It can be done, but only THE JO-TEL can do it.

Before I begin, let me first tell you how inspiring Achilles’ shield is.

It’s kind of like that scene from National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation that I can’t find on youtube. You know, when the wife catches Clark coming back upstairs with a chainsaw and a small tree from the front yard? “Clark!” she says. “What, honey?” he responds, “I needed a coffin– I mean, a tree. Luis burned down my tree, so I made due as best I could!” Similarly, Achilles needed armor. Hector stole his original armor– a gift from his mother, the sea nymph Thetis– so he tried to make due by asking his mother for more armor. That’s where the analogy ends though, because while Clark ended up with an inferior, albeit adequate Christmas tree, Achilles’ ended up with possibly the best armor– and, at the very least, the best-described armor– in the history of Western lore.

Its meaning (or meanings) are not publicized to you by its author. The story is simply told. Perhaps the moral lesson was apparent to its own generation, but today the story must be absorbed with an historically understanding mind. To me, the key to The Iliad is how Achilles knows he will die. It is very typical in Greek mythology for heroes to know their fate, and even to have some cryptic notions of the specifics of their undoing, but to struggle with how to deal with knowledge. There are usually two variations on this seminal form: (1) where the protagonist tries to avoid his fate, almost always failing to do so (see e.g. Oedipus trying not to kill his father and sleep with his mother); and (2) when the protagonist knows his fate but is not permitted to even attempt to avoid it. It is surprisingly rare in Greek myths, though, for the protagonist to know his fate, know how to avoid it, but choose not to avoid it. The triumph of free choice over either variant of determinism in Achilles’ choice to die in war for the sake of honor might, then, be art’s first exultation of the human triumph over nature. This decision, made before any of the events described in Homer’s poem, defines The Iliad and helps to explain, why 2,600 years later, it remains the greatest of all human works of art.

And the shield that Hephaestus makes for Achilles is key. Because the problem with Agamemnon taking Breisis from Achilles is not one of sexual gratification (Achilles, presumably, has Patroclus for that), it is honorific: if Achilles is going to choose death in exchange for glory, then an act that strips him of spoils– the most important signifier of ancient glory– undermines his justification for death. So he abstains from war. The Greeks are routed. His friend is killed. And his armor is stolen. But when he returns to battle, he does so to not only to reclaim his past honor, but to become the greatest war hero that civilization will ever know. And he does this behind the shield forged by Hephaestus, a shield that Homer devotes 275 lines to describing. When I read Melville’s description of the Nantucket chapel in Moby-Dick, which itself lasts 3 pages, I couldn’t help but think of Homer’s description of the shield of Achilles. Moby-Dick abounds in allegory; so does The Iliad, and no more than with the description of the shield of Achilles, which, in its unrealistically intricate contents, seeks to symbolize all of life. [FN1] But the point is that the shield, as described, is made to seem living. It is a god-like forgery that depicts not only “life” as a static concept but life as constant flux, as only the immortal gods could know it. The depictions on the shield are as follows:

• Earth, heaven, sea, sun, moon, and “all stars/ that heaven bears for garland”;
• A peaceful city during a wedding feast, “brides/ led out through town by torchlight from their chambers/ amid chorales, amid the young men turning/ round and round in dances,” and a makeshift law court in session “over satisfaction owed/ for a murder done,” the town elders considering the arguments and speaking in turn, with varying degrees of persuasiveness;
• A besieged city during wartime, the denizens ambushing a group of herdsman outside the city walls, precipitating a battle wherein “all figures clashed and fought/ like living men, and pulled their dead away”;
• Plowmen in their fields;
• The king’s harvest, with harvest hands and binders collecting the stalks of grain, and “amid them all the king stood quietly with staff in hand,/ happy at heart, upon on new-mown swath” while his attendants prepare a harvest banquet;
• A vineyard, “weighted down with grapes,” the harvesters working while a boy among of them “played a tune of longing, singing low/ with delicate voice a summer dirge”;
• Herdsman moving cattle along a river, besieged by a pair of lions that make it past the dogs and “rend[] the belly of a bull … gulping down his blood and guts”;
• A calm pasture with sheep;
• A dance floor, “like the one in royal Knossos/ Daidalos made for the Princess Ariadne,” where men and women dance “linked, touching each other’s wrists,” as two tumblers lead the beat with spins and handsprings, circling the floors “with ease/ the way a potter sitting at his wheel/ will give it a practiced twirl between his palms/ to see it run”; and
• Around the rim of the shield, a depiction of the might of the ocean streams. [FN2]

Italian painter Angelo Monticelli attempted to recreate the shield literally, in all its complexity and flux:

[FN3]

And Achilles brings the shield into battle to show the triumph of life over death. Here is Homer’s description of Achilles donning his armor:

