DoE Flashback May 29, 2014: All Women, All Men

  Facebook is filling up with witness to sexual assault/abuse/harassment against women, and I think it best that men temporarily step off the facebook response/engagement train to allow women the space to have their say (am I the only one who finds the "we see you" posts, no matter how well intentioned, as just another way to insert men into the discussion?). Obviously men have to step up and stand against institutional misogyny, but they need to be bringing these discussions into "male" spaces (King Cheeto's infamous "locker room"), and stand behind the women who are leading the public interrogation.
  To that end, I am using my space here to re-run a Death of Everything post from 2014 on the issue. I want to take a little time to refocus an issue that this post addresses, and a couple that it doesn't:
  1)  All women have been subject to sexual abuse of some sort. On the flip side, all men have been guilty of harassment at some level, if only because misogyny is so deeply written upon our culture. I have sexually harassed women before (see the discussion of "grabass" below). What I did may not have been outside the "normal" behavior of teenage boys, but that only goes to show how deeply misogynistic our culture is. There is no point in saying "not me"; we have to take personal responsibility, and move to make changes. It is easy to attack big monsters like King Cheeto or Harvey Weinstein, but it is the very banality of misogyny - the asshole cat-calling in the street, the guy greeting a woman with "hey baby" when she walks in the room, the never-ending normative comments on appearance based on the male gaze -  that is the bedrock of female oppression in our culture. It really is every woman, every man. 
  2)  I understand my discussion of the issue is gendered in a very determinative way, and I understand the problems and limitations of that. I choose to have this discussion traditionally gendered because that is how misogyny is coded into our culture. I also understand that, beyond misogyny, gender itself is an issue.  
  3)  Perhaps my biggest reservation about running this is the manner in which it personalizes the oppression of the other: like the man who prefaces his disgust with the big bully misogynist with "as a father of two daughters", it implies that I can only understand oppression when it involves me personally. In spite of that, I think it is worth reposting; but we have to be able to comprehend and deal with oppression outside of our sphere if we ever expect justice to be served.
  Oh yeah, and never, ever, ever, ever drive drunk. That is bad bad bad. I could have killed someone that night.
  With that, on to this post from The Death of Everything. . . 

I grew up sheltered to a large degree, and my realization of the depths of the issues that women face was a bit slow in coming.  The slap and tickle grabass that sometimes broke out among teenagers always stopped at "no" as far as I was concerned . . . and besides, it was mutual, wasn't it?  It didn't occur to me that maybe a girl grabbing a boy's ass isn't the same as the other way around*.  Or, more to the point, that many women didn't have the agency to say "no" when the line had been crossed.

The whole concept of explicit verbal contracts for physicality was just surfacing at universities when I was in my twenties, and was subject to about the same level of incredulity that trigger warnings are today.  And like trigger warnings, the verbal contracts at very least started to bring to the surface deep structural issues (in this case, the pervasiveness of men's institutional control over women and their bodies).

It took another incident to start to bring home what a woman in this culture has to deal with.  In my twenties, I was really only good at drinking, so I spent a lot of my time going to house parties, since I never had the income to blow at the bars.  There was a young woman, "Janie" we'll call her, who used to hang out with us.  Janie was (and still is!) a bright, bubbly girl who had an amazing smile that she beamed constantly.  She was always full of positive energy, and a delight to be around.  She was also all of 16 years old when we first met (I was about ten years older), and perhaps slightly naive about the sexuality that she radiated.  She was, however, a pretty good judge of character, and surrounded herself with people whom she could trust; while she was out on the punk rock house party circuit frequently, she was always surrounded by her extended family of big brothers and big sisters who would watch her back (and, it also helped immensely that she was never much into booze or drugs, so she wasn't compromised in that sense).

One night Janie, my friend Al, and I were at a particularly loud and crowded party.  We got there early enough to make three or four runs at the keg before the line got too long.  After that, Al and I did pretty much what we always did at parties: lean against the wall, slam down whatever booze we got our hands on, and cracked wise.  This party, as crowded as it was, didn't afford us too many beers, so we were light on the booze and heavy on the cracking wise.  At a certain point, Janie circulated back around and chatted with us briefly.  I lamented my lack of beer, and Janie volunteered to go get me one, since she knew the guy dispensing the beer would let her cut to the front of the line.  I was fine with that, so against the wall I stayed.  An ass pocket bottle of whiskey was passed my way, and I got a short drag just before Janie got back with my beer.  As she gave it to me, I told her not to stray too far, that I was planning on leaving fairly soon, pretty much as soon as I finished the beer.  And that's the last thing I remember with any real clarity.

