Beowulf: The Prequel

Foreskin's Lament by Shalom Auslander

I have this rule that I only want to write about things I loved, so I have to write this in the dark in order to get away with it. I did not love Foreskin's Lament.

On the other hand, this: "Hello, McFly! You realize that your blog is just a way to hear yourself talk, right?" So much for rules I made up.

I listened to this book, actually, as narrated by the author in a mostly flat, deadpan-to-the-point-of-maybe-actually-dead drone. It took me what felt like a long time to get through all 63 tracks; walking around the neighborhood, ironing, vacuuming. You name a domestic chore and Mr. Auslander and I have done it together.

I wanted to love this book, and I'm frustrated because I think I could have. It's essentially about Mr. A's Orthodox Jewish upbringing and how its strict rules and mercilessly punitive conception of God screwed him up. In his confusion and anger, he fought back with pornography and hotdogs and finally broke with his family after the birth of his son.

This is a story built on a lot of pain and emotion, and the unfortunate thing for me as a reader is that Auslander chose to bury the pain and emotion under Catskills-level jokes and a sneering disregard for everyone else (except his wife, whom he describes as being very cool and witty, and his baby, who I mean seriously, like he's going to be shitty about his newborn).

His main joke to hide behind is that he gives God the finger, quite literally, whenever he breaks one of the many laws of his religion. The extension of the joke is that God is out to get people, but particularly Mr. Auslander. There is a long section near the end of the book about the convoluted attempts of Mr. A and his wife to both honor the Sabbath and watch the Rangers vie for the Stanley Cup. The lengths that they go to are quite funny, an actual caper, even, but make no sense in the midst of Mr. A's insistence that he doesn't honor the Sabbath (so his mother is hurtful to him for reminding him of it) and that God will punish him personally by making the Rangers lose. When the Rangers win, it is still God punishing him. The tortured logic Mr. A employs to make himself God's victim regardless could've been amusing if done self-deprecatingly or with some kind of self-awareness (after all, Richard Lewis has made a career off of this idea), but it isn't, so it isn't.

God never does get the credit for the good things that happen to Mr. A -- his lovely wife, his son, his friends, who are mentioned in a tantalizing but brief bit at the very end of the book as being "foreskins" like himself. The people he admires and loves do merit mention, I suppose due to Mr. A's thesis that God will punish him and take away the things he loves.

This then is a failure on his part and a mark of the fact that he wasn't ready to tell his story. No amount of bitter attacks on his family or on practitioners of his (former?) religion will signal that he is fighting back against the damage instilled by his upbringing. It simply indicates that he's still fearful and still running away.

I think his editors did Auslander a disservice by not pushing him to tell the more meaningful story. It's as if they settled for the cheap jokes, betting that people wanted to hear a guy ridicule convoluted Orthodox Jewish traditions (though why this means he also has to ridicule and stereotype the inhabitants of his chosen home in Woodstock and the other places he's lived in Israel and New York is beyond me).

I think Mr. Auslander and his editors fell into the David Sedaris trap, whereby they think that it's easy to be as funny as Sedaris -- all you have to do is write about your crazy family. Give it the detachment of Running With Scissors, and you've got a winner on the bookshelves.

But note that Running With Scissors was followed by Dry -- there was a price to pay for that first book's insistence that you can triumph over a bizarre and neglectful upbringing without a scratch. And note that Sedaris is a write of extraordinary gifts and care for the people he writes about. He doesn't ridicule, though he does tease. He doesn't hide from pain; he puts it in context.

And context is lacking from Foreskin's Lament -- Auslander rattles off the prayers required over various types of food and the many and layered activities that are forbidden on the Sabbath, but he doesn't bother to wonder or explain why they exist and why some people are okay with them and why he's not. He's content to nudge us and say, "Isn't that ridiculous? Isn't it stupid?", so we'll say, "Yeah, it is stupid. High five!" That's fine talk for a barbecue, but you need to expose yourself more in your writing. You need to allow yourself to be vulnerable.