Achaeans then came swarming out from their fast ships.
Just as freezing snowflakes fall thick and fast from Zeus,
driven by the raging sky-born North Wind—that’s how
crowds of them streamed out then, pouring from the ships—
brightly gleaming helmets, strong-plated body armour,
ash spears and embossed shields—the glitter of it all
flashed up to heaven. All around, earth chuckled
to see that gleaming bronze. A noise like thunder rose,
drummed by the soldier’s marching feet. Amid them all,
noble Achilles armed himself for battle,
his teeth clenched, eyes blazing with a fiery light,
his heart filled with a sorrow not to be endured.
As he pulled on the divine gifts which Hephaestus
had made for him, he raged against the Trojans.
First, he strapped on his leg armour, beautifully made,
fitted with silver ankle clasps. Then on his chest
he fixed the body armour. Around his shoulders,
he slung his bronze silver-studded sword, then picked up
his huge strong shield which, like the moon, shone everywhere.
Just like the blazing light that sailors glimpse at sea
from a fire burning in some isolated farm,
high in the mountains, as winds blow them further out,
taking them against their will over the fish-filled seas
away from loved ones—that’s how Achilles’ shield,
so finely crafted, burned out far into the sky.
Then raising the great helmet, he set it on his head.
It glittered like a star, that helmet with its horse-hair plumes,
adorned with the golden hairs Hephaestus placed
so thickly round the crest. Noble Achilles,
trying out the armour for himself, made sure
it fit him so his splendid limbs could move with ease.
It was like his own set of wings, lifting him up,
this shepherd of his people. Then from its case,
he took his father’s spear, heavy, huge, and strong.
No other Achaean could control that spear.
He was the only one with skill enough to wield it.
Made of ash wood from the top of Pelion,
that spear had been given to his own dear father
by Chiron, so he could kill heroic warriors. [FN4]

Thus, when Achilles routes the Trojans and then dies, it is the choice to live shortly and boisterously versus the choice to live quietly, or to live not at all. It is life routing death and, specifically, the “death” that would result from choosing longevity over heroism. And what is heroism other than the drive of the human species, as a whole, to attain post-biological heights? Is it heroic for an antelope to kill a two-toed sloth to feed his family? Or for a lion to stake his pride’s territory? Arguably not, because these are all instinctual survival techniques. Heroism, as we know it, involves noble acts that defy these instincts: biological endpoints of survival and longevity reduced from paramount concerns to default certitudes, replaced by feats of post-biological transcendence like paragon battlefield speed and valor and, incidentally, the creation of artistic subjects.

Anyway, here’s another top 15 albums list.

______________________________

#15
Revocation
Chaos of Forms

Oh man, the album art on this thing. The logo, which– pointy, air-brushed font heading in all kinds of EXTREME directions except the directions that would allow you to legibly discern the word that they are trying to spell– succumbs to every single pitfall of the metal logo genre since Dave Mustaine tried to make Megadeth’s logo sort of look like Metallica’s, is a marvel of artistic creativity compared to the Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen-aping album title logo, which serves as foreground to the point of origin of the utterly un-intense-because-horribly drawn cyclone of, um, comically wrought faces including “old dead opera lady” immediately below the ‘n’ in ‘Revocation’ or the Monopoly man-resembling visage two dead, gray, souls above the ’s’ in ‘Chaos of Forms’ while lightning strikes cheesily in the background? But, you know, the music on it’s really good.

#14
Sandro Perri
Impossible Spaces

Every year-end list needs one surprise entry. You know, the album that is released late in the year and you haven’t really processed until the last minute and that, undeniably, benefits from the timing of being your favorite album of the moment. These types of picks often don’t pan out in the harsh light of January, and this album by Sandro Perri may end up fitting that bill. But, first off, one of the Perri’s earlier projects, the unappreciated Glissando 70, put out one of the better albums of last decade. So the hasty recognition here has been somewhat earned. But as for Impossible Spaces, after a handful of listens the thing just keeps yielding new surprises. Nick at Forest Gospel described it as “a more successful version of Bitte Orca.” I would agree with that, minus the back-handed Dirty Projectors diss.

#13
Andy Stott
We Stay Together

Note to all aspiring electronic artists and producers: album art is important; don’t let this happen to you. Maybe when we’re being overtaken by raised-lighter rock-and-roll moments, we can tolerate looking at album art like this. And maybe when we’re indulging in frantically catchy pop, this type of album cover doesn’t bother us. But when we’re listening to electronic music, fiending over the precision of beats and organic style, then bad album art not only offends the eye but pervades the mind, thwarting any delicate pleasure the music might deign upon our intellect. So, yeah, here we have good album art, and the fact that, despite my best efforts, I can’t seem to turn “Bad Wires” up loud enough.

#12
Ponytail
Do Whatever You Want All the Time

Ponytail is the last (or, at least, the most recent) in a line of musicians starting with Lizzy Mercier Desclox, whose yelping vocals over spindly no-wave guitar (which can be heard on the landmark cut “Fire” from her 1979 album Press Color) prominently influenced the style of initially ignored, but currently revered band Life Without Buildings– Sue Thompson’s vocals hitting the same notes at those of Desclox, but with a backing band more interested in honing expanded, spacious song structures than pop gems. Ponytail sounds a lot like those two previous bands except song structures are replaced with pure outbursts of hedonistic sound. Usually things would move in the opposite direction: from chaos to structure. Ponytail, however, are a uniquely misanthropic band. And their latest album, entitled Do Whatever You Want All the Time, is their best yet.

#11
Chad Vangaalen
Diaper Island

1. The video for “Peace on the Rise”. The video for “Peace on the Rise” is so good, but I would like to focus on the last 15 seconds, which animate what seems like transitional electronic buzzing on the song with a tour-de-force of tripped-out acid animation. Vangaalen is really good at taking acid drawings to interesting new places and he throws every melty, free-form creature seemingly ever conceived at these last 15 seconds of the “Peace on the Rise” video. It is a breathtaking moment if you care to notice it.

2. The song “Shave My Pussy”. I certainly wasn’t expecting a song called “Shave My Pussy” to capture– better than any song before it– the unspoken anxiety of modern consumer spaces.

