthony’s crew worked like this: there were four of us who would sit at four different tables and play for the minimum while we counted the deck. When any of us had a high count we would signal in Anthony and his girlfriend Alexa, who would come over to our table and start betting big until the count went cold.

The table I saddled up had a $5 minimum. I just played $5 a hand while I tried to keep the count going in my head. It wasn’t at all easy. There were so many distractions all around me that kept me off the count, not to mention all of the decisions I had to make along the way. One thing I failed to take in to consideration while practicing at home was that I’d still have to play my hands and play them correctly, which often caused me to forget where the count was at. It was constant stress. I was sure I wasn’t counting right. I missed cards left and right. It’s one thing to be a little off when you’re playing with your own money, but this was a whole other thing, Anthony’s “nothing serious” money. I prayed that my count never got high enough to warrant me signaling Anthony and Alexa over to my table. Just a couple of hours in to the first night and I was petrified. I wanted out of this.

It didn’t help that I was seated next to Paul. Paul was a very large man in a tweed jacket with wild hair and large, thick eyeglasses. He was professorial but also completely wasted. He rambled on and on out into the ether; neither the dealer nor I were paying his trivia and anecdotes much mind. It was irritating on many levels, but mainly because it was fucking up my count.

Then it happened. My count was growing steadily. One stiff card after another came out of the shoe. I grew anxious. If my count was right then it was time for the signal. I signaled by taking off my baseball cap. I waited. The count grew higher. Plus-one, plus-one, minus-one, plus-one, plus-one, plus-one, on and on it went—still no Anthony or Alexa. I glanced around the room. The other counters were all around me. Anthony and Alexa stood behind a table, not even playing. I leaned back in my chair, trying to get their attention. Anthony looked over at me, saw my hat was off, and then looked away as fast as he could, not even making eye contact.

“Sir, place your bets.” The dealer was waiting for me to put my $5 chip out in the circle before dealing the cards. I wasn’t sure if my count was right, but I knew that even if I was a little bit off, the count was still huge. I wasn’t going to let this opportunity go to waste. Screw waiting for Anthony. I put a hundred bucks on the circle.

“Holy Mary Mother of God!” Paul almost fell out of his stool. He slapped his big ham hock of a hand on my back. “Check out Mr. High Roller over here! You feeling lucky or what?”

Paul wasn’t helping. The whole reason card counting crews operate this way is so that a single player doesn’t have to do what I’m doing, dramatically vary their bets with the count. It is a dead giveaway that you’re counting if the pit boss or dealer is paying attention. We do the counting, Anthony and Alexa do the betting, that was the idea.

“Yeah, I feel lucky. Plus I’m going to go soon,” I tried to cover.

“If you’re feeling lucky, I’m feeling lucky,” Paul said. He dropped three more $25 chips on top of the green $25 chip he had already bet. Great, now I got a partner. I looked around for the closest exit. I wanted to disappear.

- – -

I left Arkansas after graduation. Jamie finished high school and stuck around Arkansas. She tried college for a semester but failed every class. She tried living on her own for a while but managed to get fired from every job she had, usually for sleeping through work. Over the years her popularity had turned to notoriety. Her circle of friends shrunk and her number of enemies grew. She did drugs, she drank to excess, she stole, she got in to fights. She had a terrible car accident one night while driving stoned and exhausted. She was thrown through the windshield of her car and met the pavement on the interstate with her head. The crack in her skull that prevented her brain from swelling kept her alive. When she regained consciousness in the hospital, the police were there waiting to question her about the stolen purse they found in the car and the drugs they found in her system.

Eventually Jamie figured she needed to flee Arkansas and the people in her life in order to give herself a chance to catch some good cards. Our parents reluctantly agreed. On one hand she had proven a poor decision maker, immature and irresponsible in virtually every aspect of her life. On the other hand there were no good jobs in Arkansas and Jamie’s only friends were a seedy cast of characters. Collect calls came to the house from prisons. Police would come to my mother’s home, guns drawn, to search for suspects. Every month there seemed to be another funeral for another kid from Jamie’s class. It was a tough choice to let her go off on her own, but at the time it certainly seemed wise compared to the status quo.

She chose Dallas, Texas. She crashed with a friend and quickly found a good job and a nice apartment. By that Christmas she was buying everyone expensive gifts and paying off her debts. She was kicking our mother extra cash, even picking up the check at dinner. She seemed happier. A little change of scenery and the cards were finally breaking the other way. Everyone breathed easier and bragged on the newfound spring in Jamie’s step.

