Less Than Negative One

Imperial Bedrooms by Bret Easton Ellis

June 15, 2010

Knopf

169 pages

The harrowing and sublime sequel to 1985’s Less Than Zero, Imperial Bedrooms fast-forwards 25 years to a movie-industry-obsessed Los Angeles that, because of its author’s maturity, outshines its previous incarnation as a grim and deeply effecting dystopia, one void of compassion and saturated with a sense of distrust that seems frighteningly universal. This smoothly rendered thriller may lack the scope and wit of previous works like Glamorama, but Ellis’s portrayal of Clay, now a successful screenwriter, and his increasingly despicable circle of friends, cuts satisfyingly to the core of a bleak tunnel with no existential light at its end. In an era where blond bangs and Ray-Bans have been replaced by Botox and botched eyebrow lifts, Clay must ask himself what it looks like to be aging in a city that exists only for the young. The answer: not pretty. Ellis reaches his usual quota of (real or imagined?) squirm-inducing torture scenes and ultra-depraved, drug-fueled sex trysts. But the book’s quietest moments – the vibration of an iPhone, the digital billboards beaming images into the desert night, the condo lights left on when no one’s supposed to be home – are often its scariest, perfectly capturing an odor of uneasiness and of time being frozen, of a middle-aged man’s struggle with, and eventual acceptance of the darkest moments that have come to define his sad, plastic life. Equal parts Raymond Chandler L.A. über-noir and spot-on postmodern satire, Imperial Bedrooms is Ellis’s most polished, succinct novel to date, and his most disturbing since 1991’s American Psycho.

Philip Roth Is A Dirty (Awesome) Old Man

The Humbling by Philip Roth

November 2, 2009

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

140 pages

Although it lacks the scope and detail of Roth’s masterworks like The Human Stain and American Pastoral, The Humbling presents a convincingly haunting – albeit too brief – glimpse into the complex darkness of a decaying star at his lowest and most vulnerable. The prose is disturbing, the characters more so, and the brusque plot is generally riveting. For his thirtieth book, Roth departs from Newark, his longtime muse, to impart the novella-length tragedy of Simon Axler, an aging stage actor who, at 65, finds himself unable to act, and engaged in an invigorating yet confounding affair with an ex-lesbian 25 years his junior. In much of Roth’s most recent work (Everyman, Exit Ghost), the dialogue appears unrealistic to the point of being distracting. However, in The Humbling, this self-aware (in true Roth fashion) “soap opera” speak, far from seeming stilted, embellishes the suffocating sense of the primary characters only being able to exist and function in scripted roles that are either ill-chosen or unknowingly thrust upon them, roles that can only be renounced by carefully conceived deception or spontaneous violence. Also featuring some of Roth’s raunchiest (and best) sex scenes since Portnoy’s Complaint, The Humbling is a late-career bright spot that deserves a larger canvas.

Page 39

I’M RIDING SHOTGUN, breeze-happy in the Automatic Climate Control. Billy’s chiefing on a joint in the back, bobbing along to Big L’s “The Heist”.

The plan is to spend the night in Southwest Harlem – four blocks from Columbia – at the apartment of one of Davis’ friends. A pit stop on the nostalgia train for me, and, more importantly for Billy, a sweet squirt of debauchery in the Lecherous Apple. It just feels good to get out, to be moving again, like running downhill. No more vibrations in my pocket.

I-95 South is an asphalt hell-hole, suffocating, fume-laden at the tail-end of rush hour. A twenty-foot black-and-white Derek Jeter eye-fucks his new Movado timepiece. McDonald’s crucifixes coax their congregations with promises of the holy trinity– High Trans-fat! High Sodium! Free Happy Meal Toys!

Billy tosses the roach out amidst a thick cloud. An elderly couple in a Lincoln glare. “At least we’re not going to die soon!” he screams at them, clown-smiling. They pull off the highway. Davis’s CDs cycle endlessly through his unique brand of nineties minutiae – Mobb Deep, Smashing Pumpkins, Weezer, Nas, variations of alternative, jangle-pop, post-hardcore punk, trip-hop. The Ghosts of Genres Past. I drift in the familiar guitar chords, the middle-school-dance mystique. A breath of old-fresh air.

Traffic crawls.

Davis keeps checking his iPhone. Just after we pass Exit 18 in Southport we see the cause of the congestion, across the median in the oncoming lanes. A truck has skidded perpendicular to the road, four huge tracks of burnt rubber streak the asphalt. The cab is facing us, windshield smashed. Gobs of blood, gray and brown pieces of clothing are splattered across the white hood, a messy abstract canvas. A compacted heap – what might have been a yellow Nissan Altima – rests against the median. Pieces of glass litter the road like parade confetti. People are talking on two-ways, drinking Dunkin Donuts iced lattes. Two paramedics rush past, wheeling a man in a stretcher toward a nearby ambulance. A third paramedic, his sleeves and latex gloves soaked, tries to hold in the strings of glistening hamburger meat seeping out of a gash below the man’s ribcage. Billy rolls up his window, lights another joint, keeps saying Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ between hits. I rifle through my backpack, open a few of the orange bottles, swallow what I hope are a Zoloft, a Percocet, and a Prozac. Davis gives me this look in the rear-view mirror and I know what he’s thinking. In front of us, an old beige Chevy truck with a navy blue bumper sticker that says, I’m Gonna Miss Me When I’m Gone…


…and I’m walking past the baggage claim at JFK two-and-a-half years ago, talking on my cell phone to Lauren who’s at school, trying to avoid the young couple that had been sitting in front of me on the flight, making out the entire time, exchanging handjobs under the complimentary blanket. Lauren’s trying to hold it together, but she’s sobbing, telling me she loves me and I’m not crying and I can tell she’s really drunk.

Maybe it’s because, given what’s happened, she feels extra bad about fucking Archer Hamilton on the back seat of a charter bus headed to a Young Democrats formal the night before, something I won’t find out about until I get back to school two weeks later.

Lauren’s saying that everything is going to be fine in between sobs and swallows of what I’m assuming is a mixed drink involving watermelon vodka or something equally sinister. Aunt Susan’s on the other line. She’s calm, sticking to facts, mapping out the next couple of days, the lawyers, the medical examiner’s office, the funeral director in East Fairport, which of my cousins are staying with me for the service and I’m not really listening to any of it and the couple in front of me is sweaty, gleaming, making out roughly on the escalator.

Davis is waiting outside the automated doors in a dark gray suit, leaning against his father’s Maserati. He tucks away his cell phone, smiles sadly, takes my bag.

“Thanks,” I say, “I really appreciate you coming to –”

“It’s the least I could do,” he says. “Your parents, you know how much they meant to Dad, to the whole
company. It’s…” he trails off, looks at the ground.

“I know, it’s been –” I stop and realize everything. I’m starting to fall, not faint, but toppling against the weight of my own legs. Davis is pulling me up and saying I’m here, I’m here, don’t worry before I feel the taste of tears running down my cheek and neck, staining my tee shirt and Davis is taking three Lexapros out of a bottle he’d had in his pocket and is feeding them to me and I’m swallowing and the ride back to East Fairport takes no time at all.

