LA Weekly

Lost of feelings to get to.

First off, Jim Ladd. Jim Ladd is a true American cornball. God bless him. Sure, his musical tastes haven't grown past Tom Petty, but he still believes, you know what I mean? He believes in the power of music to affect the atmosphere and the other night, when I was driving home from a friend's house, a friend who is undergoing a gnarly procedure to hopefully help his Hep C, I was feeling really bad about the atmosphere. I have another friend on the other coast who is undergoing heavy chemo and radiation to deal with a really bad cancer situation, and, of course, there was the Virginia Tech situation, and shit just feels really bad. It feels like a classic Didionesque time of paranoia and fear and bad tidings, and there was Jim Ladd. He seemed to be feeling the same way, but he was trying to do what he could about the situation, playing music he believed to be transformational. I caught a couple of songs, songs that seemed only tangentially related to the sickness in the air, Bruce Springsteen's dark and erotic "Candy's Room" and the Cult's epic "She Sells Sanctuary" and while nothing in the songs' lyrics could be tied back to what I, or maybe even he, was feeling, both songs were perfect salves at the moment. They helped me feel a little defiant, a little steeled, a little hopeful that as long as there is meaningful music, music with heart and committment, no matter what the content of the songs themselves, there's reason to believe, or at least a source from which to gain strength. And that's what music can do, still.

Which brings me, sort of, to American Idol. I hate American Idol. Not because I'm some snob who thinks the music is tripe and that the whole thing is some corporate-engineered hoax, which it is, of course -- if you aks me, nobody has come from American Idol and contributed much of anything except commerce to the world -- but because the show sucks. It's an overlong, boring, mediocre beauty pageant set to Muzak. More importantly, it often pre empts good shows on Fox, like Bones and House, two of the only shows I look forward to watching.

As for Alec Baldwin, and the call to his daughter that's currently taking over the talk shows, a call in which he seemed really pissed at her for some phone-related nonsense, and the content of which was leaked in some kind of divorce or custody hearing (I don't know, or don't care). What's the big deal? He sounded like a pissed off dad to me and as far as I know, he had reason to be pissed. Who knows what nonsense the kid was up to? I know, people are going to say the call was abusive (he called her a pig, or something) and mean and bad parenting, etc., and she was just a kid, etc. You know what? Twelve-olds are kids, sure, but they're also quite capable of getting up to a lot of nonsense and sometimes they'll piss off a dad, or a mom. My mom decked me once. My dad was always, as Baldwin did, threatening to fly, drive or molecularly transfer to wherever I was at the time to straighten me out (as Baldwin did to his daughter). You know what? I was scared he would, because he often did, and he didn't give a fuck how badly he embarassed me in front of whomever I was getting up to nonsense or mischief with. What kind of nonsense is a 12 or 13 year old kid capable of? Well, plenty. And fear of repercussions probably kept me from getting in any more than I did, which was plenty.

The NRA, whoever they are, must be the most selfish people on earth. They value their right to hollow-point bullets, like the VA Tech killer used, over the safety of their children... or at least other people's children. Talk about eating your young. Give me Alec Baldwin any day.

...Okay, I just heard the voicemail message to his daughter in full. He's not going to win father of the year, or at least not on that day, but still, I'll take him over the NRA.

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Words can't express the sorrow and horror and the fact that it happend just days before the anniversary of Columbine only makes it that much more depressing. Deepest sympathies to the victims, their families, the school and our country. Very near the top of the white house's statement was a defense of our country's easy access to guns -- a spokesperson saying that while the president defends the right to bear arms, he thinks it should be borne lawfully. Good one, guys. The fact that the white house feels the need to defend plentiful guns n ammo for everyone right after this tragedy is a fine reminder of the sickening place our culture is at. Thanks for that. It's an obvious thing to do, but it's really hard not to view this in context of the overall degradation of our culture, you know movies like Saw, etc., video games that try to top each other for gore and violence. That kind of thing. Sad stuff.

Here's what my colleague, Rena, wrote about her surreal experience of this tragedy.

At 8:30am Monday morning, on the way to photograph a suspected serial killer at L.A.’s Criminal Justice building, I heard an NPR reporter say that one person was killed by gunfire at Virginia Tech, and that the assailant hadn’t been found.

One person?  I thought to myself.  It was probably a crime of passion. Someone got mad. Someone cheated on someone else, someone stole their roommate’s guitar.  Maybe there was a kid on too much PCP cramming for finals.  Then the reporter said the shooting had happened a day after a campus bomb threat, and that the students were fleeing their classes in panic.

Those lucky slackers, I thought.  I used to love milking bomb threats in college—they were consistently a perfect excuse to play hooky.

Inside the People vs. Chester Turner courtroom, I waited around to take a fetching portrait of a monster.  As he was walked in, I searched for a good angle, and observed the defense lawyer smile with his client, laugh with him, pat him on the back.  Such is the occupation of a Criminal Defense Attorney.  I rolled my eyes quietly.

On the elevator ride down I got a call from my father.  “Did you hear about Viriginia Tech?  Ten students were killed.”  “Ten?”   I asked, “I thought it was one.  What happened to the gunman?”  “They haven’t found him,” Dad said.  “I can’t believe it but they haven’t found him yet.”

Down on the lobby patio I managed to join the mob of paparazzi snapping pictures of Phil Spector waltzing slowly up from the parking lot for his first day of trial.  I sneaked down the ramp past the large media group to get a closer look, which caused the other photographers to get a little grumpy.

“Hey you, lady, you can’t go down there!”  I ignored them.  Eventually it progressed to, “You bitch!  Get the fuck out of the way!”  I walked back up and told them to relax.  A woman beside me asked what the “crazy looking white guy” was on trial for.  “Murder,” I replied.

