President Obama

I like saying those words. He’s a politician, not a messiah, but it’s such a goddamned relief to see sanity and competence return to the fore.

Exit, pursued by bear market

I realize that on Inauguration Day, it’s de rigeur to marvel at the ease with which power is transferred from one administration to another, without gunfire or fisticuffs. And it is, indeed, a wonderful thing.

But there was nothing in the Bush administration’s exit to suggest any appreciation of or pride in the workings of American democracy. The governing philosophy of the past eight years has been to max out the credit cards, run up all the tabs, break open the cash registers and clear the shelves before the bills came due.

In the criminal sphere, it’s an old con called a “bust out,” and it’s usually practiced on businesses that are up for sale. Make a down payment, get access to the credit lines and gorfge on easy to dispose of merchandise before the down payment check bounces and the owner reclaims the business, which has been hollowed out by debt.

On those terms, why would Bush want to stick around? He’s had his way with us. Thanks to Osama bin Laden, he had an extra four years to do an extra-thorough job. Now he gets to swagger off into the sunset, and collect a fat pension check to boot.

Don’t read ‘em, don’t need ‘em

There once was a time when it was nice to get Time or Newsweek in order to scan the past week’s events, get a somewhat fuller picture of the news, and simply catch up. I’m going back a couple of decades, sprouts, when Time would actually run deeply reported stories, give somebody like Robert Hughes beaucoup column inches to talk about modern art, or offer detailed schematics and diagrams of Three Mile Island to help readers understand how close Pennsylvania came to being renamed the Forbidden Zone.

You can water down your product only so many times before people start wondering why they need another stack of recycling fodder in the garage. And if you think pumping up the amount of punditry and opinion-mongering is the key to your magazine’s survival, you might want to consider giving space to fresh and original thinkers, not party operatives like William Kristol and Karl Rove who divide their time between getting things wrong and lying about the world.  

So when I hear Howie Kurtz keening over the decline of the glossies, I find it have to give a damn. Give me information and give me breadth, or get lost. The “media savvy” bigwigs running those magazines just sound like higher paid, better groomed versions of the hack newspaper editors I used to see, who decided that alienating people who read newspapers was the key to getting more readership. Adio, bozos.

Approved authors 8

It’s taking longer than I expected, but I’m talking about some of the books I’ve read and appreciated the most this past year. The majority were published in 2008 and a few were written by people I’ve had some contact with, whether e-mail or in person, but they’re here because I enjoyed them and I think you will, too.

LUSH LIFE by Richard Price, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2008.

Richard Price’s novel Lush Life opens with a “quality of life” police patrol, operating undercover in a converted taxi, monitoring traffic entering Manhattan from the Williamsburg Bridge and picking targets on the principle that anyone who obeys traffic regulations must be trying to avoid police attention:

The Quality of Life Task Force: four sweatshirts in a bogus taxi set up on the corner of Clinton Street alongside the Williamsburg Bridge off-ramp to profile the incoming salmon run; their mantra: Dope, guns, overtime; their motto: Everyone’s got something to lose.

“Is dead tonight.”

The four car-stops so far this evening have been washouts: three municipals — a postal inspector, a transit clerk, and a garbageman, all city employees off-limits — and one guy who did have a six-inch blade under his seat, but no spring-release.

A station wagon coming off the bridge pulls abreast of them at the Delancey Street light, the driver a tall, gray, long-nosed man sporting a tweed jacket and Cuffney cap.

“The Quiet Man,” Geohagan murmurs.

“That’ll do, pig,” Scharf adds.

Lugo, Daley, Geohagan, Scharf; Bayside, New Dorp, Freeport, Pelham Bay, all in their thirties, which, at this late hour, made them some of the oldest white men on the Lower East Side.