Rockin' the Suburbs (Is a Good Idea for Even the Biggest Asphalt-Addicted, Tight-Jeaned Burnout City Freak)

A recent trip to upstate Connecticut, the land of Huskies, steamed cheeseburgers, and most importantly, my birth, has given me a much needed breath of filth-free air, a reminder of why the first twenty-odd years of my life were zenlike when compared to the gonzofied sensory-explosion monkeybomb world I currently inhabit -- and more than a few reasons why I will ultimately return to live out the rest of my days in a kingdom of soccer milfs and weed whackers. I'll list a few of these until the "pizza" delivery guy shows up with a fat bag of "pizza", or until the technology-induced ADHD kicks in, whichever comes first.

• Trees. Yes, Central Park and Riverside Park offer the occasional unspoiled leafy glen, and all the biking, tennis, cross-country skiing, frisbee, and sunbathing options that any urban treehugger could possibly desire. But they also offer more than the occasional glimpse of foaming junkies getting their tweak on, and Puerto Rican hookers having their asses eaten out next to busy playgrounds. Not to mention the major highway that runs alongside Riverside, or the European tourists make the Great Lawn seem like a Great Place to swallow a bucket of lighter fluid. In CT, I went on a 15-mile bike ride through a quaint town center, a primeval forest that has been unchanged since we gave smallpox to the Pequots, a nature preserve, a river that doesn't have a highway next to it, rows of endless tobacco fields, a cemetary with stones from the 1600's, the pristine campus of my prep school, and a dirt road next to a turf farm where my buddies and I used to "study" after school. Not once during this entire ride was I accosted by a crackhead or subjected to the constant ruckus of taxi horns, packs of creepy obese children, garbage-day stink-smells, and crosswalk stagnation. Besides the occasional car and dog walker, this was Nature on my own quiet, bird-call-filled terms. Wide open (if manicured) spaces, the pump of the bike, the empty blue of the sky and my peace-starved head. Transcendence ahoy!

• NO HIPSTERS!!!

• Real dogs. People actually have real, outdoorsy, L.L. Bean Catalogue-worthy labs and retrievers, not the pathetic, yappy punt-worthy rat-creatures I have to avoid stepping on all the time. And the dog in the 'burbs are much happier, free to roam, to chase rabbits, to be actual dogs, instead of crying blankets for miserable 30-year-old single women who get stood up by their match.com dates. 

•  Pickup trucks with the occasional racing sticker. 

• Golf. It's crack for white people (except for the white people who actually smoke crack). I didn't realize how badly I missed it until I played a round. The attraction is simple: Take the Nature idea and add open boozing and swearing and hitting things with a metal stick. There is nothing finer on God's earth. Besides porn. And "pizza". 

•  Did I mention no hipsters?

• In the suburbs, there's much less room for dissatisfaction. When the choices of what to do on a Friday night are limited to a dozen restaurants and a handful of decent bars, there are two options: either stay inside or make whatever you're doing fun.[Not to forget house parties. Not sweaty, forty-assholes-cramped-into-a-tiny-apartment parties, HOUSE PARTIES. Like "let's go out back to the barn or skinny dip in the pool or be able to have a conversation where I don't have to smell your breath or count the open pores in your face!"] New Yorkers will spend an entire night working their way through 15-20 bars/clubs in one neighborhood looking for the perfect vibe, only to realize that it doesn't exist, and that the search has depleted most of the week's paycheck. Sure, people and places in the 'burbs may be simpler, but that simplicity generally makes happiness a much easier state to attain. I'd rather hang out at the same local, familiar pub with my best buddies night after night than have my brain explode while trying to figure out which of the 85 Thai places to go to within a three-block radius of my apartment. 

• There's also something to be said for being able to drive for hours on open stretches of road and highway, letting your arm catch the breeze outside the window, blasting your tunage with the unshakable confidence of knowing that you will never be a slave to the hell-colored stoplights of the All-Mighty Grid. 

Not to say that the suburban life is total nirvana. There's plenty of reasons why I stay in Manhattan. Career progression, 4 am last calls, exotic polychromatic women, getting a bacon-egg-and-cheese and a 40 oz whenever I damn well want. And most importantly, there aren't any pizza guys in the suburbs. And like clockwork, as I write this sentence, the buzzer is ringing. I wonder what delicious toppings he'll have today. The suburbs, for now, are only a distant Disneyland dreamworld. And one day I will sleep there in the carefully crafted fantasy that is Connecticut. But until then, I have more pressing business. Lunch is served!

To MFA or...uh, Not (A Brief, Rushed, and Not At All Authoratitve or Even Informative Take on Graduate Writing Programs)

A writer who’s just graduated from a writing program is supposed to write about it, right?

I can remember when, three years ago, as a young, impressionable undergrad who thought (wrongly) that he could write a good story or two, I began to research MFA programs. Why an MFA, you ask? Doesn’t it make more sense to get something useful, perhaps a JD, an MBA, any other M[pick a letter]? Something with a future? Those are great questions. After all, as my parents have pointed out several times – I did get into law school. I guess there were two primary reasons for the MFA. (1) Writing fiction was (and is) the only thing besides playing music that I ever truly enjoyed putting a huge amount of effort into, and I had this grand scheme to write a horrific Easton Ellis-esque novel, a collection of short stories, and a volume of poetry, and to be wallowing in royalties from their respective sales by age 24. And (2), I wanted to attain the more realistic goal of avoiding getting a “real job” (one where I have to get up before 11 am and shave more than once a week) for as long as possible. Happily, (2) has worked out pretty nicely, and I have written the aforementioned novel, although my fame, riches, and 70 Natalie Portman virgin body doubles have yet to materialize.

I’ll try to avoid making this about the pros and cons of my own program (Columbia) and instead focus on the pros and cons of the “MFA experience” in general, though inevitably most of what I’ll be drawing from will be based on my time at one institution, one that may be infinitely different than most places, like, say University of New Hampshire.I don't know. I only applied to programs where you didn't need to take the GRE.

I didn’t enter a graduate a writing program to “find myself” or “perfect my craft” or make new friends who weren’t my cat, or any of the other stupid cliché reasons I’d read on artsy-fartsy blogs I perused while researching programs. I wanted to publish something big, get paid, bang Natalie Portman, and live the dream (also a cliché, I guess). I suppose that’s completely counterintuitive to the very idea of an MFA program, and although (obviously) my goals haven’t been accomplished, I can honestly say that I would be NOWHERE (relatively) near as close to achieving them as I am now. Plain and simple: Getting an MFA taught me everything I now know about writing. Granted, it’s not like that for everyone. Some lucky bastards are born with a freakish amount of literary genius. But for those of us not named Philip Roth or Bret Easton Ellis, an MFA is vital, if only because of what I call the Immersion Factor.

As an undergrad journalism major, I hadn’t read as much as the English majors but because of my program’s requirement of three seminars a semester, I was soon reading the equivalent of three-and-a-half books a week, and, more importantly, learning how to read as a writer. I cannot stress enough the importance of reading on the writer’s learning curve. If you don’t read – YOU WILL FAIL (or just suck at writing forever). What would Lady Gaga sound like if she decided never to listen to Madonna? After all, the greatest artists are the greatest plagiarists and one of the best bi-products of learning how to read is learning how to steal – and steal successfully. The only other comparable non-academic option would be to lock yourself in your room for a year and do nothing besides read (and write once in a while). The obvious drawbacks to this lifestyle are that vampires aren't as popular as they were last year, and that once in a while, you need to supplement your life with (surprise) life experience, as well as a few people who you can bounce your work off of. Which brings me to my next point.

