January 26, 2009

The sad ignoramuses who fall victim to those audacious enough to act “as if”

From my vantage inside the liberal urban bubble of Chicago it’s tough to find people who are overtly against our new president. Nationwide, 66 percent of Americans polled said they feel optimistic about Obama, and in the golden boy’s adopted hometown that percentage is undoubtedly higher. Within the social circles in which I operate, arguments posed against the politician far more frequently revolve around a sense of disenchantment with American politics in general than any idea that Obama’s opponent would have been a better pick. One group of acquaintances does provide me with reports of such sentiments, however: Friends in my hometown of Rock Springs, Wyo., tell me that anti-Obama attitudes are by far the norm, and that racist rhetoric and actions aimed at him and his supporters are commonplace.

During a visit to Rock Springs last September, I hung out with my good friend Dan, an Obama supporter who builds various apparatuses for an oil field equipment supplier. He said that, to most of his coworkers, the 2008 presidential election was even more of a far-gone conclusion than most in the avidly Republican state, and backed up their staunch stances against Obama with such eloquent arguments as, “Why would I vote for Muslim?” and “Just what we need — a nigger in the White House.” I asked Dan via email the week after the election how his coworkers were taking the results, and he replied, “So if I learned anything new during this election season, it’s that I’m a ‘nigger lover.’ At least that’s what everyone at work calls me. It has actually gotten quite unbearable, and pisses me off considering one of my blood cousins is half black. There’s a lot of people thinking Obama’s election means racism is over. I on the other hand am astonished on how rampant it actually is. Some things will never change.”

Dan rules

I spoke on the phone today with another friend who is a lawyer in Rock Springs, and she told me someone down the street from her put a Confederate flag in their living room window the day after the election, where it will probably remain for the next eight years, or until the people there move.

These things all felt particularly poignant later this afternoon while I was watching Ken Burns’ fantastic documentary about Jack Johnson (the boxer, not the hippie songwriter). One hundred years ago, it was virtually unthinkable that a black man would ever be allowed to hold the title of heavyweight champion of the world. Boxing, along with horse racing and baseball, was one of the most-followed sports in the world at this time. In Jim Crow America and pretty much every other white region of the world, the degree of its popularity roughly coincided with that of the idea that people of African descent were inherently inferior in every way to whites. As Johnson, the son of recently freed slaves, emerged as the premier pugilist of his day by pummeling opponent after opponent regardless of their race, he was denied the opportunity to fight for the heavyweight title by a series of white boxers who said they would never give a black man the chance to obtain it. However, in 1908, then-world-champion Tommy Burns succumbed to public pressure and a lucrative purse and agreed to fight Johnson in Australia. Johnson beat Burns easily, becoming the first black heavyweight champion in history. Two years later, former undefeated heavyweight champion James Jeffries was goaded out of retirement to take the title away from Johnson in order to restore white America’s damaged sense of superiority. “I am going into this fight for the sole purpose of proving that a white man is better than a Negro,” Jeffries said. After fourteen rounds in Reno, Jeffries’ eyes had swollen nearly shut, his broken nose has spilled blood all down his front, and he had been knocked down twice. His corner threw in the towel, acknowledging that Johnson had won. Over the next few days race riots tore most major American cities apart.

Jack Johnson was a champion character aside from his skills in the ring. He held a patent for a wrench he invented to help him work on the fast cars he loved to drive, he played the bass cello, read voraciously, and attracted scores of ladies — many of them white — in an age when white mobs lynched black men with startling frequency for nothing more than a glance at a white female. When a white man asked Johnson, as an expert on the subject, why he thought white ladies were so often attracted to black men, Johnson, with a straight face, replied quite perfectly: “Because we eat cold eel, and think distant thoughts.”

On other more serious topics, Johnson was equally on point. One oft-cited quote attributed to him is this: “White people often point to the writings of Booker T. Washington [who argued that blacks should work within the framework of 'separate but equal' until an opportune moment came when they could demand better] as the best example of a desirable attitude on the part of the colored population. I have never been able to agree with the point of view of Washington, because he has to my mind not been altogether frank in the statement of the problems or courageous in his solution to them … I have found no better way of avoiding race prejudice than to act with people of other races as if prejudice did not exist.” [emphasis added]

I have always been a strong advocate of willing your desires into existence. Many of my successes in life have begun with an element of arrogance — or “audacity,” as some would put it — which I carried with me into tasks I was entirely unqualified to undertake, but that I completed with bravado regardless. Uncountable failures stem directly from underconfidence. By pretending an unappealing situation does not exist, we condition those who constitute it to accept the change we wish to create.