- – -

The dealer dealt out the hands. I had an eight. Paul had a sixteen. The dealer showed a face-up four. So much for the count being high. The dealer motioned to Paul.

“Hit me.”

I sat straight up in my seat. Did he just say “hit me”? With a sixteen against a four? Even a drunk nutjob like Paul should realize that the dealer was going to have to take a card and stood a good chance of busting. The dealer peeled off another card. Fwap. A three.

“Nineteen! Not bad! I’ll stand.”

The dealer motioned towards me. I swiped my card towards me indicating I wanted a hit. She slid out the next card from the shoe and flipped it over—the jack of clubs. I waved my hand to indicate I wanted to stand on eighteen.

The dealer then flipped over her facedown card. It was a nine giving her thirteen. She took off another card—a six—giving her nineteen. She picked up my green chips and put them in her rack. She patted the table next to Paul’s chips, indicating a push. He clasped my shoulder.

“Guess that feeling you had wasn’t luck after all,” he chortled, rubbing salt in my wounds.

“It would have been if you knew how to play your hand!”

If Paul had stood on sixteen like he was “supposed” to, then I would have caught his three and my ten to make twenty-one.

“I think I did just fine. If I played my hand the way you say, I would have lost,” Paul huffed, his breath sour with booze. “Just worry about how to play your own hand instead of worrying about how I play mine.” He grinned and winked as he slapped me on the back.

“That’s hard to do when the way you play your hands is costing me money,” I growled. The dealer patiently waited for our argument to finish before dealing the next hand.

“Your bad luck isn’t my fault, kid.”

“You are my bad luck,” I shot back.

“You think all those cards are in that shoe in some kind of perfect order, just magically arranged so that you can win? The cards come how they come. How I play my hand didn’t make you lose. You think that when I got up to take a piss an hour ago and missed all those hands, you think that made you lose this hand, too? I mean if everything I do affects you, then it must!” He laughs and slaps the table. “This isn’t like some butterfly flapping his wings in China shit. Me and you aren’t connected.”

“I don’t know about all that. I just know that nobody hits a sixteen against a four.”

“It’s easy once all the cards are out face up to see how maybe you could have won if this thing didn’t happen or that thing did happen. But that isn’t how life works.”

“What are you, a philosopher now?”

“No, I’m just someone a lot older than you who has been playing this game a lot longer than you. You think you’re fooling anyone? I know you’re counting cards. Hell, even she knows!” He pointed at the dealer. She chuckled. I knew then why Anthony and Alexa had written me off. I was made. The pathetic thing was it didn’t even matter; the casino didn’t even push me off.

“What’s the point of all that, counting cards?” Paul asked as the dealer started dealing again.

“To make money,” I responded. “To get an edge on the house.”

“Yeah but where’s your edge?” he laughed. “You just lost a hundred bucks!”

“Over the long run I have an advantage.”

“Long run, I love it.” Paul grabbed me by the back of my neck and aimed my face towards the dealer. “Can you believe this kid?” he said to her. I wiggled out of his grip.

“How long is this long run, anyway? Hours? Weeks? Months? You planning on moving in to this place? You gonna sit here wearing a diaper like those other degenerates?”

“It’s all just one long session,” I said, repeating something I’m sure I heard someone else say once. “Tonight and every other night, it’s all one long game.”

Paul shook his head in disapproval. “That’s the trouble with you ‘advantage players,’ you long run types. You never know which shoe could be your last shoe.”

He looked down at his cards. Blackjack. The dealer said “ooh, nice one,” as she stacked his chips in front of him. He tipped her a five-dollar chip.

“Forget the counting, kid. Carpe diem and all that shit. Just try to enjoy the game.”

- – -

Jamie told herself this would be the last time she did it. She had been lucky so far. Lucky to have made so much money. Lucky to have so many powerful people looking out for her. Lucky to have kept it all from her family. Lucky that she hadn’t been caught by the police. She knew that eventually her good luck would run out. But she needed to do it one last time. One last time and she’d be done for good.

There had been other ‘one last times,’ but this one was different. She needed this money. She had to get oral surgery, the last oral surgery in a long line of dental work she’d had done throughout her life. The time she fell at daycare when she was six had set her teeth growing in all sorts of strange directions. She spent decades with braces and bridges and mouthpieces, all manner of contraptions to get her teeth growing back in the right direction. But now she was an uninsured adult with several maxed-out credit cards and an expensive drug habit, and dental work isn’t cheap.