The next day I had to open the record store at about noon (it was Sunday).  As I jammed my key into the lock in a mad scramble to get the lights on, drawers counted, and the store open, I managed to slam my right hand in the heavy glass and metal front door.  That was the first event that I remembered clearly since I got that beer from Janie the night before.

At this point, anybody reading this knows exactly what happened.  But at the time, Law and Order: SVU had yet to turn roofies into a standard plot cliche, so I had yet to grasp the situation.

I was definitely much more than just hung over.  I got the store open reasonably close to on time.  It was the summer in a college town, and the store was right off campus, so no one was banging the doors down to get in.  The light was slicing through my head: it was so bad that I took of my prescription glasses, stuck them in my pocket, and grabbed some shades from the sunglasses display.  At about that time, Al walked in, and seeing me behind the counter with a set of Velvet Underground wrap around Ray Bans pasted to my mug sent him into a laughing fit that lasted five minutes.

I told him that I had no idea what happened to me the night before.  I could only remember drinking, at most, five beers, along with a slug or two of whiskey. I figured something must have happened after we left the party, but Al assured me that I started acting very strangely right before we left.  Al and I were frequent drinking buddies, so he was shocked that I was going to hell so quick on such a small amount of alcohol.

I had totally blacked out part of the night.  The only time I had blacked out before, I had consumed many, many times that amount of alcohol.  To this day, those are the only two times I have ever blacked out.

I was completely confused about what happened.  Al and I went over the night minute by minute, but nothing got much clearer.  He said that after Janie got me the beer, I chugged it, and then told Janie to say her goodbyes so we could hit the road.  That took her approximately twenty minutes to a half hour; by the time she got back, I was slurring my words.  As we walked to the car, Al noticed me stumbling.  He passed a friend who had just arrived at the party and got his car keys.  Janie in the meantime decided to leave with another friend, so Al was left with only me.  He couldn't talk me into leaving my truck there, so he told me to follow him, and he led me safely home.  As I went up to my house, I was barely walking, so it seemed unlikely that I did anything other than fall into bed when I got home.  It's a wonder I managed to set my alarm.

As we discussed it, all I could do is say "man, that beer Janie got me really did me in".  About the third time I said it, Al gave me a strange look, and I realized what had happened: some asshole was trying to get Janie, but got me instead.  Considering how whatever that beer was spiked with hit me, it would have completely wiped out poor little Janie.

We got a hold of Janie a few days later.  I'm not sure if what we were saying to her registered, other than the fact that she had to be careful when she was out.  Fortunately, she already was careful.  I can't say the same for some of her peers that showed up in the scene a few years later.

*          *          *          *          *

I will never understand fully what it is like to be a woman (obviously).  Even my wife, who is no shrinking violet, has had to get off the bus a stop early, or get off and walk around the block, just so some creep that was bugging her on the bus can't see where she lives.  As for me, there aren't many places in this city where I am afraid to walk (a few, but not many).  Only once was I concerned about my safety when I was being followed on the street, and all it took was an opportune scrap of 2" x 4" to redirect the attention of the people following me.

It is all women, and it is all men.  There are thousands of small, seemingly insignificant gestures that are coded in ways that men don't understand.  But worse, there are thousands of gestures which clearly cross the line that our culture still tries to excuse.  The fact that you have every intention of treating women decently is moot unless you work to revolutionize the sexist culture that surrounds us.  The fact that anyone finds the discussion of these things even remotely feminist (as opposed to being about SIMPLE HUMAN DECENCY) is sad.

So remember this next time you want to complain about being "friendzoned": first, she doesn't owe you anything, much less her body.  Second, her friendship is probably the most valuable gift she could give you.  Third, if you even think "friendzone" is a thing, you don't deserve her friendship.

It is time to start shunning and shaming sexist behavior.

_______________
*  I won't deny that boundaries are being violated in each case, but they are in no way equivalent.  It's the same with the idea that men can be the victims of physical domestic abuse.  I once discussed with an acquaintance some of the episodes from an earlier relationship when my significant other physically attacked me, and he went immediately to "see, men can be victims of domestic abuse too!", which was completely absurd because I had a foot and 110 pounds on my ex.  She was not a real physical threat to me.  Situations that are different are very, very rare.

DoE Flashback, January 8, 2013: The Trace of Jon Rans, and the Defiance We Owe Him

Jon Rans passed away November 18th, 2012.  Of course, I meant to do this much closer to the event, but when do I ever finish anything in a timely manner?