Christopher Hitchens discusses this idea in his book Letters to a Young Contrarian. He writes:

“In the fairly long interval between 1968 and 1989 — in other words in that period where many of the revolutionaries against consumer capitalism metamorphosed into ‘civil society’ human-rights activists — there were considerable interludes of quietism and stasis. And it was in order to survive those years of stalemate and realpolitik that a number of important dissidents evolved a strategy for survival. In a phrase, they decided to live ‘as if.’ [Note Johnson's use of this exact phrasing in his statement about Washington.]

“I’m never certain which author can claim the credit for this mild-sounding but actually deeply subversive and ironic decision. Vaclav Havel, then working as a marginal playwright and poet in a society and state that truly merited the title of Absurd, realised that ‘resistance’ in its original insurgent and militant sense was impossible in the Central Europe of the day. He therefore proposed living ‘as if’ he were a citizen of a free society, ‘as if’ lying and cowardice were not mandatory patriotic duties, ‘as if’ his government had actually signed (which it actually had) the various treaties and agreements that enshrine universal human rights. He called this tactic ‘The Power of the Powerless’ because, even when disagreement can be almost forbidden, a state that insists on actually compelling assent can be relatively easily made to look stupid.

“One could add further examples. In the late Victorian period, Oscar Wilde — master of the pose but not a mere poseur — decided to live ‘as if’ moral hypocrisy were not regnant. In the Deep South in the early 1960s, Rosa Parks decided to act ‘as if’ a hardworking black woman could sit down on a bus at the end of the day’s labor. In Moscow in the 1970s, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn resolved to write ‘as if’ an individual scholar could investigate the history of his own country, and publish his findings. They all, by behaving literally, acted ironically. In each case, as we know now, the authorities were forced first to act crassly and then to look crass, and eventually to fall victim to stern verdicts from posterity.

“All I can recommend, therefore, (apart from the study of these and other good examples) is that you try to cultivate some of this attitude. In an average day, you may well be confronted with some species of bullying or bigotry, or some ill-phrased appeal to the general will, or some petty abuse of authority. If you have a political loyalty, you may be offered a shady reason for agreeing to a lie or a half-truth that serves some short-term purpose. Everybody devises tactics for getting through such moments; try behaving ‘as if’ they need not be tolerated and are not inevitable.”

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January 24, 2009

This is your face on video games

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January 18, 2009

Shame on the macho men

I was at the Empty Bottle the other night with some friends when I found two of them embroiled in a losing game of pool against two meatheads — real Anglo-Saxons, one with a shaved head and the other with tattoos on his neck. The apes were beating my friends pretty badly and getting excited about it. After the game the Alpha Anglo started hassling my friends about playing another game for twenty bucks. He had bulging eyes and thick veins running up his neck. His arms were muscled and sinewy and hairless. I told my friend to take the bet, but with me as his partner. The ape said something about how if I was some sort of shark he would beat us up with his pool cue in the parking lot after we left the bar.

I found myself delighted when our competitor came back just before his break and said that his girlfriend had mandated that we lower the bet to ten bucks — I gathered she was bankrolling his wager. I had seen them conferring moments earlier and imagined their conversation being something along the lines of, “Babe, you know I’ll beat these pussies.”

The Alpha man broke and didn’t make anything. I ran five balls and then sewed up Alpha’s partner with a savvy safety shot. The partner still managed to make three balls before my partner knocked our last two in, and then the eightball. The game was short and sweet and devastating to the egos of our testosteroney victims. The lead Mongoloid clapped ten bucks into my hand with a frown and a mumble, and my friend and I relished breaking into the circle of wound licking that the two players and their girlfriends had made so we could shake their hands under the pretense of good sportsmanship. The girlfriend of the lead male was scowling at her mate. The moron had lost her ten bucks and looked like a loser. He was thoroughly shamed. He was an asshole, and probably will be his entire life. He was cocky and macho and not smart, and it was a pleasure to make him look like a pitiful ass in front of the girl he wanted to impress.

I love making people who threaten me with physical violence look like idiots in front of their girlfriends. It’s a much-preferable retaliatory method than actually punching back.