Forty minutes without a nibble …

Restless, they finally pull out to honeycomb the narrow streets for an hour of endless tight right turns: falafel joint, jazz joint, gyro joint, corner. Schoolyard, crêperie, realtor, corner. Tenement, tenement, tenement museum, corner. Pink Pony, Blind Tiger, muffin boutique, corner. Sex shop, tea shop, synagogue, corner. Boulangerie, bar, hat boutique, corner. Iglesia, gelateria, matzo shop, corner. Bollywood, Buddha, botanica, corner. Leather outlet, leather outlet, leather outlet, corner. Bar, school, bar, school, People’s Park, corner. Tyson mural, Celia Cruz mural, Lady Di mural, corner. Bling shop, barbershop, car service, corner. And then finally, on a sooty stretch of Eldridge, something with potential: a weary-faced Fujianese in a thin Members Only windbreaker, cigarette hanging, plastic bags dangling from crooked fingers like full waterbuckets, trudging up the dark, narrow street followed by a limping black kid half a block behind.

“What do you think?” Lugo taking a poll via the rearview. “Hunting for his Chinaman?”

“That’s who I’d do,” Scharf says.

“Guy looks beat. Probably just finished up his week.”

“That’d be a nice score too. Payday Friday, pulled your eighty-four hours, walking home with what, four? Four fifty?”

“Could be his whole roll on him if he doesn’t use banks.”

“C’mon, kid” — the taxi lagging behind its prey, all three parties in a half-block stagger — “it doesn’t get better than this.”

“Actually, Benny Yee in Community Outreach? He says the Fooks finally know not to do that anymore, keep it all on them.”

“Yeah, OK, they don’t do that anymore.”

“Should we tell the kid? He probably hasn’t even heard of Benny Yee.”

“I don’t want to come between a young man and his dreams,” Lugo says.

“There he goes, there he goes …”

“Forget it, he just made us,” Daley says as the kid abruptly loses his limp and turns east, back towards the projects, or the subways, or, like them, to simply take five, then get back in the game.
Right turn after right turn after right, so many that when they finally pull someone over, and they will, it’ll take a minute to get their legs under them, to stop leaning into their steps; so many right turns that at three in the morning, six beers deep at Grouchie’s, everybody silently, angrily watching the one lucky bastard getting a lap ride in a banquette by the bathrooms, they’ll be canting to the right at the bar, then, later in bed, twitching to the right in their dreams.

At the corner of Houston and Chrystie, a cherry-red Denali pulls up alongside them, three overdressed women in the backseat, the driver alone up front and wearing sunglasses.

The passenger-side window glides down. “Officers, where the Howard Johnson hotel at around here …”

“Straight ahead three blocks on the far corner,” Lugo offers.

“Thank you.”

“What’s with the midnight shades?” Daley asks from the shotgun seat, leaning forward past Lugo to make eye contact.

“I got photosensitivity,” the guy answers, tapping his frames.

The window glides back up and he shoots east on Houston.

“Did he call us officers?”

“It’s that stupid flattop of yours.”

“It’s that fuckin’ tractor hat of yours.”

“I gots photosensitivity …”

A moment later they’re rolling past the Howard Johnson’s themselves, watching as the guy from the Denali makes like a coachman, holding the door for all the ladies filing out from the backseat.

“Huggy Bear,” Lugo mumbles.

“Who the fuck puts a Howard Johnson’s down here?” Scharf gestures to the seedy-looking chain hotel, its neighbors an ancient knishery and a Seventh-Day Adventist church whose aluminum cross is superimposed over a stone-carved Star of David. “What was the thinking behind that.”

“Twenty-eight flavors,” Lugo says. “My dad used to take me every Sunday after my game.”

“You’re talking the ice cream parlor,” Scharf says, “that’s different.”

“I never had a dad,” says Geohagan.

“You want one of mine?” Daley turns in his seat. “I had three.”

“I can only dream of a dad who’d take me to a Howard Johnson’s after my game.”

“Hey, Sonny.” Lugo catches Geohagan’s eye in the rearview. “Later tonight, you want to have a catch with me?”

“Sure, mister.”

“Pokey as fuck out here, huh?” says Daley.

“That’s because it’s your turn to collar,” Lugo says, waving off some drunk who thinks he’s just flagged down a taxi.

“Somebody up there hates me.”

“Hang on …” Scharf abruptly perks up, his head on a swivel. “That there looks good. High beams going west, four bodies.”

“Going west?” Lugo floors it in heavy traffic. “Think thin, girls,” as he takes the driver-side wheels up onto the concrete divider to get past a real cab waiting for the light, then whips into a U-turn to get abreast of the target car, peering in. “Females, two mommies, two kids,” passing them, hungrier now, all of them, then Scharf ahoying once again: “Green Honda, going east.”