Another unique aspect of the MFA experience is the sheer amount of criticism one receives, and the luxury of being able to learn how to deal with, and benefit from that criticism. Workshops are horrifying. Having to submit your work (aka your soul – or the sinister void that used to be a soul) a handful of times a semester and have it thoroughly dissected and desecrated by people who probably aren’t your closest friends is sort of like being chained, face up, at the bottom of an outhouse while the entire Oakland Raiders starting lineup takes turns relieving themselves on you after an all-night free buffet at Waffle House. Not fun. But like any academic experience, you (hopefully) learn something once in a while. And after a couple discouraging weeks spent thinking you’re the shittiest person ever to put your fingers to a keyboard, you realize that the critiques – though occasionally harsh – are meant to be CONSTRUCTIVE, that your professors and (some of your) classmates actually want you to get better, and that “good job” or “this is perfect” are probably the worst comments you can get on a submission. Sure, there may be an asshole in your workshop who’s pissed you’ve been hooking up with the only non-lesbian/non-fat-chick-who-isn’t-married in your class and will tear up your submission purely out of spite. But again, that’s the beauty of college. You will learn to separate the helpful from the worthless, the inept from the well-thought-out. You will also learn about the most valuable mental tool a writer can possess – the ability to edit your own work. This may not sound like much, but believe me, cutting large chunks of something you’ve been working on creating for years can be harder than aborting a fetus. One of my workshop professors singlehandedly taught me everything I know about line-editing and paragraph structure, and I will forever be grateful to her.

I guess the third and final (positive) aspect of the MFA experience could be called Networking, or, equally as uncreative, The People You’ll Meet and What To Do With Them. A good MFA program is a great place to meet distinguished writers (i.e. faculty members). The level of interest they show in you as a budding wordsmith will vary, and depend on how much you nag them, but chances are you will form at least a moderately strong bond with at least one or two of them. These connections are vital, more so in writing than in most other fields. Any strides I’ve made in the literary community (or sphere, or whatever) have been a direct result of getting advice from / getting introductions from my professors. Nowhere besides an MFA program will you be able to make friends with such a high concentration of established writers. Or maybe not, but you will meet a lot. In terms of getting an agent and getting published (both of which should be important to you or why the hell would you bother getting an MFA?) I will say that the New York City programs do offer a bunch of easy ways to get yourself on the radar, considering how much of the publishing industry is situated within a couple square miles of Manhattan. However, if you get into a great, but more geographically remote program (Iowa, Johns Hopkins, Houston, UMASS-Amherst), GO THERE. The Internet has made location obsolete; the only important factor on whether or not you get published is the strength of your manuscript. You either got it or you don’t (unless you’re a fashionable, overachieving celeb who for some reason decides that millions of movie dollars aren’t enough of an accomplishment. Then you can write garbage).

Your classmates are another matter. Typically, and especially in a larger writing program, you’ll find a vast spectrum of humanity – all ages, shapes, colors, sexual orientations, political views (mmm maybe not). Don’t feel pressured to make friends with everybody. You should try to be outgoing, especially in a larger program. Most writers aren’t the most socially adept creatures, but some are really fascinating, caring people, believe it or not. It is important, also, to invest in a couple close writing colleagues with whom you feel comfortable swapping your work. Remember what I said about having a couple pairs of eyes that aren’t yours. They will see things that you don’t. Just make sure they’re eyes you trust.

--- Now I need to stop ---- and be brutally honest, in a way that will most likely alienate four out of the six people who probably read this blog. WARNING: The vast majority of young “writers” (especially in NYC) are HIPSTERS. These are not the badass Kerouac and Ginsberg-esque beatniks of the fifties, or the Warhol Factory luminaries of the seventies, or even the cool, “different”, and edgy kids today who one might consider hip. No, these are the worst breed of hipster, the antithesis of cool. The hipsters who shop at Salvation Army but whose hedge-fund-managing parents pay their entire rent and tuition in the hopes that their wayward, possibly bi-curious 30-year-old daughter will finally make something out of herself and stop creeping out the rest of the family. These are the almost comically pretentious, negative-Nancy hipsters who think that because they’ve spent the last ten years sitting in a dark basement listening to depressing indie music and cutting themselves because ‘Wah! Wah! No one understands me!’ that their crummy lives are worth writing about. Get a (real) life. I’m sorry, but if I wanted to wear ball-strangling jeans and stupid-rimmed glasses, and not take showers or be optimistic about anything, I’d do the world a favor and never leave the wretched outer-borough hovel Daddy bought me for my last birthday.

A little bombastic, yes, and spiteful; let me clarify. There are lots of great, interesting, and hilarious hipsters in every writing program, and I’d like to think that there’s at least some good or redeeming qualities in even the scruffiest wookie. But still, generally speaking, most hipsters should be treated the same as mosquitoes.  Unfortunately, it is these very hipsters who run the publishing industry. I even had one professor go so far as to tell me that I should remove my jobs as a bouncer and a water polo coach from my résumé because they would make me look like a “stupid jock”. Wow. I’m sorry I’m not an effeminate pussy. I’m sorry that I like watching (and playing) sports possibly more than any other activity besides sex (and writing, sometimes), that I prefer the company of I-bankers and accountants because they actually pay their own rent, that I enjoy hunting critters and gutting fish, that I’m a registered Republican. All of which brings me to my last major point – BE YOURSELF! Don’t allow going to an MFA program to change who you are, because as corny as it sounds, the truer you are to yourself, the better your writing will be. If you become fake, your work will look that way. You won’t fool anybody. And if any punk steps to you, you can tell him/her/he-she to go screw a Katy Perry blow-up doll, or whatever hipsters are doing these days.

Some other writing program drawbacks include the two or three years of tuition, which can range from the affordable to the frighteningly absurd (i.e. Columbia University), and the fact that many employers will laugh in your face when you include an MFA in your list of credentials. But if you’re serious about becoming a great writer and don’t have the natural talent of, say, a David Foster Wallace, then I really believe that getting an MFA is by far the best, if not the only option. And actually, David Foster Wallace got an MFA, too. Then he killed himself.  

A New Yorker in....uh, New York (part 1)

After reading Pete Hamill's "Downtown," a badass memoir-slash-history of living and working in Lower Manhattan during the last 300 years, and after living here for almost three years (and never even having seen the Statue of Liberty from a distance), I figure it's about time to strap on a fanny pack and capri pants and check out the places that obese families from Arkansas wearing all-white New Balances and faux-hawked Euros ask me how to get to while I try to mind my own business on the subway. Also, I have a lot of free time and the eye candy is getting splendid (thank Buddha that Ugg season is over!), and besides, it never hurts to get a lil art & culture up in yo life (in addition to the fact that my Columbia ID that gets me in to every museum for free expires when I graduate in May).

First stop on the tour - the Metropolitan Museum of Art - which I checked out last Wednesday, was the shortest, because it's the only place on the list that I've already been to several times, and one with which most people are familiar. I'll dispense with the descriptions of the massive columned exterior, the huge glass pyramid looking out into Central Park, the guilded, turn-of-the-century mansions across the street, and the Asian man in the Scooby Doo tee shirt who asked me to take a picture of him next to a hot dog cart with his 100000000-megapixel Asian camera. Although he was pretty cool. Instead, some random thoughts:


- Greek bodies drawn on urns and vases look remarkably similar to today's cartoons, except there are many more penises on them. Greeks love penis, I guess.