For some reason these sorts of things happen often around pool tables, where I spend quite a bit of time. Another instance along the same lines happened in Lawrence, Kan., a couple of years ago, and also involved a tough guy trying to look hot for his lady, who undoubtedly let him sleep alone that night.

I was making my rounds around an eight-ball game against my friend Tom, who was at the front of the bar buying some beers, when I heard from a booth near the end of the pool table, “Hey, nice fucking shirt!” The guy was staring at me. I looked down at my relatively tight and high-necked all-over-print t-shirt featuring San Francisco landmarks, looked back at him, and said thanks. I really did think it was a nice shirt. Still do. I continued shooting pool, then the guy said, louder, “Nice shirt you fucking faggot!” making sure I knew for certain he was not complimenting me.

Okay, here we go.

I stood in front of the booth in which the yelling dude had sat with a girl next to him and a guy and a girl across. Yelling dude rose, stood a few inches from my face, attempted to establish whether or not I had a problem with him (although I was sure we were past that mattering at this point, as I explained to him), and he went on to air his grievance: that I, in the process of leaning down to shoot a pool ball into a pocket, had stuck my ass in his face right in front of his girlfriend.

Ah, the girlfriend ticket. She was sitting with a facade of nonchalance in the booth, looking nice and mediocre. I started making sarcastic remarks to the man seething in front of me. His friend was just over his shoulder, ready to pummel my face, and just as the situation was about to explode into sloppy, drunken violence, my friend Tom walked up and smashed a full glass bottle of beer on the edge of the booth table.

This may sound crazy or irrational — the act of smashing a glass bottle — but it was actually the most perfect action anyone could have taken in this situation. No one who really wants to stab a person with a jagged stump of bottle breaks that bottle on a table. If someone is really up to stabbing, they break the bottle first on their adversary’s head, then commence thrusting whatever’s left into their skin. Breaking a bottle on a table is a threat — but a pretty tame one. It’s meant to diffuse a situation — to let the people involved know that things could get very serious momentarily, and that they should consider the far-too-infrequently-considered-in-drunken-bar-situations option of thinking before they act. Did this guy really want to fight me because I stuck my ass in his face on accident? Probably not, but he was going to do it anyway, until Tom smashed a bottle and made things potentially consequential.

After the bottle broke, the guy standing in front of me — whose gaze formerly purveyed totally concentrated, manly aggression — assumed a much more hesitant continence. Beer from the bottle had splashed all over his girlfriend — admittedly an unfortunate case of collateral damage — and she said something about glass in her eye, which apparently was not that serious because she was fine, albeit shocked, moments later. The attention of the entire bar turned toward us. Tom dropped the bottle stump, I stood my ground, and the bar’s security goons descended to separate the involved parties. I explained to them my side of the story, in which I was a victim of jockish antagonization, and they ushered the two aggressors out the back door, their ladies in tow. Tom and I were instructed to finish the unbroken bottle of beer and leave quietly out the front.

The guy who had tried to fight me was a buffoon. I am dismayed that his girlfriend was covered in beer and may or may not have gotten a shard of bottle in her eye. But, in the end, it probably taught her a lesson: Don’t continue to date the moron who caused this situation in the first place. As Tom and I ambled on to our next destination, gleeful from our victory over a stupid ass and energetic from the excitement, I could only imagine the defeated tough guy stomping down the alley home, ignoring his irate girlfriend’s repeated admonishment: “What the fuck were you thinking?”

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January 9, 2009

Nami Mun

An article that resulted from an interview with Nami Mun and the reading of her book, Miles From Nowhere. This originally appeared in Time Out Chicago

Nami Mun admits she isn’t a natural writer. She says telling the story of Joon, the teenage runaway at the center of her debut novel, Miles From Nowhere, was something she felt she simply had to do. Writing was a slow, meticulous process, during which she became intimately acquainted with the young cast-outs, queers and addicts who populate her book. Each character is the result of a determined and imaginative effort that, if somewhat involuntary, was personal and organic, as if they sprung from her own life.

Miles From Nowhere follows 13-year-old Joon from a broken home in the Bronx out into the jungle of pre-Giuliani New York. When the transition to life in the States cripples her Korean-immigrant parents’ marriage, Joon abandons them for days of danger and escapades among her new homeless peers. She dabbles in prostitution, falls in love repeatedly, obtains and loses a string of odd jobs, and swims through a flood of drugs.

