On the Evolution of Teaching Letter From a Birmingham Jail

When I first started teaching college composition 6 Autumns ago, I threw Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Letter From a Birmingham Jail" onto the syllabus mainly because it was a famous essay and I was a last-minute hire still trying desperately to flesh out a course plan.  In my painful naivety, I taught "Letter" like a historical artifact, a relic from some bygone and incomprehensible era--fantastically well-written of course and well worth modeling, but fundamentally dated.  The students responded well to it so it stayed on my syllabus; nevertheless I still felt slightly guilty, that I hadn't assigned a selection that was more contemporary, more "relevant."

But then Trayvon Martin happened, and Michael Brown, and Tamir Rice, and the Ferguson riots and the Baltimore riots and etc and etc and etc, and it became sadly clear to me that there was nothing dated about MLK's message at all, that for all our lip-service to his memory, his fundamental message is still as urgent as ever.

Then Election 2016 happened.  Now "Letter From a Birmingham Jail" is my manifesto.

Early in this essay, he writes, "In any nonviolent campaign there are four basic steps: collection of the facts to determine whether injustices are alive, negotiation, self-purification, and direct action."  I am now entering my self-purification step, as I prepare myself for what will come next, examining my motivations, removing my fear and anger, considering what my responses should be, strengthening my commitment, contemplating how I can do the most effective good. Self-purification is no longer something that once happened, but must still happen.

Teaching this essay, I had often praised to my students how MLK, despite having every reason and justification to lash out viciously at his critics while he sat in jail on trumped-up charges, nevertheless still engaged with them respectfully, kindly, friendly, in love and charity and brotherhood, all the while still remaining uncompromising, unyielding, and outspoken in his convictions--he sincerely sought to persuade, not just shout.  I will now be meditating on how to consistently perform such a feat myself.  Following the admonition of Christ, I must always love my enemies, no matter how vociferously I disagree with them, no matter how many people they hurt, including me.

I will not condemn protests but consider their causes; forswear the path of the "white-moderate" more committed to peace than justice; become an extremist for love and not hate in the face of a resurgent White Supremacy (yes, they had always been there, I know; in a perverse sense, it's almost a relief to have them back out in the open, where we can see them). 

It used to be a sterile intellectual exercise for me to wonder whether I would have supported the Civil Rights movement had I been alive in the '50s and '60s--of course I hoped I would have been, but one can never be certain, what one would have been like, how one would have been raised.  But we no longer need to wonder now, do we; in fact, as protests and KKK parades sweep the nation, we can prove with whom we stand right now.  I will forthwith be teaching "Letter From a Birmingham Jail" accordingly.

I started teaching college composition the same year I started this silly little blog; I may take a break from writing here awhile--or, I may need to express myself here more than ever, who knows, I haven't decided yet, I've never decided yet.  But either way, whether this is a final sign-off or but a brief pause, in the words of Dr. King:

"Let us all hope that the dark clouds of racial prejudice will soon pass away and the deep fog of misunderstanding will be lifted from our fear drenched communities, and in some not too distant tomorrow the radiant stars of love and brotherhood will shine over our great nation with all their scintillating beauty.

"Yours for the cause of Peace and Brotherhood,
Martin Luther King, Jr."

The Last Time the Cubs Won the World Series...

I of course can only put it in temporal terms that would most resonate with me personally:

The last time the Cubs won the World Series, TS Eliot was still at Harvard, Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock not even a twinkle in his eye--and it would be far longer before the Cubs would again dare disturb the Universe.

The last time the Cubs won the World Series, Ernest Hemingway was 9--the Sun would not Also Rise over the Cubs for another century.

The last time the Cubs won the World Series, Ezra Pound still hadn't arrived in London, let alone turn to fascism (a word that didn't exist yet)--there were still no apparitions of these faces in a crowd, Petals on a wet, black bough.

The last time the Cubs won the World Series, Gertrude Stein had yet to self-publish Three Lives--A Rose was not yet a Rose was not yet a Rose was not yet a (Pete) Rose.

The last time the Cubs won the World Series, Virginia Woolf hadn't even started work on her first novel yet--for that matter, she still couldn't vote or legally inherit property, rights she would obtain before the Cubs saw another pennant. 

The last time the Cubs won the World Series, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was still alive and writing new Sherlock Holmes stories--he would solve more mysteries in the 20th century than the Cubs would win series.

The last time the Cubs won the World Series, Marcel Proust had not started In Search of Lost Time--For a long time he still went to bed early, as did the Cubs' repeated playoff's hopes.

The last time the Cubs won the World Series, Picasso was only barely past his Blue period--though the Cubs, unbeknownst to them, had only begun theirs.

The last time the Cubs won the World Series, Bloomsday was just another forgotten Thursday--History was not yet a nightmare from which the Cubs were trying to awake.

The last time the Cubs won the World Series, Ireland was still entirely part of the UK, William Butler Yeats had no notion of one day memorializing the Easter Rising, James Joyce had only just barely ditched work on Stephen Hero for A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and George Bernard Shaw had yet to write Pygmalion, the precursor to My Fair Lady--Ireland made more progress in 107 years than did the Cubs.

That is, the last time the Cubs won the World Series, the term "Modernist" did not yet exist, nor did any of the texts it would eventually get applied to.

In short, the last time the Cubs won the World Series, my entire dissertation topic didn't even exist yet!

On "Checking In" at Standing Rock

So early yesterday morning, I opened up Facebook to see that one of my friends had checked in at Standing Rock Indian Reservation in North Dakota!  Not only one, but several!  In fact, the list kept on growing!  At first it appeared that a bunch of my old classmates at University of Iowa had taken a road trip together, but then I saw folks checking in from Chicago, Seattle, and even L.A.!  Overwhelmed, I considered how the most I had done so far is donate a few bucks to their legal defense fund, while these courageous souls had actually put their own physical bodies in harm's way—

Except no, none of them were physically at Standing Rock at all, they had only "checked in".  Some sort of social media awareness campaign/solidarity strategy against the local Sheriff's office (though why the Sheriff would need to comb through FB check-ins to find all the protestors they had just arrested—or why protestors risking their lives would check into FB in the first place—I confess is beyond me).  And who knows, maybe it actually worked, or was at least useful in raising awareness and putting pressure upon the powerful or what have you.

But you'll understand if I still felt a little deflated. Facebook activism is to real activism what Facebook life is to real life.

Edinburgh, Scotland

I was about to insist that it should really be spelt "Edinborough" if they're going pronounce it that way--but then I remembered that "-ough" has 3 different renderings based on if it's prefixed by a t-, thr-, or b-, so I let it alone and reminded myself that English is basically 2 steps from Chinese anyways.

My wife worked a trip to Edinburgh, Scotland this weekend, and despite having to be re-routed through a number of totally different airports, I was able to join her and sight-see for a day.

The Scottish secession vote was just 2 scant years ago (and on a side-note, I'm genuinely curious as to how big the Venn Diagram overlap is between those who opposed Scottish independence and those who voted for the Brexit--and vice-versa), and given the specific economic grievances the Scottish National Party held against merry ol' England, I guess I had kinda assumed that Scotland must really suck or something.  And perhaps outside the capitol, things are more sketch.

Nevertheless, I was still so unprepared for just how lovely Edinburgh is!  The pristine, clean streets, the dazzling diversity of architecture from Medieval to Modernist, the bag-pipers busking on the streets, the Halloween decor simultaneously exported to and imported from the United States (now there's the paradox of post-colonialism in a nutshell!), the lush green trees tinged with autumn leaves--it was rejuvenating, is what it was.

Edingburgh Castle was of course the highlight, and everything else was a cherry on top--but there were still lots of cherries.  I was especially enamored with the Sir Walter Scott Memorial; I've seen a number of dead-author's placards by now, but there are Kings and U.S. Presidents with less elaborate monuments than Scott's.

My middle-name is derived from the clan MacLeland, my Dad's Mother's line.  As in Denmark, I was again left wondering: does the weather here feel homey cause it reminds me of Washington, or is it the other way around?

[View from Edinburgh Castle]

On Bob Dylan and John Ashbery

So one of the predominant responses I'm noticing to Bob Dylan's Nobel for Lit. is (generally unfavorable) comparisons to John Ashbery, of all people, e.g. "Look, Dylan's fine, but he's no Ashbery" or "So when does Ashbery win a Grammy?" and etc. Implicit in these responses is the argument that Dylan, as a song-writer, is not a poet, that he writes in a completely different genre.