I'm guessing that Mr. Auslander felt all too vulnerable in going as far as he did here: in talking about his drug use and trafe indulgences and his encounters with porn and with a prostitute. And especially about his family, and about how his father used to beat his brother with his mother's passive consent.

But he stops just when the writing would've become meaningful. He resorts to arguments with his personal guardian God and the resultant tired anti-Auslander's-God jokes rather than putting his feelings and his anger and sorrow into context. He never wonders how others view God, how others deal with the same thing he's going through, how his mother and father may have seen things. He's so tied up in his own head that he can't see anything else, which ultimately makes his writing tiresome and thin.

I wish he had been pushed to tell the whole story. I wish he'd written openly about his anger and his fear instead of wrapping them up in deflective humor. He didn't admit that he's still struggling with terrible fears, all the more terrible because he knows they aren't logical. He didn't admit that he lost something by breaking with his parents, and that they must've lost something, too. He didn't talk about how therapy helped (or hurt) him; he falls back on (of course) a repated deadpan joke about how much the therapy cost.

He didn't go on a quest to address his problem, he just folded up more into himself. And that's a shame not only for him, but for his readers.

My Loves (of the big and small screens)

I can't explain it. These people show up in a guest spot or a movie trailer and I sit up and go "Hey! I've got to see that! I love you, Ian McShane!"

1. SuperDave Osborne, aka Bob Einstein.
Ok, his real name is Bob Einstein, so that's cause for love right there. He played Officer Judy on the Smothers Brothers show, and though that was before my time and I've only seen clips, the very name Officer Judy makes me laugh every time. I mostly know him as SuperDave, the parody of the Evel Knievel-style stunt performer, and I've mostly only seen SuperDave on Letterman's show. So when I think about it, I've barely ever seen this guy, yet every time is a treat. Thanks to Curb Your Enthusiasm (and a few Arrested Developments), he's around more than ever before. His starkly deadpan delivery and distinctive husky voice make him instantly recognizable. His no-bullshit demeanor in the midst of playing the most bullshitting of characters is utterly delightful. He doesn't beg you to laugh because he knows you will. Love!

2. William Daniels
That's Dr. Craig to me, of my beloved St. Elsewhere. Another one with a highly distinctive voice (maybe that's the secret to my heart) -- a short guy with a powerful presence, perfectly cast as John Adams in the movie musical 1776 (he sings, too!). He's a perfectionist and an autocrat doomed by his own pride (just like me!). In real life, he's been married to his actress wife Bonnie Bartlett (Mrs. Craig, natch) for one million years. He was the voice of KITT the car. When he took the part of Mr. Feeny in Boy Meets World, I despaired that he was sinking into the sitcom mire, but he's smarter than I am and picked a good show. He's 80 now, so my longtime dream of acting with him is increasingly imperiled, but I'll always have him yelling at Erlich. Get younger, Mr. Daniels!

3. Gary Cole
You find me another guy who can perfectly embody murderer Jeffrey MacDonald, superfather Mr. Brady-via-Robert-Reed, and the boss man in Office Space. Oh, you can't? Of course not -- no one else is as perfect as Cole. He brings class and gravity to everything he does, while being one of the funniest guys around. Try that for your next party trick. Hint: you can't do it!

4. Robin Weigert
If I get started on the Deadwood cast, I'll never stop, so let's just mention the amazing Jane Canary. I've only ever seen her in one other thing, a bizarre bit in Angels in America where she plays a Mormon diorama thing come to life. She just has one of those faces -- kind and compelling, a face that really seems to see the people she's looking at, which brings every scene she plays to crackling life. Hey -- IMDB just told me she's on the new show Life! Now I have to watch that.

"My Kid Could Paint That" (2007, dir Amir Bar-Lev)

Buy what you love, because if you buy art as an investment, you're playing a loser's game. Not a losing game, necessarily, but a loser's game, a game played by people with too much money and too little interest in natural gas futures or real estate. Art is meant to be lived with, to instruct and enlighten and enrage and love, yet much of the best of Western art (at least; how the fuck would I know about any other kind?) is locked up in temp-controlled storage units owned by the wealthy. With the wine, maybe. (Ha! Of course not -- totally different temps required. Wow, that's a filthy rich person's sidesplitter right there!)