In conversation, Mun cannot stress enough that she thinks her book is hopeful, despite its rapes, abortions and depravities. The optimism she maintains shines out from the text in both quick flashes and prolonged, subtle glows. Mun says this effect springs from the research of marginalized people she conducted after she wrote the story’s first draft.

“I’d watch documentaries or I’d read letters that teenage runaways would write to their parents—these little tiny artifacts,” says Mun, who now teaches creative writing at Columbia College Chicago. “And what I got from them is this sort of tone, where it wasn’t all just harsh realities and cruel and painful existence—there’s some really funny, weird, magical things that can happen when you’re living in the margins.”

Mun, who was a teenage runaway in New York herself, adamantly denies that the episodes in Miles From Nowhere reflect her actual past. Her memories served as entry points, she says—“some detail or setting I had experienced myself, something about the carpet or the lighting”—and from there she followed her imagination. She summons Rainer Maria Rilke’s credo to explain her impulse: “A work of art is good if it has sprung from necessity.”

Maybe more than a writer, Mun admits, she’s a reviser. While other authors may enjoy the initial creative burst, she relishes the trimming and reworking of words.

“I used to think it was this writerly thing,” she says, “but it turns out that your brain secretes some chemical when you finish a task, and it makes you feel good. So I think it’s actually just physiological. With the revision process, I swear that every time I take a word out, that chemical gets secreted. I’m like, ‘Yes! That is the sentence I wanted!’ ”

Her attention to detail pays off. The sound and rhythm of her sentences enable her to convey the deadpan of a jaded teen in a terrifying world with understated poeticism: “One time I rode on a bus that ran a red light and crashed into a family wagon, killing the baby in the backseat.” Sometimes, her language is just plain lovely: “It was sunny and raining. Blades of white light cut through the clouds and shined on the glassy tubes of rain as they streaked the air and tapped my jean jacket.”

Mun says she never meant to be a writer. But as the short stories she jotted down—while working odd jobs—began to coalesce into what she thought were worthwhile pieces, she shopped them around to literary journals. One of these was the Evergreen Review, whose editor, Barney Rosset of Grove Press fame, published her first story and encouraged her to continue.

An M.F.A. from the University of Michigan and a handful of awards later, Mun is a writer, whether she meant to be or not.

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January 1, 2009

La apertura goreteña

The Goreteños Invade Chicago art show is up now at the Metal Shaker, and will stay that way until Jan. 19. Some of the pieces may be taken down on nights when Ronato, the guy who books bands at the bar and who helped us arrange the show, isn’t there. Ronato doesn’t trust some of the bartenders who work at the Metal Shaker because he had a wicked Halloween poster hung up on the wall and someone stole it, presumably with the help (or at least ignorant inattentiveness) of the bar’s employees. We nailed to the wall all the pieces that are in wooden frames, so those will be up for the duration, as will the ones that are behind the bar, but the others may be taken down on nights when there aren’t shows. I just got back to Chicago from a trip out West for the holidays (stay tuned for details about my infiltration of a Scientologist storage facility construction site), so I haven’t checked in on the show since its opening, which took place on Dec. 19 (photos below). I got a new camera for xmas and plan to post some better pictures of the art soon.

LA APERTURA

It’s Miller time:

de Agustin (arriba) y Putrid:

dos de Agustin:

de Piraña (arriba) y Putrid:

dos de Putrid:

dos de Diente (arriba y la izquierda) con Piraña abajo:

La grande de Piraña, con Agustin, Piraña y Diente al lados:

PUNKS AND DRUNKS:

the inimitable Mr. Masterson:

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December 22, 2008

One night in Salt Lake City (to my absentee hostess, MJN)

Dear Melinda J. Nevarez,

The following is a letter of disclaimer I suggest you present to future guests to your home based on my experience of staying at your house last night. While I appreciate your hospitality immensely, something like this would have gone a long way toward making my stay more comfortable and enjoyable.

Yours,

Nathan C. Martin

+++

DISCLAIMER:

Dear friend/relative/train-hoppin’ hobo to whom I gave my number last time you stopped through town on your way on the rails out West,

Thank you for choosing to stay at my home during your visit to Salt Lake City. This means a lot to me, because it indicates that I am one of your less anal-retentive friends that is still cool enough to allow such things to happen, while so many of our former cohorts have become old and lame and use excuses like, “I have to work early in the morning, and you might wake the baby,” when asked if a friend can crash his/her two dogs, smelly backpack, bandmates, random bar drunks, and startlingly unwashed body upon their furniture. I appreciate this greatly.

