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PREDICTION FOR THE NEW YEAR:
I'll post more frequently in 2008 than I have in the last month.
POLITICS:
Wow. Who saw THAT coming?!?!?
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Well, Hillary cried and got what she wanted.
Is that a breakthrough for women or a setback? Who knows.
What I do know is that this was one hell of a turnaround. And that the vaunted prophetic power of the intrade prediction markets is overrated. Obama was trading at 98% likely to win New Hampshire a few hours into the New Hampshire Primary. It's hard to decide which was the most stunningly unexpected phenomenon: Obama's huge victory in Iowa, Hillary's narrow victory in New Hampshire or the remarkable inaccuracy of all of the pollsters and pundits.
A few observations: Obama's concession speech was essentially indistinguishable from his victory speech. He did a pretty good job disguising his disappointment, but the speech, quite understandably, lacked the musicality and incantatory power of the one he delivered 5 days ago. It was as if a part of him were hovering outside himself, wondering "What the hell happened to that 13% lead in the polls? Am I being punished for the hubris of having chosen Stevie Wonder's "Signed, Sealed, Delivered" as tonight's theme song?"
I also couldn't help but note the slightly demystifying Freudian slip (I love the word "parapraxis") when he said "your votes" instead of "your hopes." It is totally understandable that he would be thinking in terms of votes instead of hopes in the wake of this shocking result. When he finally hit his MLK-esque rhetorical rhythm, I took the subtext to be: "I have a dream...that a black man will have his way with a white woman in South Carolina this month."
As for Hillary: She seemed about as genuine and approachably human as I've ever seen her. But that's not saying much. While she was less packaged and programmatic than she has been in the past, I feel that if I had just seen my political life flash before my eyes and then been granted a merciful reprieve (or a miraculous resurrection), I would have somehow evinced more passion and contagious realness. Even at her most humbled and authentic, even having "found her voice" by listening to the voters, she was rather prosaic and uninspiring. But I guess that's just who she is. Not everyone can have charisma and oratorical aptitude and maybe that's a good thing. (I am reminded that Hitler and Mussolini were charismatic and oratorically compelling).
Still, it's terrible when she smiles cheesily in anticipation of delivering a clever line in her speech. She simply doesn't have any kind of rhetorical authority. Or more critically, any clear and compelling message.
Even in defeat, Obama feels more like a leader than Hillary.
The main verdict of this whole roller coaster I suppose is this: The political process is alive and well right now. And ultimately this was a good thing for America and for the Democrats in particular. And frankly even though I prefer Obama to Hillary, I think it is a good thing that the nomination isn't just handed to him--that he has to actually fight for it and strengthen and clarify himself in the process.
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Bill Clinton did quite a job attacking Obama and I'm frankly surprised those transparently negative tactics paid off so immediately. That said, I am convinced that while what he said certainly had a grain of truth (namely, that Obama had been getting some kind of a free pass with the media), these negative tactics will not play well over the long haul. They do not constitute a sustainable and winning strategy. There is also something unseemly in the man who prides himself in being, symbolically speaking, the first "black" president nakedly attacking the man who has the chance to be the first black president in a literal sense.
LFAQs:
Was it just me, or did I detect something less than true ebullience in Bill Clinton during Hillary's victory speech as if he was thinking "Damn. Now I have to stay in this marriage 4 more years!"
Is it possible to be dumb and depressed?
Has "Be Green" become the new "Support Our Troops?" The new empty and unopposable utterance?
WEATHER REPORT:
Apocalyptically pleasant.