- Has the act of creation become undervalued? In antiquity, even the most simple items like hairbrushes were painstakingly handcrafted to become works of art, to say nothing of the ornate statues, paintings, tunics, and wall hangings that are ubiquitous in their intricacy. What has mass production and a consumer ethos done to our conception of beauty and what should be beautiful? Does anyone care?

- Has our easy access to cheap, plastic, throw-away goods destroyed a part of the skill set that defines us as human? Is digital art just as beautiful, the next logical cultural step, or is it just a product of postmodern laziness, pressing a button to let a machine do the real creative work?

- I need to learn all the romance languages in order to spit game to the FOOOIINNNE ass European girls giggling at the African fertility sculpture. Need to find what country they're from and move there ASAP.

- Symbolism and myth have been been so integral to every culture for at least 50,000 years, from the French cave paintings to English Romanticism. What are our symbols? Has our scientific, realist-centric society destroyed the validity of myth in the overall human conscious? What has this done/will this do to our collective psyche?

- There was definitely a huge bong masquerading as a vase in the modern furniture exhibit, designed by Dale Chihuly. I would like to chill with him.

- 50% of all government funding should go to time travel research, as that would be the coolest technology EVER. I want to see how creepy the Greeks really were. Not to mention dinosaurs.

Willie Nelson's (Organic) Spicy Potato and Onion Soup

After handing in my grad school thesis, and while I embark on the Great Hunt for a publisher for Monkeytown, not to mention decent editorial jobs that don't seem to exist anymore, I have a lot of free time on my hands. Most of this is spent pretending to venture out of my cave to hit up the gym and various artistic and cultural NYC destinations, working on my squash game, and playing the role of Aging Creepster at local college bars when there are drink specials. But I also get hungry. And in the spirit of being too frugally cognizant (i.e. broke) to eat out all the time (read: ever) I've spent the past few weeks finding simple, easy, and healthy (NO MORE CRACKDONALD'S!!!) recipes to which I can add my own humble twist. The following addition to the Small Drunken Cookbook is the first in what will hopefully be a short series (because once I get a book deal, I'll finally be able to score an 8:30 res at Dorsia).

Willie Nelson's Potato and Onion Soup is a spiced-up variation of a recipe I recently came across. Its name derives from the fact that with so much free time, I've been living a "green" lifestyle (as in eating healthy, sleeping late, and playing guitar, you weed heads!!), similar to that endorsed by the singer. Flavorful, hearty, and perfect for a cold, rainy spring evening, the soup's preparation is easy and wide open to personal preference, and shouldn't take more than 15-20 minutes to make.

What you'll need:

- skillet (frying pan)
- medium-sized pot
-1 organic diced (into cheese-square size pieces) potato from your local hippie/yuppie market
- 3-4 Tblsp. of diced onions
- 3 strips of turkey bacon
- a nice chunk of your favorite cheese (I prefer aged Gouda or smoked cheddar)
- 3-4 Tblsp. of chives
- at least 2 cups of milk (or soymilk)
- Bob's Red Mill Potato Flour (or any potato flour, or any flour, but potato flour works best)
- 1 Tblsp. of butter or extra slutty olive oil
- salt, black pepper, and ground red pepper
- a few drops of Tabasco sauce (for non-vaginas)

Begin by greasing skillet with butter or oil and start frying the bacon. When it's almost crispy, add the potatoes and onions. Remove the bacon when it's done; add salt, pepper, and red pepper and saute until the potatoes are a bit soft and onions are slightly brown (that's what she said). On a different burner, pour the milk into the pot, remembering to keep the heat at low to medium at all times. Stir in the contents of the skillet, making sure to include the bacon drippings for flavor. Stir in the chives, cheese, and (chopped up) bacon, then the flour for thickness (The amount of milk and flour used is entirely up to you - less flour and more milk for a thinner, traditional soup; more flour for a porridge-like consistency, which is how I like it). Continue stirring, adding more pepper or salt as you like. Cook for about five minutes or until it tastes right. As far as I'm concerned, the spicier the better.

Serves anywhere from 2-4 people, depending on your level of munchies.

Willie Nelson's can stand alone as a meal or late-night snack. I like it with pork chops and apple sauce, or as a prelude to any seafood dish. As with all the Small Drunken recipes, the soup is best enjoyed with a healthy glass of Maker's Mark and your favorite herbal blend. Cheers!

What You Got In That Bag, Girrrl?????

One of my resolutions this year is to try to stay positive and to be more "compassionate", whatever that vaguely defined state of mind means. Besides a few notable lapses, I think I've done a pretty decent job, but women/girls-with-unnecessarily-and-inexplicably-large-handbags, you aren't helping matters at all. In fact, you're making them much, much worse.

As a doorman, my night generally consists of: dealing with rich knuckleheads who NEVER have to wait in line, and continually remind me of this fact as they WAIT in line for an hour; stopping girls from running into the bathroom five at a time to stuff lines up their noses; and endlessly explaining to packs of Italian tourists what "we're at capacity" and "stop singing retarded soccer chants at full volume or I'm throwing you the fuck out" mean. And, yes, all this I can handle. I even catch a few laughs (mostly at the stupid Euros).

But then the inevitable happens. Then it happens again, and again. One, or perhaps several classily dressed (in business cash, maybe a lovely evening dress) ladies will approach the bar, cheerfully oblivious, BlackBerries ablaze, handbags big enough to fit my laundry pile, mouths watering at the prospect of LIKE, A VODKA TONNN-IC!! that is, until I ask the first one for her ID. There's the look of shock, of disbelief, then the eye roll and the angry grunt, like we're THE ONLY BAR IN THE WORLD that cards people. Then comes my favorite part - the lengthy (at least 2-3 minutes) awkward silence while I strain to hold open the door and while the woman shuffles through the numerous contents of her bulging luxury-brand sack, hopelessly flinging around god-knows-what while giving me the same devil stare and while her friends/boyfriend/fuck buddy look on sheepishly until she finally finds the golden ticket buried at the bottom of her treasure stash. She has now wasted a significant chunk of my life (that I could have spent staring at girls who are actually attractive in line), and more importantly her own, and will be too pissed off at me to enjoy her VODKA TONNNIC and her boyfriend probably won't get laid. True story.

Listen, I know it's a lot easier for guys to simply open their wallets for age verification purposes. And I'm not going to ask the obvious (and naive) question, i.e., "Why the fuck do you feel the need to carry such a monstrous load around with you?" I decided a long time ago that whatever stuff women lug around (gum, gym clothes, cell phone with glitter case, walk-of-shame clothes, tampons, various other mystery items) are somehow inextricably and symbiotically linked to the women themselves, sort of like the bionic implants fused to members of the Borg race on Star Trek. Even the most callow rookie knows that to separate a woman from her bag can have disastrous, if not deadly consequences.

All I'm humbly suggesting, ladies, is that before you go out, just put your wallet (or other weird piece of card-carrying luggage) near the top of all the "stuff" in your bag, or at least put your ID in one of the many magical pockets of your accessory where you'll remember it. That will save you a lot of time, provide you with more time for Vodka tonics, and will make every doorman you come across not hate you or hate themselves and their horrible lonely lives even more than they already do. And the last thing you want is an angry doorman Muahahahaha!!... Just kidding - unless you're really attractive, or have other really big, ah, accessories, we'll probably forget all about you and your freakishly large "purse". After a while, you all look the same.


