It's tough when you're looking for your soulmate but you feel like you've already met her and it doesn't seem like there's any way you'll ever end up together.
This story begins in the summer of 2003. I'd recently hooked up with two guys from South Dakota writing sketch comedy. They lived downtown and uptown (Mpls., of course). I was coming to the end of a year living with my parents in the 'burbs. (That was where I crash-landed after crapping out in Chicago for 2 years, my first post-collegiate experience.)
The guy who lived downtown (Hans) moved in with the guy who lived uptown (Casey). During that gloriously boring summer (the weekly brainstorming sessions with Hans and Casey were my only salvation), they had a housewarming party. Obviously, I attended. That was their 2nd party of the season. I believe those were the only truly social events I attended that year, besides my own birthday, which they very generously hosted in the fall.
I'm not sure if the number of partygoers ever broke double digits. The apartment's decor was spartan. A single thrift-store table was the locus of the dining room (that doubled as a foyer), around which some folding chairs gravitated. There was indie rock on the stereo nearby in the living room, where 3 people chatted on a futon. I was sitting in a folding chair, trying not to feel incredibly awkward about the silence enveloping the group of people around me.
That's when Liz arrived. Casey answered the door and must've hugged her or gotten a hug from her. When I saw her, I just thought, "Wow. She's really cute. There's no way she'd ever go out with me." Her top was a khaki green t-shirt with bright orange(?) lettering on the front. I don't remember what it said, besides "I was purchased secondhand." That was all I needed to know. She sat down at the folding chair nearest mine, which was still a few feet removed. She just sat there for a few minutes, didn't say anything, no one said anything to her. The chairs were spaced too far apart to encourage conversation over the blaring stereo, and everyone was too socially uncomfortable to move their chair to a more accomodating location.
After a few minutes of this agony, I thought, "There's a really cute girl sitting all alone a few feet from you. She's WAY out of your league; therefore, you have nothing to lose. Just talk to her and you can go home with the satisfaction of having talked to a really pretty girl." I leaned slightly in her direction and inquired, "Do you like music?" In my mind, this was a brilliant joke. Who doesn't like music? (Only the soulless.) Unfortunately, she didn't hear it. I believe her exact word was "What?" But she said it so kindly and with such a generous smile that repeating myself felt like a privilege she had bestowed on me. So I scooted my chair closer and repeated the question. Apparently, it lost its humor in repetition. She said "yes" warmly, and we set off on a conversation of our favorite bands.
Luckily, the music of the Flaming Lips was extremely dear to both of us. She talked about their tour with Beck and how he supposedly covered some of their songs on the nights when he opened for them (they alternated), which pissed them off because it prevented them from playing those songs in their own set. I was extremely disappointed in Beck. I distinctly recall saying, "Oh no! But I love Beck!" She did too and was also disappointed. I told her of my dream of forming a Flaming Lips tribute band. She must've been supportive. (I can't imagine her being anything else.)
After a half-hour or so, the conversation ended and she left. I left soon after. The talk was good, but not the kind of life-changing event you'd expect to have with your soulmate. I asked Casey about her once or twice in the following year. The questions were just about what she was up to. I didn't wanna tip my hand too blatantly. It would've been too embarrassing. I didn't want them to think I actually thought I had a chance with Liz. They might've feared for my sanity. She was in her senior year at Creighton University in Omaha. As it so happens, my cousin and long-time best friend Erin attended Creighton. This was a pleasant coincidence.
In the summer of 2004, our sketch comedy troupe (the Half Windsors) performed our first revue at the Bryant-Lake Bowl. (That show had premiered at the Acadia Cafe in the spring.) Afterward, Liz and a guy and a girl chatted with us outside the BLB's front door. She was standing next to me and playfully said, "I bet you don't remember my name." I smiled shyly (it felt like my face turned a little red too) and answered, "Of course I do..., Liz."
Then she smiled.
One year later, as I was slowly climbing out of a deep emotional hole blasted open by a nervous breakdown, that moment when Liz smiled at me suddenly seemed like the defining event of my life. After two years of just having a crush on her, I immediately became convinced that she was my soulmate. The few seconds of that smile turned into something out of a movie, a transcendent instant when everything else in the universe ceased to exist and her face was the sun, blinding in its beauty and love.
But, at the time, it didn't seem to have such a profound effect on me. It felt amazingly good, but not necessarily transcendent. I wonder if my extraordinarily vulnerable emotional state the following year invested that memory with a significance it didn't really have, or if my extraordinarily open emotional state allowed me to openly feel, for the first time, the strong affection for Liz that I hadn't allowed myself to feel, out of fear of rejection.
Soon after my soulmate "revelation," I sent a voicemail and e-mail to Casey, pleading for any contact info for Liz. Eventually, he e-mailed back that he didn't have any. I still find that hard to believe. The truth, and his potential motives, remains a mystery. I'd left the Half Windsors the previous year. I only heard from them in occasional mass e-mails promoting their shows. They're in NYC now trying to make it in comedy, so the question of the integrity of his friendship is moot.
I didn't have her last name, rendering my internet searches pointless. I actually tried to guess her last name, based on nothing but a hunch. My attempts to track her down online went nowhere, and, as the months passed, my infatuation faded.
Flash forward to the summer of 2007. I was walking home with two of my best friends, Marc and Sadie. I mentioned Liz and my desire to see her again, if only to learn whether that moment when she smiled at me meant something to her too. They suggested looking her up on MySpace or Facebook. I felt pretty dumb for not thinking of that before and said I'd try it. The next day I got an e-mail from Sadie saying "Is this her?" It was a link to her MySpace page. It was her. She wasn't quite as beautiful as I remembered. (I don't think the camera can capture that kind of beauty.)
I wanted to e-mail her, but I paused. According to her page, she was "in a relationship," and there was a guy in two photos who looked like a boyfriend. (Predictably, he was much more handsome than I.) I wasn't sure I could handle seeing her now if we could only be friends. But I e-mailed her anyway, nervously. Two years had passed since our last (and second) meeting. I tried to jog her memory and otherwise played it safe. Unfortunately (or fortunately), I never heard back from her. Maybe it'd been too long. Maybe I never meant that much to her. Or maybe, just maybe (Damn that bitch goddess, Hope!) she felt the same way about me and couldn't put herself through the agony of seeing me again while still pledged to someone else! (For the record, that last theory has about 1% support in my brain.)
So that's where I stand. I can't help but think this fate was preordained. I've always been a star-crossed romantic. I'd rather pine for a girl who seems angelic from a distance than get up close and risk having my hopes dashed on the rocks of reality. How could I be so obsessed with a girl with whom I've spent less than an hour of my life? What kind of God would cast me in this tragedy? Or is it my fault for passing up my chances with her and other girls for the risk-free escape of fantasy? I've got my money on the last theory.
(Author's Note: None of the names has been changed. Hopefully, that will not come back to haunt me. The song you should listen to after reading this story is "Simple Twist of Fate" by Bob Dylan, the 2nd cut off of Blood on the Tracks. That's how it felt.)