Before the interwebs, there used to be bulletin boards (at the dawn of the interwebs, they initially referred to online message board sites as bulletin boards).  When I think of bulletin boards, I think specifically of ride board in the student union (pick yr school), with thousands of tattered flyers with tear-off phone numbers, scribbled notes, maps and pins, etc.  Those huge bulletin boards were always a nexus point, an intersection where traces of passages where left, and to where trace vortices pointed to all different points of the compass & forward and backward in time.  Those bulletin boards were coded portals to elsewhere, even if your elsewhere was as prosaic as a ride home for the break.

Lately, the bookshelf stereo in my kitchen has functioned like one of those bulletin board nexus points.  I spend a fair amount of time in my kitchen at home, and the stereo is always booming away as I work.  Stacks of CDs and cassettes have sprouted up around it, always in constant rotation, always spilling all over the place.  In early March of 2010, downloaded copies of 70's Alex Chilton albums burned to CD made it to the stack of burned CDs by the stereo, along with my cassette of an '84 show he did in Bloomington.  Then, in the midst of my Chilton binge, I received news that Chilton had died.  I got a little chill, like someone walked over my own grave . . . those CDs, that tape, became the tattered trace of someone moving on.

In December of 2010, Don Vliet, a.k.a Captain Beefheart, passed away.  Of course there was a Beefheart CD in the player when I heard, but I always have Beefheart in rotation, so I didn't make the connection there.

Last April, Paul's Boutique and a handful of Beastie Boys singles from the Check Your Head era found their way into the cassette stacks for the first time in years; and (you guessed it) Adam Yauch passed about a week later.

This past November, while doing something resembling deep cleaning on the kitchen (really all that means is that I did the windows), Latent Chaos tapes showed up in the stacks.  And then, I found out about the death of Jon Rans.

Another trace left on the board.

In a related note, Dan Willems has expressly forbid me from playing Sick City Four in the kitchen anymore.

*          *          *          *          *

We are always so quick to name ourselves, sometimes more out of a sense of preservation than anything else.  We want to identify with a group, we want the protection of a clique.  So people ask us: what are you?  And we always seem to have an answer.

I don't know how Jon answered that question, but he could have answered it many ways.  He owned a record store (Repeat Performance) and co-owned a club (along with Jeff Weiss, the No Bar and Grill) that was the center of a small but very vital Muncie scene in the 80's.  He was a booker and a promoter.  He was a drummer for garage revivalists The Mystic Groovies and Hoosier avant krautrock noise pioneers Latent Chaos.  He played drums for anyone around who needed a drummer.  He made money restoring and writing about pottery.  He was a father, husband, and probably many other things in a private live I never accessed.  He was so many different things . . . if I had to guess, his answer to the question was "Whatever the fuck I want to be", because that pretty much sums it up.

I met Jon Rans through Tony Woollard.  Tony and I were both from the Muncie area (Anderson for me, New Castle for Tony), but the Muncie scene hadn't started to bubble up when I left Anderson in '79.  Tony and I were in Bloomington and in a band together in '86, and I met Jon when we went up to play the No Bar.

The No Bar was home for a bunch of artistic misfits, and the personality of the place was largely Jon Rans's personality: a sort of base-level, no-shit attitude about doing something to escape the gray oppression of the Midwestern American landscape.  They weren't a pretentious bunch, but neither did they make the mistake of avoiding anything for fear of being called pretentious.  Eccentricity was not a lifestyle choice, but rather a response to a situation, and it was never held against anybody.  They took you as you were, not as they thought you should be.  If you were ever at the No Bar and saw (what you considered to be) an uncool or bullshit band/act up on the stage, you best keep it to yourself, because the first snide comment you dared utter, about five No Bar regulars would turn on you in unison and shout you down: "Well, at least they're up there fucking doing something.  What's your excuse?"  That was the voice of Jon Rans, no matter who was mouthing the words.  That was the ethos of the place: do something.  Take control.  Break through the oppression of the normal.  And that, too, is the legacy of Jon Rans.

There are a lot of people who figure into a musician's deal: there are the artists you idolize up from afar, the musicians you get to know and admire up close.  There are the scene masters, the people who create an atmosphere to do your thing.  There is the audience (who are treated not as "fans", but as a peer group, again per the No Bar ethos), the people around to give you feedback, the people who test your ideas.  There are the people who help you get your deal to a larger world, either by booking/managing your band or releasing your music to the world at large.  Jon Rans (again, along with Jeff Weiss) was all of these things to me.  I started out as a Latent Chaos fan when those avant-weirdos seemed distant to me, I stayed a Latent Chaos fan when I stood in an audience with a handful of people mere feet away from them.  I got to go onstage with them at the No Bar to lay down sheets of guitar noise for an unruly version of "Golden Moments", a memory I find touching to this day.  And beyond all that, there were the (all too rare!) times when Tony and I showed up at the shop, or hung out with him at Second Story at a Mystic Groovies gig, just to shoot the shit.