#10
Burzum
Fallen

Bands have been trying to move black metal in all kinds of directions as of late. Ever since Xasthur showed that you didn’t have to be Norwegian to “practice” black metal, a new wave (if you will) of USBM bands have mixed everything from naturalism (Agalloch), hardcore (Woe), post-rock (Deafheaven), jam-banding (Wolves in the Throne Room), and indie rock (Boris) into the underlying black metal formula. This blurb is not intended to malign those bands (except for Boris); instead, I just want to point out that no one had yet successfully incorporated catchy lyrics and melody into black metal. Until this album, that is, which was fittingly written by the dude that invented the form. [FN5]

#9
Bruno Pronsato
Lovers Do

Minimal techno is a subgenre known for album-length discipline, but not so much for moments of stand-out sound. Bruno Pronsato’s Lovers Do manages to do both. Sounds like the delicate, repeated slurping sound on “Anybody But You”, the “feel right” sample that bubbles beneath the surface of “Feel Right”, or the echo-y graveyard whistle haunting the dancey title track are as memorable to the attuned ear as broad-brush rock-and-roll moments like on, say, the top album on this list. Yet the whole album maintains the discipline so key to minimal techno, never departing from its own unique brand of off-kilter beat dodging.

#8
Kurt Vile
Smoke Ring for My Halo

I kind of feel guilty or at least a bit lame for liking this album so much because I know that there must– there must!– be other albums like this one– and just as good– that have come out in the last few years but that weren’t hyped by mainstream music publications. It’s just that I haven’t heard them. Smoke Ring for My Halo dabbles in chillwave sounds but turns them into something greater, resembling singer-songwriter albums of old by people like Roy Harper, Bill Fay, and Skip Spence. The So Outta Reach EP, with its attention-grabbing but ultimately un-beffiting album art, is also very good. When sending this album to someone, consider replacing LP track “Society Is My Friend” with opening track “The Creature” from the EP and not telling the person. Max gibs.

#7
Earth
Angels of Darkness, Demons of Light 1

Okay, here’s what I want to do. I want to use “Father Midnight”, the first song on this album, as the background music for a video involving two cowboys, faced off against each other in the early morning with only the blasted shrubs of the high desert between them, eying each other, fingering their respective holsters, cautiously shifting in anticipation of the draw– and they would do this for almost all of the song’s eight-minute run time, tumble weeds patiently rolling by, until the very end of the song when the camera would slowly pan away from them over to the horizon and, the duelers out of view, would launch into a time-lapse scene of day turning to afternoon, then night. End of video.

#6
The Caretaker
An Empty Bliss Beyond This World

The album is apparently about the deterioration of memory and, specifically, Alzheimers. [FN6] The imperfection of recollection is shown by how many of the found songs (mostly 1930’s ballroom tunes) consist of repeated fragments, echoed over and over and even brought back to bleed into later tracks (two tracks have the same name to emphasize the point). And if the songs can’t be ordered properly, they certainly cannot cleanly conclude– every song but one is interrupted mid-stream and/or begins in media res. The album plays on universal fears of old age while, at the same time, showing the gentle and soothing nature of certain moments of memory– at once, making people think and worry but also be comforted that someday the songs of our youths will rattle around, haphazardly and incomplete, in our heads, and may even sound as wonderful as this album does.

#5
Crystal Stilts
In Love With Oblivion

I kind of got shot down earlier this year on my local message board, when I compared this album to early Pink Floyd. I stand by the comparison. The steely guitars throughout resemble the sound that Syd got by using a zippo lighter as a hammer on. (I always felt that this gave Piper at the Gates of Dawn a cold, icy feeling. I hear space is cold.) These guitars pervade In Love with Oblivion, but look specifically to 3:02 – 3:08 of “Alien Rivers”. There are other analogies too, including the obvious one: that both bands wrote songs about space. For example, On In Love with Oblivion, “Flying into the Sun” goes:

There’s a black hole behind these eyes
That takes everything with it when it dies
Until the stars decide to shine
We will recline in time together. [FN7]

#4
Trap Them
Darker Handcraft

The combination of metal and hardcore has been going on for a while now. Converge, whose dense Jane Doe is my favorite metal album of the last decade, initiated the trend. Of late, others bands have taken the metal/hardcore hybrid to more accessible, song-oriented places. Coalesce’s Ox from two years ago had moments of brilliance, including the rhythm-shifting monster that was opener “Plot Against My Love”. The Trash Talk EP from this year got some attention thanks to Stusoy’s Pitchfork review, and it’s good but honestly it just doesn’t hold a candle to this album by Trap Them, both in terms of scope and execution. Just listen to how the drummer unintentionally screws up the beat by entering too soon at the 2:47 mark of standout “Day 33-The Facts”– it really makes you realize that this thing is being recorded in a basement somewhere. And, I mean, just listen to the goddamn mindfullness of the quiet high hats at the 2:30 mark of “Day 41-Every Walk a Quarantine”! Do it. Do it, now.

#3
Perc
Wicker & Steel

“My Head Is Slowly Exploding”, which is a mallet, is hitting you on the head over and over until the moon and stars above look like sandpaper– like gravel-flecked concrete almost. Then “Start Chopping”, which is a person, approaches and approaches and finally says into your ear

buh

and you start to lose balance and stumble around spinning, somehow dancing to the sound of being bounced off a brick wall by something called “JMurph”, which is a part of you, and seems to be gurgling out from a manhole cover and saying things like “London, We Have You Surrounded”, which is a feeling that you now have.