Monday, November 05, 2007
Friday, February 23, 2007
My Review of the 1960 Movie "Pepe"
On President's Day Morning I leapt out of bed like a kid, hurrying to see what Uncle Sam had left under our plastic, flag-bedecked Liberty Bell. When I saw that the living room was as barren, lifeless and bottle-strewn as usual, I realized that my President's Day fantasy had merely been a fever dream brought on by my second bout of stomach flu in 2 months. (That last part's true. Thank god this case was much milder than the last.)
In lieu of a patriotic bounty, I found a cinematic oddity on cable. My choice to watch this film was determined by its status as a musical (as indicated by the DIRECTV on-screen guide) and the involvement of Shirley Jones. I've greatly admired her work for just over a year and a half now, since first I had the pleasure of watching her in Oklahoma!, Carousel and The Music Man. She has a beautiful voice. Plus, she was dreamy back then.
The star-studded project Ms. Jones chose to lend her name to is entitled Pepe. It's a love story, specifically, the love between a man and a horse. Cantinflas, the Mexican Charlie Chaplin (but for the talking and the moustache that exists only on the edges of the lip and not at all in the middle, the polar opposite of the Chaplin/Hitler), plays the titular character, a horse trainer who leaves Mexico for L.A. when Don Juan, the magnificent white stallion he has raised from infancy and calls his "son," is sold to a movie producer. Pepe can't bear to be separated from Don Juan, so he goes looking for the horse's new owner in La-La Land.
Thus begins a long string of luminaries who are confounded by the simple, linguistically-challenged Mexican. The first victim is Ernie Kovacs as the border security official who is thoroughly flummoxed to learn that Pepe's son is a horse. Even Kovacs' legendary, world-weary mug can't salvage this routine. Unfortunately, the bits don't improve much on the first one, and there are roughly 5,000 cameos in this film. Paying all those celebrities must've taken up most of the budget. It doesn't seem like there was much left over for the script.
Clearly, this isn't a movie meant to be savored for its plot. It's like a Three Musketeers bar in which the star-gazing represents the fake-mousse filling and the musical comedy represents the chocolate shell. My problem with the picture is that it lasts TWO-AND-A-HALF HOURS! Sure, there are many intriguing scenes, which I will shortly relate to you, but nothing that justifies a running time of ~150 minutes. The plot would be blown away at the slightest breath. The characters would fall flat at the softest touch. It's just amazing to me that they would make a piece of celluloid so long and yet so thin. Oh well. It's still way better than Gigli. (Or so I've heard.)
So anyhoo, Pepe goes to the backlot of the studio where the producer who bought Don Juan works. There he meets Shirley Jones, a hardened waitress whose parents failed to realize their showbiz dreams. It's kinda funny listening to Shirley give a bitter, street-smart screed on the naivete of Hollywood hopes, given her peaches'n'cream screen persona and the fact that her career is proof of the (albeit rare) fulfillment of big-screen ambitions. Pepe soon runs afoul of Bing Crosby and Jack Lemmon, who's in drag, presumably for Some Like It Hot. The best reference to a star's screen work comes when Pepe delivers flowers to Janet Leigh while she's taking a bath. I found it an amusing nod to her shower scene in Psycho.
Pepe visits Shirley at her cafe, a subterranean cavern full of beatniks where the coffee is hot and the jazz is hotter. Bobby Darin entertains the crowd with a cool tale of love and murder. I don't think real beatniks found Bobby Darin all that "hep," but their silver-screen facsimiles really seem to "dig" him. The next number is a modern dance piece that bears an uncanny resemblance to West Side Story, with chain-link fences, back alleys and desperate, attractive youth. Shirley portrays a girl on the short end of a love triangle. Just when the tension between her suitors starts to heat up, a concerned Pepe intervenes to "save" Shirley. This throws the entire club into chaos, forcing Bobby Darin to cut the epilogue of his song short as projectiles whiz by his head and smash the windows behind him.
At this point I'm going to drop all attempts to reconstruct the plot. As I said before, it's not worth the effort. I'll just stick to the interesting scenes. One highlight is when the movie producer is trying to write the script for his new film. It's important to note here that he's a recovering alcoholic, and, in a moment of weakness, he removes the cap to a rubenesque liquor bottle covered in a wicker(?) mesh. Two tiny Mexicans emerge from the bottle and float down to the tabletop. They're wearing big sombreros that hide their faces, but in the course of their dance we discover that it's Cantinflas and Debbie Reynolds. The song they're dancing to is "Tequila," and I must say the scene rivals Pee Wee's Big Adventure for best dance number ever performed to this song. The Mexicans dodge a huge pencil and other giganticized objects in a drunken, acrobatic dance as the leviathan face of the producer looms over them in a state of stupefaction.
Pepe hitches a ride to Las Vegas to find the producer, who's embarked on a bender after his plan to direct his script was rejected by Edward G. Robinson. (The "producer" seems to be more of a writer/director, but I've been calling him the "producer" for too long to stop now. I thought that's what he was called in the movie.) Pepe finds the producer and learns that he needs $250,000 to make his movie. With the money in his piggy bank (Yes, he brought his piggy bank to offer it to the producer. That's Pepe!), Pepe proceeds to win $250,006 at the Sands (I don't remember what the extra 6 bucks was for. He gives it to Frank Sinatra, one of the owners of the casino, as a thank-you gift.) while driving the entire Rat Pack (plus Jimmy Durante) to distraction.
Now that the producer has the money for his movie, he begins filming in Acapulco with Shirley Jones as the star. (Earlier, Pepe managed to bring together the producer and Shirley on this project. It was quite a feat, too, considering their stubbornness, her distrust of showbiz types and his alocoholism. But Pepe's a people person. SPOILER ALERT: Shirley and the producer's relationship will evolve beyond its initially professional scope ;-) The triumvirate (Pepe, Shirley and the producer) take in a show at a fancy club in Acapulco featuring Maurice Chevalier and a bevy of beauties. Pepe and the producer join M. Chevalier on stage for a dance, after which Pepe asks the Frenchman for advice in love. Unfortunately, this leads Pepe to believe he has a shot with Shirley, an utter absurdity to anyone with half a brain. (Sorry, I didn't mean to be so mean. I'm kinda bitter when it comes to romance.)
After picking out an engagement ring with help from Kim Novak, he goes looking for Shirley only to find Edward G. Robinson, who tells him that Shirley and the producer are engaged. Pepe tells Robinson to give Shirley the ring and that he's going back home. Robinson quickly runs into Shirley and the producer and gives them the ring and the news. The couple feels understandably awful about their treatment of Pepe, and try to catch him before he leaves. Predictably, they do, and the whole sha-bang is wrapped up in a funny, touching, heartfelt denouement which I can't recall. The final scene is Pepe leading Don Juan (the horse, remember?) and his foals (including a cute little burro) down the dusty dirt streets of what appears to be a shantytown. So, even though Pepe has achieved financial security, he seems to be back where he started. But isn't that what we all hope for, really?