I'm not going to pretend that I knew Jon well, because I didn't.  That perhaps makes it all the more remarkable that I always felt like I did know him well whenever I was around him.  He was that type of guy.

I'm not going to be the one that tells you stories about Jon being in a better place, or Jon looking down beatifically upon those of us left behind.  I'm not going to tell you that Jon is still with us like some ethereal phantom that wafts in and out of the physical world.  I don't have time for such fairy tales.  But before he gets lost in the cultural detritus, before he descends into the scrap heap of history, I will tell you that he lives.  He lives in those who bought into his ethos, he lives for those who modeled parts of their lives around his example.  He lives for those of us left who refuse to knuckle under to the narratives presented to us for our lives, who continue to fly in the face of whatever odds there are to do what it is we do, to do SOMETHING.  Jon Rans lives through me, and everyone else who he touched . . . and he will continue to live at least until they pry my guitar from my cold, dead hands.  It is that defiance, in the end, that I feel I owe Jon.

DoE Flashback, October 2, 2008: The Banality of Greed

I recently read an atrocious little volume called Cosmopolis by Don DeLillo. It reminded me of Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities, another novel I hate. At the same time I was reading Cosmopolis, I was reading Wall Street Versus America, Gary Weiss's book on Wall Street greed, corruption, and incompetence. And then, shoes started dropping on Wall Street. Ah, synchronicity . . .

There's a lot of anger associated with all the bank and brokerage failures, even before the government started dumping chunks of the treasury into these private clusterfucks. Apropos DeLillo and Wolfe, we imagine the villains to be the so-called "masters of the universe" (a coinage of Wolfe's from BotV) that run Wall Street. While the stink of deep soul corruption hangs like a dank fog over the centers of money and power, the roots of the greed that bore this toxic fruit are sunk deep into the everyday soil that we ourselves tread. Contrary to the sexy elitist makeover that DeLillo and Wolfe (among many, many others) foist upon it, greed is, in fact, banal & pervasive.

A few years back, there was an exodus of salesman from my workplace into the mortgage industry. It was where the money was. As far as I know, it was all kinds of high-risk paper: re-fi, no money down mortgages, etc. A few of them came back because they weren't comfortable with the business. The idea was to pistol whip as much of this paper through as possible, any way possible. As an agent, you are not allowed to make judgements concerning a customer's ability to pay. Now, that sounds reasonable, except sometimes the customer just doesn't know what the hell is going on. You can sit there knowing damn well the customer isn't going to be able to make the payments, but as long as your bosses keep stamping it and sending it up one more level . . . well, not your problem. It's your job to pump paper into the pipeline, it's someone else's job to kick it back out. The more paper you pump, the better off you are.

This isn't Glengarry Glen Ross stuff here, this is just a bunch of kids trying to get themselves enough extra cash to get a new car, or a big screen TV. They want to impress their bosses, they want to make a reputation, so racking up big numbers is the way to do that. To get the numbers, you push limits as far as possible. A client may have put down that he makes $50,000 a year as a Burger King shift manager, but is it the agent's job to question that? Well, no, however unlikely, it is possible. Or there's that guy with his own "lawn service" who makes $70,000 - once again, it is possible, even if that broke-down 10 year old F-150 with a push mower and a couple weedeaters in back says otherwise. It's not the agent's job to be detective. Thought about a transaction can never be "is this the right thing to do, for the client and for the company?"; rather, all attention has to be focused into "what is the best way to maximize this deal for me?". The real face of the mortgage crisis isn't Cosmopolis's Eric Packer betting huge mountains of cash against the rise of the yen, it's a kid working far too many hours, going out and getting drunk after work, coming in again with just a couple hours of sleep, and having to borrow $10 to eat lunch the day before payday. The face of the mortgage crisis isn't one of Wolfe's "masters of the universe", it's a harried father trying to push a little extra paper so he can afford a babysitter and a rare night out for his wife on payday. This isn't the outscale greed that splices itself to hubris, this is the greed that puts the simple desire for a little self-gratification above everything else.