#2
Grouper
A I A: Alien Observer / Dream Loss

I was worried that Liz Harris wouldn’t make A I A, a towering double album of ambient music. I figured she would follow the trajectory indicated by the catchy “Heavy Water/I’d Rather Be Sleeping” and do the typical thing of moving away from lo-fi towards clean production, away from soundscapes towards pop songs. It is the dominant storyline in music today. And A I A– with its plodding, delicate ambient suites– totally and gloriously bucks it by not only staying lo-fi, but by continuing to use fuzzy recording to mine the conflict at the center of her music. Specifically, the push and pull between claustrophobic tape hiss and melodies that push you out into space.

#1
PJ Harvey
Let England Shake

If “[w]hat an age can read in Homer, what its translators can manage to say in his presence, is one gauge of its morale, one index of its system of exultations and reticences” as a writer for the National Review once wrote, it is because, more generally, a generation is defined by its outlook on and reaction to the eternal reality of war. War brings out the basic and the fundamental: the stuff that lasts. PJ Harvey’s Let England Shake is a work of art about war in that great tradition. It doesn’t focus on politics, which has a tendency to become either incorrect or obvious in hindsight, or simplistic peace-mongering. The lyrics seem to persistently, poetically remind us that war, which is odd and horrible, is happening under our noses, all the time now. [FN8] More albums should be at least affected by this. Also, more albums should be this good.

-Shark
_______________________
FN1: The unrealistically detailed shield also reminds me of a more modern novel: Vonnegut’s Blue Beard, where the main character, Rabo Karabekian, is an Expressionist painter that has been secretly working on a painting that is hidden in his barn. The painting is ultimately revealed to be an 8 x 68 foot painting depicting the following:

On the average, there are ten clearly drawn World War Two survivors to each square of the painting. Even the figures in the distance, no bigger than fly-specks, when examined through one of several magnifying glasses I keep in the barn, prove to be concentration-camp victims or slave laborers or prisoners of war from this or that country, or soldiers from this or that military unit on the German side, or local farmers and their families, or lunatics set free from asylums, and on and on.

There is a war story to go with every figure in the picture, no matter how small. I made up a story, and then painted the person it had happened to. I at first made myself available in the barn to tell anyone who asked what the story was of this person or that one, but soon gave up from exhaustion. ‘Make up your own war stories as you look at the whatchamacallit,’ I tell people. I stay in the house here, and simply point the way out to the potato barn.

(Chapter 35, p. 270.) To defend Vonnegut’s image, it takes on extra meaning when contrasted with the fact that the actual Expressionists reacted to the horrors of war by painting pure abstraction, not hyper-detail. But, still, the book is set up so that the nature of the picture is a McGuffin-like mystery, and, while interesting, the painting doesn’t provide the twist that the plot mechanizations require. It’s okay, though, not every book can be as good as The Iliad.

FN2: Fitzgerald trans., Book XVIII, lines 475-645. Euripedes describes the shield differently, and with greater economy, in his Electra. There, as the chorus describes it, the shield contains a depiction of Perseus slaying Medusa:

Of old the Nereids passed Euboca’s headlands
bringing the heavy shield of gold
forged on Hephaestus’ anvil, and golden armor.
Up Mount Pelion, up the jut
of Ossa’s holy slopes on high,
up the nymphs’ spy-rocks
they hunted the aged horseman’s hill
where he trained the boy as a dawn for Greece,
the son of Thetis, sea-bred and swift-
lived in Atreid wars.

Once I heard from a Trojan captive known to the port
in Nauplia close to Argos
of your brilliant shield, O goddess’
child, how in its circled space
these signs, scenes, were in blazon warning,
mourning, for Phrygia:
running in frieze on its massive rim,
Perseus lifting the severed head
cut at the neck– with Gorgon beauty
he walks on wings over the sea;
Hermes is with him, angel of Zeus,
great Maia’s
child of the flocks and forests.

Out of the shield’s curved center glittered afar the high
shining round of the sun
driving with winged horses,
and the chorused stars of upper air–
Pleiades, Hyades– Hector eyed them,
swerving aside.

(Vermeule trans., lines 443 – 469.)

FN3: Le Costume Ancien ou Moderne (The Ancient and Modern Outfit), 1820. The following is a diagrammed version of Montecelli’s shield:

FN4: Lattimore trans,, Book XIX, lines 430-71.

FN5: Even if you view Mayhem as the first black metal band, the guy in Burzum killed their guitarist, so …

FN6: On his website, however, Kirby refers, more esoterically, to “anterograde amnesia”.

FN7: Now, let’s be clear though, the vocals of Crystal Stilts are more a combo of Jim Morrison and Calvin Johnson, and nothing like the snappy, free-form vocals of Syd Barrett.

FN8: See e.g. the WWI tone poem “On Battleship Hill”:

The scent of thyme carried on the wind
Stings my face into remembering
On Battleship Hill caved in trenches
A hateful feeling still lingers
Even now 80 years later
The land returns to how its always been:
Thyme carried on the wind;
Jagged mountains, jutting out,
Cracked like teeth in a rotten mouth.
On Battleship Hill I hear the wind say,
“Cruel nature has won again.”

“Outbound Atreid”

When I’m onto something like
My Atreid I
Wish I could just color the landscape,
Make the Mycenaean era something to remember like
Oranges or In the
Aeroplane Over the Sea.

“Cadmus, Your Local Hero”

Into unending multitudes because,
If so,
Then when your family was sown like
Dragon’s teeth
You would have finally learned what it was like to
Be a dragon.

“Never-ending Pathways”

Ordered passageway through BART,
Your project is omnibus, your pathways are
Never-ending.