Imagine pouring your heart and soul and possibly risking your life or risking exile to produce a work of art, and now, however many years later, it's locked in a giant closet in Sylvester Stallone's house, or Lars Ullrich's. Want to see art used as an investment? Watch the Metallica doc "Some Kind of Monster" and see Lars sell off his Basquiats and whatever. Let's hope there is no afterlife or there are bound to be some very disappointed paint-spattered souls up there.

But here's where I'll contradict myself -- art almost always has been defined by patronage, and I'm thinking that's the way it should be. Pieces produced for a specific purpose, often erotic (I think most major art museums should just be called what they are: "Museum of the Depiction of the Female Butt, Plus Some Saints and Jesus to Alleviate Resultant Guilt"). This whole bit of nonsense about one soul expressing himherself is kind of...well, the work's going to go on the auction block one way or another, isn't it? So it isn't so much expressing one's soul as it is guessing what other souls will want to see. Patronage. (Oh, and HINT: the other souls mostly want to see naked female butts, and/or war scenes and/or people being eaten by sharks.)

All I'm getting at is that I saw Amir Bar-Lev's doc, and although I was enraged for the first ten or fifteen minutes by the fact that I paid eleven dollars to sit in a theatre with six other people and some dopey woman STILL came right up to my seat in the back and asked to see my ticket because I had apparently sat in her ASSIGNED SEAT (Jesus, what is this, EUROPEAN SOCIALISM WITH THE ASSIGNED MOVIE SEATS?) -- I mean, for Christ's sake lady, there were only four other people there and you still walked down my row and said "Excuse me" to climb over my legs and you still bumped me out of my seat, I mean THIS IS AMERICA, LADY! -- so, fine, she picked the seat I should've picked, all's fair and I moved to another seat in only a 95% huff, and I was then further enraged by the fact that Amir didn't seem to have complete command of the focusing ring on his camera, so most of the interview sequences in the early part of the movie (with the journalist lady in overalls, and with Mark-the-dad) were fuzzy and, seriously, I paid 11 dollars to sit there watching a movie by a guy who couldn't manage to shine enough lights on his subjects and maybe needs new glasses.

But this movie was fantastic, really, and I think it comes down to Amir's niceness. He's so nice, it seems, that I feel I can call him by his first name. He's humble. He's not today's style of doc filmmaker, which is too often someone who wants to make narrative films with Angelina Jolie but needs to do something cheap and provocative first in order to get noticed. He's not a jerk with a camera looking for an expose or looking to make a point about society such that he'll edit his footage to fit it no matter how poorly his subject matches his theme --

(oh, I just watched "The Staircase" on DVD, CAN YOU TELL? Fascinating to watch and all, but damn there must be some kind of reverse libel statute that doesn't let you cover up so much of a real incident to fit your "American Southerners are homophobes and fools who consider justice a cotton-picking nuisance, and women are important only insofar as they are cute and doubtless golddigging and wear their hair in ways we find appealing", THAT MEANS YOU Jean-Xavier de Lestrade (writer/dir) and ESPECIALLY YOU Denis Poncet (producer), thanks for including the DVD extra of your own views on the case that explains your movie and it's creepy slant) --

...uh, where was I? Right, Amir. He's a nice guy who wanted to catch the painting prodigy in her ascendancy, and who's heart was, I think, genuinely a bit broken when he came to the inescapable conclusion that daddy was "helping" the prodigy to employ shape/form/repetition and theme in her paintings. You know, the things that a four year old couldn't employ or formulate. The things that make the paintings appealing and that make them sell.

Well, no. They sell because of the story behind them, and that's fine because lots of art is like that. "Guernica", or Motherwell without the Spanish war is...what? Mondrian without the move to New York and the influence of jazz is...not the same, I think. So the people who buy little Marla (+ big Mark's, I think) paintings are not being duped in any way that any art buyer isn't duped.