P.S. One of my coworkers told me last night that she read an article that conclusively linked handbag size to sluttiness. Just some food for thought the next time you're on Canal St. about to pick up some knock-off Luis.

Don DeLillo and the Premature Demise of Good (read: Challenging) Prose

As I’m finishing Don DeLillo’s compact (116-page) new book, “Point Omega”, I’m reminded of an old interview he did in the 70s or 80s. In it, he says:

“Making things difficult for the reader is less an attack on the reader than it is on the age and its facile knowledge-market. The writer is driven by his conviction that some truths aren’t arrived at so easily, that life is still full of mystery, that it might be better for you, Dear Reader, if you went back to the Living section of your newspaper because this is the dying section and you don’t really want to be here. This writer is working against the age and so he feels some satisfaction at not being widely read. He is diminished by an audience.”

To me, that really summed up nicely what DeLillo is (unconsciously?) doing with his fifteenth novel, one that I enjoyed massively, and one that won’t be a best-seller, one that’s already been dismissed by a bunch of critics, and one you probably won’t want to read. It’s slow-moving, frequently depressing, there’s only three characters, no real plot, nothing close to what could be considered a resolution at the end. Vaguely centered on the idea of Tipler’s omega point theory, “Point Omega” follows a young filmmaker into the desert where he attempts to film a documentary about a reclusive professor who happens to have worked deep within the Pentagon, advising military officials on the Iraq war. The filmmaker ends up chilling with the professor – Richard Elster – at his house. Eventually Elster’s daughter joins them, and besides one strange missing-person “event” that could be called the climax (Spoiler: Elster’s daughter disappears), that’s it. Nothing else really happens.

The narrative is framed nicely by an anonymous man at a MOMA exhibit that shows the movie Psycho slowed down so that the entire film takes twenty-four hours to run. Upon a closer read, one finds many subtleties between the exhibit and the main thread of the narrative, the three major characters, and the themes of time, death, and special relationships that are discussed – subtly – throughout “Point Omega”. DeLillo creates a world that is – you guessed it – full of mystery, difficult to tackle on several levels, oftentimes obscured by his unique genius. But the thing about DeLillo is that no matter what happens in his books, no matter if you “get” what he’s trying to say and do, no one – and I mean NO ONE – can craft a sentence the way he does. He’s always been criticized for being overstylized, but I think that his style is what separates him from everyone else, and always has; a style that functions almost like another character just waiting to be dissected. Burning and slashing your way through DeLillo’s prose is like eating a five-course Italian meal – it should be savored, consumed until each plate is clean, with the undeniable desire to suck up every last drop of dessert even though your stomach is overstuffed and ready to explode. DeLillo is like the asshole waiter who doesn’t even give enough of a shit about you to re-fill your water glass because he knows you’ll be back for more; you can’t help it. Below are some of my favorite nuggets from “Point Omega”:

"His face was long and florid, flesh drooping slightly at the sides of the jaw. He had a large pocked nose, eyes maybe grayish green, brows flaring. The braided hair should have seemed incongruous but didn't. It wasn't styled in sections but only woven into broad strands a tthe back of the head and it gave him a kind of cultural identity, a flair of distinction, the intellectual as tribal elder."

"It’s all about time, dimwit time, inferior time, people checking watches and other devices, other reminders. This is time draining out of our lives. Cities were built to measure time, to remove time from nature. There’s an endless counting down, he said. When you strip away all the surfaces, when you see into it, what’s left is terror. This is the thing that literature is meant to cure. The epic poem, the bedtime story."

“I began to understand what Elster meant when he said that time is blind here. Beyond the local shrubs and cactus, only waves of space, occasional far thunder, the wait for rain, the gaze across the hills to a mountain range that was there yesterday, lost today in lifeless skies.”

With so much of contemporary literature feeling too oversimplified and refined, paragraphs like those give me a reason to get up in the morning and keep me from killing myself when I pass the endless brightly colored rows of James Patterson and Dean Koontz at Barnes & Nobel.

Not to say that there haven’t always been cheap dime-store novels, used exclusively for low-thought entertainment purposes, throw-away pleasures. But it seems to me that back in the day, the biggest best-sellers were usually always literary fiction, books that challenged readers as well as entertained them. Before the mind-numbing, instant-satisfaction era of TV and the Internet, people used to actually enjoy having to mentally work their way through a dense sea of prose in search of the sublime. Having the revelations handed out on a platter just wasn’t as much fun, apparently. It’s refreshing in this literary age – where “writing” insipidly about vampires or wizards is basically the only way to sell a million copies – to see that there are still real writers like DeLillo still putting out challenging, powerful books and not giving a fuck if anyone reads them. In DeLillo’s case, it does help that he probably hasn’t had to worry about money since writing “White Noise” twenty-five years ago. “Underworld” probably helped a little, too, in the get-paid department.

On second thought, maybe I’ll write a story about swamp monsters in England that use magic wands to suck blood out of unsuspecting Japanese tourists, before I get all serious and anti-commercial.

Fuck You, Flaming Lips (And I Was So Nice To You Earlier, You Had to Go and Blow It)!!!!!

The Flaming Lips and Stardeath and White Dwarfs with Henry Rollins and Peaches Doing The Dark Side of the Moon


"You don't need drugs to enjoy the Floyd. You need the Floyd to enjoy drugs."
- anonymous YouTube posting


Yes, I wrote a recent post about how the Flaming Lips were going to help restore music's respectability in the next decade. Yes, for all intents and purposes, they are still my favorite band putting out new material today. But why Lips, why did you have to start the decade off in the most unoriginal way possible, with a COVER ALBUM? And not just a cover album, you had to cover "DARK SIDE OF THE MOON", the most flawless forty-three consecutive minutes of musical perfection ever created. Tripped-out Wizard-of-Oz-loving college kids have probably lost more collective brain cells to this album than any other. There was no need for this travesty, and you know it.


Maybe I wouldn't be so fired up if I hadn't spent the last month and change, during the final edits for my book, listening to nothing - seriously, NOTHING - but early to mid-career Pink Floyd, non-stop. And in that time I've come to the conclusion that the Floyd were/are the most innovative, sonically adventurous, and lyrically superior band I've ever heard. (Interestingly, I made an almost identically bombastic observation about the Lips when I first started getting into them in '06) It's not that the Lips' versions of the individual songs are sub par, per se. A more uptempo, percussion driven "Breathe" is pretty kickass, the Lips' robot-synthesizer vocal effects are present - and pleasantly trippy - throughout, and Henry Rollins' spoken-word parts are maybe cooler than the originals. Stardeath and White Dwarves are a great up and coming group, and their presence is certainly felt, especially in "Time" and "Brain Damage". The point is that they're not just covering one or two songs and putting their own wacky spin on them. They're covering the entire "DARK SIDE OF THE MOON"! That's like taking a Jackson Pollock painting, buying the same color paints and flinging them onto an identical-size canvas in roughly the same splatter-patterns. No matter how "fresh" your new version might seem, there's a reason why the original sells for millions of dollars and yours looks like a three-year-old's finger-painting project. Because the Pollack is a unique masterpiece - not to be recreated.