BRIEF MOVIE REVIEW:
Finally got around to seeing the movie that's been on the top of my list since it came out: "There Will Be Blood." It was quite good. But I couldn't help but wishing that Daniel Day Lewis's otherwise finely calibrated, truly compelling, portrait of all-consuming greed (via the character of oilman Daniel Plainview) hadn't been played quite so broadly towards the end of the film. I know if is sacrilege to say this about the presumptive Oscar winning performance --but I think he could have conveyed the tormented monstrousness of the rapacious oil magnate more powerfully by playing it less theatrically, by refusing to venture into the realm of laughable caricature. I was also a bit put off by the plot twist at the end concerning his adversary and specular double, Eli the preacher. It felt like a conceptually motivated plot contrivance rather than a dramatically movitated event and hence took the film out of the realm of compelling psychological realism and into that of literary symbolism. Less grandly put: It just didn't work for me. These are quibbles, however. The movie featured stunningly assured film making by Paul Thomas Anderson, a crushingly intense score by Radiohead's Johnny Greenwood, some of the most mamby-pamby fight (or rather slap) scenes in the history of cinema, an interesting (if perhaps unintended) reprise of Day Lewis's performance in "My Left Foot" (He breaks his leg in the first scene and writhes around on the ground in a manner acutely reminscent of the famous scene from the film that made him a household name) and, surprisingly, perhaps the funniest scene of the year in movies (Day Lewis suffering the humiliation of an unwanted--but pragmatically necessary-- baptism at the hands of his preacher adversary. All in all: It is almost as good as advertised. But I stop just short of gushing about it.
ART COMMENT:
Saw the Seurat show at MOMA. I like his particular combination of precision and vagueness.
EXCITING NEWS:
My cast was removed! So I can now rejoin the population of people who have opposable thumbs and not just opposable thoughts.
IMAGINED EVOLUTIONARY ADAPTATION:
A man with broken thumbs, making use of opposable friends rather than opposable thumbs to achieve his objectives.
PROPOSED BAND NAME:
Jesse By Accident.
CONCEPT:
Retroactive Intentionality. (The art of deciding what you meant --whether you were serious or joking, etc.--after you said it.)
SUBWAY ANECDOTES:
1) A homeless guy on the subway shaking a cup and saying earnestly: "One of the hard things about doing this is when it gets really cold outside." As if being homeless were a career choice. As if he were saying "One of the hard things about doing this residency is the tough hours."
2) A group of people (evidently a family) on the subway car with me speaking and signing simultaneously. The woman speaks without any kind of a deaf person accent. And then her son responds without any accent. Then her daughter does the same. I keep assuming one member of the family must be deaf and they are signing for his or her benefit, but one by one each member of the group or family or whatever audibly joins the conversation without any trace of a problem. And then they ultimately stop signing and just speak. I cannot decide if they've just been practicing signing. Or if perhaps one of them had a slight hearing problem but, in the course of the conversation, they realized that he or she could hear welll enough or lip read. Or if they were simply performing a simultaneous translation of the conversation for any curious deaf passengers on the train.
HOLIDAY OBSERVATION:
On display in my room now is a series of holiday cards from friends with children. Looking back over the years, I note a pattern. Photos of the proud parents and adored (and adorable) child ultimately give way to shots of the beautiful child alone. As if the parents want to put their best face forward--or as if they want to clearly pass the ball of hope and dream onto the next generation rather than share it as a family unit. Or because they want to shield the recipient from unpleasant reminders of the ravages of time. Or, more pessimistically, perhaps because it becomes harder and harder for the squabbling parents to pose without the forced smiles undermining the celebratory intent of the card. Or, as a friend suggests, "I think what really happens is that they just gain weight and feel embarrassed."
QUOTE OF THE DAY:
"I feel degraded, humiliated and betrayed. But at least I'm feeling."
EDIFYING BROADCAST MOMENT:
By an overheated security "expert" on Anderson Cooper's 360 as he and Anderson watch the fragmentary Zaprudistan tape of the Bhutto assassination. "And the way the assassin held the gun over his head tells us something about him?" We cut to expert., "Yes, it tells us that he knew what he was doing. It tells us that he had a mission. And he was trying to carry it out with that gun."
NOTE TO SELF:
If a Siberian Tiger attacks some of your friends, don't I repeat DON'T try to divert him.
(A sad news-prompted corrolary to Ogdan Nash's couplet "If called by a panther/do not anther.")
NOTE TO READERS:
Happy New Year!
POETIC FRAGMENT:
The mystery of free throw shooting
The unmasterable shape of dreams and
The soul congealing effect of shopping.
Step through a cognitive side door
into the unthinkable.