This is why people need to buy what they love. The price point is beside the point. I can give you a compare/contrast scenario to illustrate (no pun intended) what I mean: Norton Simon vs. Seymour H. Knox, Jr. Visit the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena and you will see a wonderful, passionate, cohesive collection by a man who loved art, who especially loved Degas and his little cast horses. There's a viewpoint to this museum, and an expansive generosity. Now hop on a plane to Buffalo and visit the Albright-Knox Art Gallery. This collection is shit, and I'm not just saying that because I stupidly made a special trip to the frozen center of hell (Buffalo in winter) just to see it. It's shit because it's clearly the work of a rich guy, and subsequent acquisitions directors, who decided to cherry-pick from the big names in modern art. This is a collection meant to impress with it's price tag, and the works are strung up in a stiff line like the Von Trapp children reporting to Captain Dad. Entering that gallery is like walking into a party where all the guests are big name but have no relationship with one another and simply stand around glumly with drinks in their hands. This gallery left me cold, while the Norton Simon makes my heart pound with the possibilities of humanity. I can't tell you how angry it makes me that some wonderful stuff -- a side of beef by Soutine, my beloved "Yellow Christ" by Gauguin -- is stranded in the art-prison of the Albright-Knox.

So the Marla controversy is really about money and art, about the acquisition position. It isn't about the dopey "controversy" over whether modern art is "real" art -- I mean, god, are we still worrying about that? We aren't, are we? I'm sure Morely Safer is, but the rest of us? (Go paint more hotel rooms and relax, Morely.)

(Oh, shit -- I just realized how poetically perfect the Marla/Morely naming alliteration is! I would totally do that if I were naming these characters in a novel! It's FATE!)

The movie works because it doesn't stoop to Safer-cynicism or Wallace-skepticism with the subjects. Amir lets them talk. He asks the needed questions and lets their faces tell the story. He, miraculously, gets the gallery owner who made his fortune (? Or some good amount) off of Marla to admit what we movie-goers suspected an hour earlier: that he, a frustrated photo-realist painter, was championing Marla in order to stick it the art community and their inexplicable love of the quick-'n-easy and the abstract. It's a story of revenge and ego and the desire to be special (Mark, this means you). It's MacBeth. So, of course, it's tragedy, but a small tragedy, after all. Amir sympathizes with the family, especially Mom Laura and Non-Prodigy Zane, and we sympathize with all of them, too. I'm sorry you guys got into this, that your weaknesses let it happen. Weaknesses like a need for expression, a need to be heard, love of your children, loyalty to your family, not wanting to hurt or doubt the ones you love, and money-is-good. Nice, meaty, human weaknesses.

But seriously, if you're buying Markla's paintings, you'd better do it because you love them, not because you're hoping to cash in. Don't be an ass about it. This isn't "F is for Fake" territory here, so don't pretend it is.

My mom had these little blue Chinese dragons, book ends, when I was growing up. I loved them. I saw some just like them years later in a (closed) store in Boston's Chinatown and took a photo of them. Lately, I saw them on sale at Plantation LA for $250. My mom says she bought them for something like $25. It's not that they've become valuable all of a sudden -- it's that the Plantation LA buyer went down to some Chinatown somewhere and you did not, so you pay a premium.

But no matter how much or little you pay, it doesn't matter, so long as you love your dragons.

"Strangers on a Train" (1951), dir by Alfred Hitchcock

This movie exploits one of my worst fears (besides sharp corners on the edges of tables and, and this explains the first one, disembowelment): crazy people who talk to you in public settings. And then they stalk you and try to frame you for murder, and then your life is ruined.

It shouldn't feel right that a movie about a psychopathic murderer is as sprightly and fun as this one, but maybe it's the most honest way to deal with the games being played by the two men on the train. The world goes on no matter what freakiness you encounter one seat over. Hitchcock reminds us of this again and again, with our troubled heroes encountering person after person who's just going about his day or doing his job or enjoying his night at the carnival without caring about your murder plots or the man who's trying to ruin your life. I need cotton candy, and no creep stalking his prey is going to stand in my way!