In what can loosely be defined as Rock Music, there are a handful of classics that are not, under any circumstances, to be tampered with ("Sgt. Pepper's", "Astral Weeks", "Disintegration", and "Siamese Dream" come to mind). I would place "Dark Side" at or near the top of that list - along with every Pink Floyd release from 1967's "Piper at the Gates of Dawn" to 1979's "The Wall". Maybe the Lips' cover album is a big Fuck You to idiots like me who make lists of what albums aren't allowed to be covered. In that case, it's a giant waste of a Fuck You because the Flaming Lips wasted a lot of creative energy that they should have focused on crafting another one of their own masterpieces, along the lines of "Yoshimi" or "Embryonic".

With all that being said, I'm more than looking forward to checking out the Lips perform the entire album this summer at the Central Park SummerStage. Because as much as I fault them for attempting something as blatantly unattemptable as "Dark Side", I still understand that the psychedelic/prog rock torch has, for a couple decades now, been passed to them, that the Flaming Lips' originality and constantly evolving creative spirit is the closest we'll probably ever get to the mindfucking genius that was the Floyd.

Also, don't buy the Lips' "Dark Side" on iTunes. They don't need your ten bucks that badly. Get heady to the original.

Nightmare of Past Futures

I'm on the playground and it’s the early nineties. I’m shrunken, sweating, the scent of vinegary boy-smell in a turquoise Looney Tunes tee-shirt, the one where Bugs Bunny and Tweety Bird look like straight-up thugs, the first dumbing down of hip-hop on a commercial scale for a white audience, children included. The Vanilla Ice Syndrome. Billy, Ted Hernandez and I are standing on the platform next to the tallest slide, giggling at a small plastic bucket that the janitor forgot about when he was cleaning the inside of a tire swing at the far end of the playground. We’re giggling because we’ve spent the last five minutes on the platform at the top of the slide, pissing and spitting in the bucket until we’ve succeeded in concocting just about the most vile substance we’d ever seen or smelled. I think I know what’s going to happen next and I shudder. I ask Billy to stop, do we have to go through with it again but there’s two pieces of skin-colored Velcro covering his mouth, identical to what’s strapped across the top of my sneakers. He leers at me, wags his finger. I turn to Ted, to plead with him, no we can’t do this but his mouth is a zipper. When I reach up to un-Velcro Billy, he slaps my hand away, smiles, mumbles something that only Ted understands. The sky turns the same shade of turquoise as my shirt while Ted unzips his lips and yells something to this kid Arnold Weinstein, who’s minding his own business on a swing about ten yards from where we’re standing. Arnold ended up going to Fairport Prep with me, then Penn, then law school at Drexel, but that’s not in this dream. Right now he’s an 8-year-old dork, plain and simple: chubby, quiet, with freckles and a curly orange mess for hair. How much shit everyone gives him. We make fun of him for his orthopedic shoes, for always losing at foursquare, for the fact that he doesn’t know where his father lives. I’m feeling it all again, his snotty tears, my own Velcroed foot smashing into his fat gut the time he wouldn’t give me his last Double-Stuff Oreo at lunch. Ted tells me to stop thinking and waves at Arnold to come to the top of the slide. Arnold creeps towards us, real slow and timid because why would we ever ask him to hang out with us at recess where everyone can see, except that this time it’s only us on the playground because there’s no school. The sky turns indigo. Billy gets excited, rips the Velcro off and shouts out - spitting skin chunks - loud enough for Arnold to hear, the description of this horrific insect that we’ve just captured and put in the bucket. It oozes poisonous green pus out of its mouth, crawls around on at least a thousand hairy legs, has pincers the size of Swiss Army knives. If we move the bucket it might escape, so Arnold, if you want to see it, if you really want to see it, you’re going to have to climb the steps to the platform. I know what’s coming next but I can’t control my arms, and Billy’s cackling, trying to hold it together, and Ted’s already zipped his mouth back up so he won’t blow the surprise. He doesn’t have to worry. Arnold’s almost halfway up the steps when I slide bucket over the edge and his fat little smiling face gets blasted with our juice. But not just his face. His tee shirt, jeans, and sneakers are all completely soaked through. I’m too busy staring at the almost-empty bucket on the ground, trying to figure out how my arms managed to move so fast even when I didn’t want them to, so I never see Arnold run head-down all the way to the nurses’ office. Later in the afternoon, on a bus that’s empty besides Billy and me, Billy un-Velcroes and explains that Arnold’s mother had to come to take him home after lunch. We laugh our asses off the entire bus ride until it’s my stop and I’m alone. The sky is a deep orange, burning. Instead of my mother waiting for me, there’s only Andrew, his skin piss-colored, his eyes shining, holding Billy's severed head in one hand and a dripping bicycle chain in the other. I don’t want to get off the bus. Not now, not ever. An invisible pair of hands shove me forward towards the door, and I’m screaming, clawing at the green fake-leather seats, and Andrew’s skin is melting, congealing into a flesh puddle on the floor and what’s underneath is an elderly half-skeleton version of my mother, smiling a toothless smile and pointing at me with one of her bone-fingers, still clutching Tweety Bird’s head in her other hand. ‘You’ve got some explaining to do, Mister,’ she gargles as the bus disappears and the sky explodes like the scene in Terminator 2 where the robots finally succeed and everything is fire.

(picture by Jimmy Cauty via www.boingboing.net)

Can The Flaming Lips Save the Next Decade? Probably Not, But Their New Album Is Pretty Freakin' Sweet!!!! (And Lady Gaga Sucks)

It was all Biggie and Miley’s fault. Blame them.

I didn’t want to do it. I didn’t want to be like every other self-described internet journalist (aka blogger hack that no one gives a crap about) and most of my favorite cable networks, spending the last month or three trying to find some unique, compelling way to analyze the last decade – the Two-Thousands, the Ohs, the Zeros, the Oughts, the Naughts, the Oh-Ohs – whatever you want to call it. There are already the ubiquitous Top-10 lists (Top-10 iPhone Apps, Top-10 Celebrities’ Assholes Falling Out of Their Skirts), I Love The 2000s marathons, an ever expanding collection of Skillz’ year-end raps. It seems like every Twitter-head and Facebook stalker is trying to carve out his or her own nostalgia niche. It’s not that I’m being a curmudgeon or that I don’t want to remember the past ten years. They were the best of my short life, although that’s mainly due to the fact that the 2000s corresponded with many of the events (high school, college, grad school) that are supposed to be the proverbial “BEST time of your life”. Clearly, any decade in which one receives his first hand job and hazes his first batch of screaming, blindfolded fraternity pledges in the backseat of the same beat-up ’97 Izusu Trooper has to be epic on a personal scale. However, other than my generation’s collective debauchery, a lot of shit sucked. There were a staggering number of reasons (9/11-Afghanistan-Iraq-Katrina-The Tsunami-George Bush-Bird Flu-Darfur-The Great Recession-H1N1-Jon & Kate Plus 8) why well-respected voices, from Time Magazine to Gore Vidal, decided to brand this decade as among the worst in American history.

Figuring out just how awesome or lame it was will take years, more decades, hundreds of magazine articles, blog posts and PhD theses. Our overall understanding of the 2000s will change again and again. Being the passive-aggressive slacker fiction writer that I was, I saw no problem in letting the super-nerds tackle this one as I lay back in my allegorical cave creating worlds of my own.