I realize that I broke my promise about not discussing the plot, but, in my defense, the problems with continuity in this essay mirror the movie's. To dig myself deeper I'll describe another scene in the film. It takes place in Acapulco, before Pepe buys the ring, I think. The producer yells at Pepe for interfering with the filming of his movie, and Pepe wanders off glumly with a concerned Shirley in hot pursuit. They stumble onto a street festival of floats and kids in their Sunday best. Pepe forlornly paces in the entrance of an old Spanish basilica while Shirley watches from the steps. Taking matters into her own hands, she gets a stick puppet from a vendor and begins singing the praises of her Mexican friend to a gathering of adorable local children, using the puppet as a stand-in. Pepe is heartened by the kind words, but can only beam from between black iron pikes, as the basilica's gate was shut behind him. Eventually, the entire festival is swept up in the song. Pepe somehow manages to escape the basilica grounds and joins in the chorus:
Children: "P-E-P-E!"
Pepe: "Pepe! That's me!"
The scene sounds better (and funnier) than it is. But it's still pretty funny.
You may be asking yourself, "If you can't believe that 2 1/2 hours of celluloid were devoted to the recording and preservation of this film, then why did you waste so many words commenting on it?" I wish I could answer that question. I really do. The best I can do is admit that I'm fascinated with pop culture of previous decades and that my life is quite boring.
In lieu of a patriotic bounty, I found a cinematic oddity on cable. My choice to watch this film was determined by its status as a musical (as indicated by the DIRECTV on-screen guide) and the involvement of Shirley Jones. I've greatly admired her work for just over a year and a half now, since first I had the pleasure of watching her in Oklahoma!, Carousel and The Music Man. She has a beautiful voice. Plus, she was dreamy back then.
The star-studded project Ms. Jones chose to lend her name to is entitled Pepe. It's a love story, specifically, the love between a man and a horse. Cantinflas, the Mexican Charlie Chaplin (but for the talking and the moustache that exists only on the edges of the lip and not at all in the middle, the polar opposite of the Chaplin/Hitler), plays the titular character, a horse trainer who leaves Mexico for L.A. when Don Juan, the magnificent white stallion he has raised from infancy and calls his "son," is sold to a movie producer. Pepe can't bear to be separated from Don Juan, so he goes looking for the horse's new owner in La-La Land.
Thus begins a long string of luminaries who are confounded by the simple, linguistically-challenged Mexican. The first victim is Ernie Kovacs as the border security official who is thoroughly flummoxed to learn that Pepe's son is a horse. Even Kovacs' legendary, world-weary mug can't salvage this routine. Unfortunately, the bits don't improve much on the first one, and there are roughly 5,000 cameos in this film. Paying all those celebrities must've taken up most of the budget. It doesn't seem like there was much left over for the script.
Clearly, this isn't a movie meant to be savored for its plot. It's like a Three Musketeers bar in which the star-gazing represents the fake-mousse filling and the musical comedy represents the chocolate shell. My problem with the picture is that it lasts TWO-AND-A-HALF HOURS! Sure, there are many intriguing scenes, which I will shortly relate to you, but nothing that justifies a running time of ~150 minutes. The plot would be blown away at the slightest breath. The characters would fall flat at the softest touch. It's just amazing to me that they would make a piece of celluloid so long and yet so thin. Oh well. It's still way better than Gigli. (Or so I've heard.)
So anyhoo, Pepe goes to the backlot of the studio where the producer who bought Don Juan works. There he meets Shirley Jones, a hardened waitress whose parents failed to realize their showbiz dreams. It's kinda funny listening to Shirley give a bitter, street-smart screed on the naivete of Hollywood hopes, given her peaches'n'cream screen persona and the fact that her career is proof of the (albeit rare) fulfillment of big-screen ambitions. Pepe soon runs afoul of Bing Crosby and Jack Lemmon, who's in drag, presumably for Some Like It Hot. The best reference to a star's screen work comes when Pepe delivers flowers to Janet Leigh while she's taking a bath. I found it an amusing nod to her shower scene in Psycho.
Pepe visits Shirley at her cafe, a subterranean cavern full of beatniks where the coffee is hot and the jazz is hotter. Bobby Darin entertains the crowd with a cool tale of love and murder. I don't think real beatniks found Bobby Darin all that "hep," but their silver-screen facsimiles really seem to "dig" him. The next number is a modern dance piece that bears an uncanny resemblance to West Side Story, with chain-link fences, back alleys and desperate, attractive youth. Shirley portrays a girl on the short end of a love triangle. Just when the tension between her suitors starts to heat up, a concerned Pepe intervenes to "save" Shirley. This throws the entire club into chaos, forcing Bobby Darin to cut the epilogue of his song short as projectiles whiz by his head and smash the windows behind him.
At this point I'm going to drop all attempts to reconstruct the plot. As I said before, it's not worth the effort. I'll just stick to the interesting scenes. One highlight is when the movie producer is trying to write the script for his new film. It's important to note here that he's a recovering alcoholic, and, in a moment of weakness, he removes the cap to a rubenesque liquor bottle covered in a wicker(?) mesh. Two tiny Mexicans emerge from the bottle and float down to the tabletop. They're wearing big sombreros that hide their faces, but in the course of their dance we discover that it's Cantinflas and Debbie Reynolds. The song they're dancing to is "Tequila," and I must say the scene rivals Pee Wee's Big Adventure for best dance number ever performed to this song. The Mexicans dodge a huge pencil and other giganticized objects in a drunken, acrobatic dance as the leviathan face of the producer looms over them in a state of stupefaction.
Pepe hitches a ride to Las Vegas to find the producer, who's embarked on a bender after his plan to direct his script was rejected by Edward G. Robinson. (The "producer" seems to be more of a writer/director, but I've been calling him the "producer" for too long to stop now. I thought that's what he was called in the movie.) Pepe finds the producer and learns that he needs $250,000 to make his movie. With the money in his piggy bank (Yes, he brought his piggy bank to offer it to the producer. That's Pepe!), Pepe proceeds to win $250,006 at the Sands (I don't remember what the extra 6 bucks was for. He gives it to Frank Sinatra, one of the owners of the casino, as a thank-you gift.) while driving the entire Rat Pack (plus Jimmy Durante) to distraction.
Now that the producer has the money for his movie, he begins filming in Acapulco with Shirley Jones as the star. (Earlier, Pepe managed to bring together the producer and Shirley on this project. It was quite a feat, too, considering their stubbornness, her distrust of showbiz types and his alocoholism. But Pepe's a people person. SPOILER ALERT: Shirley and the producer's relationship will evolve beyond its initially professional scope ;-) The triumvirate (Pepe, Shirley and the producer) take in a show at a fancy club in Acapulco featuring Maurice Chevalier and a bevy of beauties. Pepe and the producer join M. Chevalier on stage for a dance, after which Pepe asks the Frenchman for advice in love. Unfortunately, this leads Pepe to believe he has a shot with Shirley, an utter absurdity to anyone with half a brain. (Sorry, I didn't mean to be so mean. I'm kinda bitter when it comes to romance.)
