Author / DrMabuse

by DrMabuse

Fuck the iPod

Will somebody give me one good reason why I should own a fucking iPod? Will somebody explain why I should give Steve Jobs 350 hard-earned George Washingtons to apply the Apple logo to my hip?

Sure, it’s a handy little device, I suppose. But then so is a garlic press. The garlic press, however, is much cheaper and will actually do something beneficial. Such as saving you some time when you’re cooking some pasta.

Frankly, I don’t get it. The little bastard doesn’t even allow me to record onto it. (To its credit, the Zen, Creative’s response to the IPod, does.) The least one can expect for this kind of money is a consummate fuck from a second-class Hollywood hooker. But from where I’m sitting, I’m looking at a bunch of teenagers and twentysomethings on the subway not really enjoying themselves, plugged into earphones and passing the time in the same banal way that non-iPod riders are.

Would someone explain why it’s so important to be completely out-of-touch with the waking world around me? If the iPod is about control, why don’t these folks use Nero to burn a custom CD for their pre-existing Discmen?

I’ll confess that music is important and that I listen to a lot of it. But who knew that one out of 10 Americans view the iPod as their fucking savior? Did we learn nothing from Ridley Scott’s 1984 commercial? We’re supposed to throw a hammer to the evil corporate overlords, right? Funny how the iPod has been airbrushed into a new version of the commercial. Never mind that this “Greedo shoots first” version is no longer available at the Apple site.

I’d like to chalk the iPod phenomenon up to a “kids these days” benediction. But I’m too young to be a scolding old man. Even so, I’ve seen grown men fucking around with this thing, as if the Apple Click Wheel was some technological justification for revisiting Billy Squier. Why subsidize some half-baked mofo who doesn’t even know how to spell “tonight?”

And what’s with this whole bullshit notion of the iPod empowering you? Am I missing something here? You mean to say that if I go into a Universal Unitarian church with an iPod strapped on and start talking with some slinky blonde that I’ll take her home and ensure her at least six orgasms? Wow, who knew? The iPod as muscle car. Throw the basic aspects of mutual attraction out the window, my friends.

I’m utterly convinced that historians will view the iPod in the same light that people remember the Olympus Pearlcoder: a half-baked technological tool that suggests something personal and refined, but that is ultimately about taking advantage of people’s inability to figure out the technological tools they have on their Dell computers. Namely, these things called CD burners, BitTorrents and MP3s, the latter being a format that isn’t particularly bad for something coming through your headphones.

by DrMabuse

HST: The River is Still Running

thompson-h.jpgI haven’t read the obituaries. I haven’t read anything. Hunter S. Thompson is gone and his unexpected suicide hit me hard. I was reduced to a blank, morose expression while sitting in a passenger seat in a moving car heading south for some fun. What fun could be had when America’s foremost nihilist and partygoer had decided that enough was enough? It took me about twenty minutes of explaining why Hunter S. Thompson was important and why his work mattered before I could go about my day.

Friends have often noted that I have an older man’s concern with the notable folks who die. But my concerns rest not with mortality, which is inevitable, but the more troubling question of enduring legacy. Who will replace these voices? What other tangible creative things die in the process?

Because Thompson, like all the others, was needed and irreplaceable. The landscape of American letters can never equal the strange mix of chaos and wisdom that Thompson threw into his work with inebriated gusto. It should be noted that Thompson repeatedly read the works of H.L. Mencken and the Book of Revelations in Gideon Bibles when holed up in hotels. Thompson was a man committed to a subjective form of journalism that he believed in with religious fervor, but he never lost sight of the number of the beast painted around Washington.

His work was as shoot-from-the-hip and as inconsistent as any prolific hack. His writings varied from incoherent screeds to astute examinations of American hypocrisy. But at his best (whch was often), he mattered. Thompson stood alone as a courageous voice, and he got people to listen.

A few years ago, Hunter S. Thompson stated repeatedly in interviews, “No one is more astonished than I am that I’m still alive.” I always chalked this up to the Good Doctor defiantly drinking Wild Turkey, imbibing drugs, firing guns into the night, blaring televisions and banging out political diatribes (even howling like a banshee on the commentary track for Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas), maintaining the same life that he had built his career upon. Here was a man who had openly settled for Clinton in his collection, Better than Sex, hoping that some spark of true progressivism would endure. Yet two years later, he was the only writer with the balls to eviscerate Nixon upon his death.