“Now east, he says.” Lugo does another 180 and pulls behind the Honda.

“What do we got …”

“Two males in the front.”

“What do we got …”

“Neon trim on the plate.”

“Tinted windows.”

“Right rear taillight.”

“Front passenger just stuffed something under the seat.”

“Thank you.” Lugo hits the misery lights, climbs up the Honda’s back, the driver taking half a block to pull over.

Daley and Lugo slowly walk up on either side of the car, cross-beam the front seats.

The driver, a young green-eyed Latino, rolls down his window. “Officer, what I do?”

Lugo rests his crossed arms on the open window as if it’s a backyard fence. “License and registration, please?”

“For real, what I do?”

“You always drive like that?” His voice almost gentle.

“Like what?”

“Signaling lane changes, all road-courteous and shit.”

“Excuse me?”

“C’mon, nobody does that unless they’re nervous about something.”

“Well I was.”

“Nervous?”

“You was following me.”

“A cab was following you?”

“Yeah, OK, a cab.” Passing over his papers. “All serious, Officer, and no disrespect intended, maybe I can learn something here, but what did I do?”

“Primary, you have neon trim on your plates.”

“Hey, I didn’t put it there. This my sister’s whip.”

“Secondary, your windows are too dark.”

“I told her about that.”

“Tertiary, you crossed a solid yellow.”

“To get around a double-parked car.”

“Quadrary, you’re sitting by a hydrant.”

“That’s ’cause you just pulled me over.”

Lugo takes a moment to assess the level of mouth he’s getting.

As a rule he is soft-spoken, leaning in to the driver’s window to conversate, to explain, his expression baggy with patience, going eye to eye as if to make sure what he’s explicating here is being digested, seemingly deaf to the obligatory sputtering, the misdemeanors of verbal abuse, but … if the driver says that one thing, goes one word over some invisible line, then without any change of expression, without any warning signs except maybe a slow straightening up, a sad/disgusted looking off, he steps back, reaches for the door handle, and the world as they knew it, is no more.

But this kid isn’t too bad.

“This is for your own benefit. Get out of the car, please?”

As Lugo escorts the driver to the rear bumpers, Daley leans into the shotgun-seat window and tilts his chin at the passenger, this second kid sitting there affecting comatosity, heavy-lidded under a too big baseball cap and staring straight ahead as if they were still driving somewhere.

“So what’s your story?” Daley says, opening the passenger door, offering this one some sidewalk too, as Geohagan, all tatted out in Celtic braids, knots, and crosses leans in to search the glove compartment, the cup caddy, the tape storage bin, Scharf taking the rear seats.

Back at the rear bumpers, the driver stands in a scarecrow looking off soul-eyed as Lugo, squinting through his own cigarette smoke, fingerwalks his pockets, coming up with a fat roll of twenties.

“This a lot of cheddar, cuz,” counting it, then stuffing it in the kid’s shirt pocket before continuing the patdown.

“Yeah, well, that’s my college tuition money.”

“What the fuck college takes cash?” Lugo laughs, then finished, gestures to the bumper. “Have a seat.”

“Burke Technical in the Bronx? It’s new.”

“And they take cash?”

“Money’s money.”

“True dat.” Lugo shrugs, just waiting out the car search. “So what’s your major?”

“Furniture management?”

“You ever been locked up before?”

“C’mon, man, my uncle’s like a detective in the Bronx.”

“Like a detective?”

“No. A detective. He just retired.”

“Oh yeah? What precinct?”

“I don’t know per se. The Sixty-ninth?”

“The fighting Sixty-ninth,” Geohagan calls out, feeling under the passenger seat now.

“There is no Sixty-ninth,” Lugo says, flicking his butt into the gutter.

“Sixty-something. I said I wasn’t sure.”

“What’s his name.”

“Rodriguez?”

“Rodriguez in the Bronx? That narrows it down. What’s his first name?”

“Narcisso?”

“Don’t know him.”

“Had a big retirement party?”

“Sorry.”

“I been thinking of trying out for the Police Academy myself.”

“Oh yeah? That’s great.”

