what do you think is the best moment of rock and roll committed to film?

i know there are more important questions in the world. but still, it speaks to me. let me start with my own--i'd like to suggest two examples.

the first is this one.

and the second is this.

there is nothing by my beloved ramones to compare with these. at the very least, watching these in the late afternoon, at work, makes me feel really nice. i'm happy they exist.

year after year i always come back to russian writing. i was assigned solzhenitsyn to read in high school, and while reading it at gunpoint like that, i realized i loved it. god bless the reading list—you hate it, but you know you love it, you bastard.

there was a time when it was more underground and unknown, waiting for you to discover it—dostoevsky and turgenev etc, i mean—and it wasn’t such a world-lit requirement. i was strangely happy once reading an account of hemingway telling ezra pound about something he liked in a russian translation, and pound responding, “funny, i’ve never read the rooshians.”

when i can find it in translation, i like contemporary russian writing, as well. the night souper by edward limonov has an otherworldly mood that always gets me right here. the story of a russian man living alone in a tiny hotel room near central park—sometimes when i’m walking alone at dusk in the lit-up city, and i feel alone, that story comes up beside me and takes my hand, and even though it makes me feel hopeless, i can’t resist it.

another modern one is the central-ermolaevo war by vyacheslav pietsukh. i like it not because the plot impresses me, but because it explains part of why i like reading the rooshians. he writes, “the enigma of the russian soul is actually very easily explained: the russian soul encompasses everything.”

It has the lot: constructiveness, negation, flair, pyromania, national pride, and castles in the air. Building castles in the air is, in fact, a particular strength. Imagine for a moment that a Russian, from having nothing better to do, has dismantled a shed he actually very much needs, explained to his neighbor why Russia was victorious in the war against Napoleon, and given his wife a good thrashing with the kitchen towel; he then sits back on his veranda smiling peacefully at the loveliness of the day, and is suddenly struck by the thought that it’s perhaps time he invented a new religion.

there is most definitely a cold war reason for me to like the russians. from my childhood to my adulthood, there was quite a rollercoaster involved: we would all die, on the same day, from a nuclear war, and perhaps that nuclear war would even be an accident; then they were our “friends”; and now, polonium 210 is poisoning spies, and sadly we all feel a little relieved, because the cold war is easier to understand than global jihad. all this from the russians, or the soviets, half a world away. be fascinated.


more shitty science fiction

from reading so much, over such a time, i can only say i have internalized one simple thing: at times they have loved their country and simultaneously hated their government. we may hate george bush, but we do not hate the system. it will rescue us in the end. their system was the enemy itself.

a couple years ago i bought this book of soviet science fiction. like many things, it seems like a good idea, but actually sucks. valiantly, three times, i have attempted to finish at least one story in this book, and i can’t. it is the most boring thing you have ever read. i’ve also tried to read a collection of socialist realism i got from the library, and it sucks more. the lesson i have drawn is that anything soviet is awful. and it had to be. be interesting, get shot.

there is no greater condemnation of something. if a society cannot produce a decent short story, except by sending the author to prison, then it is the bane of the earth. and every society should keep this in mind, forever.

stay with me, spiritualized

it's a grey morning. outside my window it's snowing big flakes. the buildings up close are clear, but in the distance, at some point, they are obscured in a white haze. an airplane lands, but only the tip of one wing is visible. a cooling tower on the building across 120th street expels a billowing white cloud of blowing steam. the wind shifts, and with a jerk its direction follows suit. a bird flaps over it all.

in on the road there's a part where sal paradise says that as a kid, when riding in a car he imagined himself running alongside the car, jumping over all the things in the way. dean moriarty had a variation on this imagination, as he was riding a white horse, jumping over everything.

sal also imagined a knife he could hold out the window that would chop off the trees and signs and buildings all at one level. i, josh, had the daydream of running along the road jumping, and also the one about the knife. in mine, the knife was infinitely long, and therefore would take infinitely long to build--at the end of it, off in space somewhere, was the man still adding on to the end. nearby, right out the car window, it was a regular infinite knife, slicing off trees.

is this fantasy universal? does everyone have a version of this? is it only boys? anyone?

several years ago, 2003 perhaps, a friend of mine held an art auction to raise money for her theater company. most of the artists were connected to a school—i forget which one—but she also asked some of her friends to donate things. i draw on occasion, so i said i would give her a line drawing. i did it of the neighborhood the auction was happening in, so it would be all local and stuff.


sunnyside, queens

the auction was on a friday night in a suite of converted warehouse studios in sunnyside. it had pretty hardwood floors and white walls, all lit from above, with high ceilings. off to one end was a darkened dance room with a dj and a bar and flashing lights. the dude played a lot of spaced out electronic music, and everyone had a good time walking all around and drinking wine. the art was nicely spaced out on the walls, with sheets of paper to write bids on, and one was to bid at one’s leisure over the course of the night.

a dude i knew—a friend you could say, but i didn’t know him all that well—introduced me to his girlfriend when he came in. she was cute and blonde and clearly didn’t know anyone there. i chatted her up for a while, trying to seem nice. that’s what you do, right?—you try to seem nice.