However, though I'm sympathetic, this argument is complicated by the fact that Ashbery himself blurs the lines between genres; for example, his 1972 work "Three Poems" is a collection of extended, book-length prose meditations--"prose-poems" we now call 'em, but usually folks just call them essays. In fact, I'm willing to bet a number of critics would still dispute whether they should be called "Poems," so much do they resemble straight-prose. 

 But that's exactly the nomenclature that Ashbery is questioning with the title "Three Poems": can any text be read as a poem as long we label it as such? How does genre influence our engagement with a text? Why *can't* song-lyrics be read as poetry? Was not ancient epic poetry sung? Was not Beowulf? How do we even define "poetry"? We are a long, long way out from meters and rhyme-schemes.

Don't get me wrong, I still think Bob Dylan's Nobel is kinda silly: the man certainly doesn't lack for recognition, and I generally prefer the Nobel goes to folks who do (e.g. as happened with Samuel Beckett and William Faulkner). Nevertheless, Ashbery deeply complicates these questions, not clarifies them.

Also, this comes only 8 years after the Nobel Lit. committee announced that there were no plans to award an American in the near future, considering out literature to be too "provincial". The pull of Boomer nostalgia crosses national partisanship, I suppose.

A Defense of "Rockism" So-Called

Nowadays, to be labeled a "Rockist" is a borderline slur: music critics lob it at each to slander their opponent as snobbish, stagnant, out-of-date and out-of-touch.  Among certain cultural critics, it is practically synonymous with "racist," inasmuch as "Rockists" supposedly only prefer music gate-kept by an overwhelmingly-white establishment of elderly men. A part of me is sympathetic to these anti-"Rockist" screeds, for indeed a myopic insistence on a single, aging genre can indeed cut one off from so much other excellent music--especially from minorities, which our country has a long, atrocious history of silencing.

Yet like all sweeping terms, there are significant problems with "Rockist".  First is the fact that the biggest, most unapologetic "Rockists" I have ever met are Hispanic.  It is the young Mexican-American men I've known who are the biggest fans of, say, Soundgarden, of Metallica, the White Stripes, the Strokes, who claim that Radiohead peaked with The Bends. Given how much of Rock 'n Roll was influenced by Ricky Valens, Carlos Santana, ? and the Mysterions, Rage Against the Machine, and even At The Drive-In, this shouldn't surprise us. To stereotype "Rockists" as exclusively white is itself rather racist.

It's also classist: Coastal elites and suburbanites may have long ago moved on from Rock 'n Roll, but, having lived in the Midwest, I can assure you that most the middle of the country has most certainly not.  And lest one dismiss that all as "Flyover" country conservatism, let us remember that Rock was first and foremost a Working Class genre, the music of the anti-elites.  From Chuck Berry singing "Johnny B. Goode" to Little Richard out of Jim Crow Georgia; from Alan Freed broadcasting across rust-belt Cleveland to Elvis Presley emerging from Memphis, Tennessee; from the Beatles out of the Liverpool docks to Bob Dylan hitch-hiking from northern Minnesota; from Bruce Springsteen escaping the failing-factories of New Jersey to the Ramones trapped in Queens; from Black Sabbath in the Birmingham steel mills to Guns 'n Roses running from Indiana to L.A.; from Jimi Hendrix out of rained-out Seattle to Kurt Cobain on the muddy banks of the Wishkah; from The Stooges' Forgotten Boy to The Replacements' Bastards of Young; from U2 in bombed-out Ireland to the White Stripes hailing from dying Detroit, and etc., etc., etc.--Rock 'n Roll has most often been identified with the Working Classes.  Even when so many of these bands are of Middle-Class or even Upper-Class extraction (as with, say, Led Zeppelin or Queen), their most faithful audiences nevertheless remain found in the lower income tax brackets that dominate the middle of the country.

Which makes sense, given that these "Rockists" are often folks from hard-labor backgrounds who work all day with the power-tools of heavy-machinery, and then work all night with the power-tools of amplifiers and guitar-distortion--all in a quest to reclaim their humanity from a dehumanizing industry.  It is no mystery to me why so many Hispanics are "Rockists" so-called--they above all are still entangled directly with physical labor, struggling to survive in an exploitative market system.  We can map the rise and fall of Rock's fortunes with the rise and fall of the Working Classes' fortunes, as America has shifted from a Manufacturing to a Service economy. 

This crucial shift may help explain that most petulant of "Rockist" boasts, "At least we play our own instruments!!"  Now I will be the first insist that whether one plays or programs ones music is completely irrelevant to whether or not the music is beautiful; nevertheless, one can understand where a "Rockist" Working Class is coming from, how threatened they would feel to behold their skills and livelihoods rendered largely irrelevant by computerized machinery--as has already happened to the American Working Class at large.  For the sad fact of the matter is that U.S. Manufacturing is not on the decline, in fact that sector has never been more robust--but the jobs no longer exist because it's all automated now.  Foreigners didn't kill the factory jobs, computers did--and so the Working Class is naturally resentful of computers.

Likewise, with the rise of the DJ, human beings are rendered irrelevant to the production of music--just as human beings are rapidly rendered irrelevant to production generally.  Even Hip-Hop at least requires a human voice; EDM requires no human presence whatsoever.  One can easily imagine a computer algorithm programmed to write all our dance music for us, eliminating human input entirely.  The dancers on the floor become subject solely to the whims of the machines, like some dystopic Matrix-cum-Terminator nightmare, wherein the vast majority of world is rendered superfluous, disposable, excess population.  It's not just Rock 'n Roll we worry about disappearing, but the human race entirely.

These are real concerns; the Working Class is indeed being left behind, as the majority of the jobs created in our sluggish economic recovery have occurred in the cities, and that primarily within service economies, while the Rust Belt and rural-areas are forgotten--where, not coincidentally, drug-use and suicides are soaring.  If ever you were baffled by the rise of Bernie Sanders and (much more alarmingly) Donald Trump, know that they have little to do with the rise of free-loaders or racists respectively, but the reaction of a working class lashing out.  It is telling to me that the most vicious thing Bruce Springsteen could think to call Trump was "a con man"--of working class origins himself, Springsteen fully understands the blind rage that drives so many of the working poor to Trump.  Springsteen only objects to how that anger is hijacked by a rich sleaze-bag, not as to whether its justified in the first place.  No matter what else happens in November, as long as this country continues to ignore the poor like we do, then all those potential-Trump voters will still be there--as will the Bernie Sanders voters.  And though those two groups may hold vastly antithetical ideas for how to fix America, one thing remains for sure: both groups will remain pissed.  And nothing fuels Rock more than anger.

Once Upon a Halloween in China

My one twinge of regret when I flew to China Autumn of '06 was that, for the first time ever, I would completely miss Halloween (even Puerto Rico has trick-or-treaters nowadays).  Little did I know that I was about to have the most intensive Halloween of my life.  For the private school I taught at wasn't just content to teach English with genuine American instructors, no--this place was all about cultural immerson, and as everyone worth their salt knew, that meant that these middle-schoolers were going to celebrate Halloween, dangnabit!

As such, Ken and I threw together a slap-dash, super-simple ppt. ("In this slide we see American children in scaaaaary costumes!  And in this one we see a haaaaunted house...  And in this one we see...candy!--no, no, you can't have any, that's just a slide on a screen").  We presented it over 20 times to over 20 different sections.  The whole shebang was only about 20 minutes long, followed by the first 20 minutes of Monster House on a pirated DVD, and then class ended.  While Ken gave the lecture, I carved a Jack-O-Lantern in the background, for the childrens' assignment was to carve a pumpkin of their own by October 31st, and I was showing them how.

That is, from fearing I wouldn't get to carve a single lantern that year, I carved more in one week than I had in near my entire life.

And with what factory-efficiency did I mass-produce those Jack-O-Lanterns!  It was probably the most American thing I did in China, for better and for worse.  A quick kitchen-knife around the stem, scrapping out the guts with brute strength, then stabbing out 3 triangles and a mouth.  There was neither care nor craftsmanship, only a need to crank out as much product as fast as possible.  My pride was not in my skill, but in my speed.  The U.S. work-ethic in a nut-shell, ladies and gents!