That is, until I heard Miley Cyrus and the Notorious B.I.G.’s vocals on the same track. Granted, it was just an unofficial remix/mash-up of Cyrus’ “hit” song “Party in the U.S.A.” where the verses have been changed to Biggie’s, from his old-school classic “Party and Bullshit”, mixed by some herb in his parents’ basement. And it was actually pretty catchy, too (until I heard it at every bar I went to for a week). Apparently a lot of people agree because the song has more than 1.4 million hits on YouTube, and has been a fixture on party playlist sites like fratmusic.com for a while. Maybe I’m getting older and can’t simply enjoy this song the way it’s meant to be enjoyed – twelve beers deep dancing on top of a pong table and throwing drinks at scantily clad ladies who look like J-WOWW and Snookers – or maybe I’m just thinking too much, as usual. But to me the song represents everything wrong with the current music industry, and maybe more so with the people (Generation Y) who have been listening to the music made during the last ten years.

One of the easiest ways to start to define a decade is to look at its music. Politics, fashion, culture and current events should all be reflected in what the kids are listening to. It is impossible to think about the tumultuous, radical sixties without picturing the Beatles looking all hippied-out or Jimi Hendrix jamming his soul to thousands of Woodstockers. Same with the nineties. No one who grew up then will ever forget all the disaffected, flannel-wearing grunge rockers and their rejection of ’80s excess, or the racial chaos that fueled the passionate monologues of West Coast gangster rappers.

But what about the 2000s? The introduction of file sharing and beat-making programs like FruityLoops has cheapened everything about music, has made it accessible to the point of meaninglessness. It has been commoditized like never before. Any knucklehead with a computer can make “quality” sounding tunes in his basement without any real talent besides being able to figure out which samples from REAL songs go best together. Indeed, much of what passes for music today is really just lyrics and riffs from other, better songs that have been digitally combined to form nothing more than a reusable, throw-away product. Yes, much of art and literature borrows from past works. One could argue that nothing new has been created since the ancient Greeks. But this music is not art. This is Wal-M(art). Don’t believe me? Compare rappers from the nineties to those of the 2000s. Tupac and Biggie were the mouthpiece of a generation. Auto-Tune-infested morons like T-Pain and Kanye sound like robots taking a shit. Pop Bottles! Fuck Bitches! Buy rims! We have no soul! Even popular music used to be at least occasionally multi-layered. Recently some gay friends of mine tried to explain to me that Lady Gaga is not only the Madonna of “our” generation, but is possibly more influential to today’s youth than the Material Girl ever was. If this is even remotely true, someone find me a shotgun because I’m about to pull a Hemingway. Is this what we’ve come to? Is it true, as one of the characters in my forthcoming novel puts it, that the 2000s are “a nameless amorphous creature, a vacuum, a sterile computer-chip refuse pile that’s allergic to any specific attitude, to any real passion”?

You may be wondering where The Flaming Lips come in to all of this. Weren’t they in the title? I’m so glad you asked, friend, because The Lips’ newest album, Embryonic, is one of the few musical things I’ve heard recently that has given me hope for a brighter tomorrow.

Although thematically similar to previous releases (Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, The Soft Bulletin), Embryonic is a stark departure musically for Wayne Coyne and Company. The sound is harder, more raw, yet pulsing with unparalleled grandeur and cybernetic beauty. Imagine if members of the Beatles, Joy Division, latter-day Smashing Pumpkins, the Clash, the RZA and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs all got together in the 23rd century and smoked some serious Magical Martian Red Skunk – this is what would come out. If T-Pain sounds like a robot taking a shit, Embryonic sounds like that same robot making love to Miles Davis’ granddaughter in a psychedelic field of android poppies while electric-faced cherubs wail the existential blues.

Perhaps it’s the addition of new drummer Kliph Spurlock, but raucous power jams like “Convinced of the Hex,” “Silver Trembling Hands,” and “Watching the Planets” rock harder and louder than anything since The Lips’ mid-nineties guitar-driven line-ups. But the beats are also funkier, more jam-dance friendly, as any Disco Biscuits fan or Phish phreak will attest. But they also perfectly blend in their softer side with Sigur Ròs-esque space ballads like “The Impulse” and “Gemini Syringes”.

As always, Wayne’s unique songwriting ranges from the startlingly introspective and the philosophical to the obscure and downright silly. There is maybe a bit more darkness and desperation present in tracks like “The Ego’s Last Stand”, where Wayne sings, “The only way out / Is destroying all traces / Oh, destroying yourself /There’s no way back / It’s complete devastation / Oh, there’s no way out” or in (arguably the album’s masterpiece) “See the Leaves” where he laments, “She cannot pretend / To believe that life / Really has no end”. But, in this collection of yins and yangs, there is also an undeniable streak of positive energy and hope, such as in the smile-inducing “Watching The Planets,” where we believe Wayne when he proclaims “See, the sun’s gonna rise / And take your fears away / Like the soft tit of the motherbrain” and the culturally appropriate “If” where we agree and hope in our hearts that “People are evil, it’s true / But on the other side / They can be gentle too / If they decide.”

Other highlights include the bombastic synth-fest “Worm Mountain" featuring MGMT and the happily bizarre “I Can Be A Frog” in which Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs (and the Where The Wild Things Are soundtrack) helps out by making animal noises through a telephone.

There is a general consensus by hardcore fans that 1999’s groundbreaking The Soft Bulletin was the band’s musical and artistic apex. I would argue that Embryonic not only approaches this gem but outshines it. And I’m not alone. Paste Magazine described the album as "a wonderfully weird parade of sonic delights: an arresting consummation of the Lips' two-and-a-half decade career,” and The Record Review lauded The Lips as "one of the few acts left that stills dares to be original, inspired and off-center in such a mainstream musical climate." Couldn’t have said it better myself.

So take that, Miley, Gaga, Kanye and the rest of you boring, self-obsessed , ear-bleed-inducing leaches! Biggie, please do not roll over in your grave just yet. There is hope.

(However, Miley, when you turn 18, please call or Twitter me @ChrisVola)

Finally, looking ahead: 2010 promises to be another spacey, brain-bending neo-psychedelic balloon ride for The Lips as the band has just released a song-for-song cover of Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon, featuring the likes of Stardeath and White Dwarves and Henry Rollins. So get your glow-sticks and confetti guns, kids, and prepare your faces to MELT! As for me, my biggest New Year’s resolution is to stay POSITIVE and HAPPY, something made a lot easier by the fact that the Decade from Hell is over and bands like The Flaming Lips have not only survived its aftermath, but continue to thrive. Stay up, God Bless, and please say a prayer for Haiti and everyone hurting right now. Peace.

"We Killed God! Yay! Let's Become Evil Robots!" - Thoughts on Transhumanism, iThings, and Why You Don't Care About Anything I Write

Picture this – It’s the year 2099 and you’re still alive. No, not as a 114-year-old wrinkled crone hooked up to dozens of life-support tubes, dependent on nursing home aides and your great-great grandchildren for liquid feeding, sponge baths, and as an audience to your frequent diatribes about how they don’t make jackasses like Kanye West anymore. Not even close. You feel healthier than you’ve ever been. You are ready to “do anything, or be anything, you want or need.” How is this possible and how are you going to accomplish this? Simple. First, you shed all biological matter, not just the wrinkles but everything, in order to upload your brain into a dynamic, conscious sub-entity within a larger, singular entity, all within a machine. In short, you are fusing with the artificial intelligence of the Terminator. You are taking over a robotic body, but the distinction between you and the robot, and all other robots, is minimal, negligent even. This is because all other modified humans and robots communicate in a virtual world, taking robotic forms whenever they wish. Actually having two people meet in the physical world is rare. The term “self-identity” has no meaning. Since knowledge and skills can be instantly downloaded and comprehended by most intelligent beings, the process of learning is compressed into an instantaneous affair instead of the years-long struggle “normal” humans experience. Speaking of “normal” humans, or those who choose to remain organic and unmodified – they exist on a different plane of consciousness and cannot fully communicate with uploaded humans and their robot pals. Money and death have become irrelevant. There is no such thing as gender.