In his autumn years, Thompson had settled into a comfortable routine of writing a sports column for ESPN. He had recently married and was keeping busy. But no one can keep a good political junkie down. And it was no surprise when Thompson came out with high hopes for Kerry in Rolling Stone. His essay concluded:

We were angry and righteous in those days, and there were millions of us. We kicked two chief executives out of the White House because they were stupid warmongers. We conquered Lyndon Johnson and we stomped on Richard Nixon — which wise people said was impossible, but so what? It was fun. We were warriors then, and our tribe was strong like a river.

That river is still running. All we have to do is get out and vote, while it’s still legal, and we will wash those crooked warmongers out of the White House.

Thompson must have taken the results in November hard. Harder than anyone. For as much as any of us stupored around for days, feeling as if our last hopes were defeated when four more years of Bush were upon us, Thompson had to feel the pendulum swinging to the right more viscerally than any Poe character.

There’s the famous passage in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas in which Thompson describes the death of 1960s idealism:

There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda….You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning….

And that, I think, was the handle — that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting — on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave….

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark — that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.

I always figured Thompson had found a way to go on and accept the hard realities of a nation thumping to a reactionary beat. And maybe he did for a while.

But make no mistake: despite Thompson’s ultimate answer to the predicament, that river is still very much running. And Thompson’s work will endure. The question now is this: Who has the courage to pick up the slack?

by DrMabuse

Cinematic Cockamanie?

It what might be the only bold move in Chris O’Donnell’s career, it looks like he’s set to star with Sarah Polley in a film adaptation of Will Self’s Cock & Bull, the infamous pair of novellas about a man who grows a vagina and a woman who grows a cock. It remains a mystery how such a film will get past the MPAA. Let’s hope that writer-director Matt Nix is, pardon the pun, ballsy enough to go for the NC-17.

by DrMabuse

Unlawful Common Knowledge

I’m no historian. I’m just a guy who reads books with a layman’s ambition of being well-rounded.

I can give you a brief overview of Ferdinand de Lesseps’ attempt to cut through the Isthmus of Panama without considering the mosquito problem and can suggest, without Googling, David McCllough’s The Path Between the Seas as a good book on the subject. I can tell you about why H&R Block does most of its business in January and why the working poor is terrified of filing 1040s on their own — this, well before reading David K. Shipler’s heartbreaking book on the subject. I can tell you how the umbrella came about and why men have Jonas Hanway to thank for keeping their heads dry.

I could also quote almost any line of The Big Lebowski, sing any Beatles song with pretty solid accuracy, and tell you who directed some random Val Lewton-produced film from the 1940s.

My intention here is not to boast, but to point out that there are just some things that happen to stick and that should stick. Shards of common knowledge that are the average Joe’s duty and responsibility to remember.

Lest the reader think that I am flexing my achievements here, I should also point out that despite several years of Spanish and some time knocking around in Germany, I’m a hopeless monoglot. I’m terrible with remembering first names, even when I use the name in a responsive sentence. Great with identifying sounds and voices, but sometimes the intimate contours of faces don’t always match up, even though I can tell you how a lighting scheme for a stunning shot in a movie works, can negotiate your couch through a tight crevice and tell you whether or not your car will fit into a curbside parking spot.

And I should point out that I often come up with idiotic conclusions, many of which are posted here. I also change my mind on a regular basis.

Seasoning my mind with bits of minutiae has always been a priority for me. Probably has a good deal with the way I was brought up (which was without a whole lot) and my overwhelming need to know things. Some shit, I just pick up. Other things like intricate swing dance moves (working on it) or the correct pronunciation of multisyllable words, not so easily. (In fact, not so long ago, I learned that, despite spelling it correctly on paper, I was pronouncing “mischievous” MISS-CHEEVE-EE-US. How’s that for ineptitude?) But despite the wide swath, I am, by no means, an expert.

But I’m wondering right now, after a pleasant though slightly disheartening breakfast in a diner, just how effective our current system is at turning out well-rounded folks.

Picture your humble narrator reading a book, grooving to Janis Joplin being played over the speakers, nursing a cup of coffee and digging into a fantastic chicken pesto crepe, and doing his best to resist the potatoes with sour cream. (Damn you, starch!) Suddenly, I feel two pairs of eyes seering into me. I don’t look up. But I hear a father talking with his kid, “You see, he’s reading a book.”

I use my peripheral vision to scope out Allen Funt. Not there. Oh yeah. He’s dead.