“Donnie.” Geohagan backs out of the passenger door, holds up a Zip-loc of weed.

“Because we need more [expletive] smokehounds.”

The kid closes his eyes, tilts his chin to the stars, to the moon over Delancey.

“His or yours.” Lugo gestures to the other kid on the sidewalk, face still blank as a mask, his pockets strewn over the car hood. “Somebody needs to say or you both go.”

“Mine,” the driver finally mutters.

“Turn around, please?”

“Oh man, you gonna lock me up for that?”

“Hey, two seconds ago you stepped up like a man. Stay with that.”

Lugo cuffs him then turns him forward again, holding him at arm’s length as if to assess his outfit for the evening. “Anything else in there? Tell us now or we’ll rip that [expletive] to shreds.”

“Damn, man, I barely had that.”

“All right then, just relax,” guiding him back down to the bumper as the search continues nonetheless.

The kid looks off, shakes his head, mutters, “Sorry ass.”

“Excuse me?”

“Nah, I’m just saying” — pursing his mouth in self-disgust — “not about you.”

Geohagan comes back with the baggie, hands it over.

“OK, look.” Lugo lights another cigarette, takes a long first drag. “This? We could give a fuck. We’re out here on a higher calling.” He nods at a passing patrol car, something the driver said making him laugh. “You know what I’m saying?”

“More serious shit?”

“There you go.”

“That’s all I got.”

“I’m not taking about what you got. I’m talking about what you know.”

“What I know?”

“You know what I’m saying.”

They both turn and look off in the direction of the East River, two guys having a moment, one with his hands behind his back.

Finally, the kid exhales heavily. “Well, I can tell you where a weed spot is.”

“You’re kidding me, right?” Lugo rears back. “I’ll tell you where a weed spot is. I’ll tell you where fifty is. I can get you better [expletive] than this for half what you paid seven days a week with blindfolds on.”

The kid sighs, tries not to look at the barely curious locals coming out of the Banco de Ponce ATM center and the Dunkin’ Donuts, the college kids hopping in and out of taxis.

“C’mon. Do right by me, I’ll do right by you.” Lugo absently tosses the baggie from hand to hand, drops it, picks it up.

“Do right like how?”

“I want a gun.”

“A what? I don’t know a gun.”

“You don’t have to know a gun. But you know someone who knows someone, right?”

“Aw, man …”

“For starters, you know who you bought this shit from, right?”

“I don’t know any guns, man. You got forty dollars a weed there. I paid for it with my own money, ’cause it helps me relax, helps me party. Everybody I know is like, go to work, go to school, get high. That’s it.”

“Huh … so like, there’s no one you could call, say, ‘Yo, I just got jacked in the PJs. I need me a onetime whistle, can I meet you at such and such?’”

“A whistle?”

Lugo makes a finger gun.

“You mean a hammer?”

“A hammer, a whistle …” Lugo turns away and tightens his ponytail.

“Pfff …” The kid looks off, then, “I know a knife.”

Lugo laughs. “My mother has a knife.”

“This one’s used.”

“Forget it.” Then, chin-tilting to the other kid: “What about your sidekick there.”

“My cousin? He’s like half-retarded.”

“How about the other half?”

“Aw, c’mon.” The driver lolls his head like a cow.

Another patrol car rolls up, this one to pick up the prisoner.

“All right, just think about it, OK?” Lugo says. “I’ll see you back in holding in a few hours.”

“What about my car?”

“Gilbert Grape there, he’s got a license?”

“His brother does.”

“Well then tell him to call his brother and get his ass down here before you wind up towed.”

“Damn.” Then calling out: “Raymond! You hear that?”

The cousin nods but makes no move to retrieve his cell phone from the car hood.

“So you never answered my question,” Lugo says, skull-steering him into the rear of the cruiser. “You ever been locked up before?”

The kid turns his head away, murmurs something.

“It’s OK, you can tell me.”

“I said, ‘Yes.’”

“For?”

The kid shrugs, embarrassed, says, “This.”

“Yeah? Around here?”

“Uh-huh.”

“How long back?”

“On Christmas Eve.”

“On Christmas Eve for this?” Lugo winces. “That is cold. Who the hell would … You remember who collared you?”