However, instances in the past have urged me to present all prospective guests with the following disclaimer, which I hope will clear up any confusion during the ridiculously simple process of occupying my home for a short amount of time for the purposes of free warmth and shelter.

This particular disclaimer is intended for guests who will be staying at my house while I am out of town on one of my raucous escapades. If you believe this is not your case and that you may have received this situation-specific disclaimer in error, feel free to contact me and I will provide you with an alternate version.

1) Make sure that I have not moved. I am of the ramblin’ vagabond variety, prone to up and leave whatever dwelling I currently occupy at a moment’s notice. Although it is unlikely that I will neglect to inform you that I have moved since the last time we saw each other, this has happened in the past. Before you pick up the key to my place from our bearded mutual friend, simply ask: “You live at the same place as last time I visited, right?” This will prevent such embarrassing situations as you standing in my old, empty apartment asking me via cell phone where the hell the bed went, while I try to direct you downstairs to my new bedroom through the door to the left of the kitchen, which, in my old apartment, is the door to the broom closet, in which, as you will discover after a thorough inspection, has no hidden staircase.

2) Remember the address to my apartment. If you do find yourself stumbling around confusedly in the apartment I am currently in the process of moving out of, and we clear up on the phone what has happened (after we both assume momentarily that the other has totally gone insane), pay close attention when I tell you the address of my new place. This will save you the trouble of walking into someone else’s home one block north of my new abode, and having to scurry quietly out after announcing your presence to a blaring television and hearing a startled man-cough come from the bedroom in reply. Such situations are pleasant for no one, and can be easily avoided by paying attention.

3) Bring your own utensils, and everything else. Since I am in the middle of a move, it is likely that there will be absolutely nothing in my new house to assist in the comfort of your stay. Things that you will probably not find there include: dishes, toilet paper, furniture, a shower curtain, and food, among many others. If you show up in the middle of the night after twelve hours of travel and try to cook a frozen pizza, you will likely be required to pull it from the oven using a keychain and a sock, onto the box in which it was sold to you, where you can let it cool until it’s touchable enough to pull apart with your fingers into manageable portions. I do have a bed, but it consists of two separate pieces: the mattress, which sits barren on the floor of my room, and the bedding, which has been lying in a pile of sog and mildew in the washing machine for three days.

4) Believe me when I warn you about locking yourself out. If I say to you, “Watch out for the front door, because it’s really easy to lock yourself out,” it is because this is a real-world problem that I have had to deal with personally, and it sucks. The problem is exacerbated when you lock not only your keys in the house, but your cell phone, too. However, if you do not heed my warning and find yourself stupefied at your own ignorance on my porch in the late hours of a December night, do not tromp immediately off into the darkness to look for help or curl up under your overcoat. My house is old and not airtight, and in fact I am accustomed to leaving the window to the living room closest to the kitchen unlocked. You might have to scale a few feet of rock wall and tear through some plastic insulation, but this small feat of acrobatics is much preferable to sleeping outside.

5) If all else fails… If you, like one of my hapless friends who stayed at my home last December while I was away in California, have the great misfortune of arriving in Salt Lake City late after a long day of travel, first go to the nearly vacant apartment I am in the process of moving out of, then march into the home of some poor hippie schmuck whose address bears close resemblance to mine, then want to cook some food but find not a fork or plate to aid you, and then lock yourself out and have to crawl back in through the window, there is still comfort to be found in my fridge, because though completely void of food, it almost always is populated by some beers. The keychain that holds my house key has a bottle opener on it, and after some rest on the floor with a couple of brewskies, you won’t even mind falling asleep beneath a comforter that is still noticeably damp.

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December 17, 2008

Goreteños part II

Tom Masterson and I bring you yet another installation of bitchin’ art from our groady punk rock friends from Buenos Aires. This time, the show is at Chicago’s infamous motherfuckin’ Metal Shaker, the metalist bar in the land, and runs from Dec. 19-Jan. 19. Opening party on Friday. See flyer.

This lady will serve the drinks:

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December 13, 2008

Quimby’s is the best book store in Chicago

The following originally appeared as part of a cross-promotion between STOP SMILING and Quimby’s Bookstore.