Of course, the outscale greed and hubris of Wall Street "power brokers" is involved in this as well: the actual crash is linked largely to a crisis with derivatives, bizarre creations whose only function appears to be generating cash with no extra collateral. And, as much as we feel for the homeowners who were duped into these shitty loans, as a certain point they have to be held responsible for their own decisions (it's rare that a prospective mortgage client actually gets lied to - they just don't get the full truth unless they ask). Even here, though, the banality of greed permeates: the Wall Street guys creating "financial products" were just doing their jobs, like the mortgage guys whipping bad paper at the wall to see what sticks. The homeowners jumping into risky mortgages with one eye open and their noses plugged were just grasping for what has been defined as the American Dream. Broken down to an individual level, greed doesn't seem much different than the inability to avoid that bag of chips in the vending machine when you have change in your pocket.

Wolfe and DeLillo want to make Greek tragedy out of greed. In so doing, they glorify greed even if, as in Greek tragedy, the greedy hero gets it in the end. Ultimately, DeLillo wants us to admire Eric Packer, even if we don't necessarily love him. The implication is clear: greed is something grand and desirable. They are wrong: greed is banal, pervasive, and menial. And it is destroying our culture.

DoE Flashback, May 8, 2009: The Jukeboxes of Clarksville Pt. 3

Welcome to Moe's! 

This is the story of a man who woke up one morning with a song stuck in his head. A classic tune about feeling good, sharing the love and doing your own thing. His “thing” happened to be food. Southwestern fare, with a special appreciation for the form and function of a tortilla. He experimented with fresh ingredients and had an appropriate name for each creation. He opened a restaurant, and made it known loud and clear that no matter how many times a day he had to say it, everyone who came through the door would feel welcome. And if you stuck around long enough, you’d probably hear that song that helped make a man, a legend. -- from the Moe's Southwest Grill website 

Perched on the corner of a strip mall, Moe's Southwest Grill gives you two walls of windows instead of just one. The spacious feel is accentuated by the open "industrial style" ceiling in place of the usual dropped acoustic tile ceiling. The walls are covered with commercial counterfeits of “outsider art”, fake Southwestern geegaws, and pseudo-quaint coinages such as “If you don't have fun saying guacamole, you're probably not saying it right”. The menu on the wall tags their burritos with names such as Triple Lindy, Joey Bag of Donuts, Art Vandalay, and so on. Their tacos go by names such as the Overachiever and The Funk Meister. As the door swings open & you breach the threshold, every employee in the joint yells “WELCOME TO MOE’S!” at you. You imagine the ones who don’t get fired. You immediately become more than a little annoyed with the tool who came up with that idea. You immediately become more than a little annoyed with Moe's faux feel-good 60's hipster/hippie-isms.

The typical Moe's burrito isn't exactly haute cuisine, or even particularly memorable, but at least it (seemingly) isn't the same evil processed shit you encounter at a burger joint, or Taco Bell. Moe's seems to be at least a faltering step in the right direction of real food with fresh ingredients. As such, Moe's flaunts the assumption of a kind of base-level superiority, which happens to eerily echo the assumptions of base-level superiority the Boomer generation itself has. These assumptions manifest as an easy-going hubris, which is not the less annoying for its good nature.

The playlist at Moe's is classic rock, natch. It would be virtually indistinguishable from a normal over-the-air classic rock station if it had adverts and announcers. The playlist generally eschews the rowdy side of rock (light on the biker rock) in favor of the more mainstream hippie mainstays: The Byrds, Jim Croce, "Cat's in the Cradle", "And I Love Her", etc. It also is not afraid to stray outward to such touchpoints as James Brown, Frank Sinatra, Big Band, the Bee Gees, INXS (?!), Ray Charles, and so on. Like most any classic rock station, if you are a fan of rock music of any kind, and you listen long enough, something will play that you like. Taken singly, most of the songs are just fine. Taken as a whole, and taken as part of the hipster/hippie context, the playlist is annoying.

Moe's burritos are just dandy, all things considered. I even applauded when they took a step back from the "all things good for you" aesthetic and added pulled pork to the menu (not a bold move, considering swine's position in the sacred foodie pantheon). The thing is, Moe's is not selling burritos, Moe's is selling the sixties. You know, the sixties that is FUCKING EVERYWHERE in the media these days, the sixties that is politely waiting for The Great Generation (WW II) to die off to finally have a full monopoly of the American landscape. Indeed, Moe's is selling the sixties, Dennis Hopper is selling the sixties on behalf of some hedge fund, Viagra is selling the sixties, every bank and insurance company, EVERYBODY is selling us the sixties. And why is everybody trying to sell us the sixties? Because almost every single Boomer is completely convinced of the moral, intellectual, aesthetic, emotional, even physical superiority of the New Great Generation. And being totally, irrevocably convinced of the superiority of the New Great Generation, all they have to do to sell us their great ideas and concepts is to let us know that they are coming from THE SIXTIES.