“Uh-huh,” the kid mutters, then looks Lugo in the face. “You.”

Readers who know Richard Price as a writer and occasional actor on the HBO series The Wire may conclude that Lush Life reflects that background, but the truth is that Price has been building his novels on a foundation of crime since Clockers, the 1992 epic that arrested his career spiral from wunderkind to has-been, and his ear for dialogue and skill at close sociological observation were evident in The Wanderers, the 1974 debut that earned him the wunderkind title. So you could say Richard Price had already earned his spot on The Wire, before the series was even a gleam on his computer screen.

Lush Life is ostensibly about the investigation of a robbery that turns into a murder, but the real subject is the weave of ethnic, class and economic cross-currents on the Lower East Side. The change of scene from the urban New Jersey setting of Clockers, Freedomland and Samaritan is welcome; Samaritan felt as though Price had not so much written a novel as bulldozed a mass of research along a vaguely mapped-out storyline. That same sense of notebook-dumping is also present to a lesser extent in Lush Life, but whenever the mass of accumulated observations threatens to weigh him down, Price leaps over it with a crackling stretch of dialogue or brilliantly rendered scene.

And yet, as much as I enjoyed the book, Lush Life left me with the same feeling I had after reading The Breaks: that Price has reached another artistic crossroads, and it will be very interesting to see where he goes next.

Happy Birthday

An obvious choice for today, but what’s more appropriate? Martin Luther King Jr. was the right man at the right time. Without him, there isn’t a doubt in my mind that the American South would currently resemble Belfast in the Seventies.

Blue Monday

Few bands have retooled their sound as completely, or as lucratively, as the Moody Blues. After trying to make a go of it as a not-bad Merseybeat group with decent taste in R&B (they even backed Sonny Boy Williamson for a time during his stay in the U.K.) they took the sound of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band and ran with it. Starting with Days of Future Past, released in 1967 only a few months after Sgt. Pepper, they racked up big sales as progressive rockers, packaging their albums along lose conceptual lines, enhanced with the trippy artwork of Phil Travers. The foundation of their new sound was the Mellotron, a proto-synthesizer that used tapes of string instruments to approximate the sound of an orchestra. In this 1970 clip of the band performing “Tuesday Afternoon,” you can spot bandmember Mike Pinder on his Mellotron, which he had extensively tweaked for the band’s purposes.

It’s hard to believe that anyone ever took that thin, reedy whine for a string section, but as this MetaFilter link package reminds us, the Mellotron was quickly taken up by the Kinks and other bands looking for a progressive flavor.

At the risk of losing whatever hipness credentials I may possess, I confess to a lingering fondness for the Moody Blues. Chalk it up to those first couple of years in high school, when I thought Every Good Boy Deserves Favour was the most profound set of songs ever scratched onto both sides of a black vinyl disc. By my junior year I’d come to think there was something a bit . . . overripe about their Rod McKuen versifying, and Graeme Edge’s poetic musings could have been dropped into This Is Spinal Tap without anyone being the wiser. But there was a lot of pop songcraft beneath the overdubs, and there’s a decent single-disc compilation to be culled from their bulky catalogue. But please, make sure you cut out the poetry.

One of the sins on my conscience is having participated in the one time that I witnessed Moody Blues lyrics being used as an instrument of torture. I was at a party long ago with a couple of acquaintances, one a hipper-than-thou type, and when he learned that the other acquaintance had been a Moody Blues fan, he showed no mercy.

“Breathe deep the gathering gloom,” Hipper Than Thou rumbled.

“Yeah, okay, I never liked that one,” the victim sighed.

“With the force of a million butterfly sneezes,” Hipper Than Thou continued, “man has conquered the wayward breezes.”

“Oh come on!” the victim protested. “Enough! I give up.” He turned to me, obviously hoping to change the direction of the conversation.

I looked him in the eye and intoned: “When the white eagle of the north flies low overhead, and the leaves of autumn lie in the gutter, dead . . .”

The victim went howling off and I never saw him again that night. I think he changed his name and signed aboard a tramp steamer, trying to escape the shame and make a new life somewhere. I’m not proud of what I did, but I wont deny it was fun at the time.