So imagine my astonishment when those Chinese children, who had only learned about Halloween the week before, not only carved Jack-O-Lanterns, but carved (doubtless with the aid of their parents and their fine-carpentry sets) some of the most exquisitely detailed pumpkins I have ever seen in my life!  Flying dragons, elegant calligraphy, portraits of old Confucians with their every wrinkle subtlety traced into the skin--and all this for pumpkins that would rot in a week!   To my shame did I fail to take pictures of them.  Yes, it is in the land of sweat-shops and cheap-production, of all places, that the tradition of careful-craftsmanship and beauty-for-its-own-sake still lives! 

Halloween night proper, Ken and I finally finished watching Monster House (you can only watch the first 20 minutes so many times before you are filled with an irrational need to witness the ending) and placed a lit Jack-O-Lantern outside.  The next morning Ken got up early for a jog, only to find that someone had turned its face around--superstition still lives in the Middle Kingdom, too.  Ken turned the face back around and then went running.  When he returned, he found the pumpkin on the ground, smashed to pieces.

China A Decade Later

My wife is a flight-attendant, and this weekend she worked a trip to Shanghai.  This has put me in a deeply reflective mood, because it was exactly a decade and a month ago that I first walked the streets of Shanghai myself.  At the time I was a junior in college, off-track at BYU-Idaho, and my chief goal at the time was to get as far away from Rexburg as I possibly could--and boy did I succeed!

Late August of '06, I flew from San Francisco to Shanghai all alone, a wannabe-English major with only an Associates and no formal teacher training to boot, sent by a fledgling Idaho-based outfit called China Horizons--years later, the founder Jacob Harlan even apologized for flying me over all by my lonesome self; the company has since vastly expanded, and now does a much more admirable job of sending whole groups over together, such that their various teachers travel with a mutual support system already in place.  In those early days, however, I was quite solitary.  Not only was I flying solo into one of the largest cities on earth, but from Shanghai I had to figure out how to take a 12-hour train-ride west to AnHui Province, to teach at a private middle-school in the "small" town of AnQing (pop. 600,000).  If ever anything was the opposite of insular, barely-populated, middle-of-nowhere Rexburg, it was The Middle Kingdom: China.

But of course my Chinese adventure was about more than just escaping the oppressive smallness of Rexburg.  At the time I had been home from my mission to Puerto Rico for 2 solid years--and at that halcyon age, being home from your mission for as long as you were out is a sobering moment, a realization that every missionary you could have possibly known is home now, that the institutional memory of your very existence there has already been erased, that you either live on in the hearts of a few scattered Puerto Ricans or nowhere at all.  The mission was no longer a thing I had recently done, had "just gotten home from".

In short, I needed a new adventure, something to reassure myself that my life hadn't already peaked at 21, that I wouldn't remain mired in memory, re-hashing half-remembered "glory days" forever, that there was still so much to look forward to.  What's more, I had to know that I was capable of doing such things--which was by no means a given for me at the time.  I was kinda shy and awkward growing up (in other words, I was a teenager), and frankly a bit of an unambitious home-body, yearning for something more yet still too trepidous to take any real risks.  Yes, I had risen to the challenge of a Caribbean mission at the tender age of 19--and grateful that I had--but that whole experience was still mostly financed and encouraged by family and Church, it was an expected thing that I should do. 

My sudden decision to go to China, then, was perhaps the first adult decision I made entirely on my own, took the initiative on my own, paid for on my own, accepted the risks of on my own.  And the risks were real--I even had a mini-panic attack on the flight over the Pacific, as I realized that I didn't know Chinese, I knew no one in China, that I scarcely had cash in my bank account.  "Turn this plane around!" I wanted to scream, "I'm going to die out there!"

Fortunately I was sitting next to a retired newspaper reporter who was returning to China for the 6th time to teach English himself, and he quickly reassured me of how kind and friendly and hospitable the Chinese are (which proved to be true), gave me some advice, some pointers, some encouragement, even complimented me for being so daring at such a young age.  I don't remember his name and I doubt he remembers me (if he's still alive...), but I would love to thank him again--he sure did help me get off to China on the right foot.

In the years since my semester in China, I've roamed fairly widely, enough to consider myself a reasonably confident, seasoned traveler (if I do say so myself), one who is no longer intimidated by foreign customs and unknown tongues.  (I'm also a much more experienced and confident teacher, while we're at it).  International travel now feels familiar to me.

But then, everything feels familiar after China--when you are an American abroad, you can't get much more jumping-in-the-deep-end than the People's Republic. The scorpions on a stick, pig-feet, steamed-lilies, and fish and foul with their heads still attached for dinner; the family-names first and given-names last; the baffled way you and they regard each other because they prefer their water hot while you prefer it cold; the opinions kept private and the Tai Chi practiced openly; the collective refusal to remember the '60s; the capitalist communism; the oxen plowing in the shadows of sky-scrapers; the swastika as Buddhist instead of Nazi; the stiff-as-a-board beds; the hole-in-the-floor toilets; the every-which-way they are blunt where you are delicate and delicate where you are blunt; the way even the local Police Chief calls you handsome, and random teenagers want their picture with you; how you will never be quite sure if they are actually inviting you over for dinner or just being polite; their utter lack of personal space yet profound discomfort with actual physical touch; the chaotic order of their every traffic stop, how the mass of pedestrians weave through the oncoming traffic in perfect safety; the language with zero correspondence to the Latin alphabet, that grammatically formalizes the vocal-tones we refuse to admit exist in English too--take every last thing you are used to in America and reverse it.  I had to sink or swim, and with a little help from my new friends there--Chinese and American alike--I learned to swim.

Over all, China was an important turning-point and confidence-booster in my life (and hopefully my students actually learned a thing or two from me also, as I faked my way through teaching them how to pronounce the letters V and L--and I do declare that you haven't lived till you've led a chorus of Chinese 7th graders in belting out "Yellow Submarine" and John Denver's "Country Roads").  And when I finally stood upon the Great Wall one brisk, bright mid-Autumn morning, it dawned on me: I might actually be able to do this whole see-the-world, seize-the-day, live-you-life-while-you're-still-young thing after all (it's probably no accident I married someone who chose to become a flight attendant).  While it is sobering to realize a full decade has now passed, it is supremely gratifying--even a relief--to note how full that decade has been.

But though I am now more sure than ever that there is still so much more to come, my wife in Shanghai today has nonetheless got me feeling nostalgic, so indulge me as I post the barest sampling of decade-old photographs:

The Jade Buddhist Temple in downtown Shanghai.

The very modern view from this very ancient temple.

The Oriental Pearl Tower in Shanghai.

The Great Wall of China in Beijing

At the Great Wall with my American roommate/co-worker/friend Ken Carlston.

I had, and continue to have, no idea who any of these people were.

Entrance to the Forbidden City.

Mishaps at a Chinese masseuse parlor.

At Guniu national forest.

This pic is one inspirational quote away from a Dental Office.

Hiking Tianzhu Shan.

That chicken had been alive only an hour earlier.

A mere sliver of the view from atop Yellow Mountain.

Me taking in said overwhelming-view that no camera will ever be able to capture.

That bridge, for scale.

The sacred Buddhist mountain Jiuhua Shan.

The Catcher in the Rye Revisited; or, Catcher in the Rye as a Christmas Novel

When I was a teenager I read The Catcher in the Rye.  I also read Catch-22, Tropic of Cancer, Dilbert comics, wore Chuck Taylors, and listened to The Doors, Queen's Greatest Hits, and Dark Side of the Moon.  I wasn't exactly original. (Teenagers never are).

But maybe originality is overrated--not to mention a myth--and the reason why J.D. Salinger's lone novel continues to sell in excess of 250,000 copies a year well over a half-century after its publication is because there is nothing original about its premise: a teenager hates his life.  Holden Caulfield's is the common voice of adolescent dissatisfaction, distilled down to its purest and most impotent rage.  Sometimes you don't need to read something original--sometimes you just need to know you're not alone, that there's someone else out there who understands.

Or Holden Caulfield is just a total spoiled brat, an epitome of unexamined privilege so devoid of real problems that he has to invent some to justify his narcissism, selfishness, and general dickishness.  Such, increasingly, has been the summation of a growing number of folks, in the surprisingly burgeoning sub-genre of Catcher in the Rye re-reads.