The sixties were dying a slow toxic death in the mid-70's when the capitalists started to get involved . . . or rather, when the "revolutionaries" decided to become capitalists. The selling of the sixties began around that time, when the salesmen decided that a little hair of the sixties dog would cure that seventies hangover. The selling began in earnest when the New Great Generation self-analyzed their guilt over being capitalists almost into oblivion (almost! They still are just guilty enough to have to rationalize everything they sell by pointing to its inherent goodness, which of course is owed to its being a product of their own imaginations/toils, which means it derives its goodness from the Boomer's own inherent goodness). It started with The Beatles, the Summer of Love, tie-dye, rock -n- roll (not the same as The Beatles), and sex, and eventually evolved into the mask of total superiority that we have to deal with today. Perhaps most annoyingly they sell the sixties as youth culture, and expect it to be EVERYBODY ELSE'S youth culture as well . . . repackaged, degraded simulacra of the events that were more myth than reality to begin with. They expect their hippie-isms to be hip . . . and that's not just wrong, that's pathetic. Everyone is entitled to play with their juvenile identities as much as they wish, but ultimately, a tie-dye shirt is as defective a cultural marker as a Playboy bunny or a Nike swoosh.

I have to admit that I, too, am a fan of the sixties. I love loud guitars and feedback. I love crazy, insistent drums and singers who believe what they say matters. I love bangs. I love sunglasses. I love left-wing politics. I love all those black power free jazz guys (and even a few gals) pushing every limit thrown in front of them, including good sense. I love fast, loud cars driven in a homicidal/suicidal manner. I love the saturation of sex. I love wacked-out Marxist European intellectuals who actually believe revolution is imminent. I love wacked-out European intellectuals who think that Marx has long been passé. And yes, the sixties do mark the point that America began to awaken from its parochial slumber (a process still in its infancy, unfortunately). Without the sixties, we would not see a generation of the most socially conservative, fundamentalist Christians now coming into power that care almost as much for environmental and poverty issues as they do about eliminating abortion and gay rights. Above all, I love the sixties for the idea that you can CHANGE THE WORLD.

Yet it's clear that such monumental turmoil pulls much in its wake. The sixties are about narcissism as much as they are about anything else. There is something about "newly-won freedom" that devolves from wonder, power and excitement on down to hedonism to bottom out in a kind of solipsistic dissolution. The grand victories in civil rights lead everyone to see themselves in some way as a repressed minority so that they may personally share in the "rights" revolution, so that they too belong. Today, the civil rights battle for people repressed because of race, sex, religion, nationality, income, and sexual preference has to share media time with pathetic degraded civil rights-styled nonsense such as "airline passengers' bill of rights" and "consumers' bill of rights". It is a tribute to the leveling effect of the "everything is everything" sixties fake equality mindset that mainstream news media can equate the complaints of consumers with the Bill of Rights completely without irony. Ultimately, the legacy of the sixties is massive and ambivalent, unlike the unambiguously hip goodness its shills present to us with brain dead smiles.

And so the violent tumult of an entire decade gets degraded like faulty mimeographs into small empty talismans of commercialism. I like Moe's burritos just fine. I could switch up my choices enough so that I could eat there several times a week and not get tired of the food. Their trademark salsas are actually pretty damn good in spite of the ridiculous names. I like most of the music that is played over the speakers. And indeed, unlike the corporate fast food along the Veteran's Parkway/Lewis and Clark Parkway mall corridor, this food doesn't seem specifically designed to kill me (even if it is still a long jog away from being healthy). But, the New Great Generation's sales job gives me indigestion. That, and the fact that some poor sucker could be called to account for not yelling "Welcome to Moe's" every time that damn door swings open.

DoE Flashback, April 13, 2009: The Jukeboxes of Clarksville Pt. 2

 The Long John Silvers is Evil & Rockin’

Long John Silvers could kill me. That wretched grease-soaked fish is like an RPG smoking straight toward the arteries, yet I (used to) eat it willingly, even joyfully. There was something about eating rice, beans, peanut butter, and popcorn all the time that had you heading for Long John Silvers when payday hit.

Down here in the “’Ville” (as the university sports department’s marketing wing calls it) I momentarily let my love for fried fish get the better of me. Not only the real deal, like the Fish House off of Barrett and Winter, but the chains big & small. A particularly lethal nexus was the Moby Dick just off the Mellwood ramp onto 64 East. Days when I was hanging down by the floodwall, the Moby Dick was the only joint within a quick stroll, & there was a paper box out front . . . a nice leisurely lunch with the CJ, a First Mate on rye with fries and pups and plenty of tarter sauce, hot sauce, malt vinegar . . . two huge slabs of cod with extra-crunchy cornmeal breading . . . well, it’s a wonder I still walk the earth.