She knew the routine. She left her apartment at dark driving a white rental car. She called up the guy she only knew as Peanut and told him she was on the road. As many times as she had made this run, she always knew better than to ask what it was she was carrying. Better she not know, she figured, in case she ever needed the deniability.

She drove for a couple of hours on Interstate 30 heading east towards Arkansas. Usually when she made these runs she had an escort in a car up ahead of her or behind her, just to make sure things went well. Tonight they sent her out alone. When she crossed over the state line she picked up the phone they gave her and dialed Peanut to tell him.

“Get off at the next exit,” he told her. “There’s a Wal-Mart on your right. Park it in the lot, leave the keys in it, then go inside. I’ll call you when it’s time to come out and someone will give you a ride home.”

“I’m afraid,” she told him.

“You’re doing great,” Peanut consoled her. “There’s nothing to be afraid of.”

Jamie reached up and adjusted her rearview mirror to get a count on the number of police cars behind her.

“What about all these blue lights in my mirror, P? Should I be afraid of that?”

- – -

Walking around the yard outside the prison visiting room, I tell my sister about counting cards. I wonder whether or not she thinks it is an apt metaphor for what happened to her—that her life ran in streaks, each one eventually and inevitably met with its opposite.

“I don’t think there’s such thing as streaks, as luck. Nothing was inevitable. I just think the more you win, or get away with or whatever, the more you risk the next time. And the more and more you risk, the more severe the consequences when you finally lose.”

“Was this really the last run, then? It sounds like you think if you got away with it you’d have done it again.”

“Every trip was supposed to be the last one. At least that’s what I’d tell myself. But I don’t think that means I had no choice. I had a choice. I made the wrong choice over and over again. And you get used to making bad choices is all. But it doesn’t mean you don’t still have a choice. It just gets harder and harder to make the right one the more wrong you do.

“I could have got out. I could have avoided 38 staples in my head when I was nineteen. I could have made straight A’s and got an education. I could have made different choices. But this life got to where it was what was more comfortable for me, believe it or not. Doing all this shit was actually the easier choice than to play it straight. Isn’t that nuts?”

I didn’t think it was nuts at all, and I told her so.

“I still try to make my bad choices worth all of this,” she motions around the prison yard. “I had tons of money, tons of friends, tons of free time, tons of fun. But then sometimes I think coming to prison saved my life. Maybe that’s all luck is, unintended consequences. Like I was lucky I didn’t wear my seatbelt that night I had the wreck because flying through the windshield probably saved my life. And I’m lucky I got busted because who knows where I was headed if I didn’t?”

We sit down on a bench for her to show me the hat she has knitted for my infant son, her only nephew, who was born after she was locked up. Knitting is a popular pastime in prison. I always figured that when my sister did her bid she’d make use of the time by taking college courses, learning a new language, exercising, whatever; and she did all of those things. But eventually the women in the prison turn their attention to idle activities like knitting or playing cards because it makes time pass by quicker. I asked her about this.

“That’s one of the things you learn in here,” she tells me. “Nobody can stop time. You just have to wait it out.”

I look up to my sister despite all of this. Her kind of life has been a hard kind, one filled with heartbreak of epic proportions, only the surface of which I’ve scratched here. Even now, hearing her brush aside any suggestion that a hard life is a form of hard luck, I still won’t be angry with her for the choices she has made. Her choices had terrible consequences, and they affected more people than just her, myself included. All the same, they were hers to make alone. Sitting here next to me in this prison yard, telling me about how luck is bullshit, holding this tiny little hat, she’s paying the price alone. I still can’t protect her. I will not judge her.

“That’s the trouble with you ‘carpe diem,’ short-run types,” I tell her. “You never …

December 2, 2011

Historys a Bitch: A Dog Walk Through Time: Space Rover by Robb Fritz

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The Earth is the cradle of the mind, but one cannot live forever in a cradle.—Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, Russia’s “Father of Rocketry”

And just think of Laika, the space dog. They stuck her in Sputnik and blasted her into outer space. Wires in her brain and her heart showed how she was doing. I don’t think she felt so hot. For five months she circled the earth until her food ran out. So, compared to stuff like that…
—My Life As a Dog, Lasse Hallstrom 1987

- – -

On November 3, 1957, Russia shocked the world by launching the first living creature ever into space: Laika, a gentle, intelligent part-Samoyed terrier from the streets of Moscow. Within the week, New York Times writer Gay Talese would add Laika’s name to the list of the dogs of history, alongside Argus from Homer’s Odyssey, FDR’s dog Fala, and Checkers, the star of Nixon’s speech from five years earlier. Thanks to Laika, the spacecraft in which she flew, Sputnik II, was immediately dubbed “Muttnik.”