These various responses, in fact, had me a tad trepidous to re-read Catcher myself.  Even after Salinger's death in 2011, I couldn't quite bring myself to revisit Holden.  Some cherished childhood memories are best left in the past, I figured.


But then last week at the airport, disaster struck: I lost the book I was reading (Vol. 4 of In Search of Lost Time--and boy, if there could ever be two more differing approaches towards remembering childhood than Proust and Salinger!).  Begrudgingly, like an amateur, I sauntered over to the Airport Bookstore & Minimart to find a replacement.  Amidst all those paint-by-numbers spy thrillers, hackneyed romances, formulaic fantasies, flavor-of-the-week best-sellers, cash-grab celebrity bios, petulant political screeds, insipid self-help books, and insidious Get-Rich-Quick schemes, I felt a sort of nausea fill the pit of my stomach.

That is, I was put in just the right mindset to re-read Catcher...which is why it startled me to find the book on the shelf!  What strange company for Caulfield to be keeping! How ironic to be so surrounded by "such a bunch of phonies," as Holden might say! It almost felt like some secret joke perpetrated by an irate bookstore employee.  I couldn't resist--I bought a copy.  Just finished it this afternoon.

Let's get something out of the way first: Holden Caulfield is indeed insufferable.  His critics are right.  But what his critics miss is that he is insufferable in the exact same way all teenagers are insufferable.  That is an incredibly rare feet--in most film, TV, and fiction, teenagers are idealized, articulate, a fantasy of what we liked to imagine we were like at that age, rather than a reflection of what we were actually like.  Ferris Bueller is who we wanted to be; but Holden Caulfield is who we actually were.  I suspect that much of the adult backlash against Holden is sheer resentment, for reminding us of how embarrassing we all sounded in our teens, which we've spent most our adulthood trying to forget.

But here's the other thing about Holden: he's also self-aware!  Multiple times throughout the novel, Holden mentions how he himself is a phony, duplicitous, inconsistent, and terrible.  Pay attention for those moments if you choose to re-read it.  Indeed, I dare say that a huge source of Holden's frustration and anger is his growing awareness--which, as a true teenager, he still lacks the vocabulary to fully express--that he is in fact inextricably complicit with the phoniness of the world!

And that I think is why the novel continues to resonate even today: because we all feel that same rage at our own inescapable complicity.  Our clothing is sewn by children in third-world sweatshops; our food harvested by exploited immigrant labor; our rubber comes from African and Malaysian slave plantations; our electronics from nightmarish Tawainese factories, built with rare-earth minerals mined by Afghan child slaves; our diamonds from genocidal warlords; our gasoline from hyper-destructive industries; our high standard of living from ruthless corporations; and so on and so forth.  In America, we are all spoiled, petulant, narcissistic brats, people who burn away all our many opportunities and invent problems to justify our misery--Holden, at least, is aware that he does so.  He is also one of the few characters in fiction who actively tries to disavow all his unearned privilege--and even fails as he tries.  The problem of privilege runs deep.

But then, his anger is not solely rooted in societal injustice, is it; early in the novel, we learn his brother Allie had recently died of leukemia.  Holden's grief, then, is of a kind with Prince Hamlet's--they are both morose, brooding jerks precisely because they are both grieving.  Grief has a funny way of stripping away our filters, dropping our defenses, making nothing feel like it matters anymore.  Holden isn't just the archetype for the raging teenager; he is also that of the grieving brother.

Nor do I bring up Hamlet arbitrarily (well, besides their shared spaces on every High School syllabi ever); a couple years ago I argued that Hamlet can be read as a Christmas play.  Remember that the latter takes place in the winter months; the ghost appears "against that season...Wherein our Saviour's birth is celebrated;" and that for centuries, the telling of ghost stories was a holiday tradition. As I pointed out back then, it is no coincidence that Dicken's A Christmas Carol is first and foremost a ghost story, that Joyce's "The Dead" takes place at a Christmas party, that Andy Williams' 1963 hit "It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year" boasts "There'll be scary ghost stories..."  Up till two short generations ago, the dead were as much a part of Christmas as the trees and mistletoe.

And like Shakespeare's Hamlet, Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye (and I suspect this point isn't emphasized nearly enough) can also be read as a Christmas novel.  It, too, takes place in late December; Holden gets depressed at one point when he sees some men swearing as they put up a municipal Christmas Tree; his younger sister Phoebe is playing the lead in a Christmas pageant; she lends Holden some of her gift-buying money; and as had happened for centuries of Christmases, a ghost haunts the proceedings, that of the late Allie Caulfield.

I perhaps read The Catcher in the Rye a little too early in the season--it is really a Christmas story.  More precisely, it is a Christmas ghost story, in the same tradition as Dickens, Joyce, and Shakespeare.  Though a self-proclaimed "kind of an atheist," Holden nevertheless possesses Christ's same absolute impatience for "phonies"--or as the Savior put it, "Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!" (Matt. 23:13).  The novel's title even comes from Holden's dream of catching kids-at-play from falling off a cliff--that is, Holden wishes to be a savior to little children, "for of such is the kingdom of God." Despite all its casual blasphemy, this text is permeated with desire for a Christ.

I may need to add Catcher to the thin list of books I re-read every Christmas, the books that actually remind me of the "reason for the season"--namely, that because we are all, like Holden, such prodigal sons, because we are all selfish, wasteful, despicable phonies (and that never more so than during Christmas), we are all in need of a Savior more desperately than ever.

Venice, Copenhagan, Rekljavic

Look, I don't want no guff from you--because life is already so capricious and unfair as it is, that on the rare occasions where it is so in your favor, you learn to take the money and run.  Hence, when an opportunity arises to go on what is in effect an all-expense-paid round-trip to Venice--especially when you are a broke community college adjunct grad student--then you friggin' take it.  Because you are the sort of person who's not supposed to be able to do this; you are supposed to be at the whims of the market, not vice-versa.  Flying to Venice thus becomes a form of resistance: politically, economically, even cosmically.  

But hark, there is danger!   For you may be tempted to be a total hipster about it, and roll your eyes at the Gondolas, sneering that they're all just some overpriced, overrated tourist trap. Protip: Ride the Gondola anyways.  And elect to ride the small canals over the Grand Canal, too.  Even the most cynical among you won't be able to repress a smile, nor a sense of awe at this romantic place.  It is magical on purpose.

For some reason, it wasn't until I was physically walking the streets of Copenhagan that I suddenly realized I was visiting one of the haunts of my Mother.  She straight-up skipped her High School graduation, I recalled, to fly across the Atlantic with my Grandparents, to pick up my Uncle Tom from his mission to Denmark.  I also have ancestors from this corner of Scandinavia.  You will also note that all of these people I just mentioned are now dead.  Hence, as I wandered past the Little Mermaid statue, the colorful homes of Nyhavn, the Danish Royal Palace, the Christus, I couldn't help but feel how I was now stepping where they once stepped, seeing what they once saw--the spirits and ghosts fluttered beside me.

I tried to quote Kierkegaard there, but I wasn't feeling existential enough (though it's not like Hans Christian Anderson is terribly cheery, either).  I'm from Washington, so the cool climate of Denmark felt especially like home--or is it the reverse?

In Iceland, everything feels primordial: the visible tectonic plates, the geothermal hotsprings, the moss-covered volcanic rock, even the language with letters unused by English since the composition of Beowulf, all make the island feel like a relic from the dawn of time, a vision of a young Earth.  The tour-guide may tell you that at a "mere" 18 million years old, the landmass of Iceland is, geologically speaking, an infant--but that is just another way of emphasizing how much older everything is than humanity, how we really are just guests. (Prometheus was filmed here with reason.)

Of course, such a recognition cannot help but make you feel younger, as well--and to take yourself less seriously.  Perhaps that is why the Icelanders, despite their general icy Germanic demeanor, were among the nicest and most helpful people I've ever met, especially when they didn't have to, especially when I needed it most (I almost got stranded at their tiny airport at the edge of the world, save for the kind airport employees who bent over backwards to get me rebooked). Iceland tops all those Human Life Indexes most deservedly.