After picking out an engagement ring with help from Kim Novak, he goes looking for Shirley only to find Edward G. Robinson, who tells him that Shirley and the producer are engaged. Pepe tells Robinson to give Shirley the ring and that he's going back home. Robinson quickly runs into Shirley and the producer and gives them the ring and the news. The couple feels understandably awful about their treatment of Pepe, and try to catch him before he leaves. Predictably, they do, and the whole sha-bang is wrapped up in a funny, touching, heartfelt denouement which I can't recall. The final scene is Pepe leading Don Juan (the horse, remember?) and his foals (including a cute little burro) down the dusty dirt streets of what appears to be a shantytown. So, even though Pepe has achieved financial security, he seems to be back where he started. But isn't that what we all hope for, really?
I realize that I broke my promise about not discussing the plot, but, in my defense, the problems with continuity in this essay mirror the movie's. To dig myself deeper I'll describe another scene in the film. It takes place in Acapulco, before Pepe buys the ring, I think. The producer yells at Pepe for interfering with the filming of his movie, and Pepe wanders off glumly with a concerned Shirley in hot pursuit. They stumble onto a street festival of floats and kids in their Sunday best. Pepe forlornly paces in the entrance of an old Spanish basilica while Shirley watches from the steps. Taking matters into her own hands, she gets a stick puppet from a vendor and begins singing the praises of her Mexican friend to a gathering of adorable local children, using the puppet as a stand-in. Pepe is heartened by the kind words, but can only beam from between black iron pikes, as the basilica's gate was shut behind him. Eventually, the entire festival is swept up in the song. Pepe somehow manages to escape the basilica grounds and joins in the chorus:
Children: "P-E-P-E!"
Pepe: "Pepe! That's me!"
The scene sounds better (and funnier) than it is. But it's still pretty funny.
You may be asking yourself, "If you can't believe that 2 1/2 hours of celluloid were devoted to the recording and preservation of this film, then why did you waste so many words commenting on it?" I wish I could answer that question. I really do. The best I can do is admit that I'm fascinated with pop culture of previous decades and that my life is quite boring.
Saturday, December 30, 2006
Reflections on the Stomach Flu
Most of my Thursday night was spent in the bathroom, waiting to throw up. Very little of this time actually involved vomiting. Of course the anticipation of vomiting is much worse than the act itself, so this may have been my least favorite bout of stomach flu. (This was #3 for me.) I apologize if you didn't wanna hear about that. My Friday was queasy and head-swimmingly unpleasant. The TV was too cacophonous and my book wasn't distracting enough. Today was much better. The TV was fine and I went to McDonald's for dinner as my first meal since Thursday. Since then I'd been subsisting solely on 7Up. (You know, it's 100% natural now!) That's one of the liquids my parents would give me when I had a tummy ache, although they'd give it to me flat. (FYI, the other liquid was mint tea.)
What made this illness especially sucky was the way it brought up questions about the direction of my life and my emotional well-being. What is it about puking your guts out that makes you question your place in the universe? God didn't give me the stomach flu. Duane did, as I just found out this evening while talking to him (talking to Duane, that is, not God).
Now I'm gonna hit the sack. The last Arrested Development of the night just ended on G4, the usual cue that my Saturday nite is over. Catch ya on the flipside!
What made this illness especially sucky was the way it brought up questions about the direction of my life and my emotional well-being. What is it about puking your guts out that makes you question your place in the universe? God didn't give me the stomach flu. Duane did, as I just found out this evening while talking to him (talking to Duane, that is, not God).
Now I'm gonna hit the sack. The last Arrested Development of the night just ended on G4, the usual cue that my Saturday nite is over. Catch ya on the flipside!
Sunday, September 03, 2006
The Great Electrodelic Get-Together
On Thursday the 24th I went to the Flaming Lips show at the State Fair, and I'd like to recount the event for Marc and Sadie's sake:
I drove to the fairgrounds. (My parents were on vacation. They said I could borrow their car. Honest!) The sky had been darkening since I left Uptown. After I parked and started walking, I saw a nightmarishly dark sky creeping up on the Fair from the north. I began to think the concert might be cancelled. When I got to the entrance, a monsoon hit. I had to struggle against the wind and horizontal rain. People were being blown past me as they fled the grounds. A teenage girl under a small tent was selling tickets. She let me in free after advising me not to even bother with the Fair.
I forged ahead in my rain jacket (which is more of a glorified windbreaker), until I realized that I had to find shelter. I wasn't worried about a tornado, I just didn't wanna get any wetter. I chose a rustic-looking log building. It turned out to be a store/museum devoted to Minnesota's pioneer days. There were some women inside in period dress. One was kind enough to let me use their private bathroom. Just the kind of generosity you'd expect from people pretending to be pioneers.
The rain let up after about 20 minutes, whereupon I wandered over to the Food Building (they should really try classin' up that name) and got a Veggie Pie, which I'd seen listed on the State Fair website's list of food. It was an assortment of raw vegetables stuck to a shingle of dense, indeterminate bread with an unidentified cream dressing serving as glue. It was OK, but certainly not the work of vegetarian gourmets.
After I finished that, with help from a bottle of water, I ran into Dan, my best friend from high school. I didn't recognize him until he was within a few feet. He was unusually buoyant. His sister was with him. She didn't seem to remember me. He asked what I was up to. I told him and then forgot to ask him the same. Dan then bid me adieu and got in line with his sister for one of the building's many gastronomic (Thank you, The Oxford Thesaurus: American Edition!) delights. I'm not sure if the pause between the end of my answer and the beginning of his signoff was long enough to justify one of his famous grudges. It seemed like he cut the conversation short. He could've just filled me in on his life without my prompting, at least to the shallow degree I shared my situation with him.
After the encounter with Dan, I walked around and eventually found the Grandstand, but I didn't go in right away since it wasn't even 7:30, the scheduled start time for the show. So I meandered around a few more minutes before my self-consciousness and boredom drove me back to the Grandstand. I followed the line up the stairs and found a crowd already congregating in front of the stage. But the crowd was pretty widely dispersed; we Midwesterners like our personal space. I found a random spot on the black pavement and occupied it. There were numbers on the ground to indicate chair placement when they set up chairs for other shows. I kinda felt like a chair.
Usually in this situation I would've felt extremely self-conscious, but I was relaxed. And bored. In between people-watching, I went to the bathroom twice and stood by the entrance to see if I could find any familiar faces (and also to look like I was expecting someone). I could've eaten at one of the booths on either side of the stage, but I wasn't in the mood to gorge myself. Something about pigging out alone in public seems really sad.
A man onstage told us the first band, the Magic Numbers, had their equipment drenched in the deluge and wouldn't be performing. The crowd reacted with disappointment mixed with cheers for Sonic Youth, who he said would go on at 8:20. This required more waiting. But finally the sun slipped below the horizon and Sonic Youth came out. (Coincidence?!) A lotta people were into Sonic Youth, but there was no moshing or dancing, except from Kim Gordon (the lead singer), who bounced around in her china doll dress like a teenager numbly trying to escape some secret pain.