Quimby’s Bookstore is a haven for the literate eclectic. Comic book enthusiasts and fiction aficionados feel equally at home among the scattered racks and tables stacked high with printed guides to everything from radical poetry to political philosophy, craftivism handbooks to macabre art. Though not short in any sense of gems straight from the professional printer, Quimby’s collection of handmade zines and chapbooks has made it an international destination for those who relish the underground network of DIY publishing. In the point-and-click era, Quimby’s remains a major hub for those who stay true to the write-print-fold-staple-send (as in, with a stamp) method.

Quimby’s opened in 1991 in Chicago’s Wicker Park neighborhood with a mission statement penned by original owner Steven Svymbersky: “I really want to carry every cool, bizarre, strange, dope, queer, surreal, weird publication ever written and published … because I know you’re out there and you just want something else, something other, something you never even knew could exist.”

Seventeen years later, Quimby’s is based around the corner from its original location and operates under the stewardship of Chicago Comics owner Eric Kirsammer. But even as Wicker Park has morphed from a sort of dingy bohemia into a host for chic boutiques and bank branches, Quimby’s has remained relatively unchanged. Chicagoans come to find the newest issues of their favorite independent publications, most of which Quimby’s sell on consignment, and visitors from around the world seek it out. (Quimby’s manager, Liz Mason, with tongue planted firmly in cheek, said the store is something of “a tourist destination for cool people.”)

Quimby’s fiction selection is relegated to only 12 shelves, but the denseness of its quality makes one wonder how the planks stay fastened to the walls. Five steps sideways can move your eyes over titles by Sam Lipsyte, Will Self, Dave Eggers, John Fante and Ed Park. Mason explained that the process of curating the fiction stacks is entirely up to the employees, whose sensibilities are largely in line with those of the clientele.

Besides its role as bookseller, Quimby’s also offers its space to an array of book-related events. Whether it’s Timothy Archibald presenting photographs and anecdotes from his book on homemade pleasure devices, Sex Machines, or members of the Temporary Services collective describing their tribulations dealing with penal authorities during the creation of Prisoners’ Inventions, each occasion offers its own delightful bafflement.

During a stop at Quimby’s on a recent reading tour for her novel, Vacation, Deb Olin Unferth told the audience, “When I lived in Chicago, I came to Quimby’s all the time, and I thought it was the coolest place on earth. … I was definitely not cool enough to be in here. So when they invited me to give a reading, I was like, ‘Wow, I have reached the pinnacle. I am officially cool now.’ But when I showed up, I felt strongly that I still wasn’t cool enough to be here.”

Don’t let the shop’s coolness dissuade you. Visit Quimby’s at 1854 W. North Avenue in Chicago, or online at www.quimbys.com.

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December 9, 2008

Nate’s News and Updates

From the Editors:

As you may or may not have noticed, I have been neglecting my blog. I have a myriad of excuses, most of which deal with me having a full-time job now, plus projects on the side. As a sad replacement for an actual new post, I will do what lots of other bloggers do an tell you, dear Grating Space followers, what I have been up to while not writing here.

1) The job. It’s at a magazine called Stop Smiling. You may have heard of it, if from nowhere else than this blog. I don’t have a job title. I do too many things. Today I called myself a marketing associate when I was writing an email to a fancy art hotel in Miami to see if they would trade some ads for credit and buy some copies of the print magazine to put in their fancy art rooms so their fancy art guests can enjoy it while they stay there. But I am more than a marketing associate. Much more. My editors have no idea what they will call me in the masthead of the new issue. I do too much. I’m too diverse. I told one of them today that when I got my first low-level magazine job at SLUG, my name in the masthead was labeled “Office Bitch.” My parents were so proud.

One thing you might keep up on is the blog on the Stop Smiling homepage, where I post most every day. Recent entries of mine there include “The City of Big Shoulders Slumps,” “Where’s the Latin Love,” and “Unexpected Bounties.” The blog on the homepage links to an actual Stop Smiling WordPress page, where you can read all the brilliant things I come up with in the morning after drinking coffee and reading the news on the clock.

A couple of weeks ago I went to DC to throw the release party of the Stop Smiling DC Issue. It was my first business trip, and a total success. As I sat on the plane waiting to fall asleep across three empty seats on a severely underbooked Southwest flight, I couldn’t help but think of Ed Norton’s character in Fight Club on his business trips, and how he probably wished he was headed to hang out with Ian Svenonius, Thomas Frank, and Anwan Glover each time he boarded a plane for business. Lucky for me, I didn’t have to wish. I also got to see my dear friend Suse, who is by far the coolest East German I know, and hang out in super sweet bars that were filled with both white people and black people, which is an anomaly in Chicago, the most stupidly segregated city in the country.