Pop-culture obsolesence watch

I’m about as interested in this summer’s Star Trek relaunch as I am in handicapping the Tibetan yak races, but Dances With Mermaids took to the Star Wars movies in a pretty big way, so I Netflixed Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Chiefly because I remembered it as having been a legitimately good action movie after the grinding bore that was the original flick, and because Dances was interested in the fact that the villain was played by Ricardo Montalban, the grandpa from the Spy Kids flicks.

Let’s just say the flick hasn’t aged well. The Woman Warrior and I kept cracking up at Khan’s fright wig, and the mumbo-jumbo in the dialogue kept Dances With Mermaids asking for explanations of what was going on. When it was all over, she said: “It was just a lot of people in uniforms standing around talking.”

Guess I better not rent The Final Frontier, eh?

Now it can be told

An insider look at the publishing industry. Hey, I learned from this thing. (Bird-dogged by Andrew Sullivan.)

Circles and spheres

If you’re as tired as I am with the brain-dead arguments over “liberal media bias,” read this Jay Rosen piece on how the mass-market media shape and corral political debate (and how the rise of bloggers, some of them with expertise to rival that of many journalists and pundits, is weakening that power), then listen to Rosen’s chat with Glenn Greenwald.

More revisionism

A while back I posted this take on a very famous author’s five simple rules for writing. Now Joe Z. reminds me of an earlier debate about whether revisions are a good thing or a watering-down of one’s initial inspiration. My contribution to that talk, dredged from the depths of Joe’s comment fields:

Early to bed, early to rise; revise revise revise.

Beginning writers are commonly afflicted with two mistaken ideas: (a) you only write when inspiration comes over you (preferably late at night, while the bourgeois are asleep and the Muse comes skipping over the rooftops and springs through the open window of your garrett), and (b) your first drafts are always best because that’s when your inspiration is at its freshest.

As a former sufferer, I can attest that a third delusion grew naturally out of the first two: since the initial writing is always the best, I had to make sure everything was perfect before I could go on. This meant that whenever I hit a speed bump while barreling through a writing project, I would get stuck there, trying to solve a problem while my inspiration and fire dwindled away.

The net result was a drawerful of unfinished and half-realized projects.

In my case, the first-draft delusion grew out of my school days, when I habitually larked off on assignments until the very last minute, then fulfilled them in a frenzy of caffeine-drenched activity. Since these assignments almost always won good grades, I received positive reinforcement for a very bad writing habit. The fact that I worked for many years in the newspaper business, constantly writing for tight deadlines, didn’t do much to improve the situation. On top of that, I’ve been a Bob Dylan fan most of my life, and he’s famous for winging it in the studio and releasing first takes of songs because he wants that fresh, spontaneous sound. When that approach works, you get Blonde on Blonde. When it doesn’t, you get Down in the Groove.

First drafts contain nuggets of pure gold. They also contain plenty of boilerplate and second-hand phrases that need to be reassessed in the cold light of day. True creative freedom and productivity followed when I realized that
second, third and even fourth drafts are not only acceptable — they’re desirable. I didn’t have to stop when I hit a bad patch — I could always slap something in and come back a few days later with a fresh point of view. Nine times out of ten, continuing with the work took the story in a direction that solved the problem for me. Then I could go back to the rough patch and come up with a more artful way to set the stage for events to come.

Another great thing about this approach is that it allows you to become more humane with your writing regimen. I used to think that I couldn’t write anything unless I had a big bloc of time in which to pursue the Muse. I now know that I can accomplish more in a concentrated one-hour writing session than I can by putting aside an entire afternoon. I also know that I do my clearest thinking in the morning, so I schedule that brief session before the kids wake up. A regular writing schedule doesn’t make you a drone. Keeping a regular schedule means the Muse will know where to find you.

The marvelous thing about this arrangement is the fact that it aids concentration. When I tried to write for hours at a time, the least distraction would have me clutching my hair and pounding the desk like Roderick Usher. Now I think I could write on the lip of an erupting volcano and not even notice the ash in my hair.

So, let all tyros take note. You don’t have to get it all right the first time. Most of the time you won’t anyway. The only really successful first draft I’m aware of was written on the top of Mount Sinai. Personally, I think even that would have benefitted from a few additional drafts.