I started wishing ardently that I'd brought some friends along at this point, because I came up with some great jokes. When Sonic Youth came out, I thought they should've asked the audience, "Are you ready for cool detachment?" When Thurston Moore (the lead guitarist) mentioned eating at Mickey's Diner and his intention to eat something on a stick at the Fair, I wanted to say, "He's connecting with us!" And then when they settled into another moderately-paced semi-rocker, I wanted to shout, "Whoo! Mid-tempo!" I thought of sharing these with the strangers around me, but I didn't have the guts. Thank god I remembered my witticisms so they weren't lost forever.
Sonic Youth was OK, but the songs all sounded the same to me and they weren't dramatic at all. It was a strangely sluggish warmup for the Flaming Lips. When SY was done, I made my move toward the stage, letting the two guys ahead of me blaze my trail. The crowd was in a state of flux because of the SY fans either heading out or just going to the bathrooms or the food booths. I only got within 100 feet of the stage. In front of me was a solid wall of humanity. To get any closer I would've had to endure the displeasure (either silent or spoken) of my fellow attendees, and I wasn't willing to do that, not even for the Flaming Lips. Besides, it would've been rude.
I think it took an hour for the Lips to set up. The main problem was the huge projection screen that was still wet from the rain and vulnerable to the wind. There were four cannons, multicolored boxes on wheels with megaphones sticking out the top. They looked like relics from Dr. Seuss's personal battery. The drum kit, an orange keyboard, the amps and the mic's were set up in front of the screen. A tiny camera was mounted on Wayne's mic, allowing us to see a huge closeup of his head on the screen. The crowd cheered the first few times Wayne appeared onstage. As the setup dragged on, though, the sight of him became less thrilling. Michael and Steven didn't arouse the same enthusiasm.
Just before the music began, Wayne surfed the audience in his clear plastic bubble like a hamster. He almost got to me, but then headed back to the stage. Inside the sphere he had trouble keeping his balance and fell down often. It was cool to see my hero looking like a victim of America's Funniest Home Videos while literally putting himself in the hands of hundreds of strangers. It showed he had at least some belief in his songs' message of hope in humanity.
I tried to guess which song they'd open with. I thought "The Yeah Yeah Yeah Song... (With All Your Power)" was most probable, although starting your concert with the first song off your most recent album is not the most imaginative choice. I was hoping they'd open with "Race for the Prize," but when they actually did, I was rapturously surprised. The crowd burst into a blissful bounce and the electrodelic revival kicked off with a cannon-shot of confetti, a blast from Wayne's streamer gun and a hyperkinetic video montage. The famous costumed contingent consisted of a squadron of Santa's on the right side of the stage and on the left was a gaggle of girls disguised as sexy aliens from the Jetsons era.
The second song was "Free Radicals (A Hallucination Of The Christmas Skeleton Pleading With A Suicide Bomber)," a heavy, Prince-like funk plea for sanity. The intensity of the song makes it ideal for live shows. The screen showed an apparently Japanese game show in which women stuck their heads through holes in a platform across which lizards were walking. The appeal of the show lay in watching the women's disembodied heads scream as the lizards approached them. The Japanese sure know how to live.
Unfortunately, the Lips then stepped aside so the Magic Numbers could play an abbreviated set. After the protracted delay and performance of only two songs, this interruption was aggravating, but the Numbers only played two songs, so the interlude was mercifully short. The Numbers were decent. They had sweet voices. The lead singer was a tubby guy with long black hair and an acoustic guitar. Two women sang along, a chunky girl with a tambourine and the other empty-handed.
When the Lips returned, they delighted the audience with "Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots pt. 1," followed by an a capella sing-along reprise led by Wayne and assisted by his nun hand puppet. The Yoshimi album cycle continued with "Yoshimi... pt. 2," which was energizing. "Vein of Stars" came next, a nice, mellow break to gaze overhead at the low, grey clouds scudding across the sky and watch the stars drift by in the screen's cosmic scene. It was basically just a "warp" screensaver with a fancy red nebula in the background, but its languid feel and endurance through the entire song accented the music beautifully.
Then the highlight of the evening: "The Yeah Yeah Yeah Song." Wayne explained what he wanted us to sing before they began. He said we'd have to violate our personal beliefs by agreeing ("Yeah yeah yeah yeah...") with the selfish, greedy lyrics. He started with a dry run of the first line: "If you could blow up the world with the flick of a switch, would ja do it?" Sixteen "yeah"'s exploded from the crowd in pummeling succession. Wayne was clearly impressed. Then the song began in earnest, the laity providing the "yeah"'s and accompanied by a prerecorded black'n'white closeup of Wayne's face singing along to a series of words in different languages, which I assumed all meant "yeah" (or "yes"). The video, the audience's incredible energy in singing the "yeah"'s (and some of the "aaah"'s) and the band's funneling of this invincible electricity combined to lift the show to a new, astral plane of existence, for which we had previously only produced a close simulacrum.
Alas, the following songs could not maintain this ethereal altitude, but they delighted nonetheless. "The W.A.N.D. (The Will Always Negates Defeat)" rocked like the cosmic protest song it is, featuring Wayne on megaphone. "My Cosmic Autumn Rebellion (The Inner Life As Blazing Shield Of Defiance And Optimism As Celestial Spear Of Action)" had an endearingly simple cartoon (from the '70s?) about the life cycle of the frog with the song's lyrics superimposed. "She Don't Use Jelly" reignited the congregation, and "Do You Realize??" burned the house down with flames of bittersweet, majestic love.
The devotees' deafening din slowly swelled after the Lips left the stage and then broke on a magnificently rocky coast of euphoria when they returned for the encore. Black Sabbath's "War Pigs" kept the crowd at fever pitch as a battering montage of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and their war machine (with a Colin Powell cameo) provided the backdrop.
After this kind of life-changing, revelatory experience, you'd expect people to stick around for a while afterward to let the mindblowingness sink in. But everyone marched resolutely to the exits as soon as it was over. Many of them had to rush to catch the last buses out at midnight. My pace was determined as I tramped through the mostly dark and deserted fairgrounds with an escort of happy, wired coreligionists. Despite our shared devotion to the Lips, I didn't sense a great esprit de corps in the cool, fall-foreshadowing midnight air. We just boarded our buses and hopped in our cars in apparent resignation (or eagerness) to the return of normalcy.
I drove to the fairgrounds. (My parents were on vacation. They said I could borrow their car. Honest!) The sky had been darkening since I left Uptown. After I parked and started walking, I saw a nightmarishly dark sky creeping up on the Fair from the north. I began to think the concert might be cancelled. When I got to the entrance, a monsoon hit. I had to struggle against the wind and horizontal rain. People were being blown past me as they fled the grounds. A teenage girl under a small tent was selling tickets. She let me in free after advising me not to even bother with the Fair.
I forged ahead in my rain jacket (which is more of a glorified windbreaker), until I realized that I had to find shelter. I wasn't worried about a tornado, I just didn't wanna get any wetter. I chose a rustic-looking log building. It turned out to be a store/museum devoted to Minnesota's pioneer days. There were some women inside in period dress. One was kind enough to let me use their private bathroom. Just the kind of generosity you'd expect from people pretending to be pioneers.