after a while i was wandering around again, looking at all the stuff on the walls. back in the dancing room, i talked to the dj, who told me to check out st. germain, whom he was playing. dj’s will always tell you about music. it doesn’t matter what they’re doing—drinking a beer, talking to a pretty girl, trying to get their records sorted—they will always stop to tell you everything about the song they’re playing.

people were bidding up my drawing, which made me happy. it had as long a list as any, and there were three people who seemed to want it. the price was creeping toward a hundred dollars, and i hoped it would make it.

walking through the hallway where my drawing was hanging, i saw the blonde girl, my friend’s girlfriend, looking at it and holding the pen-on-a-string connected to the bid sheet. she smiled, and as i passed, i said, “don’t bid on that shit!” she laughed.

at midnight, the bidding ended, and while the dj played his last set—his weirdest favorite songs—everyone who had won an auction item settled up the tab and began removing things from the wall. i signed my drawing for the winner—a native new yorker who said it reminded him of his childhood commute to school. he told me it was great, and that he couldn’t really afford it, but he didn’t care. effusive, he was.

i was staying till the last, as i was on the clean up and lock up crew. while the attendees were thinning out, i was in a gallery with half the art gone from the bright, white walls. the blonde girl walked through, and came over to me.

she put her hand on my arm and said she’d enjoyed talking to me. i said likewise. she said she would see me around. “and thanks for telling me not to bid on that drawing. my boyfriend really liked it for some reason.” she laughed. “it was really bad wasn’t it?”

“totally,” i said.

every once in a while i think about this kentucky fried chicken commercial from about four years ago that struck everyone a little dumb. in it, a thirty-something wife tells her charmingly clueless husband they are going to have to shape up and eat healthy. apprehensive, he says ok. then she sets down a bucket of 20 pieces of kfc fried chicken, and happiness dawns on his face. the message: fried chicken is good for you.

to be sure, there is nothing more uncategorically unhealthy than fried chicken. heals the soul, but you really shouldn't be eating that shit.

this commercial might have been the top of a parabola curve--the curve of being able to publicly claim whatever you want, as long as it's false. yes yes, chicken is healthy if you pound it down and cut off the skin and fry it in vegetable oil or something, and eat less than ten grams of it--i'm sure that's in the fine print, but the take-away message is pretty blunt: kfc = right on.

the decade from 1995 to 2005 will perhaps be best summarized by this banal advertisement. not the bullshit colin powell report to the UN security council, nor the 16 words of nigerian yellowcake uranium, nor even what the meaning of the word is is. less important, but more emblematic: a fucking stupid kfc commercial.

after sept 11, people had something weird in their heads about the end of the age of irony. i always took this as some kind of attack, because irony is healthy. maybe it's not for everyone, but irony is a perfect defense against the uncaring weight of the world. were these irony-hating people expressing an abhorrence of the young? my generation, to use the phrase without stuttering? (m-ma-ma-my generation?)

now i don't think so at all. it's a semantic issue. irony isn't what they meant. sarcasm isn't what they meant. what they meant was they wanted a new age of sincerity. a time when you can't say complete bullshit you clearly don't believe and expect the world to back you up on it.

i'd like that myself.

or, ironically: that would be terrible, wouldn't it?

there's some wind pattern that makes the airplanes landing at laguardia come down and bank right in front of my office window. i dig it when they do that.

the clouds are thin and distant. and purple. insubstantial things floating far away, over another country. nearby there is a cold river. and white birds.

we-ah-wi, javelin

there are several years i have no memory of dreaming. either there were no dreams to speak of, or i forgot them immediately.

as a teenager, dreams featured a lot of open spaces and geometric landscapes. imagine a black and white checkerboard going off to a horizon, with high pedestals here and there. the whole idea is very big and open, say the size of the universe, but it has the feeling of being indoors nonetheless. very much the dreamscape of a teenage boy. people i knew were hardly ever there. all characters were new people.

that age i was proud of my dreams, because i thought they were weird. not that i would have told anyone i was proud of them. who would i have told? or maybe i would have.

i'm beginning to get dreams again, after some matter of years. i feel they are more conventional these days, but who can ever be sure. just last night, i was showering in a huge, well-decorated living room. the shower was to one end, and roughly the shape of a yin in the yin-yang.

the curtains were about two feet long, and needed to be, say, forty feet long to suffice. i'm not shy, so i went about my shower anyway, but then everyone came in the living room. the host and hostess had told me they'd wait, but everyone seemed to want to watch tv. i knew there were trees outside, and we'd come there on a school bus, and that's what i was thinking of.

dreams aren't ever really good, and most of the time they have something humiliating to them. but there are worse things you could torture yourself with. i can remember quite a few terrifying dreams, and i will take showering in polite society over those. in one strange one from childhood, my father, my grandfather, and i all went over a cliff in a speeding car, not even trying to stop. the cliff in question is on the outskirts of nashville, and i always think of the dream when rounding that curve. usually i chuckle to myself.

when i was twenty-four years old, i had a dream that was so horrible and creepy that i was finding it hard to think about anything else. no matter what i thought of, it was back to that within about a minute. in dramatic fashion, the tortured artist himself (that's me) went to his typewriter (how very affected) and banged it all out in 12-pitch type on one sheet of paper. then he wadded it up, took it outside, and burned it up with his lighter.

i have to tell you: that actually did work.