Clarksville has its two poles of fried fishiness as well. Not far off 65 on 131 is a Captain D’s. I used to eat there often since it was easy walking distance from work, but I had to stop. It became more than borderline disturbing: I rarely saw anyone slimmer than myself, and at 6’ 2”, I tip the scales around 250. I’m not exaggerating when I say this. I was definitely the skinny of the bunch.

The other pole, down in front of the old Kroger along with a Frisch’s and a Rally’s, is that broke-assed classic, Long John Silvers. Not too long ago (I don’t remember exactly when) they underwent a facelift. Seems they really wanted to nail down that FISH/SEAFOOD thing, so they went for a funky surfside look – rustic “aged” “wood” paneling, fish shack adverts (“The Beachcomber”, Charleston SC, “Sea Lion”, Galveston TX, “Castaway”, Mobile AL, etc.), references to corrugated tin roofing, booths upholstered like ‘50’s car bench seats (heavy on the turquoise) – the whole mid-century schtick. The food, of course, has remained pretty much the same forever, or at least since the strategic roll-ins of chicken and shrimp onto the menu. They’ve recently added some NON-FRIED fish, but they’re not fooling anybody.

The thing about the LJSs is that they rock. I mean, if not exactly the hard edged Charlie Feathers-as-King royal lineage, then still pretty rockin’ . . . Mitch Ryder, Spencer Davis Group, “Memphis” by Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, Everly Brothers, leavened with the likes of “Don’t Be Cruel”, B J Thomas’s “Hooked On a Feeling”, “Beyond the Sea” by Bobby Darin, and so on. Or, was it simulations of real rocking? Sometimes I had to listen really closely to make sure I was hearing the real thing. Now, granted, I’m going to know the real “Space Truckin’” in three notes, whereas my Mitch Ryder exposure is somewhat more limited, but for chrissakes, I really wasn’t sure about “Don’t Be Cruel”, and how many times have I heard that damn song, especially since I had the single when I was a kid?

The Long John is insidious. You go for the fish, but is it the fish, or is it the saturated fats coursing through your blood, soothing your body into a warm, wooly, almost hallucinogenic food coma after a couple weeks of struggling down rice and beans after another lousy paycheck? You know that the wood is fake, you suspect the fish is barely fish, you even question the validity of songs you’ve heard a million times. In the end, you don’t even know if the simulacra are a real problem.

Comes a time in a man’s life when he needs to take that nutrition shit serious. The Long John Silvers is out of rotation. Like McDonald’s, it’s dead and gone, goner than the Rally’s, which can still suck me in for the occasional barbecue bacon double cheeseburger (topped with a big, fat, deep-fried onion ring!). It’s gone like the Burger King, gone like Fazoli’s, gone like the Captain D’s. In the event that I need fried fish, it’s the Fish House, or the Moby Dick, who can do fish right.

DoE Flashback, March 28, 2009: The Jukeboxes of Clarksville Pt. 1

The Hut on the Trail West

The Pizza Hut on Lewis and Clark Parkway stands largely silent. In the J-Town Pizza Hut, the jukebox spews top songs until someone ponies up some change to play something different. Here, however, silence is the rule rather than the exception, and the austerity is matched by the empty tables – no grated cheese, no crushed red pepper, no salt, no pepper.

The jukebox is one of those modern CD jobs, 4 plays for a buck, 25 for a five, filled only half full. Lots of cowboy hats, lots of classic rock, that's what this Clarksville jukebox has. Kenny Chesney, Tim McGraw, Fleetwood Mac, Bob Seger, Martina McBride, John Mellencamp, John Mayer, and lots and lots of cheap compilations – rap, r & b, rock, country, all straight off the radio . . . the only thing that would earn a worn dollar bill from my pocket is Johnny Cash's 16 Hits.

A couple of the employees are hanging with friends at a corner table. They are loud, but not obnoxious. They are older than average pizza jockeys (this being late afternoon, the kids are in school), of ambiguous age somewhere between a hard-rode 35 and a weathered-but-youthful 48. I jump a little when, from out of nowhere, the jukebox springs to life. It's some generic manicured cowboy hat. As suddenly as the jukebox blares awake, it again falls silent. In the three times I've eaten there, I've heard three songs: two cowboy hats, and one hippie lite jam which I imagine was Dave Matthews . . . it seems no matter how many times I hear Dave Matthews, I never can register how he really sounds.