I will have a couple of pieces coming out in the next issue of the print mag, which comes out in February. They are an interview with Natasha Wimmer, who translated The Savage Detectives and 2666; my interview with her will be part of a larger Roberto Bolaño mega section, which also includes the last interview the author ever did, which we scored from Mexican Playboy. I also wrote reviews of a good documentary and a bad book. Expect versions of this written material to appear on Grating Space. For past work I’ve done for Stop Smiling and copied and pasted into this blog, go here.

2) I’ve also managed to land my first Chicago freelance gig, a feature article on author Nami Mun for Time Out Chicago. I’m reading her new book right now and must say it’s pretty alright. Mun was a teenage runaway in New York City, and her novel, Miles from Nowhere, is about a teenage runaway in New York City. Fancy that. The most satisfying aspect of it is that, as Mun has said in interviews, she feel like she wanted to write the book, she felt like she had to write it. One can sense this from the text. Bataille argues that this is really the only way one can create good fiction, and I tend to agree with him. Those of us untested souls who only really, really want to write a good story are out of luck until some shit hits some fan.

I’ll post the Mun piece when it’s up on the Time Out site.

3) In case you’re not yawning already, there’s more. I’m curating another art show for my friends from Buenos Aires here in Chicago, this time at the city’s premiere heavy metal bar: The Metal Shaker. It’s totally rad. The opening is on Dec. 19, which means I should have already made a flyer and sent out a press release, but I have not. Consider this the initial publicity campaign. The Argentine artists are named Diente, Piraña and Agustin Croxatto (I’ve written abou them before here and here), and they will be showing with some American metal artists, Erik Pertl and Tom Crites. Some wicked punk/metal bands are going to play the opening. Maybe some goats will be slaughtered on site. Who knows? If you’re in Chicago on Dec. 19, let’s go.

4) I went to Denver to hang out with my family for Thanksgiving. They are all doing well, thank you. My aunt and uncle are giving me their heavy bag for Christmas, so come spring I’ll be all diesel and you suckas best watch your backs. I also picked out a selection of books I will receive from my aunt who finds it easier to give me money and let me do my own shopping for myself, rather than tell her what I want and have her buy it, or not tell her what I want and, consequentially, not get what I want for Christmas, which would be an American tragedy. The books I will receive are:

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
Journey to the End of the Night by Louis-Ferdinand Celine
Letters to a Young Contrarian by Christopher Hitchens
What Can I Do When Everything’s On Fire? by Antonio Lobo Antunes
Hopscotch by Julio Cortazar

So, if you wonder in January what I’m up to, I’ll probably have my nose in one of those. None of them are written by a white American. This was on purpose. No, none of them are written by women. So sue me. I tout Rebecca Curtis, Deb Olin Unferth, Gertrude Stein and Amy Hempel to everyone I meet. Every. Single. Person. All the time. They are so fucking sick of hearing me go on and on about Curtis this and Unferth that and “So, I was reading The Gradual Making of the Making of Americans the other day,” that they have begun to physically threaten me and, on occasion, act upon those threats after I refuse to stop extolling the virtues of the sentences in “Nashville Gone to Ashes” — their precision and musicality, their rhythms and descriptions. I was getting on the bus yesterday and the driver reminded me of the homeless man in the backseat in one of my favorite stories in Twenty Grand, “To the Interstate,” so I told him so and explained to him what I was talking about when he said to me, “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” and while I was doing it the woman behind me began to complain about the weight of her groceries and the coldness of the air from the street blowing in through the bus door, which was open because there were even more people standing behind her, blocking it from being shut without some sort of mangling or minor accident. She said her produce was about to burst through the bottom of her plastic bag and, restraining myself from commenting on the fact that if she had enough money to afford that much fruit in this economy then she damned-well had enough cash to buy herself a decent durable and reusable grocery bag, I continued to describe to the driver what I meant by telling him he reminded me of the man in the backseat in the Rebecca Curtis story, and he yelled at me to shut the fuck up and move toward the rear or get off his goddamned bus before he punched my pointy nose straight back into my ugly face. The woman with the heavy bag of food began to swing it against my leg and to my surprise it did actually seem heavy enough to complain about, but as I feel the urge to tell everyone I come across about these amazing female authors — an urge that literally burns in me until it blackens the inside of my skin in the summer and makes me look like I have a sun tan — I kept going. I detailed the plot to him, about the little girl and her sister, their escape from the youth home. The trickery of the car doors that would not lock. The fact that the little sister said she hated kissing. Someone shoved the woman with the groceries into my back and she fell over, sprawled across the yellow line you’re not supposed to cross while the bus is in motion. The driver put his rig in park and helped the woman into the handicapped seat at the very front, then turned to me and put his thick hands around my slim, white throat and squeezed until I was no longer capable of producing the necessary air from my lungs to continue to give these unappreciated women their proper praise. The people who had been waiting in the bus doorway and outside on the sidewalk pressed their fleeced and scarved bodies into the vehicle until I was mashed, the driver’s hands still around my neck, against the Plexiglas partition that separates the passengers from the attention of whoever is operating the machine, as more and more of them crammed in.