Exactly 30 days earlier on October 4th, Sputnik I, a basketball-sized metal ball with four long antennae trailing behind was the first object to be successfully sent into orbit. Coincidentally, this was the same night as the launch of another ’50s icon, Leave It to Beaver, a time capsule of bland Eisenhower-era domestic unreality that was a mainstay of my ’70s afterschool TV lineup. The lineup also included the Space Race-inspired I Dream of Jeannie, featuring Larry Hagman as an astronaut who, after landing far from his planned recovery site, finds a Jeannie in a bottle, played by Barbara Eden in an elaborate costume carefully designed to hide her navel in order to comply with the TV standards department of 1965.

But back in the fall of 1957, actual manned space flights landing on beaches laden with magic lanterns were years in America’s future and the squeaky-clean conflicts between the Beave, Wally, and that devious suck-up Eddie Haskell were the last thing on Eisenhower’s mind. Russia’s Sputnik double-whammy was everywhere in the press, and the launch of Laika into space so soon after Russia had launched the first orbital satellite was salt in the wounds of America’s already damaged pride. Sputnik meant “satellite” or “moon” in Russian, and there were now not one, but two “Russian moons” passing at regular intervals over American skies, one carrying an actual full-sized dog. There was a deeper, darker Cold War fear at work as well: the same rockets that could send a dog successfully into space—if not yet, as it happened, successfully bring that dog back to earth alive—could also potentially send apocalyptic nuclear payloads across the ocean into American cities.

My mother-in-law grew up in the ‘50s in Hampton, Virginia, at the epicenter of a critical mass of naval, army and air force bases, shipyards and research facilities, where her father worked for NASA and its precursor NACA. When she was 10, she vividly remembers overhearing an eye-opening conversation between her father and a co-worker, discussing the rationale behind the recent decision to stop teaching “duck and cover” in the local elementary schools: in the event of a nuclear attack, the area where they lived would be such a prime target they wouldn’t even stand a chance. So the people she grew up with had a particular reason for the dread that kicked in with the launch of the two Sputniks.

Soviet leader Nikolai Khrushchev was thrilled by the public relations coup instigated by Sputnik I’s 18,000 mph circling of the planet, sending out its trademark 40 megacycle “beep… beep… beep” to ardent shortwave-armed “Sputnik chasers” worldwide. He gave his chief rocket scientist Sergei Korolev just one month to come up with an even greater spectacle to capture the public’s attention, timed to coincide with the fortieth anniversary of the October Revolution on November 7th. Korolev suggested putting a dog into space and Khruschev was immediately sold on the idea.

Laika had been introduced to the Russian public a week before the launch as Kudryavka (“Little Curly”) when she barked into the microphone during a radio interview with one of her keepers, Dr. Alexei Prokovsky. The professor was explaining the dog’s role in achieving their dream of a time when “human travel in space will be a reality” and man could “establish contact with other distant, hitherto unknown worlds.” A few days later, on October 31st, she was brought to Sputnik II, readied with sensors to monitor her heart rate, blood pressure and breathing, and strapped into her flight container. There she would sit in wait for two days, 70 feet above ground at the top of the huge R-7 rocket that would carry her into space. Her handlers decided that a shorter, easier name was needed for world consumption, and her new name was born: Laika, meaning “Barker” in Russian, in honor of her radio performance from the previous week.

The time constraint placed on the rocket team led to the launch’s one PR miscalculation: with no knowledge yet of how to return a Sputnik safely back to earth, whatever dog went up into space was not coming back alive. The scientists working with Laika were certainly saddened by this, and one of them brought her home to play with his children the night before she was scheduled to be placed aboard Sputnik II.

As it was, Laika did not make it anywhere near the five months that Ingemar imagines in My Life As A Dog, nor did she even make it the week that the ship’s designers had intended for her to survive. Already leery of the bad press they were starting to get as it dawned on the public that Laika was not coming back to Earth alive, the Russians told the press that Laika had adapted well and had survived for six to seven days. In fact, while her heart rate did race up to 260 b.p.m. during the launch when she was no doubt terrified by the deafening roar of the R-7 rocket and the terrific g-forces being exerted on her body, she had initially recovered well. It wasn’t until 1999, 42 years after the launch, that some of the scientists involved with the launch admitted the truth: the cooling system for Laika’s cabin had not performed as they’d hoped, and Laika had overheated, dying somewhere between four and seven hours into the flight.