“Bouquet of NBA Dunks”

Understanding is nothing, it’s all about fishing for crabs on Polk Street. Because you have big biceps, because you are a bouquet of flowers. But I saw your reflection in a shop window and you were crying like an oyster.

-Shark

No F.W. Murnau’s City Girl (1930) …

… no Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven (1971)

-Shark

There was a segment on the Neil Conan’s NPR show [FN1] this afternoon that featured two doctors discussing how bad it is to drink alcohol in the way that I and many of my friends drink alcohol. I found the show interesting, but was irked with the overall tone, which was markedly and pervasively anti-alcohol. It desperately needed a more realistic perspective. Give it a listen; it’s got some good facts, at the very least. But, I don’t know, it’s just that I’ve had fun at a lot of parties, made out with a lot interesting people, written some pretty good poems, spearheaded some pretty epic dance parties, played some really good pranks, and generally had a lot of remarkable experiences that I would not have had without being drunk on alcohol. Certainly I believe in, and have practiced, what I call “responsible drinking”. For instance, I try to avoid drinking in order to have fun and, instead, try to reserve bouts of boozing for events and circumstances that warrant and justify that. I’ve also tried to roughly keep track of how much I drink every week and cut back or eliminate even moderate weekday drinking in anticipation of some significant weekend event. And I am certainly not ignorant to the health risks of excessive drinking. My point, however, is to take personal umbrage with the tone of the NPR show as an example of a trend I see developing in the field of social medicine. That trend is essentially to portray “boozing” as the next “smoking”: while it may seem ingrained in society, it is entirely and irredeemably harmful and should be gradually phased out. First off, even my brand of “responsible drinking”, as described above, would be categorized by these doctors as “chronic binge drinking”, which, they will tell you, is just as harmful as your average alcoholism. Even assuming arguendo that the health effects of “responsible boozing” or “chronic binge drinking” are as severe as chronic smoking, there is, of course, the important difference that boozing is a lot more fun than smoking and leads to significantly more valuable life experiences than smoking. I am, of course, aware that excessive drinking also results in bad things like car accidents and rape, and that some people are genetically predisposed to alcoholism, such that they are unable to live productive lives without completely eradicating booze. Fortunately, I am not an alcoholic. And, through perhaps no small personal determination on my part, I’ve never done anything really bad while drunk. But it is a personal thing, and I am by no means trying to espouse a “one-size-fits-all” alcohol policy. However, for me, even if I knew I would die, maybe 10 years earlier because of my alcohol intake, I don’t think I would care. Because I’m not sure I would be as excited about being alive in a world where I couldn’t have that feeling, after the second Bloody Mary, of looking at the sun pouring in through a bar window, feeling buzzed, and knowing that you have a whole Saturday in front of you as you chomp on a celery stalk; or hanging out in your friend’s kitchen at 8:30 p.m. with your favorite songs, everyone looking sharp for the night, taking those first shots of booze like little explosions of warmth; or floating on your back in the middle of a lake at 1:30 p.m. and imploring your friends on a houseboat to throw you another beer, which arrives shortly, and opening the beer and getting that first guzzle of cool beery innards as the sun warms your face and the water cools your back and nothing else matters one bit. When are one or two great, memorable moments worth of full day of drudgery or boredom? Do the math, and cheers.

-Shark
_____________________
FN1: I strongly dislike Neil Conan, by the way. Only on NPR would a guy that sounds like a nervous dad ALL THE TIME, have an interview show at a prime time-slot.

My secretary– who I should mention is a very nice person– is dumb. The fact that she is dumb works to her disadvantage as a secretary, something that I put up with so as to not make waves in the office and, also, because having her as my secretary provides me access to lots of stories of her doing hilariously dumb things. Here is a list of the top 5 best stories of her doing dumb things. Most of these, she told me herself. Also, keep in mind, that these are just the dumb stories that I find amusing. There are others– like how she hasn’t had a license or car insurance for seven years, how her son shot a class-mate’s eye out with a potato gun during chemistry class, etc.– that I don’t find particularly amusing and that are not on the list.

5. Wears sunglasses to work once a month. My secretary wears contact lenses normally, but she runs out of contacts often and, when she does, she never has the next supply on hand. Nor does she have a pair of prescription glasses to wear, except for a pair a prescription sunglasses. That’s why, about once a month, I arrive at the office and my secretary is wearing sunglasses at her desk.

4. She dials 9-1-1 by accident all the time. I work in the East Bay and the area code is 925. Also, the area code for nearby Sacramento is 916. Like most offices, we have to dial-9 in order to dial out. My secretary, however, lacks the mental capacity and philangial dexterity to dial the 9-1-9 prefix. Instead, she has, on many, many occasions, called 9-1-1 instead. To make matters worse, she gets nervous when she dials 9-1-1 and immediately hangs up, so that the 9-1-1 operator then has to call the receptionist to make sure there is not an emergency. Then we get the ump-teenth office email telling us that “if we call 9-1-1, to stay on the line and tell the operator it was an accident”. And then Sheryl yells down the hall, “Sorry” and we all go back to work realizing that the only office-worker in Northern California than cannot dial 9-1-9 works at our office.

3. Watered a fake plant for three weeks. She watered a fake plant for three weeks. When the plant lady came by, my secretary was pointed out, politely, that she had been neglecting to water her plant. The plant lady looked at the plant, determined that it was fake, and moved on to the next cubicle.

2. Melted her car. Of course, the little plastic cap that covers the cigarette lighter (which was on the horizontal gear-shift panel of my secretary’s Pontiac) was gone. So when her son placed a penny in the lighter hole and left it there, my secretary woke up in the morning to find that her entire car had melted.