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November 8, 2008

This magic moment

We sat on a bench along the bike path that overlooks Lake Michigan finishing a pint of bourbon before we rode the final stretch down to Grant Park. I was in the middle, between my friends Tom and Beth, my arms sprawled across the top of the back rest in both directions. The last we knew, Obama was up in the polls substantially but McCain had just won Texas’ 34 electoral votes.

I had sent a text message that morning to all my friends in swing states that said, “I have tickets to see Obama in Grant Park tonight. Please help make sure I don’t attend a mass suicide.”

We immersed ourselves into the throng along Congress Parkway in downtown Chicago. We stopped to dance next to people beating on buckets, but otherwise walked with the flow of tens of thousands across the bridge that spans the train tracks toward the entrance gates. We entered the park and realized we were headed into the non-ticket area, so we turned to walk back to the street.

I have video of this stretch of our night. It’s what you’d imagine — a view from the eye of a camera held in a shaky hand that shows men and women in suits and hoodies and gala dresses and afros and finger waves and wing tips and combat boots and Barack Obama paraphernalia of every variety, almost all smiles and songs in the unseasonably warm November night.

As we approached the corner around which we would find the entrance for those of us fortunate enough to have obtained tickets, we could hear John McCain’s voice on the loudspeakers positioned at the south end of the park. We could not make out what he was saying. Near a barricade several people wearing yellow security jackets were huddled together along with a handful of random others. One security agent was holding a tiny portable television, like the one Bart used to appease a murderous Homer at the end of The Simpsons Halloween parody of The Shining. We asked what was happening.

“McCain’s giving his concession speech.”

A feeling of surreal elation welled up in me that has yet to completely subside four days later. The three of us scrambled through the crowd, stating to many whom we passed, in a manner that seemed like we were trying out the phrase in our mouths to see how it felt, that McCain had conceded. Obama had won.

True to the form of people like ourselves who have attended event after ticketed event as a regular part of our young lives, we cut in the enormous line to enter Grant Park about 200 people from the back. It was moving quickly anyway — word had spread that a victory speech was imminent — and the virtue of polite patience does not often cross the minds of those who have just had a spotlight eradicate the dark vision of the future of American politics they had held for their entire adult lives.

I had a ticket that admitted me and one guest. I had heard there would be metal detectors, had been instructed not to bring bags or bottles, but when the three of us reached the point at which police were taking tickets we walked in easily, noting the squad of mounted CPD officers whose eyes, through plexiglas riot helmet visors, all said, “We’ll let you in without hassle, but you know what will happen if you get out of hand.”

We danced some more inside. It bummed some people out. Obama gave his speech. You know all about that. My cell phone exploded with calls from friends and family across the country.

“Are you there? What’s it like?”

“I can’t talk now. It’s beautiful.”

Today on an NPR segment the host had gathered sound bytes from people who were asked what song the election’s outcome made them think of. It will be made into a mix and sold on the Weekend America website. If I was asked to add a track, it would be “This Magic Moment” — the Lou Reed version that plays on Lost Highway when Balthazar Getty first sees Patricia Arquette in the mechanic garage. It was that cinematic. Looking back, I can picture all of us bunched together around that tiny television with McCain’s face in staticky black and white, then the camera pans outward and around in a spiral, up into the sky as if lifted by a fast-moving crane, so we can see the mass of celebrators, the jumbotrons, the cordoned-off downtown avenues, the Chicago skyline, the Secret Service helicopters, and finally the empty black of the lake reflecting the blinking lights on the top of the Sears Tower, and a smattering of stars shining through the smog and whatever clouds remained in the mostly clear night, hanging there like cotton.

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