While the full truth of Laika’s early death was not known at the time, her ultimate fate was, and the recriminations started rolling in. The ASPCA announced that it deplored an act that could not “possibly advance human health and welfare.” A particularly pathos-laden New York Times editorial declared Laika the “shaggiest, lonesomest, saddest dog in history,” which was certainly wrong on at least the first fact, and would have required a reliable dog psychic to confirm the final two. Eisenhower would later note that while everyone was certainly impressed by Russia’s technical feat sending Laika into space, “by a strange but compassionate turn, public opinion seemed to resent the sending of a dog to certain death.”

In any case, Laika was not the first and certainly not the last animal to die, or at least risk death, for the Space Race, and Americans were as guilty of the practice as Russians. An entire menagerie of mice, rats, dogs, spider monkeys and even bears—which the Americans used to test the affect of massive Gs on the human body—were to follow.

But Laika’s ultimate fate did little to diminish the impact of the achievement itself. After Laika was launched into space, Eisenhower’s Gallup poll numbers went the exact opposite direction, diving by a stunning 22 points in a matter of days. The fact that he had been intentionally avoiding escalating the Space Race with Russia in order to avoid also escalating the arms race was a fact he was forced to keep to himself; the main message the public received, often from Wernher Von Braun, the dashing, press-friendly former Nazi rocket scientist who now ran the U.S. Army’s space efforts, was that the Eisenhower administration was senselessly stifling America’s potential dominance in space.

A few weeks after the launch of the first Sputnik, Eisenhower announced his plans to go on the air with a series of what he called “confidence speeches,” popularly known as the “chins up” speeches, in an effort to calm America’s fears by putting Sputnik I in context and explain the planned American response. Unfortunately, the launch of Sputnik II intervened. This meant the President’s first speech was now scheduled three days after Russia stunned the world all over again with a second momentous Space Race victory. After the ill-timed speech the legendary Washington Post cartoonist Herblock made a point of depicting Ike indeed giving the speech “chin up”… chin up because he was staring at an object labeled Sputnik II flying over his head.

The stress got to Ike, and by the end of the month Laika and the Sputniks had literally driven him apoplectic. On November 25th, three weeks after Sputnik II’s launch and right before he was scheduled to deliver his third confidence speech in Cleveland, Ike found himself unable to speak clearly to his secretary. He had suffered a stroke, although for obvious reasons the nature of the illness that took him out of the public spotlight for three days was not revealed. Initially, there were rumors that he would have to leave office, in which case Vice President Richard Nixon would have become president. Within three days of the stroke, however, despite occasional difficulties with his speech, Eisenhower was again taking official visits and he eventually fully recovered.

The Democrats worked to ensure that the political damage from Laika’s flight into space was more permanent. Three days after Sputnik II made headlines and immediately after Eisenhower’s first “chins up” speech, a young senator named John F. Kennedy, already working on his 1960 run for president, gave a speech in which he declared, “The people of America are no longer willing to be lulled by paternalistic reassurances, spoon-fed science fiction predictions, or by pious platitudes of faith and hope.” Another presidential hopeful, Senator Lyndon Baines Johnson, went a step further and started hearings before the Senate Preparedness Subcommittee about the state of the United States space program, opening the hearings by announcing that in his estimation Sputnik was a bigger concern than even Pearl Harbor.

Politics aside, Johnson was hardly alone in equating Sputnik with Pearl Harbor. Even decades later historian Walter A. McDougall would write about the Sputnik launches that “no event since Pearl Harbor set off such repercussions in public life.” Without question, the Sputnik launches set off a spirit of competition with the Soviet Union that led to a massive increase of American research and funding of the sciences, technology and engineering. My mother-in-law remembered being less than pleased at finding herself in the first wave of eighth grade classes required to learn algebra.

Paul Dickson, in his history of Sputnik, points out that this renewed American focus led directly to the development of microelectronics, the foundation of our fully-computerized world, and that “many essential technologies of modern life, including the Internet, owe their early development to the accelerated pace of applied research triggered by Sputnik.” The next time you find yourself wasting an hour of your life paging through your Twitter feed and Facebook updates, thank Laika!