On Baseball, Football, Leisure, the Labor Movement, and U.S. Manufacturing

Last week I participated in that most perennial of American traditions: going to a baseball game with my Dad and brother.   We saw the Mariners play in Seattle, as we had so often when I was growing up.  The inherent traditionalism of the sport, paired with the intrinsic leisureliness of the spectacle, couldn't help but put me in a reflective mood.

Specifically, about the leisureliness itself of baseball.  The sport in fact has its roots in the U.S. Labor movement; "8 hours to work, 8 hours to sleep, and 8 hours to do as we please" was the rallying cry of the first American Unionists (so much less ambitious than their Socialist counterparts in Europe), who were understandably resentful of their 14-hour work days in horrific factory conditions.  The factory owners themselves, of course, were less than thrilled with the prospect of 8-hour work days, and claimed to be battling "indolence, loafing, and laziness" among the Lower Classes with their punishing work days.

This rhetoric, in turn, prompted the factory workers to lay claim to "indolence, loafing, and laziness" directly as a form of political resistance, which they expressed by playing baseball--for there is no sport more laid-back than baseball.  Most the time, you'll note, the players are simply standing around, or leaning on the railing, casually waiting for things to happen.  The most celebrated legends of baseball--e.g. Babe Ruth--are renowned for drinking, smoking, and walking around the bases.  Baseball wasn't just lazy, it was proudly so--it was the working man claiming his right to leisure.  It is perhaps no accident that baseball rose to its highest prominence in American culture at the same time that the U.S. Labor movement achieved its greatest gains: the 8-hour work week, overtime pay, weekends, paid holidays, minimum wages, workman's comp.

It is perhaps also not accidental that baseball has been displaced by football in the American psyche at the same time that the Working Class has been displaced.  U.S. Manufacturing is mostly automated now, where it hasn't actively been in decline; consequently, the U.S. Labor force has moved from a largely manufacturing economy to a service one.  This point is integral: for in the days when factories dominated the U.S. landscape, men worked hard labor jobs--thus proving to others and themselves their own strength, virility, and masculinity--and baseball was how they unwound and relaxed on weekends.

But the majority of our jobs are no longer considered "manly"--our labor is now largely sedentary, service-oriented, with little chance to prove our virility, our masculinity.  Fight Club, both the novel and the film, rose to prominence in reaction against an "emasculating" economy, as men fought in underground clubs to vent their pent-up frustration; however, it wasn't fight clubs that arose in real life to give us vents, but American Football.  The violence, the toughness, the sheer danger of the sport, gave U.S. males an outlet for their aggression that they could no longer find in their careers.

Yet with this key difference: it is largely a vicarious outlet!  For by contrast, when one watches baseball, one is being leisurely even as the players on the field are likewise being leisurely!  That is, we are all being leisurely together! There is this unspoken camaraderie across social classes at a baseball game, all claiming their leisure time together at once.

But in football, the athletes are all taking the hits for the spectators!  The latter may shout and scream and cheer, channeling and venting all their pent-up energy after a dull work-week; but it is the athletes alone who are subject to all that horrendous violence.  Football is a sport wherein 40,000 people who need to exercise more watch 22 men who really need a rest.  Despite all the face-paints and colorful costumes and DIY signs to the contrary, there is no genuine camaraderie between spectator and participant in football.

Likewise, in baseball, the crowd may cheer at, say, a double-play, or a home-run, but otherwise we are chatting amiably with our neighbors, hanging out with our friends--the game is as much about us as it is about them.  But in football, good luck trying to chat casually with anyone!  If you're not screaming the whole game through, then you're doing it wrong, for it's never about you, it's always about them. 

We are disconnected from the athletes we watch in football: we likewise no longer feel truly connected to our products (made in China), our clothing (made in sweat-shops), our food (harvested by migrant workers); we are a long way removed from our American agricultural and manufacturing past, wherein we could directly and easily trace where all our products come from.  Nowadays we have to advertise certain foods as "locally sourced," as though that were some strange, new thing.

The great popularity of baseball among Latinos is perhaps linked to the fact that they still work in physical labor, especially agriculture--they are still fighting for their right to leisure.  (This agricultural-labor connection perhaps explains why our most famous baseball film, Field of Dreams, takes place on a farm, in a corn field).

We likewise all feel disconnected from our policy-makers, from our leaders, from the powerful; after slowly undoing the long gains of the Labor movement, CEOs now make hundreds of times more than their workers, far in excess of what they made in the hey-day of Unions (and of baseball).  The recent rise of Bernie Sanders and (perversely) Trump likewise signals a deep and general resentment among working Americans, against a power-class that feels completely disconnected from their lived experiences.

We may still cheer on our favorite political parties, as we do our favorite football teams, but we do not feel like we are actually participating with them--in fact, the loudness of our cheers are usually in direct inverse proportion to our actual influence upon the actions on the field (unless you're a Seahawks fan, of course, but that's a topic for a different day).  It is perhaps apropos that your average MLB baseball ticket is reasonably affordable to a working man--while only the rich can afford an NFL game.

I will be curious to see if and how football preserves its current cultural dominance, especially as the whole concussion controversy calls into question the violence inherent in football's whole exploitative system--which is in turn a metonym for our whole exploitative economic system.  Moreover, that awareness of the violence endemic to our economic system is clearly spreading throughout our increasingly angry working class, at all point of the political spectrum.  If current trends continue to boiling point, we may well return to baseball yet.

Fixing Star Trek

[Cause boy does it need it, if that fugly new ship is any indication!]

This last weekend I visited my Nautilus! co-author in Connecticut; among other things, we watched Star Trek Beyond, which inevitably meant further late-night conversations on where the heck did our favorite child-hood shows go wrong??

Nautilus! in fact began one night as we discussed the utter disappointment of Star Trek: Voyager, what an utter waste of a fascinating premise that was. Stranding a Federation starship on the far-side of the galaxy, in a 24th-century odyssey that wiped the slate clean of all burdensome mythology to spread forth a fresh new cosmos to encounter?  What a dynamite set-up!  They would have to try to mess it up!

Yet mess it up they did: if the hackneyed writing, wooden acting, and one-dimensional stereotypes masquerading as diversity (I'm looking square at you Chakotay!) weren't bad enough, the show was somehow even more subject to the mythology than ever!  What's the point of flying to "Where No Man Has Gone Before" if you're just going to complain about home??  Star Trek: Voyager was like every middle-aged tourist you've ever heard of; as Edward Fischer once wrote:

"Several million of them get up enough nerve each year to leave home in body, but the landscape of their mind never alters. They are annoyed with anything unfamiliar--be it a brand of coffee, the plumbing, or cultural patterns. They want the whole universe paved just like the streets they live on. They walk through castles and museums and cathedrals and are bored. If they were aware of their sagging spirits as they are their aching feet, it would be a hopeful sign. The sense of awe is dried up in them and they seldom show wonder, unless you want to count the many times a day they say, 'I wonder how far away the bus is parked?'"  Star Trek: Voyager was the bland-American-tourist of the Trek franchise, so fixated on getting home that they forgot to actually enjoy the wondrous cosmos.

This utter creative failure was not only frustrating but baffling, considering how it debuted just after The Next Generation had wrapped up its critically acclaimed run, Deep Space Nine was still crescendoing, the TOS movies had finished on a high note, and First Contact appeared to be the beginning of a cracker-jack TNG film series.  In 1996, on its 30th anniversary, the Star Trek franchise appeared unstoppable.

But Voyager turned out to be no aberration, but the start of a long, excruciating, down-ward slide.  It was followed by Star Trek: Enterprise, a prequel series which only doubled down on the lazy writing, wooden acting, and utter lack of awe and wonder to be exploring the cosmos, but perhaps most egregious of all, spent more time setting up the mythology than actually exploring outer space--you know, the whole original point of the series.  When Enterprise was unceremoniously cancelled in 2005, no one shed a tear, save for the fact that for the first time in nearly 20 years, there was no new Trek on TV.

Upon consideration of the failures of Voyager and Enterprise, I think I can better articulate where I think the franchise went wrong: in TOS, TNG, and DS9, the Federation, Starfleet, the whole mythology, is but a means to an end (viz: the exploration of the cosmos), not an end unto itself.  That is, the show's mythology served the story-telling, not the story-telling the mythology.  