Robert Walker does something very difficult in this movie: he plays a crazy person who knows he's crazy. Bruno isn't sane-crazy like Cuckoo's Nest inmates; he isn't cuckoo-crazy like a Batman villain; he isn't animal-crazy like the Cape Fear guy. He's psychotically crazy, which means that he seems rather normal. It's a Ted Bundy crazy. It's the type that convinces himself that his actions are justified with rigorous application of Crazy Logic. When explaining C-Logic to you, the psychopath does so in a calm, matter-of-fact manner and, when you react with disgust, makes you out to be the nutter.

In this case, the psychopath needs to involve someone else in his plan. He isn't explaining after-the-fact; he's laying out the plan in advance. Thus Walker has to play Bruno as a psycho who knows that he's acting for an audience. He performs for Guy Haines in order to make the proposed murders seem natural and inevitable. Walker has to act while acting, while squeezing Guy slowly tighter in Bruno's soft-from-underwork hands. He does a wonderful job, and unfortunately it seems he came by his look of haunted and resentful confusion honestly, given that he apparently suffered from depression and alcoholism and died at the age of 32 shortly after making this film.

This is a great film about how easy it is for one person to rule over another with the use of two great weapons of persuasion: Flattery and Resentment. Prey successfully on someone's ego about what they do have and on their bitterness against what they don't have and you've got yourself a willing puppet. Every demagogue and tyrant knows this, whether at the level of nation-building or spousal abuse. Guy resists Bruno's manipulation, but too late, at first. Only Hitchcock saves him at the end when order is restored.

Patricia Highsmith, author of the book of the same name on which the movie was based, did not restore order in her version of the story. I don't think she believed that the good guys always will or should win in the end. She created Tom Ripley, and Ripley's evil always carries the day. She knew that sometimes evil sticks around. Sure, it dies like everything else; every regime falls eventually, every domestic tyrant dies sooner or later. But that doesn't mean they were defeated by anything but time.

Thus this is a good time in history to revisit "Strangers on a Train". We need to remind ourselves of how easy it is to ignore the Brunos and their horrible (though horribly compelling) schemes before it's too late and they've set their plans in motion, and you're implicated. You! And you didn't do anything except do nothing!

List of the Worst of Human Society (General)

I brainstormed a list of the worst of society, the lowest of the low, the degenerates, the people you would send to populate Australia. This was my list:

Mercenaries
Criminals
Murderers/Assassins
Child Abusers
Wife Beaters
Slave Traders
Sex Slavers
Terrorists
Pirates
Torturers/Inquisitors
Animal Abusers
Rapists

As we can see, the first Worst that came to mind was "mercenaries", because I in my mind apparently live in 1600s Europe. I think I was also thinking of Haliburton and other defense contractors and weapons makers, as they are the modern mercenary, available to any combatant with money. Plus it just sounds like a villainous word.

"Criminals" is too all-encompassing, as everyone on the list would fall under the criminal banner, but it was brainstorming after all.

The next thing of note is that I thought of "pirates" before "rapists". PIRATES. It seems that I am marginally more afraid of PIRATES than I am of RAPISTS or TORTURERS. Pirates arguably are rapists/torturers, but the opposite is not true, so I am still more afraid of everything that pirates embody than I am of being a victim of a sequel to the Spanish Inquisition. (At least pirates are not "animal abusers", as everyone knows they love their parrots.)

Where did I acquire my ever-loving fear of pirates? Maybe blame Robert Louis Stevenson. Maybe blame Daphne DuMaurier, whose novel Jamaica Inn I read recently -- the whole danged village feared the innkeeper for being a...well, I don't want to spoil it for you.

First fear the Terrorists, then fear the Pirates. They will swashbuckle you all over the ding dong plank.

Dr. Genius and Mrs. Hunh? -- the G4 sleeps tonight

I think I might be a genius, which is a good thing because I need someone around to clean up after the boneheaded mistakes I make.