The rain let up after about 20 minutes, whereupon I wandered over to the Food Building (they should really try classin' up that name) and got a Veggie Pie, which I'd seen listed on the State Fair website's list of food. It was an assortment of raw vegetables stuck to a shingle of dense, indeterminate bread with an unidentified cream dressing serving as glue. It was OK, but certainly not the work of vegetarian gourmets.
After I finished that, with help from a bottle of water, I ran into Dan, my best friend from high school. I didn't recognize him until he was within a few feet. He was unusually buoyant. His sister was with him. She didn't seem to remember me. He asked what I was up to. I told him and then forgot to ask him the same. Dan then bid me adieu and got in line with his sister for one of the building's many gastronomic (Thank you, The Oxford Thesaurus: American Edition!) delights. I'm not sure if the pause between the end of my answer and the beginning of his signoff was long enough to justify one of his famous grudges. It seemed like he cut the conversation short. He could've just filled me in on his life without my prompting, at least to the shallow degree I shared my situation with him.
After the encounter with Dan, I walked around and eventually found the Grandstand, but I didn't go in right away since it wasn't even 7:30, the scheduled start time for the show. So I meandered around a few more minutes before my self-consciousness and boredom drove me back to the Grandstand. I followed the line up the stairs and found a crowd already congregating in front of the stage. But the crowd was pretty widely dispersed; we Midwesterners like our personal space. I found a random spot on the black pavement and occupied it. There were numbers on the ground to indicate chair placement when they set up chairs for other shows. I kinda felt like a chair.
Usually in this situation I would've felt extremely self-conscious, but I was relaxed. And bored. In between people-watching, I went to the bathroom twice and stood by the entrance to see if I could find any familiar faces (and also to look like I was expecting someone). I could've eaten at one of the booths on either side of the stage, but I wasn't in the mood to gorge myself. Something about pigging out alone in public seems really sad.
A man onstage told us the first band, the Magic Numbers, had their equipment drenched in the deluge and wouldn't be performing. The crowd reacted with disappointment mixed with cheers for Sonic Youth, who he said would go on at 8:20. This required more waiting. But finally the sun slipped below the horizon and Sonic Youth came out. (Coincidence?!) A lotta people were into Sonic Youth, but there was no moshing or dancing, except from Kim Gordon (the lead singer), who bounced around in her china doll dress like a teenager numbly trying to escape some secret pain.
I started wishing ardently that I'd brought some friends along at this point, because I came up with some great jokes. When Sonic Youth came out, I thought they should've asked the audience, "Are you ready for cool detachment?" When Thurston Moore (the lead guitarist) mentioned eating at Mickey's Diner and his intention to eat something on a stick at the Fair, I wanted to say, "He's connecting with us!" And then when they settled into another moderately-paced semi-rocker, I wanted to shout, "Whoo! Mid-tempo!" I thought of sharing these with the strangers around me, but I didn't have the guts. Thank god I remembered my witticisms so they weren't lost forever.
Sonic Youth was OK, but the songs all sounded the same to me and they weren't dramatic at all. It was a strangely sluggish warmup for the Flaming Lips. When SY was done, I made my move toward the stage, letting the two guys ahead of me blaze my trail. The crowd was in a state of flux because of the SY fans either heading out or just going to the bathrooms or the food booths. I only got within 100 feet of the stage. In front of me was a solid wall of humanity. To get any closer I would've had to endure the displeasure (either silent or spoken) of my fellow attendees, and I wasn't willing to do that, not even for the Flaming Lips. Besides, it would've been rude.
I think it took an hour for the Lips to set up. The main problem was the huge projection screen that was still wet from the rain and vulnerable to the wind. There were four cannons, multicolored boxes on wheels with megaphones sticking out the top. They looked like relics from Dr. Seuss's personal battery. The drum kit, an orange keyboard, the amps and the mic's were set up in front of the screen. A tiny camera was mounted on Wayne's mic, allowing us to see a huge closeup of his head on the screen. The crowd cheered the first few times Wayne appeared onstage. As the setup dragged on, though, the sight of him became less thrilling. Michael and Steven didn't arouse the same enthusiasm.
Just before the music began, Wayne surfed the audience in his clear plastic bubble like a hamster. He almost got to me, but then headed back to the stage. Inside the sphere he had trouble keeping his balance and fell down often. It was cool to see my hero looking like a victim of America's Funniest Home Videos while literally putting himself in the hands of hundreds of strangers. It showed he had at least some belief in his songs' message of hope in humanity.
I tried to guess which song they'd open with. I thought "The Yeah Yeah Yeah Song... (With All Your Power)" was most probable, although starting your concert with the first song off your most recent album is not the most imaginative choice. I was hoping they'd open with "Race for the Prize," but when they actually did, I was rapturously surprised. The crowd burst into a blissful bounce and the electrodelic revival kicked off with a cannon-shot of confetti, a blast from Wayne's streamer gun and a hyperkinetic video montage. The famous costumed contingent consisted of a squadron of Santa's on the right side of the stage and on the left was a gaggle of girls disguised as sexy aliens from the Jetsons era.
The second song was "Free Radicals (A Hallucination Of The Christmas Skeleton Pleading With A Suicide Bomber)," a heavy, Prince-like funk plea for sanity. The intensity of the song makes it ideal for live shows. The screen showed an apparently Japanese game show in which women stuck their heads through holes in a platform across which lizards were walking. The appeal of the show lay in watching the women's disembodied heads scream as the lizards approached them. The Japanese sure know how to live.
Unfortunately, the Lips then stepped aside so the Magic Numbers could play an abbreviated set. After the protracted delay and performance of only two songs, this interruption was aggravating, but the Numbers only played two songs, so the interlude was mercifully short. The Numbers were decent. They had sweet voices. The lead singer was a tubby guy with long black hair and an acoustic guitar. Two women sang along, a chunky girl with a tambourine and the other empty-handed.
When the Lips returned, they delighted the audience with "Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots pt. 1," followed by an a capella sing-along reprise led by Wayne and assisted by his nun hand puppet. The Yoshimi album cycle continued with "Yoshimi... pt. 2," which was energizing. "Vein of Stars" came next, a nice, mellow break to gaze overhead at the low, grey clouds scudding across the sky and watch the stars drift by in the screen's cosmic scene. It was basically just a "warp" screensaver with a fancy red nebula in the background, but its languid feel and endurance through the entire song accented the music beautifully.
Then the highlight of the evening: "The Yeah Yeah Yeah Song." Wayne explained what he wanted us to sing before they began. He said we'd have to violate our personal beliefs by agreeing ("Yeah yeah yeah yeah...") with the selfish, greedy lyrics. He started with a dry run of the first line: "If you could blow up the world with the flick of a switch, would ja do it?" Sixteen "yeah"'s exploded from the crowd in pummeling succession. Wayne was clearly impressed. Then the song began in earnest, the laity providing the "yeah"'s and accompanied by a prerecorded black'n'white closeup of Wayne's face singing along to a series of words in different languages, which I assumed all meant "yeah" (or "yes"). The video, the audience's incredible energy in singing the "yeah"'s (and some of the "aaah"'s) and the band's funneling of this invincible electricity combined to lift the show to a new, astral plane of existence, for which we had previously only produced a close simulacrum.