Kirk regularly ignored orders when they got in his way (arguably his most defining characteristic), Picard more than once had to speechify against Admirals who failed to live up to his high ideals, and DS9 was all about the deconstruction of Federation self-righteousness. That is, the Federation was great when it helped fulfill their ideals, but was swiftly ignored when it didn't; on a more meta level, the show was at its best when it had the same relationship with its own convoluted mythology: an aide when it helped tell a cool story, but wisely ignored when it didn't.

But beginning subtly with Voyager, and greatly exasperated by Enterprise, the Federation (and by corralary the mythology) became more important than the sheer joie de vivre of exploring the cosmos. Voyager became so fixated on getting home that all else became subordinated to it; they were no longer looking outward but looking back, quite literally; that, in retrospect, may be why a premise intended to free then from prior mythology only tied them all the more burdensomely to it. Enterprise in turn became so preoccupied with establishing the mythology that they plumb forgot why we ever cared about it in the first place. 

In both cases, decent acting and writing took a backseat to conforming to the Federation mythos, when the priorities should have been reversed. The reboot films, likewise, have been so needlessly preoccupied with reestablishing the original mythology that they've steadfastly ignored what this mythology is even supposed to be doing (i.e. encountering the sublime vastness of the cosmos).


And now I learn that CBS this Fall is at last debuting a new Trek series, Star Trek: Discovery.  Initially I was cautiously optimistic, especially when I read about how director Nicholas Meyers of Star Trek II and VI (e.g. the best ones) was being brought on board; the sub-title Discovery also seems to indicate that this iteration would actually remember what the whole point of Trek was supposed to be (though the fact that it will be shortened to STD betrays a fundamental lack of foresight on their part).  But then I learn that this will also be another prequel, that it "[T]akes events mentioned in previous iterations of Trek but never full explored"--that is, yet another Trek show far too enamored with its own mythology. 

Now, I could be completely wrong, the new show could be great (though the fact that it will only debut on CBS's newfangled subscription streaming service is hardly a rousing endorsement), I would sincerely love to be delightfully surprised.  But I deeply dread that, despite having 10 years to clear out the cobwebs, Discovery is about to repeat the same mistakes as the last two shows.  Show-runner Bryan Fuller may promise openly gay characters and a lead who is not the Captain and what-not, but these are but superficial novelties; in reality, nothing has changed.

But it's easy to complain--the real question is, how could it be fixed?  Well fortunately, David Harris and I are Star Trek nerds, and so by definition we have opinions!  Oh boy, do we have opinions!

But our opinions are rooted in a firm diagnosis: Trek lost its way when its mythology ceased being a means to an end (the joy of exploring outer space) and became a means to an end.  He and I, thus, came up with two contrasting yet I believe complimentary visions for fixing the show's relationship with its own mythology.

David's solution is, intriguingly, to lean into the mythology all the harder.  The ridiculous reboot films, remember, kick off the new time-line with the 24th century destruction of Romulus (Trek's Soviet Union stand-in) by a supernova, which created a blackhole that sent a Romulan mining ship 100 years back in time to wreck havoc upon Kirk's era.  The 2009 reboot movie became about how Kirk gets the crew together to defeat this hyper-advanced menace.  But what the heck was the fall-out of what, in essence, was the destruction of the Soviet Union back in the 24th century?  

David W. Harris proposes Star Trek: Nautilus, a show which would follow a Federation star-ship, the USS Nautilus, on its mission to aide the former Romulan Empire, which, with the loss of its capital, has fragmented into several warring regional powers.  One said fragment has established a bona fide democratic Romulan Republic, and opened formal relations with the Federation.  

The Nautilus would act as an aide to the young Republic, operate as a peace-broker between competing Romulan powers, make contact with the many subjugated worlds recently liberated from Romulan rule, and, most importantly, explore this secretive former-empire.  New and fresh possibilities for Trek's twin-missions of humanitarian-aide and deep-space exploration would be opened up.  

There could even be an over-arching narrative: what caused the supernova that destroyed Romulus in the first place?  What new threat is emerging from deep space, which the Romulans encountered first but could next threaten the Federation?  This premise has the added virtue, I believe, of completely upsetting the balance of power in the Trekverse--abandoning the status quo, in other words--thus forcing the franchise to expend far less time and energy on setting up the mythology, and more instead on using the now-disrupted mythology to generate new story-telling.  The shift might be subtle, but nonetheless essential: the mythology would once again be used in favor of fleshing out the premise, and not vice-versa.

My solution would be, as I said, contrasting yet ultimately complimentary: I would take the wasted premise from Voyager but tweak it.  For if the inherent vice of Voyager was that they became so fixated on getting home that they forgot to explore the cosmos, then I would make sure that my Federation starship ends up stranded on the far-side of the galaxy on purpose (perhaps taking advantage of the unstable wormhole from TNG's "The Price").  They would be sent on a 5-year mission of exploration, to document whatever potential threats may be coming the Federation's way as they make their way back home.

I would entitle it Homerically Star Trek: Odyssey, so as to keep constantly foregrounded in the imaginations of both the writers and the viewers that this show is supposed to be an epic, one wherein they are explicitly to encounter super-powered beings that exceed imagination.  For once, the Trekverse's manifold god-like beings would make perfect sense.  This would not be like Voyager, wherein they prance about as the most advanced starship in 100 light-years, boringly white-man-burdening their way through the Delta quadrant; but rather it would feature the Federation's most advanced warship, the USS Odyssey, constantly finding itself vastly out-matched by gods, super-beings, and dyson spheres--and being the better for it!

Adding nuance to the mission: It has now been over 15 years since DS9 finished the Dominion War, which means that the new senior brass in Starfleet are scarred war-veterans still dealing with lingering PTSD.  (The show could perhaps proffer greater resonance in our post-9/11 world increasingly populated with Iraq and Afghanistan veterans).  This show would have a much-needed redemption arc, then, as a starship manned by scarred and suspicious officers learns to regain their sense of wonder and child-like awe as they encounter the sublimity of the cosmos--they would remember why they joined Starfleet in the first place.  

It would be the same arc as Admiral Kirk's in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Kahn--i.e. the best one. It would begin as a mission to help save the Federation, but transform into a mission to save their own souls--which in turn would still save the Federation, as they help remind humanity, upon their return, of why we ever looked to the stars to begin with.  The Odyssey crew would learn both humility and self-reliance, their own utter puniness and great significance.  (This would likewise be a meta-redemption of the Franchise itself, as the show re-learns what the whole franchise was ever supposed to be about).  

Of course this is all purely speculative: absolutely no one has ever asked either me or David to save Star Trek from itself.  What I hope this proverbial message-in-a-bottle has demonstrated, however, is that the recurrent mistake that the franchise has made since 1996 is to presuppose the Trekverse mythology was what was the most interesting part of the show, when in reality it was the fact that it was a Star Trek--a Trek through the Stars!  That's why any of us ever tuned in!  If the franchise is to be resuscitated, it must remember that first--and make new series accordingly. 

On Beach Slang, On The Other Hand

On the one hand, as many folks have pointed out, Beach Slang's signature song, 2015's "Bad Art & Weirdo Ideas" sounds kinda like Joy Division's 1981 "Ceremony"--which just proves there's nothing new in Rock 'n Roll.  The genre long ago played out the last of its interesting ideas. 

On the other hand, no, as a matter of fact, "Bad Art" doesn't sound like "Ceremony" at all--a repeating 1st and 3rd step is by definition not the same as a repeating 1st, 3rd, and 5th step--and moreover, a melancholic swan song by a suicidaly-depressed 23-year-old certainly does not sound the same as a the power-anthem of a 40-year-old proclaiming his right to feel alive!  (Besides, it actually sounds like The Replacements' "Bastards of Young"--both of which are those rare songs I will regularly listen to on repeat, often to the exclusion of the whole rest of the album).  Like the best art, Beach Slang takes what's old and worn-out, and makes it new again.