Is this a recreation of the famous Bill Hicks wafflehouse joke? No. Because reading has taken neither a positive or a negative impression.

“That’s what happens when you go to school,” continues Daddy-O. “You learn how to read and you read books! And you’ll be reading just like him.”

The father’s tone is encouraging. I dig any parent willing to get such a young child reading. The father apologizes. I tell him it’s no problem and scoot up to the edge of the booth, beaming a broad smile to the kid, “And in twenty-five years, another child will be looking at you as you’re reading a book in a diner.”

Nervous laughter, apologies. Really, it’s no big deal, I say. Just part of the natural human cycle that will go on into perpetuity. We are all the richer because of it. I’ll do the same thing myself if I ever have kids.

We start talking. The guy’s all right. This youngish father is there with his mother. To keep the excitement rolling for the kid, I note that Theodore Roosevelt would read a book in one night, starting at a late hour, and was then fully prepared to discuss it with his staff the next morning. The conversation shifts to U.S. Presidents.

The boy’s grandmother is a big Jefferson fan. “Oh,” I say, “have you read Joseph Ellis’ American Sphinx? Great book on Jefferson’s character.” She’s read a few books on Jefferson but can’t remember the names or the authors. “Jefferson still lives,” I say.

“What?”

“Did you know that Thomas Jefferson and John Adams died on the same day?”

I figure this would be common knowledge for anyone interested in Jefferson, let alone anyone who has ever taken a U.S. history class. That Adams and Jefferson died within hours of each other, Adams croaks, “Jefferson still lives” just before meeting his maker, and that, to seal one of the greatest historical coinicdences in human history, the two die on July 4, 1826 — exactly fifty years from the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

But they don’t know this. And while they’re delighted to know, I’m a bit mortified. The young father is a history major. What’s more, David McCullough spoke at his commencement. I rattle off three McCullough books I’ve read, but the history major hasn’t read any McCullough.

Then there are more titles of books, more facts, more things that come to mind (which apparently is a lot) — all in the interests of historical boosterism. I talk briefly about Jefferson’s second catastrophic term as president, about Abigail Adams’ “remember the ladies” letter to Jefferson, and several other things.

“You must be a historian!” says the dad’s mother.

“No,” I say. “I’m just a guy who likes pesto.”

The funny thing is that, as several of my teachers may attest, history was never really my strong suit in high school or college. Even though I could bluff my muddled memory of historical facts in essay form.

But I’m thinking to myself that if these two adults, who are very nice and conciliatory, and who are everyday people, think I’m a historian, then we are in very big trouble indeed.

I’m not trying to smear these three people. They were very grateful for the titles they loosened from my tongue. And they had fantastic things to say about our founding fathers, based on what they could remember. They showed a keen interest and curiosity in the ways that our national quilt was knitted.

But the distinction here is that they had no real grasp on the details, even when, in one case, history was the primary base of knowledge.

This cultural stigma goes far beyond mere facts. I had a conversation with an acquaintance the other night and I mentioned the tea ceremony at the Asian Art Museum, which I was honored to attend last weekend. This acquaintance told me how she couldn’t possibly attend because she was mortified that only educated folks would find the ceremony interesting.

Nonsense, I replied. I knew almost nothing about tea ceremonies and Asian art. But I pointed out the atmosphere, some of the limitations, and the rules that I could remember, pointing out that my pulse rate was halved just by sitting down, taking in the relaxing rites.

When our motley group was strolling around the museum, I was audacious enough to call the artist behind one fantastic piece of chiaroschuro papyrus “the Aubrey Beardsley of Korea,” which didn’t sit so well with one self-appointed “expert” who thought that such comparisons were uncouth. Uncouth? I was just trying to remember. Who knew there was an unspoken code of acceptable associations?

I wonder if this “expert” (or any educator, for that matter) has any idea that strangling an individulal’s curiosity or telling someone how they should talk about culture is what leads to people like the history major who can’t remember basic details. I wonder if the experts are truly cognizant of the unnecessary chasm that separates the layman from the cultured. The strange stigma behind an enjoyable book like Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything, which sets out to explain a good deal of science to a popular audience.

What we are seeing, I think, in this age of reactonary and results-oriented education, is a nation that is creating or pepetuating a knowledge class system. The disparity between the knows and the know-nots.

And it kills me to see the mad rush of curiosity suffering such an unnecessary crib death. Really, our countrymen are better than this.