Back at the office around 11am, I opened my gmail account and saw a message from a friend. “VIRGINIA TECH!  18 people dead!”  I hit reply.  “18?  I thought it was 10.” I clicked on the ABCNEWS.com link that was forwarded to me, and saw SWAT Team members carrying injured students to emergency vehicles.  I wrote again.  “WTF is goin on over there?  This has been happening since 8:30 in the morning!  It’s only one guy, right?”

Getting down to hard work, I sorted though images of my Saturday night at the drive-in movie theater seeing Grindhouse, “A great movie,” I told my co-worker, “because it’s so over-the-top violent.”

At 11:45am I clicked the Refresh button on my browser window.  “29 People Confirmed Dead.”  Then my face started to get hot.  I saw more and more photos of limp students being haphazardly rushed out of their dormitory, hoisted up by their wrists and ankles.  I saw panicked looks on the face of policemen. Moisture stung my eyes and clouded my glasses.  I went outside to have a smoke because I needed to calm down and it’s embarrassing to cry at work.

Once back in my office, I stared at my mouse pointer sitting poised for action on that terrible button.  I didn’t really want to, but I clicked on Refresh again.  “33 people confirmed dead at Virginia Tech.  Worst Shooting Rampage in United States History. Gunman Dead, Motive Unclear.”

Then the hot tears let loose.  I wish I could just learn when to stop clicking.

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I read DeLillo's short story in the latest New Yorker last night. I could have stopped at just I read last night and that would have been impressive enough since I usually just go home and cry, unless Bones or House is on, in which case I'll go home, watch Bones or House, eat a half box of Wheat Thins...and cry. Anyhoo...back to DeLillo. His story is called "Still Life" and it was inspired by the iconic image seen in just about every publication following the 9/11 attacks in New York of that guy who was walking away from the towers in a business suit with a briefcase, covered in ash. In fact, it takes up his story where that image leaves off, imagining him going home to his estranged wife and reconnecting with her and his son. I'm not sure what, if any, research DeLillo put into the effort - did he make contact with the fella? Is any of it grounded in truth, or is it a complete imagining? I imagine it was the latter. It felt a little invasive to me. After all, that guy in the photo was a real person and now there's a alternative narrative out there that's inextricably related to him because everybody has that image seared in their minds. Clever. But just? Worthwhile? I'm not sure. The story itself is pretty trite. One of the subplots revolves around the reforming couple's son, who spends time at his friends' (a brother and sister) house secreted away in a room in their high-rise apartment peering out a window with binoculars. Of course, you see the big reveal coming a mile away: they're keeping watch for the next attack. I guess my question is why now, six years later?

Reading, I kept asking: what's new here? What's helpful? What further understanding does this story bring? What's the point...? Except as a creative excercise in imagining the real life of a still life, i.e., the iconic image of that man. Even that feels a little too facile towards the story's end of reminding us that innocence had been lost on that day, that everything changed. Whose innocence? The childrens'? The country's? Really?

This tendency to look at 9/11 in this way, as it's own entity -- the thing that changed everything -- also tends to separate it from us and imbue the nature of the change it brought with some sort of inevitability. Yes, everything did change, and plenty of nothing did, too. Maybe not enough and too much did at the same time. The story is still being written and we have a part to play in how it is, but I'm a bit tired of the almost nostalgic looking-backs of this sort of literary grave-dancing. Here DeLillo gives us a 9/11 romance: girl meets boy, boy leaves girl, planes crash into towers, girl gets boy back. It would be utterly banal, except for his use of the backdrop of 9/11, which doesn't make it any more profound, just sort of exploitative, to me anyway. Not to mention a day late and a dollar short. Or is not enough days late? Maybe metaphysical context isn't possble yet, and all we can do is continue to sift through the ashes of that bad minute.

On the other hand, we look to masters like DeLillo to grapple with our societal and historic narratives and I shouldn't begrudge him for trying -- wait a minute, that's exactly what I'm doing, but you know what I mean. I'm not sure, though, that we look to Mike Binder and Adam Sandler. Binder is the director of the bereft Reign Over Me (the mildly charming Upside of Anger previously), a movie that, like DeLillo's story, has nothing new to add to the 9/11 narrative and not much more on its mind than a mawkish seduction aimed at setting us up for the kill: the cry moment when Sandler's Charlie finally talks about the family he lost in one of the planes. Talk about low-hanging fruit. I mean, of course I cried (see title of blog), but without out the movie having anything real to say (not sure of its tone, the film bordered at times on a comedy of manners -- almost like Woody Allen does 9/11), the tears were cheap and the movie left my wife and our friend with almost nothing to discuss afterward. It was like a piece of sugar-coated pain candy - easy to swallow but worth nothing inside.

Not that such subjects are verbotten (United 93!). And in a world that seems on the verge of lunacy, I often find myself wondering what the hell the hot, young generation of writers, the McSweenyites if you will, are doing. They seem so detached from the big questions and so focused on minutie and the arcane and the ironic (excepting Eggers himself) that I get frustrated with them. I mean when was the last time a publication like The Believer or McSweeney's itself wasn't an excercise in trivia? A breeze through the archives renders titles like: "The Personal Journal of Zan, The Male Half of the Wonder Twins", and something about someone's journal entry indicating a need to stop watching porn, and "My Rejected Design Theme For J.Crew's Summer Catalog.", etc. I'm sure a lot of this shit is funny, and one of the funniest things I ever read, an essay about how many 12-year-olds the writer could take in a fight, was in either McSweeneys' or The Believer... but c'mon, isn't there more to life?

Life, however, goes on and much of life is trivial and small. Until, of course, it isn't. And then we yearn for the time when it was so.

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