On the other hand, maybe this time Rock 'n Roll really is dead: Top 40 is dominated by Hip Hop and Dance Pop--for that matter, so is the Indie World.  Rock's cultural omnipotence has at last gone the way of Jazz, Swing, Blues, and Tin Pan Alley before it--that is, it will continue to find acolytes and practitioners, but never in a manner that totally dominates the musical landscape again. Modern Rock radio stations are dropping like flies, and the ones left over primarily play hits from the '90s, becoming indistinguishable from the Classic Rock stations that have also absorbed the '90s; if they play new songs, it is only those of long-established acts like Weezer or Blink-182 (which were considered second-tier acts even in their hey-days).  Maybe Rock only sounded fresh when it itself was young; at 60+, its time for it to retire.  In this sense, Beach Slang, fronted by a 40-year-old veteran of the '90s punk scene, is but the last, defiant gasp of a dying era. 

On the other hand, these things are cyclical, and folks have been gleefully predicting the death of Rock ever since Decca passed on signing the Beatles cause "guitar bands are on their way out."  Rage Against The Machine recently launched a reunion tour, and it hasn't been graying Gen Xers selling out the tickets but 18-year-olds; the teenagers I teach still obsessively listen to Queen, David Bowie, Led Zeppelin, Metallica, Pearl Jam, System of a Down, and want to talk to me about Kurt Cobain (which intrigues me, because they were born even further away from Cobain's death than I was from John Lennon's).  There is clearly a deep-seated need to Rock that the current market is not filling.  In this sense, Beach Slang does not signal an end, but a beginning--James Alex may be 40 but the rest of the band is much younger--they are the warning shot before the next round of Rock re-surges yet again.

On the other hand, what on Earth do I care whether Rock retains its cultural currency or not?!  I was just complaining a few months ago about how much harder it is to find new music that resonates with my current age; songs about turning 23 certainly do not help me with turning 33.  What's worse, far too many 30- and 40-somethings sing like they're still teenagers, in a misbegotten desire to stay "relevant".  Why the heck would you want to stay relevant with teenagers??  Even teenagers hate being teenagers!  But the list of musicians who know how to actually keep up with their ages is thin:  Andrew Bird, LCD Soundsystem, Sufjan Stevens, Low, Kishi Bashi, TV on the Radio, Sleater-Kinney, Leonard Cohen, maybe Wilco (David Bowie was doing a bang-up job, but then he died).  Beach Slang, then, is a much-needed addition to the pantheon of Rock music by adults for adults--not nostalgia trips.  I don't need Beach Slang to save Rock 'n Roll, but to save me.

On the other hand, Beach Slang is arguably the very type and model for the aforementioned old guys pretending to be kids; as Pitchfork's review of their 2015 debut album notes, "In seven of those songs, James Alex sings the word 'alive,' in three others, he sings 'young,' and there's one song called 'Young and Alive.'"  Geez guys, trying a little hard? And c'mon, that title on their debut, "The Things We Do to Find People Who Feel Like Us"?  A little on the nose, isn't it?  I mean, isn't that what all music's about, finding the songs that will connect us to people who feel the same way we do?  It's not exactly a fresh idea--anymore than any of the other stale ideas on this record.  Whatever happened to nuance, subtlety, playfulness?  And now I learn that their second album (coming out September) is entitled, even more bluntly, "A Loud Bash of Teenage Feelings"--quit trying to relive your youth, man, and age gracefully while you still can.

On the other hand, few folks know how to value their youth more than those who don't have it anymore.  The album's obligatory ballad opens with, "Too young to die/Too late to die young"--those are the lyrics of a man keenly aware of his age.  Here the comparisons to Joy Division are perhaps instructive: 23-year-old Ian Curtis could maybe afford to indulge in such gloominess and darkness precisely because he was so young; death was only frightening because it was so strange, so foreign.  Hence, he had to seek out death directly to touch it, to know it.  But 40-year-old James Alex is sprouting gray hairs, showing wrinkles--he knows he need not seek out death, it will come for him much too soon enough.  His, then, is the music of a man who has decided not to fade gently into the passing of the night, but to rage, rage, against the passing of the light.  He does not want to die, but to live--an incredibly important pick-me-up for the aging.

On the other hand, at the end of the day, they still sound like every other Punk band you've ever heard of--calling theirs "The Best New Replacements Album in 25 Years" is both a compliment and a slam. "Bad Art" may sound different enough from "Ceremony" (not to mention "Bastards of Young"), but it's still not all that different.

On the other hand, at the end of "Bad Art & Weirdo Ideas," there's just that killer line, that all-important affirmation that should never be obscured under irony, sarcasm, or wit, that so many of my community college students need to hear--that maybe Ian Curtis needed to hear--that maybe we all need to hear: "We are not alone, we are not mistakes/Don't whisper now, we're allowed to be loud"--so reads their every lyric sheet, save I swear he actually sings, "We're allowed to be alive..."

We are.

On Alexandre Dumas' 20 Years After

I recently finished Alexandre Dumas' 20 Years After, the 1845 sequel to The Three Musketeers. It takes place during the Fronde in France and the English Civil War--that is, during a time when the world is violently polarized, like now.  In fact, the 4 musketeers end up on opposite sides of the same conflicts: D'artagnan and Porthos with the Cardinal, Aramis and Athos with the Frondists--only to ironically switch around in England, with D'artagnan and Porthos on the side of the Republicans, and Aramis and Athos with the Royalists. Yet they all 4 still remain best friends--that still feels like a very relevant lesson today.

I'd first read Three Musketeers 6 years ago, but I really felt like I needed to read 20 Years After in 2016.

Star Trek Beyond: An Initial, Rudimentary Analysis

This will be really spoiler-heavy, so, you know, you've been forewarned.


In the original Star Trek series, there's an episode where the entire planet is run by a 20th century Roman Empire; another where they all act like 1920s Chicago gangsters; there's also a Nazi planet; one where Kirk gets into hand-to-hand combat with a dude in a giant green lizard suit; one where the Greek God Apollos himself captures the Enterprise with a giant floating hand (which is even referenced at one point in this film!); and another where they encounter two aliens seeking each others' extermination, because one is black on the left side and white on the right side, while the other is black on the right side and white on the left.  It's not subtle.

I remind myself of all this silliness because Star Trek Beyond has Kirk ride a motorcycle in order to liberate a prison camp, and features the Enterprise crew straight-up surf a literal wave of swarming-ships, and destroys them by blasting "Sabotage" by the Beastie Boys--and it's all so ridiculously campy and hilarious, to the point that I can't even tell if its intentional or not--which just might mean that Star Trek Beyond is more in tune with the spirit of the original series than any other film to date.

It's the 50th anniversary of the debut of the original Star Trek this year, and though the franchise has certainly seen worse days (at its 40th, there were no new movies and no TV shows), it's also seen better.  I was a lil' tyke at its 30th, when there were 2 concurrent series airing, TNG had just concluded a critically acclaimed run, TOS was still on heavy rerun rotation, and First Contact was doing gangbusters at the Megaplexes.  Star Trek was in victory lap mode.  The franchise looked unstoppable.  Yet by 2009, it took a drastic reboot by a director who straight up described himself as "more of a Star Wars fan" to bring the series back from the dead.

We Trekkies were all grateful, but what a price we paid! Though Star Trek (2009) did fantastic business with amazing cross-over appeal, it had plot-holes the size of the Grand Canyon (Why the heck would Kirk, ejected into the infinite cosmos, land on not only the one planet, but the one corner of the planet that held Old Spock?!  Why the hell would Kirk be promoted to Captain simply for picking a fight with Young Spock?!  And why in blazes would they introduce Time-Travel and not use it to save Vulcan and Kirk's Dad?!  I've graded C- Freshman English papers with better rigor).  Nevertheless, the box-office receipts had spoken: the characters were fun and the visuals a blast and so that was the way the new movies were to be, even if you had to turn off your brain to enjoy it.

That Trek fans have historically preferred not to turn off their brains appeared to be beside the point.  Nevertheless, the sequel Star Trek Into Darkness at least gestured towards grander "themes" generally, with a rather on-the-nose parable about the dangers of mass-militarization and the atrocities we justify in the name of national defense (ironically, if the film had come out just a few years earlier or later, those themes may have hit home all the harder).  The action was exhilarating and the stakes high enough that it took us slightly-longer this time to start cataloguing this fresh new crop of plot holes (why on earth would a star ship need to hide in an ocean?! And how could a super-advanced society never realize they now had a 300-year-old cure for death?!), with shameless rip-offs added to the stew this time (Khan?  In Another Star Trek 2?  Serious?!  And the villain wanted to get caught?  Again?!).  Though the film also did gangbusters at the box office, it still felt strangely like a failure somehow.  We all breathed a quiet sigh of relief when the director finally left the franchise to direct an actual Star Wars film instead.