Driving back to the store at the end of my break, I think about those soldiers who go in before the bombers fly and "paint" infrared tags on the selected targets. I think about calling in an air strike. I am not in a good mood. There's something about Clarksville that makes me feel like Céline (and I don’t mean Dion). It's not like Anderson, which is getting progressively poorer, damaged, displaced, and desperate. Clarksville's not this thing in decay; it's just this thing. There's something about Clarksville that puts my gut on the boil.

Corporate Corned Beef Could Be a Lot Worse Than an Arby’s Reuben Sandwich

It's not as if there's a kosher deli in Clarksville, IN. Far as I know, the closest top-notch deli is Shapiro's in Indianapolis. The Arby's reuben has soggy, processed "marble rye", stringy sauerkraut, flavorless swiss cheese, and corned beef that can be pretty nasty at times. Nonetheless, more often than not, it hits the spot . . . besides, corporate food rules the Lewis & Clark Parkway, so there's not much in the way of competition.

The Arby's also stands out because, unlike most of the other joints on the strip, it actually plays a normal over-the-air local radio station in the dining room. Of course, "local" needs to be segregated out with big-ass quotation marks, since commercial radio is no longer local. The only hint of local flavor is in the advertising, making it local in the crassest of ways. So, you’re sitting there chilling with your reuben, and there's irrepressible chatter, commercials, commercials, commercials, and (theoretically, at least) music. I'm not sure exactly what is what, because it's all woven together in a white-noise-invisible tapestry of blandness, like the swiss cheese and sauerkraut on the reuben. This is what seems to be called Easy Listening (a step blander than Adult Contemporary), though it should be called "I Don't Want Anything Even Remotely Involving to Pass Through My Earholes".

Besides the reubens, the main reason I come to the Arby's is the big front window. It's a grand window, from tabletop to ceiling, with minimal interruption from support pillars or dividers. I chill in the booth with my books, notebooks, sandwich, fries, unsweetened ice tea, and look out the window . . .

And, friends, it is a bleak view indeed. Down at the southwest corner of the dining room, looking up to the northeast, the massive white block overpass of 65 marks the horizon. The rest of the tableau spreads forth like a perspective exercise in an intro to drawing class: streetlights, signs – Hooters, Denny's, Home Depot, h h gregg – concrete, and a wire-crossed sky vast and indifferent. I have often tried to capture the emptiness in words, and even with a camera, but the void escapes my expression.

I have written a chapter of a detective novel staring out the window of Arby's. It will more than likely never be finished, but in it, I (the detective) am a voyeur spying on a banal lover's tryst in the Don Pablo's across the street. The lovers disappear into static air. In reality, everything gets swallowed up & disappears in this landscape.

One day, as I stared out the window, a Dodge Neon pulled up in the lot & kicked me out of my reverie. The Neon was sort of a dust-brazed dull gold color, and it had a spoiler, and a HUGE white Playboy bunny decal taking up most of the back window. A skinny white boy (about 20) rolls out, sporting a wife beater, baggy jeans, and a medium-thin gold rope. He seemed like a nice kid and all; he had his 20 year old wife with him, and a little girl, and he treated them both with obvious love and uncommon respect, but the symbol was still jarring . . . that fucking Playboy bunny, blaring incongruously from the back window of a sad little Neon, an aspiration to a goal simultaneously worthless & unobtainable, a playaz desire to be what his disguised handlers say he should be (though what he really be is cannon fodder in the culture wars), filed & forgotten by the true playaz populating the capitol of this country, a lost boy doomed by a defective cultural marker . . .

Ah, Clarksville. I resist accelerating this strip of mall of a town into a symbol, but it keeps reaching out to me, positing itself as type . . . and it promises nothing but oblivion.

I slouched down to Louisville Derby weekend of '97. I've lived in the Highlands; I now live in Butchertown. The majority of the last ten years I've worked in Clarksville. I’m not slow: it hit me between the eyes as soon as I showed up. From '98:

SPRING, NEAR THE KENNEDY

Rain ankle deep
soaks through holes in shoes.
They're dealing morphine at truck stops in Clarksville -
it's not news, friend,
nothing surprises, and little lives here.
This, then, is the promised land:

cancer as connective tissue,
a facile denial of what is, followed by the
disappearance of is:
a map spread across the passenger seat . . .

here, by this cigarette burn,
an anonymous junction of Interstate 65.
Hell is there, or hell is not.
Stories are told, rich at a dime a dozen:

and a filmist’s manufacture,
an oncologist's atmosphere . . .

and this, the promised land,
blurred with opiates
dispensed like potato chips in the Bigfoot.


I’m not wrong about this.