Sound scary? Enticing? Insane? According to futurist Ray Kurzweil in his book "The Age of Spiritual Machines", none of what I have described is science fiction. They are accurate predictions he’s made based on current developments in medicine (human genome project, stem cell research) and science (nanotechnology, artificial intelligence). Many of his predictions stem from the fact that technological evolution is occurring at a highly exponential rate (consider that for 99 percent of our species’ existence we were hopping around caves and flinging poo at each other), a rate so fast that by 2045 we will have reached a technological singularity, an intelligence explosion that would render the human mind obsolete.

While some haters have described Kurzweil as a pseudo-scientist quack, a surprising number of the world’s brightest minds not only agree with him, but are working hard to make his dreams a reality. These are the transhumanists, men and women who regard certain aspects of the human condition, such as disability, suffering, disease, aging, and involuntary death as unnecessary and undesirable. They strive towards transforming themselves into what they call posthumans, similar to Nietzsche’s “Ubermensch”, self-actualized beings of extraordinary skills and abilities. Demi-gods, if you will. According to many members of the scientific community, the transhumanists will achieve many of their goals sooner rather than later. The vast majority of Kurzweil’s predictions for the 21st century have become a reality so far, meaning that some time in the next 50 years (barring a nuclear war or a super badass mutant swine flu outbreak), those of us who are still alive will have to make a choice. Do we continue to live as we have for countless thousands of years? Or do we deny our own biology, hook up to the machine and become post-human immortals?

You may be saying to yourself (if you’re one of those creeps who talks to yourself), “What’s wrong with living forever? Becoming a robot doesn’t sound so bad. Actually it sounds pretty freakin’ sweet!” After all, humans have been trying to transcend their natural state for as long as we’ve been around. It’s no accident that we live three times as long as people 10,000 years ago despite little or no change to our biological chemistry. Countless advances in medicine, science, technology, and nutrition have been made to ensure that we live longer, live healthier, and are able to exercise near-complete control over our environment and the natural world in general.

Conservatives and Christian fundamentalists would be quick to point out that the quest for immortality represents the ultimate hubris, that to attempt to become “God” is the ultimate transgression. I would argue that modern science (see: Evolution) has already done a quite thorough job in dismantling the classic Western conception of a monarchical white-bearded deity shooting lightning bolts down from the heavens. We have effectively killed Him. There is also a big difference between playing God (i.e. bombing the shit out of innocent people because their beliefs don’t conform to what you perceive is the ultimate ‘good’ morality) and realizing that we are all gods, albeit the "bankrupt gods" of Jean-Paul Sartre, condemned to be free in a world in which we are only able to exercise a finite (yet growing) amount of control. Most intelligent people understand that there is no Guiding Hand. Reality is us and we are reality. All we have is now.

OK, so archaic and foolish belief systems are not a good excuse to halt our quest for immortality. In fact, many transhumanists look at their ideals as a kind of New Age spirituality, the ultimate salvation. But what about Science? Isn’t it also a form of fundamentalism, just as susceptible to mindlessness as religion? The scientist who is unable to look beyond the absolute sacredness of his numbers, facts and theories is like a quarterback who doesn’t understand that the plays which have called for him by his coach are not set in stone. His blindness to what’s happening outside the pocket is what leads to interceptions, fumbles, failure and loss (Not like my boy Eli!!!). The intangible and creative aspects of humanity (love, joy, community, art, music) are quickly dismissed as secondary to the cold, hard “truth” preached by modern scientists.

Religion and Science aside, my biggest problem with the whole idea is not so much the idea itself, but the people I see around me on the streets of Manhattan every day (see above photo), the people who make up my own generation. I would venture to say that as a whole, people in their twenties are more individualistic than any group in the history of civilization, even more so than our parents, those ex-free-lovers and unforgiving yuppies who spawned the "Me" generation. Our technology starkly reflects our individualism. Cell phones, computers, iPods, DVRs, and those ubiquitous social networks that have made many of us virtually useless in genuine face-to-face conversation. The simplest act of communication, like asking for driving directions, is almost unheard-of. We have been allowed to withdraw completely into a digital fantasyland, causing our reality to suffer horrendously. It’s no surprise to me that relationships and marriages are failing at an unprecedented rate, that there are four times as many prescriptions for depression and ADD issued than ten years ago. Technology’s promise of “Harder, better, faster, stronger” has destroyed our attention spans, and along with them, any desire to continue in the moment, to find any lasting satisfaction in who we are NOW, who we’re with NOW. Fantasyland kills “the [real] moment” every time. I find it hilarious when someone gets pissed, no, genuinely furious when I take more than an hour to respond to a trivial text message that they could have called me about and gotten over with in less than fifteen seconds. I'm sorry, but if you're that insecure and starved for attention, don't bother texting me anymore. When we allow technology to seep into the fabric of who we are, when we allow the digital comfort blanket to dictate our relationships, our ability to feel pleasure and sadness, and our very identity, we are reduced to little more than Andy Hargreaves' "people with mobile-phone headset attachments...talking aloud and alone, like paranoid schizophrenics, oblivious to their immediate surroundings. Introspection [for them] is a disappearing act." Even on crowded streets brimming with humanity they "scan their mobile phone messages for shreds of evidence that someone, somewhere, may need or want them."

Just as life implies death, death (i.e. emptiness) implies the meaningfulness our lives are capable of achieving. When one of the female vampires in the HBO series True Blood is asked why she prefers her human companion to members of her own (immortal) species, she replies that (I’m paraphrasing here) because their existence is so short, they feel things so much stronger, more passionately, and with a much greater sense of urgency. Only in their mortality are they able to find true purpose. And conversely, in the words of Slovenian poet Tomaz Salamun – “Immortality is always nihilistic.” Why live forever if you’re just going to be a lonely robot with no purpose, endlessly searching the stars for shreds of evidence that someone, somewhere may need or want you?

In short, if we are to transcend the limits of our biological mortality, we must transcend our current societal system. The coldhearted, digitized and capitalistic waste-land that we know now, a flimsy diaspora of haves and have-nots, cannot be prolonged forever in its current state. The future has become something which we fear, not cherish. Before we can fully embrace transhumanism, we (i.e. Generation Y) must become humanists. Because a dystopia composed of a selfish, self-absorbed class of nihilistic immortals, and an equally selfish, and therefore jealous, class of "normal" humans without the money or resources to make the necessary adaptations is a recipe for an unhappy and bloody extinction, a fate worse than the slow, natural death we know today. Only a fully integrated community with the same desires for knowledge, happiness, and self-betterment would make an eternity meaningful. If you can picture that, let me know, because the way things are going right now, I can’t.