But that has still left the fate of the franchise in a rather awkward lurch.  Even with word of a fresh TV series finally coming this Fall (albeit on streaming-services only--hardly a rousing endorsement from CBS), and even with reports that the new film would be written by folks who actually like Star Trek for a change, I do believe it's been at least a dozen years since a new Trek film has been so tepidly anticipated.  I myself straight-up forgot that Beyond was coming out till maybe a month ago, when a friend suggested we go see it together.  The surprisingly positive (albeit reeeaaally qualified) reviews I began seeing last week were literally the first time I exercised even cautious optimism that Beyond might not suck.

Well, did it?  I was initially apprehensive because, as the first trailer indicated, this would be the third time that the Enterprise would be destroyed, as though that were some novel thing--in fact, the first time the Enterprise was destroyed cinematically was also in a Star Trek 3!  It seemed the lazy mistakes of Into Darkness would be repeated.  Moreover, the high-camp action elements, particularly given the director, tempted me to derisively nick-name it Star Trek: The Fast and the Furious.  Nevertheless, though it is doubtless too early to say, and I'll still need to see it again to be sure, Beyond I do believe breaks from its two immediate predecessors in the best way possible: for unlike Star Trek and Into Darkness, Beyond actually improved the more I thought about it!

Just to back-up a second: How many futuristic dystopias can you name off the top of your head?  Hunger Games?  Divergent?  1984?  Brave New World?  Fahrenheit 451?  Soylent Green?  Brazil?  We could go on.  Now, how many genuine utopias can you name?  I'll wait.

Really, the only one in the running--the only one even existing--is the United Federation of Planets.  That's it.  I defy you to name me a second.  It's similar to the Satan Syndrome--everyone can (and does) imagine what Satan must be like; from Milton's Paradise Lost onward, he is one of the most fascinating and fleshed-out characters in Western literature.  Now, what is God like?  Western artists, authors, and Hollywood hacks have banged their heads against the wall for veritable centuries trying to imagine a plausible God.  It's why Dante's Inferno is so much more widely read than Dante's Paradiso.

Degradation, evil, and misery we find so much easier to imagine than genuine goodness and happiness--doubtless because we have so little experience with the latter.  Likewise, Futuristic Dystopias are a dime a dozen, yet still we relentlessly crank them out as though there were something "edgy" or "bold" about them.  Bah!  Dystopias are the easy way out, the lazy way out.  It takes not only real imagination but real audacity to imagine a future for mankind that is genuinely utopic!  Not to mention really difficult, too.  Mark Fisher once said that it is easier today to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism--Star Trek alone has tried to imagine it!

I bring all this up because Star Trek Beyond not only bothers to remember that the Federation is supposed to be a utopia (as opposed to just an idealized United States), but to show it!  When the Enterprise early on docks at Starbase Yorktown, we behold not just a military installation or refueling station (the sort of which we've seen so often on the cheap-sets of Trekdom), but a genuinely gorgeous, open-air, clean, self-sustaining, diverse city living in peace and harmony!

For once, the overly-polished aesthetic of the new Treks serves a purpose: for here at Yorktown, there is no hint of hidden corruption or a seedy underbelly or whatever--simply, this is a model world we would all want to actually live in, a real place where you can walk down the streets without fear of violence, of pollution, of exploitation.  Utopia literally means "nowhere," but here in the deepest depths of nowhere, in empty space, they've built it!  Everyone is healthy.  Everyone is happy.  We see a staggering diversity of races and cultures--both human and alien--thronging the streets, just enjoying each others' company, working together for the common good.  Yorktown is a microcosm for not only the Federation, but of how we all would actually like to live! 

And the bad guy hates that!

Krall spits contemptuously at ideas such as "unity" or "diversity" or "peace" or "working for the common good" or whatever.  For him, conflict, war, and struggle are what bred strength and excellence in the human race (I'm frankly surprised he never quotes Nietzsche, or even Ayn Rand).  He wishes to "save Humanity from itself" by plunging us back into eternal war with an ancient bio-weapon.  A few years ago I might have considered such a villain a little too outlandish to be believable--but I'm now keenly aware that there are a distressing number of voters in America who would prefer to elect a candidate who promises nothing but war and violence, division and segregation, conflict and bullying.

For these people, "Political Correctness"--that is, showing basic respect for minorities different from yourself--is a sign of weakness.  They are radically uninterested in cooperation, which they also consider weakness.  That point was driven home when the Englishman Simon Pegg, Beyond's main-writer, was distressed by the Brexit vote; he saw it as a sign that the Western world is increasingly pushing away from the ideals of cooperation and unity between nations--that is, against the founding principles of the Federation.  Again, we steadfastly refuse to even imagine what a human utopia could look like, let alone work for it; it's just so much easier to imagine--to even want--the opposite.

These voters even all coalesce and congregate around a single narcissistic candidate who preaches the virtues of greed, of selfishness, of living solely for one's self.  Krall literalizes this tendency when we see him suck the life-force out of captive prisoners in order to lengthen his own unnaturally long life. He is self-centeredness personified.

The big reveal about Krall is that he was once (HEAVY SPOILERS) human himself--in fact, he was a veteran of the wars Earth waged before forming the Federation.  (His long-downed ship is the one the Enterprise crew repairs to escape with.)  But whereas the rest of humanity considered the end of wars to be a net-positive, Krall instead felt it a betrayal of his "values"--or of what a previous president called "our way of life."  Krall just wants to Make Humanity Great Again.

My wife opined that even Krall's mode of attack is selfish, as she read in it a commentary on Social Media (the preferred platform of narcissists!); for his swarms of attack-drones are called "Bees"--that is, they create "buzz"--and though they have the appearance of working together, in reality, they are all focused upon a single individual, who swarms them all to do his bidding.

Opposed to him is the crew of the Enterprise, who's principles are that of unity, diversity, and cooperation.  When the ship is destroyed and they are stranded on the planet below, their first instinct is to immediately begin working together to solve their problems.  They pool together all of their various intellects, personalities, experiences, specialties, and expertise to figure out solutions.  They are not masses swarming together to suck the life out of the oppressed, but individuals forming a team where all are equally valued.  They overcome personal differences and refuse to leave anyone behind.  All these things Krall considers weakness--and he was seemingly justified in that assumption by how quickly he destroys the Enterprise.  But cooperation is ultimately how Krall is defeated.

Krall is also the contrast of Kirk specifically--both monosyllabic K name Captains who like motorcycles and the Beastie Boys.  Beyond opens with Kirk feeling a certain malaise about his 5 year mission ("Things are starting to feel a little episodic" he says, in one of the film's many groan-worthy winks); he feels directionless, lost, without clear purpose.  He's trying to find himself.  Krall, however, is the exact opposite; he has a purpose.  A clear purpose.  In fact, too clear of a purpose.  It's maddened him.  Driven him insane.  Made a monster of him.  Literally.  I bring this up because some reviewers have claimed that the Kirk-has-a-quarter-life-crisis thread was ultimately dropped once the action begins; I'm not so sure it was, because if Kirk had found a set purpose, then he would have become a monster, too.

In fact, his resolution by movie's end--to turn down promotion to resume Star Ship Captaining--is an expression to continue not finding himself, to never find resolution, to always keep searching!  And that because he's not inward focused anymore; he's outward now, in the most literal manner possible, flying a rebuilt Enterprise out into the Great Beyond. To quit ever seeking is to cease progressing--also known as the state of being damned.  We've already covered how much easier is to imagine hell than paradise.  It's hard, but the way to imagine heaven is to imagine Eternal Progression [here my Mormonism peaks out], to never assume we know everything or have learned all there is to learn, to always work to bless and save others as well as ourselves, to cease trying to "Take Our Country Back" but to instead "Take Humanity Forward."  Disagreeing with Sartre, Trek does not say hell is other people; stasis is. Those might be the most radical thoughts of all.

Whether or not Star Trek Beyond fully lives up to or does justice to such lofty ideals is another question entirely.  But then again, that a campy ol' sci-fi show should engage with themes way above its pay-grade, almost in spite of itself, is perhaps what renders Beyond the most Star Trek-y film of all.