For instance (and this one gets blamed on both me and Mr. Hunh), we lived in our current house for a year using rabbit ears and watching fuzzy TV before we finally wondered, "Hey, what's that plug in the wall behind the TV for? And why's there a big antenna on the roof -- it doesn't even give us good reception!" When we finally attached a cable from the plug to the TV...hey, look! That antenna works after all!

That's the "What's That Thing?" conundrum that keeps biting us -- we'll notice something we can't explain and then shrug and fail to investigate it for a few years. We're busy, people, we can't be opening drawers in our own house unless it's absolutely necessary. So, What's That Thing that looks like a latch on the utensils basket in the dishwasher? Five years later, we push the latch and realize that it flips the basket open so you don't have to scrape your hands when you unload the utensils. Wow, that's so much easier! I'm a genius!

So my desktop MAC (a G4 -- if you care about these things, start scoffing about not having thousands of dollars to upgrade to a G5 for no reason...NOW. Done scoffing? Feel better? Ok.) had a little problem. The power was wonky, so the USB ports on the back of my monitor stopped working a year or eighteen months into my ownership of the unit, and the USB and firewire ports on the tower eventually became so unreliable that I had to buy new slots and install them, and the computer wouldn't sleep, so I had to either leave it on all the time or shut it down, and it booted kind of slowly, so it was the environment or me waiting an extra five seconds, and I already told you how precious time is to me.

So this has been going on for four years or so, with lots of web searching and macosxhints.com this and osxfaq.com that and Apple support knowledge base and google searches, all looking for answers to my problem. No one seemed to have exactly the same set of problems, specifically that putting the computer into sleep mode would cause it to reboot. I kept searching, tried all the basic troubleshooting (PRAM this, reset PMU that), tried different plugs and cords, etc etc etc. Tried a buttload of things. Considering replacing the power unit, since that was obviously the problem. Oh, and sometimes the Power button on the tower would not so much want to work without lots of pressing.

This weekend, I tackled the problem again, since a mechanical problem MUST have a mechanical solution, right? Dr. Genius put on her labcoat. Hmm, I guess I'll have to replace the power unit after all...I wonder what that'll be like? It'll probably be like the last time, when Apple sent a replacement unit and fan because the fan was too loud, and I switched out the....

Oh. Hmmm. Maybe I should retrace the steps from that long-distant operation and, uh, reseat the stuff I seated anew at the time. And reseat the power button thing, too, while I'm at it. I mean, it's the old Check That Your Cables are Fully Plugged In, step Uno of any troubleshooting, but how silly would it be if that were the prob...

Hey, look! My computer now sleeps again, the USB cables on the monitor work like a charm, the old USB and firewire ports fire up like gangbusters...I'm a genius! And it reboots fast enough even for me (which, alas, gives me less time to wonder What's That Thing around the house, like the black tubes mysteriously poking out of our balcony walls).

How did the old G4 chug along for the last three or four years with this underpowered handicap? I don't know. All credit to Apple construction, I guess.

This is the support article that finally got me on the right track re: reseating plugs and jogged my memory.

And I finally solved the chronic "G4 won't remember the keyboard configuration of my Microsoft Natural Elite Keyboard, so I have to run Keyboard Prefs and Change Keyboard Type every damn time the thing reboots or comes back from sleep, which it now can do, sleep I mean, thanks to my geniusocity" problem by, um, trashing the keyboard plist. Huh. That solution only took me a year or a year and a half to find, but that time is misleading because my computer wouldn't sleep anyway, so it wasn't usually a problem. I finally noticed that the plist file wasn't modified when I changed the pref via System Preferences.

The "Mail.app Smart Folders count does not refresh" problem is ongoing and seems to come down to rebuilding the relevant mailboxes, but I don't care much about that and think it's more an Apple bug/oversight than anything I can fix.

The moral of the story is: I'm a genius. The other moral is: how am I going to put off writing if everything on my computer works now? The third moral is: when people give you the troubleshooting advice of "it's broken, buy a new one", curse at them with your worst, most insulting words and run away quick because they are almost always wrong and also lazy and perhaps also smelly.