Alas, the following songs could not maintain this ethereal altitude, but they delighted nonetheless. "The W.A.N.D. (The Will Always Negates Defeat)" rocked like the cosmic protest song it is, featuring Wayne on megaphone. "My Cosmic Autumn Rebellion (The Inner Life As Blazing Shield Of Defiance And Optimism As Celestial Spear Of Action)" had an endearingly simple cartoon (from the '70s?) about the life cycle of the frog with the song's lyrics superimposed. "She Don't Use Jelly" reignited the congregation, and "Do You Realize??" burned the house down with flames of bittersweet, majestic love.
The devotees' deafening din slowly swelled after the Lips left the stage and then broke on a magnificently rocky coast of euphoria when they returned for the encore. Black Sabbath's "War Pigs" kept the crowd at fever pitch as a battering montage of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and their war machine (with a Colin Powell cameo) provided the backdrop.
After this kind of life-changing, revelatory experience, you'd expect people to stick around for a while afterward to let the mindblowingness sink in. But everyone marched resolutely to the exits as soon as it was over. Many of them had to rush to catch the last buses out at midnight. My pace was determined as I tramped through the mostly dark and deserted fairgrounds with an escort of happy, wired coreligionists. Despite our shared devotion to the Lips, I didn't sense a great esprit de corps in the cool, fall-foreshadowing midnight air. We just boarded our buses and hopped in our cars in apparent resignation (or eagerness) to the return of normalcy.
Wednesday, May 31, 2006
Wild Speculation
In the spirit of my last post (lo, those many months ago), I'd like to continue with my apocalyptic theory of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. As my title suggests, this is not meant to be a likely scenario. It's a worst-case scenario, from the global human perspective. From the Washington Consensus perspective, it could be worse. Their worst-case scenario would be if China gained control of all that oil and natural gas in the Middle East and Central Asia. But enough of this gay banter...
It seems like the U.S. military is doomed to disastrous failure in Iraq. I can discern no hope of American forces securing a peaceful occupation of the country. There's little chance they'll be able to sit serenely in their 14 permanent bases in Iraq and periodically step out to quash a rebellion against the puppet regime or a predictably "terrorist" attack against the oil industry.
So what's a humiliated empire to do? Withdrawal would allow the people of the Middle East to govern themselves, and true democracy abroad has always been the American Empire's worst nightmare, especially in regions with a wealth of natural resources. Whatever governments would spring up in the wake of our exit, be they authoritarian or democratic, they would certainly harbor a deep, abiding hatred of the U.S. Our oil imports from the Persian Gulf would dry up, while China and the rest of the world (maybe even Europe) would see their shares of the bonanza grow. It's highly doubtful they would stop exporting to all countries, as I believe some religious extremists have suggested in Saudi Arabia, for then they would face an invasion (perhaps united) by all the world powers.
The other option, "staying the course," will gradually drain more blood, materiel and support from the imperial endeavor until the troops are forced to leave by a combination of native hostility in Iraq and a deafening public outcry against the war at home.
With the emergence of a new multipolar world order, the Middle East will enjoy greater self-determination. This should be self-evident to the Bush administration now that even they find it difficult to deny the catastrophe that is Iraq. Given the above scenario that would follow withdrawal, it's no wonder they're clinging to their "stay the course" position like grim death. You can bet Dubya is on his knees every night praying to his Book-of-Revelation God for a miracle that will restore American dominance of the Middle East. But no amount of newfound humility or Iraqi and American death will bring back the good old days.
But, speaking of Revelations, there is another option. Nuke the Middle East. Then there wouldn't be any energy resources for anyone. (They'd have to withdraw the troops first though. The war machine would still be needed.) It's the logic of the playground: If I can't play my way, then I'll take the ball home so no one can play. It'd be pretty drastic. We could still buy oil from the region. The key difference, though, is that "our" transnational corporations wouldn't be the ones profiting. That's just how evil our gov't is, even if not all of the officials in Washington are aware of it. If Peak Oil drove the administration to orchestrate 9/11, then why not a nuclear holocaust to wipe out a race of people they despise?
It seems like the U.S. military is doomed to disastrous failure in Iraq. I can discern no hope of American forces securing a peaceful occupation of the country. There's little chance they'll be able to sit serenely in their 14 permanent bases in Iraq and periodically step out to quash a rebellion against the puppet regime or a predictably "terrorist" attack against the oil industry.
So what's a humiliated empire to do? Withdrawal would allow the people of the Middle East to govern themselves, and true democracy abroad has always been the American Empire's worst nightmare, especially in regions with a wealth of natural resources. Whatever governments would spring up in the wake of our exit, be they authoritarian or democratic, they would certainly harbor a deep, abiding hatred of the U.S. Our oil imports from the Persian Gulf would dry up, while China and the rest of the world (maybe even Europe) would see their shares of the bonanza grow. It's highly doubtful they would stop exporting to all countries, as I believe some religious extremists have suggested in Saudi Arabia, for then they would face an invasion (perhaps united) by all the world powers.
The other option, "staying the course," will gradually drain more blood, materiel and support from the imperial endeavor until the troops are forced to leave by a combination of native hostility in Iraq and a deafening public outcry against the war at home.
With the emergence of a new multipolar world order, the Middle East will enjoy greater self-determination. This should be self-evident to the Bush administration now that even they find it difficult to deny the catastrophe that is Iraq. Given the above scenario that would follow withdrawal, it's no wonder they're clinging to their "stay the course" position like grim death. You can bet Dubya is on his knees every night praying to his Book-of-Revelation God for a miracle that will restore American dominance of the Middle East. But no amount of newfound humility or Iraqi and American death will bring back the good old days.
But, speaking of Revelations, there is another option. Nuke the Middle East. Then there wouldn't be any energy resources for anyone. (They'd have to withdraw the troops first though. The war machine would still be needed.) It's the logic of the playground: If I can't play my way, then I'll take the ball home so no one can play. It'd be pretty drastic. We could still buy oil from the region. The key difference, though, is that "our" transnational corporations wouldn't be the ones profiting. That's just how evil our gov't is, even if not all of the officials in Washington are aware of it. If Peak Oil drove the administration to orchestrate 9/11, then why not a nuclear holocaust to wipe out a race of people they despise?
Tuesday, January 24, 2006
Iraq: Failure to Plan or Plan for Failure?
This occurred to me yesterday, though I'm sure there are others in the lonely depths of cyberspace who have contemplated the possibility. What if the failure of the U.S. occupation of Iraq is intentional? Noam Chomsky (my idol) has described it as the worst military catastrophe in history. I tend to buy into the common perception of Dubya as a bumbling idiot, but I, like most smart political observers, believe his handlers are extremely canny. But if they're so smart, how could they have screwed up Iraq so royally? I haven't discounted the theory, advanced by Frontline, that Rumsfeld thought he could handle Iraq like he handled Afghanistan, with a small force. Or the likelihood that the stifling corruption of the administration doomed the reconstruction from the start, by handing it over to such boy scouts as Halliburton and Bechtel. But the massive disaster of the operation makes me wonder if this wasn't the plan all along.