NEWS ITEM:
Rival Priests Brawl at Bethlehem Birthplace of Jesus
Thu Dec 27, 8:34 AM ET
Bethlehem, West Bank (AFP) - Seven people were injured on Thursday when Greek Orthodox and Armenian priests came to blows in a dispute over how to clean the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem.
I rest my case. I'm not entirely sure what my case is, but I feel very confident in resting it.
CONSUMER NOTES:
archaic technologies
obligatory expenditures
redundant purchases
the spiritual energies of a people consumed in the aisles of our self definition
i am a stranger here. but with each shiny enticement, I am on the brink of becoming a citizen.
--
Later that day: I am walking around with my newly purchased 40" TV . Everyone is smiling at me, offering to help me carry it. Like i was a sweepstakes winner or dating a supermodel or the quarterback of the cowboys. I was, for one shining half-ironic moment, king of the consumer hill. Living the American dream. Yup. Me. Me and my 40 inch.
--
Two weeks later:
The big screen TV dutifully bought (for year end tax reasons, for the token experience of being a citizen in the consumer society), still sits in the middle of the room, unopened. It turns out to make an excellent and useful ledge-like narrow table surface for clothing and books and might very well, i suspect, continue to serve that function for the foreseeable future. Should i die while still in my apartment, people might be surprised to discover a $1500 flat screen TV (our culture's most prized piece of technology) still in its box--serving a function far removed from the one for which it was designed.
I hear that on intrade.com, the odds of Teddy Vegas removing that big screen TV from its box in caledar year 2008 are currently set at 28%.
--
BTW: I was right in my economic forecast. Despite the dire economic warning signs, it turns out people continued to spend like crazy over the last few months, piling up unprecedented debt on their credit cards. The extent to which consumerism is truly an addiction (and functions like an addiction) is not to be underestimated. There is no sustainable cultural value to oppose to it. To provide competing gratifications. To keep it in check. But we will have to find one (or some) if we are ultimately to be competitive in the global battle for hearts and minds. Or at least recover our health and viability as a nation.
POLITICAL PLATFORM PROPOSAL:
A single day each year where it is illegal to engage in acts of consumerism.
Or at least a one week moratorium on entertainment.
Or at least a one week moratorium on polling and punditry.
SINGLE SENTENCE POEM OF THE DAY:
There are certain days when the light feels like it bears within it the distance it travelled to reach us.
SINGLE SENTENCE PORTRAIT OF THE DAY:
He travelled to outer space and almost all the way back.
NOTES FROM THE JOURNAL OF MOURNING:
It has been six months now. The year in which I lost my father is drawing to a close. I feel my unconscious accelerating the work of mourning.--as if in hopes of being finished with it by New Year's.
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Dream: I am walking with someone I know is not my father (as even in dreams, I know my father has died) but is rather his dream proxy. We are discussing his father's (my proxy grandfather's) death as he looks at the gold Patick Phillipe watch he inherited from him. "How long did you mourn his death?", I ask. My proxy non father father says, "I thought about him every single day with a pain in my heart for 13 years and then, one day, I stopped. I didn;'t stop thinking about him., But something changed."
I suspect I will never get used to it. The work of mourning is never fully done. But something will change.
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Strange as I find myself typing the phrase "I know my father has died" it stabs me like a new reality.
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I am in the country on X-mas Eve. I lie down to go to sleep in my host's house andI have a vivid sense memory of all the X-mas Eves I fell asleep in the guest bedroom at my father's house in Westport. And I absorb the reality that I will never sleep in that bed again. Nor awaken to the sound of my father's singing.
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Throughout this holiday season, I have had near constant memories of my father singing "The X-Mas Song" as he so often did with so much pleasure during this time of year. "Chestnuts Roasting on an open fire/ Jack Frost nippin at your nose." As my brother put it movingly in a little tribute he sent to me the other day. "The Lyrics to "The X-Mas Song". In Loving Memory of our father, Albert Harris Cohn who sang it often and well. May he rest in peace."
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In moments of true presence the wound of absence is ever fresh.
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Although it's been said many times, many ways...I really miss my dad.
SIGN OFF:
Sorry I've been away so long. I can't quite account for my absence. But I'm glad to be back.
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Posted on 1/9/2008
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