1. Killed her cat in the dryer (and other cat-related stories). There are not many extant details behind the main story: her cat was partial to laying among the clothes in the dryer; my secretary was partial was doing dumb thing– the result? She killed the cat in the dryer. But, in general, she is a crazy cat lady in training. The only thing she’s missing really is the “living alone” part (she has three kids), but she’s definitely got the “having tons of cats” part. She is constantly trying to get rid of extra cats that are birthed in her house. One day I asked her “wasn’t she supposed to get her cats spade or neutered”? She responded that she was teaching her kids about child birth. I responded, to myself, “your children are example enough, for the whole world, of the horrors of child birth– we don’t need to add a legion of cats to that lesson.”

-Shark

“Thetis”

There is nothing scarier that an afternoon, you and your sister on the beach in the bright sun. Hair curving over the bridge. I have a pipe in my mouth and a hunting cap on like Sherlock Holmes. My acumen suits the weather, like when beauty arrived from sea in a clam. I turn to look back towards the shore as if that cataract would be my feigned undoing. Instead, a few more cars arrive and the sun bronzes. The ocean and the way it becomes white on the craggy cliffs. Tides.

“Patroclus”

In the dark corner of a bar, Patroclus turns to you. The dog panting at your feet. You are wearing a Bloody Mary for breakfast, which can be seen in the light from the front door. Football fans cast in roses. They are giants that hold up the world on their shoulders. Gazing at them, then at you, then at the nadir imposed by the gods upon Patroclus.

“Achilles”

“On the eve of battle I gazed at Achilles, asleep in his chair; the sun was setting behind him and, through the clay soil and the fear of pending battle, I could see him long for Briseis,” Patroclus said. Then he told the ceiling, “I’m wondering if the war will ever end.” We were in the park and we were so drunk. Fingers in the sky. The afternoon went by like trees rustling against power wires. Finally, you commented that Achilles deserved his fate and blamed it on the satellite as sleep, once again, overcame you.

-Shark

Hip E.:

[I was on a date with a girl who] said the cup size corresponds to the surface distance from the nipple to the base of the half-rack. I’d never heard that before.

PETE:

In my history of boob size guessing, I’ve found the most common error guys make is to underestimate cup size with skinny girls and overestimate it with voluptuous girls.

Hip E.:

PETE, have you read the wikipedia on brassiere measurement? It’s longer than the one about WWII. Crazy. It’s not the best thing wikipedia has to offer, but I think it at least does a good job of exposing the horrible mess that is brassiere sizing in 2011. There are no standards. The consumer is basically up tit creek without a paddle. If men had hot tits, the sizing situation would never have gotten this intractable. It’s like the US corporate tax code in there.

P.S. If Thrill had written sentence #4 above, he would have changed “paddle” to “padded” or “padding.” It would have been the wrong choice.

PETE:

That’s one of the points I make about bras in my rather lengthy stand-up routine about bewbs, which of course will never be delivered in front of an audience. If men had boobs, archaeologists would be digging up ancient boob-measuring devices in China and Sumeria that predate the earliest calendars. We would have gotten a handle on this situation thousands of years before Christ. Archimedes would be known not for lifting ships from the water, but designing the Miracle Bra.

However, I do credit women with the aesthetic aspects of the bra, namely the ability to fit the wide variety of boob shapes into a pleasing, globular vessel that mimics the most attractive of all boob shape possibilities.

Hip E.:

What do women care?? Men designed the bras and have chosen the shapes! Including the ill-conceived nuclear warhead from the 60’s.

Thrill:

Hip E., I don’t get your joke about me, but OK. Regardless, I agree with you and PETE: tit technology would be centuries more advanced if dudes had bewbs.

PETE:

But women are the market makers. If they were cool with the warhead shape, we’d still have that. What they are cool with is an unrealistically cantilevered round cup that makes pretty much any bewb shape look hot. If women cared about utility they’d probably just wear sports bras all the time, but they don’t.

Hip E.:

So the fact that women’s clothes are impractical and uncomfortable is purely because that’s what women want to wear, not at all because men ran all the clothing companies and produced all the fashions from 1930-1980?

Turd:

Bewbs

PETE:

Not what I’m saying, but to that point: yeah, probably. The women are the consumers of women’s clothing. They create the demand for products. Products that they do not buy are taken off the market, and the companies that don’t adapt go out of business.

Women make several choices fashion wise that place a premium on some aesthetic ideal over practicality or comfort. Women have near unlimited comfortable shoe options, and yet the footware that demands a premium are high-heels like Blahniks and Jimmy Choos (a company, I might point out, run by a woman). If women didn’t clamor for shoes that you can’t walk more than 50 feet in without considerable discomfort, Jimmy Choo would not be able to change $800 for 13 ounces of wood and leather. It’s supply and demand, baby!

There are plenty of companies that produce comfortable footware —some of which are no doubt run by women — but there is still room in the market for companies that produce nothing but instruments of torture, and those companies are quite successful. An elongated calf muscle and 4-6 extra inches in height are worth more to some women than foot comfort.

Men can run all the clothing companies they want. The successful men will produce clothing that women like, and want to wear. The unsuccessful companies will produce clothing that women do not like, and do not want to wear.

I can’t speak to bra comfort, per se, but the most successful companies seem to be those that can combine the aesthetically desirable shape with all-day wearability. But I think I can safely say that women still chose designs that make their boobs look hot, sacrificing the added comfort that I imagine a sports bra would provide.