I should preface my theory by mentioning that I have little doubt the invasion of Iraq was motivated by the U.S.'s wish to control the world's second largest oil reserves. This is partly due to my belief in Peak Oil, but mostly due to my aforementioned worship of Prof. Chomsky and his theory of realpolitik (though I've never heard him use the word): the idea that the state acts in the interest of its society's elites.
So if global oil extraction (Most people say "production," but I don't like that 'cuz nobody "makes" oil.) is about to go into terminal decline, then it makes sense to secure the Middle East, site of most of the world's remaining oil and natural gas. But the U.S. gets most of its oil and natural gas exports from Canada, Mexico and Venezuela. We are dependent on the Middle East for our current economy, but a slight increase in fuel efficiency for our car and truck fleets (just 2.7 mpg) would eliminate the need for the 5 million barrels of oil per day we get from that region. Therefore, we can get by without them, even if oil production in the Americas declines soon. (I may be wrong, but I think it already has begun to decline overall.)
I've taken the long way around, but what I'm trying to say is the purpose of the Iraq occupation may not be to secure the oil for American use but merely to deny it to the rest of the world, in particular China and India, but also Western Europe, which has proved irritatingly insolent since the announcement of the Iraq campaign. The evidence? Iraqi oil extraction and export has dropped below pre-war levels. U.S. intelligence before the war predicted it would lead to more terrorism and greater regional instability. As Chomsky has discussed, a truly democratic Iraq would empower the Shi'a majority and could incite Shiites in northern Saudi Arabia (where most of the oil is) to revolt against the ruthless Saud dynasty. According to recent articles in the L.A. Times, Iraq is sliding into civil war, which could ultimately invite intervention from Turkey in order to suppress the independent aspirations of its own Kurdish population, Iran to support the Shi'a and Saudi and other Gulf states to support the Sunnis. Who knows how the American colony, Israel, would react, a truly frightening component since it's the only regional player holding the nuclear card. Now that would be a quagmire. Or, more accurately, a recipe for disaster, maybe Armageddon if China, India, Pakistan, Russia or Europe joined the fray to defend their energy interests.
In that scenario, and any realistic vision of the short-term future of the Middle East, it would become much more difficult, if not impossible, to import oil and natural gas from the region. Sure, the U.S. would lose the (illusory) chance of continued economic growth, but so would all of its rivals. In the end, I wonder if our elites aren't as worried about losing the capitalism endgame as they are about somebody else winning.
I should preface my theory by mentioning that I have little doubt the invasion of Iraq was motivated by the U.S.'s wish to control the world's second largest oil reserves. This is partly due to my belief in Peak Oil, but mostly due to my aforementioned worship of Prof. Chomsky and his theory of realpolitik (though I've never heard him use the word): the idea that the state acts in the interest of its society's elites.
So if global oil extraction (Most people say "production," but I don't like that 'cuz nobody "makes" oil.) is about to go into terminal decline, then it makes sense to secure the Middle East, site of most of the world's remaining oil and natural gas. But the U.S. gets most of its oil and natural gas exports from Canada, Mexico and Venezuela. We are dependent on the Middle East for our current economy, but a slight increase in fuel efficiency for our car and truck fleets (just 2.7 mpg) would eliminate the need for the 5 million barrels of oil per day we get from that region. Therefore, we can get by without them, even if oil production in the Americas declines soon. (I may be wrong, but I think it already has begun to decline overall.)
I've taken the long way around, but what I'm trying to say is the purpose of the Iraq occupation may not be to secure the oil for American use but merely to deny it to the rest of the world, in particular China and India, but also Western Europe, which has proved irritatingly insolent since the announcement of the Iraq campaign. The evidence? Iraqi oil extraction and export has dropped below pre-war levels. U.S. intelligence before the war predicted it would lead to more terrorism and greater regional instability. As Chomsky has discussed, a truly democratic Iraq would empower the Shi'a majority and could incite Shiites in northern Saudi Arabia (where most of the oil is) to revolt against the ruthless Saud dynasty. According to recent articles in the L.A. Times, Iraq is sliding into civil war, which could ultimately invite intervention from Turkey in order to suppress the independent aspirations of its own Kurdish population, Iran to support the Shi'a and Saudi and other Gulf states to support the Sunnis. Who knows how the American colony, Israel, would react, a truly frightening component since it's the only regional player holding the nuclear card. Now that would be a quagmire. Or, more accurately, a recipe for disaster, maybe Armageddon if China, India, Pakistan, Russia or Europe joined the fray to defend their energy interests.
In that scenario, and any realistic vision of the short-term future of the Middle East, it would become much more difficult, if not impossible, to import oil and natural gas from the region. Sure, the U.S. would lose the (illusory) chance of continued economic growth, but so would all of its rivals. In the end, I wonder if our elites aren't as worried about losing the capitalism endgame as they are about somebody else winning.
Friday, October 14, 2005
My American Dream
I lived in Chicago for two years as a temp. When I worked in the Loop ("downtown"), I'd walk to the El ("elevated train") to go home and pass a flower shop with bouquets displayed on the sidewalk. It made me sad to think that there was no girl waiting at home whom I could surprise with flowers. More than anything I wanted to buy a bouquet of any kind of flower, carry it on the El with a big grin on my face in the sea of guarded strangers and bring it home to my sweetheart, accompanied by those magical words: "Honey, I'm home!" I know it's corny, but I think that's all I've ever really wanted. My artistic and entertainment ambitions seem like passing fancies by comparison. I know they wouldn't sustain me.
Thursday, October 06, 2005
Five-Year College Reunion
I attended my five-year college reunion last weekend. I went to Beloit College, a tiny liberal arts institution in Beloit, WI, just off I-90 fifty miles SE of Madison along the Illinois border. They were the best 4 years of my life, even though some of my best friends have since let me way down by no longer returning my calls. Out of laziness or disinterest, I don't know which. But none of those people was at the reunion, which disappointed me actually. I'd really like to reconnect with them and find out what the &@*# happened. (I have some anger issues about this too. Expressing anger has never been my strong suit.)
Many of my friends and acquaintances made it back to campus, which surprised me. I wasn't expecting that many people to travel to Beloit for a weekend of 5-year-old reminiscing. Usually memories take longer to reach the peak of flavor, and Beloit is not a popular destination for a weekend getaway. It's an old factory town long past its prime with more bars than traffic lights.
Many of my friends and acquaintances made it back to campus, which surprised me. I wasn't expecting that many people to travel to Beloit for a weekend of 5-year-old reminiscing. Usually memories take longer to reach the peak of flavor, and Beloit is not a popular destination for a weekend getaway. It's an old factory town long past its prime with more bars than traffic lights.
Wednesday, September 28, 2005
The First of Many
Welcome to my brand-new blog. I figured the internet didn't have enough aimless ruminations by anonymous office drones with delusions of grandeur. I'm at work right now, so I don't have much time to blather on and on about nothing. I'm surrounded by faceless conversations about work that I don't understand and personal topics I don't really care about. Ah, the life of a cubicle dweller.
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