At Johnson’s senate hearings, von Braun was more than willing to fan the flames of nuclear fears in order to put the screws on the Eisenhower administration and force them to finally approve the orbital launch he’d been dreaming of and working toward for so long. When asked if the Russians were already capable of dropping a hydrogen bomb on Washington, von Braun answered “I would think so. Yes, sir.” He and others also made it extremely clear during the hearings had the Army not been hampered by the Eisenhower administration, they would have been capable, through their Jupiter program, of sending a satellite into orbit a year earlier.

Von Braun was a fascinating character with Cary Grant good looks who—much to the White House’s chagrin—had an easy and largely irrepresible relationship with the press. He was also a German aristocrat and a former Nazi who had masterminded Hitler’s V-2 rocket program (in characteristically dramatic Nazi fashion, the “V” in V-2, probably suggested by Hitler himself, stood for “Vergeltungswaffen” or “Vengeance Weapon”). When Germany’s defeat in 1945 was becoming a fait accompli, von Braun put in his lot with the Americans, who were all too willing to whitewash his Nazi past—including the deaths of thousands of concentration camp slaves in the rocket building efforts—in order to bring his genius into their own military efforts.

Von Braun’s equivalent in the Russian space program, Sergei Korolev, the man personally responsible for both Sputnik launches and later for Yuri Gagarin’s 1961 historic flight as the first man in space, was the absolute opposite of Braun’s determinedly public persona and was in fact never even identified—outside of highly secretive intelligence circles—during his lifetime. In true Cold War fashion, the Soviets, terrified that Korolev would become the target of C.I.A. assassins, would only ever identify him by the Kafkaesque rubric “Chief Designer.” The only public communication he was allowed to give were occasional letters to the press that he wrote under the pseudonym Professor K. Sergeev.

After Laika, the Space Race continued, first with America’s rushed and pathetically bungled response to Sputnik, the failed launch of the Navy’s Vanguard I, followed by Von Braun’s first success in January of 1958 with the launch of the Explorer satellite. In 1959, the original American astronauts—the Mercury 7—were chosen. For my mother-in-law’s childhood community, they were local heroes; it was a huge moment at Hampton High, my mother- and father-in-law’s high school, when the seven—Scott Carpenter, Gordon Cooper, John Glenn, Gus Grissom, Wally Schirra, Alan Shepard, and Deke Slayton—visited the school for an official tour. In 1961 the Russians reached another historic first with Yuri Gagarin’s flight into space, followed 23 days later by Alan Shepard’s much more public flight and recovery. The Americans finally beat the Russians to the ultimate finish line eight years later, putting the first man on the moon with NASA’s Apollo 11 mission on July 20, 1969 under now-President Richard Nixon.

The Cold War, which today feels like an antiquated detail straight out of Mad Men, was still very much a part of my childhood in the ’70s, and it was a favorite hobby of my parents finding communist conspiracy theories behind everything from Social Security to legalized abortion. But while I certainly absorbed a palpable childhood dread of nuclear apocalypse, the more cloak and dagger aspects of the Cold War were beginning to feel like a thing of the past. After Brezhnev, that unsmiling chunk of Slavic granite who seemed to singlehandedly put the “Cold” in “Cold War”, Gorbachev felt like a big cuddly teddy bear, albeit one with an Alaska-shaped wine-stain solidly placed on his congenial bald head. The good will of Perestroika was in the air, and by ’91 the Soviet Union was entirely a thing of the past. The Cold War was over. And the nuclear threat—while still a reality—has largely been replaced by global warming as the apocalyptic threat of the day.

Space exploration has moved far beyond sending dogs into space. Just this past weekend, NASA launched Curiosity, their new nuclear-powered “rover on steroids,” towards Mars where it is scheduled to land next August. Juno, NASA’s five-year mission to Jupiter, is already in flight, and will reach Jupiter in 2016, limiting its examination of Jupiter from orbit since Jupiter has, as far as we can tell, no actual land on which to land. Stephen Hawking, in an interview this month pushing his new TV series, reasserted his belief that mankind can’t explore space fast enough, convinced we need to figure a way to travel off of Earth in the next century before we exterminate ourselves, which he’s convinced we’re destined to do as a result of faulty, outdated survival wiring in our brains.

While I am fascinated by the prospect of terraforming Mars—and just imagine those trips home for the holidays—it’s my fond and ever-optimistic hope, based on a well-established state of denial regarding the reality of human behavior, that a more cataclysmic Sputnik and Laika-style wake up call will not be required before humans find it within themselves to advance the technologies—recyclables, alternative fuels, and sustainable food sourcing among others—that will allow us to keep Terra itself sufficiently terraformed for at least centuries to come.

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