In stating these elementary economic concepts, I render no opinion on the underlying pathology that causes this phenomenon, the why women prefer to wear impractical items.

This Network Moment was brought to you by Shark

Friday. For the last three years, October has been the worst. Work is busy right before the holidays and it is also the busy period of the class I teach. I basically have to spend most of my weekends grading moot court briefs and it blows. I did that most of Friday evening, although I took some solace in the time that I gave me to catch up on metal albums. Really like the new Wormrot, for some reason. Anyway, by 8 or 9pm I had had about as much as I could take and put out some feelers to see who was doing what. Clare wrote back– apparently she was on Upper Height following the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival, one of the popular California events that I hate for no particular reason. But I went down there anyway. The Gold Cane– a bar that has its upside but usually only during the week when it is so low key and so lacking in supervision that we were once able to climb onto the roof with pitchers of beer and a music playing device, unmolested, for about one hour– was overrun with dirty hippies and douchebags. Soon after I arrived, I realized it was time to go. Luckily, Clare and Patrick followed me, along with a few acquaintances of theirs, including a nomadic hippie-type who informed me he was on mushrooms before showing me some of his homemade jewelery. He seemed very happy. On the walk home I noticed a kid in a blazer getting an MIP citation. Strange world, man.

Saturday. I woke up relatively early and got a burrito and coffee at my local, shitty coffee shop down the street. As I walked back to my apartment I realized two things: (1) I was happy that I finally went to that coffee shop and got a burrito on Saturday morning while not still drunk and disheveled from the night before; and (2) that I should stop going to that shitty coffee shop (attached to the laundromat) for coffee because the coffee is really shitty. When I got back I started reviewing moot court briefs and continued to do so until around 4pm. It was shitty. Then, luckily, Hip E. was stirring and eager to get out of the house, so I went over to his place and we hung out for a short bit before grabbing a beer and going to Mission Dolores Park. We sat on a bench and talked about stuff like involuntary confessions and separation of powers, while also discussing the logistics of a sex change. It is important to have friends that you like to hang out with. We then met up with Clare, Patrick, and Laura, and went back to The Office and then off to El Rio, although I swear there was something in between but I just can’t think of it. Did we go to Thieves and was it horrible or was that some other time? Anyway, Thieves Tavern can be terrible in the afternoon– there’s almost nothing more depressing. But it’s great in the evening. There’s no better place these days, even if our favorite bartenders have left. It’s just totally unassuming: no one goes there specifically to have a good time, they just go there and end up having a good time. Plus, they have Can on the jukebox. So anyway, after that vague middle part, I found myself at El Rio with Laura and Hip. I think it was weird or something there. That place is weird. The vacuous outside area is almost never conducive to fun because the space is too diffuse– and then there’s the pseudo-industrial place next store whose sound and vibe (?) always spills out into the El Rio courtyard. So we left there and went to The Knock Out, which had a Sonic Youth cover band playing. They weren’t particularly good but I don’t blame them because they had to play on the midget stage at The Knock Out. It hardly mattered though because Hip, Laura, and I spent most of the time trying to take the perfect set of pictures of ourselves in the photo booth– turns out we failed EVERY TIME though because we failed to realize the breadth of the camera such that every shot was basically just Laura sitting in the middle and Hip E. and I doing attemptedly funny things out of frame. Luckily for the brevity of this post, things start to get blurry from there. We met Trey, Sterling, Jess, Noodle, and Ed at the Noc Noc in Lower Height. I will always have fond memories of the time around 2004 when I went to the Noc Noc with Patsy, Hip E. and Jay, and I ordered a nice round of fancy beers for everyone and put them on one of those little, built-in tables they have there (because in a bar built to resemble a cave there are small, built-in tables?) and then Patsy kicked the table and all the beers broke and the glasses fell. Back in 2011, we hung out at the Noc Noc for a while, had fun, then went back to my place and threw a little party with dancing.

Sunday. When I woke up in the morning, I was reminded that I had torn Patsy’s over-sized Eclipse poster to shreds. That was for certain. Whatever else happened, I wasn’t sure, except that I could tell it involved a marijuana pipe and two dozen beers, the remnants of which were scattered about my apartment. I sat down on my couch and looked across the scullery coffee table wreckage at Ed, sleeping soundly on my opposing couch. At such times, I wished I smoked cigarettes, if not simply for the appropriateness of the image. It took me about ten minutes of thought, staring at Ed, to realized that I wouldn’t be able to accomplish anything productive with my Sunday, so I put out feelers for some activities. Clare was quick to write back and we decided to go Puerto Allegre, a mediocre, sit-down Mexican place on Valencia Street. Two enchiladas and two margaritas later, I was back in the game. We went over the Phoenix, where Blaire (who works there), told us that there was a “free pig roast party”. We arrived early for the party– only a few people were there along with the pig– and I decided on screwdrivers. Sometimes you’ve got to go old school, you know? I don’t know, I just think it’s great that a drink that consists of exactly (1) orange juice and (2) vodka is called a “screwdriver”. I mean, really, if the drink-naming gods had it to do over, such a name as “a screwdriver” would have really been reserved for something with more than two ingredients. I celebrated by drinking several of them. Which was a good thing because it prevented me from malfunctioning when the “pig roast party” turned into a “Burning Man party”. The contours of Blaire’s ruse were beginning show. Now, as you know, I am a Burning Man hater. (What’s not to hate?!) But even I, especially in my drunk state, could not help appreciating the party, not because the people there were cool– quite to the contrary, every single person there was a total douchebag– but because it was REALLY FUN to watch all these douchebags walk around in their horrible pink clothes, adorned with feathers and glow sticks. Again: a rave in the desert is still rave. But, turns out: fun to watch from the sidelines. As more people started to come I got drunker and soon that warm, impervious feeling took over me, as if I were Athene dropping down onto the field of battle under a cloak of invisibility. Is there anything more beautiful than gray eyes? Or swaying the outcome of battle? There are times when you feel like a field marshal, directing the troops in perfect lockstep toward the ultimate military goal: maritime happiness. After all, my group of friends– privileged upper middle class city liberals– is weaker, by definition, that prior generations or current classes forced into war. However it also certainly true that our lives– as well-lived as they are– are celebrations of the rights for which soldiers and people of military valor fight. To sit home and sulk or fret would doubly insult the sacrifices that these men and women make. To, say, find a clump of hair in Blaire’s comb and NOT use that clump of hair for the purposes of practices jokes

Little Clump of Hair from Shark on Vimeo.

would be the worst insult of them all. After we had had our fill of the Burners, we repaired to Shalimar for a repast. God bless Shalimar, which still allows you to bring your own booze in. Not that I needed it though as I was already drunk enough that I repeatedly spilled beer on Blaire and food on the floor. Accordingly, Blaire decided I was “too drunk to see Moneyball” with her and Gardener, a determination for which I felt sternly proud as I road the bus home and left my house key on the bus so that I was locked out of the house, cold and having to urinate, until Patsy returned an hour later. I am, after all, a true American.

Monday. On Monday morning I drove to work still a-reeling from being so recently boozed. I clung to the NPR news– and along those lines was happy to catch both the Cokie Roberts segment and the story on the upcoming Supreme Court calendar– but it wasn’t nearly enough to mask that not unique feeling of dread and sadness that follows Sunday afternoon drinking: dread because you have to go to work in an atrophied state and sadness because, just a few hours ago, you were having a blast, delightfully and temporarily clueless of your impending obligations. I put on an old mix CD of mine that I had made in law school and was reminded of how, at that time, I actually liked this singer songwriter named Mason Jennings whose songs have their moments but have too many amateurish missteps for me to still appreciate them, except sentimentally. Not true with Tom Wait though. When his “Train Song” came on its slayed me; it’s probably his best ballad. Tom Waits is someone to look up to for many reasons, but one is his ability to transform himself from a creative drunk person to a creative sober person. It is not often that this happens, but Tom Waits was able to do it and there’s probably no album that marks that transition better than Frank’s Wild Years. It is the first in what would be a steady stream of movie and play soundtracks for Tom. He would never again write a truly lived-in song like, say, “Closing Time” or “The Piano Has Been Drinking”, but it opened up the possibility to write stuff like “What’s He Building in There” and “Misery”, songs that look at things more abstractly from an outside perspective. And on “Train Song”– whether on the earlier, live version from Big Time or the album version from Frank’s Wild Years– it feels like he’s perfected this ability, which manifests itself in a third-person story about a wandering baccant that returns to his home town and, for some reason or another, feels like he’s lost everything.

-Shark

If you send me an invitation to join LinkedIn, I will ignore it. Not because I don’t like you or your professional skills, but because I have no idea what LinkedIn is or how to pronounce its name.

Love,
Shark

I have probably seen the movie Beaches, starring Better Midler and Barbara Hersey, five times. The first time was when it first came out around 1985. I was five or six. Recently, I have been somewhat of an innocent bystander to Patsy’s penchant for watching it while hungover on the couch. So I have seen it many times, and there has never been a time when I haven’t noted its flaws: the pacing is way too brisk, to the point where it feels like “hurry up and [SPOILER WARNING] die, Barbara Hershey”; the kid is too cute and, therefore, cloying when she should be sympathetic; there are several songs, especially the “Love a Little” song, that are just way too schmaltzy, objectively speaking; and, generally, there is nothing filmically interesting about it, it’s just a Hollywood yarn, edited so that you forgot you’re watching a movie. With regard to the latter observation, Roger Ebert called Beaches “a movie completely constructed out of other movies.” [FN1] But, at the same time, it is time for me to come to terms with my inability to not be moved by the story– this is despite my dogged efforts to erect an emotional barrier to its plot mechanizations because, you know, it’s Beaches, it’s one of most blatant chick flicks this side of Fried Green Tomatoes. But dammit Beaches always finds a chink in the armor. I almost cry when fucking Barbara Hersey dies … every time. Basically, it’s just the thought that the most unlikely people can become your friends and that even your most random friends might turn out to be really important parts of life some day. And although, as I mentioned above, most of the songs are just too ridiculous, “Wind Beneath My Wings”, which is also ridiculous, is too good to deny. The entire movie is basically a movie video for that song, which is fine in the grand scheme of things. And for those that dismiss the song because it’s a Bette Midler song, remind yourself that Bette Midler was once kind of cool and even collaborated with Tom Waits. [FN2] I also cannot deny the fact that she manages to make her boobs look pretty nice at various points in the movie. Not as nice as here, obviously, but still. Anyway, in summary, I like the movie Beaches.

-Shark
_____________
FN1: When I searched for Ebert’s Beaches review, another movie that came up in the results was Fletch, one of the greatest comedies ever made. Turns out Ebert gave Fletch and Beaches the same rating (2.5 stars). What does it all mean?

FN2: Let the record reflect that, at this point, I looked up her wikipedia site to see if there was anything else cool that she has done and there pretty much is not. Plus, there’s a chance that Hocus Pocus cancels out the Tom Wait connection.