The Fort

Last night my friend Jessica and I took a trip up to Fort Smith, which is two hours from Little Rock on the border with Oklahoma, kind of near Fayetteville. It's Arkansas' second-largest city, and both my roommates are from there, so I was curious. Jessica prepped me on the way, saying it wasn't going to be like Little Rock, or like Fayetteville. Back in Louisiana purchase days, Fort Smith was the last outpost before Indian Territory, and it was where all the fugitive outlaws would gather trying to get out of the country. As a result, hangings were frequent -- the gallows are still there -- and there were something like 200 saloons on the main strip downtown.

Today the downtown is strange and sort of deserted. She described it as a working-class city, but I would have just said tough. It actually reminded me a bit of Allentown, where I was born. I think it's one of the tougher places I've ever been. Like punk is definitely not dead, or at least it wasn't at the bar we went to. We got out of my car and watched as a truck in a nearby lot spun its wheels until all was burnt rubber and smoke. Within five minutes of entering the bar there was a fight, and a mosh pit was definitely in full swing, and this was at a charity event for a girl who had gotten in a car accident and needed to raise money to learn how to walk again. She was there in a wheelchair, along with her mom and other older-women caretaker sorts. The crowd was a diverse mix of age groups, predominantly young. In genre the folks ranged from a Davey Crockett-type (he had a beard, ponytail and leather fringe jacket), to gutter punk sorts and people in country-western shirts with roses embroidered on them. We stayed on someone's couch, in a big old pioneer-looking house that was surrounded by vacant lots. We tried to have breakfast at a locally famous Vietnamese deli, but it was closed, so we went to a greasy spoon, thick with cigarette smoke and hash browns. The fry cook wore the stars and bars on his hat and a large hickey on his neck. I think I understand my roommates better now, or at least why one opted to drop out of high school.

But Fort Smith has bars that stay open until five and lots of pool tables. Oklahoma is only a river away, and you can visit both the old gallows and the fort that started the whole thing. You see a lot of license plates from the Cherokee Nation, and some funny bumper stickers, like "Work is the curse of the drinking class." I liked it. Or at least it was a change from the usual weekend drinking routine.

How To

This from Lindsey, who says, "From the Mexican government’s web site. Awesome how they so accurately showed that big-haired-and-tittied women in purple jumpsuits and gold bracelets will always be at hand for immigrants when trying to fill out complicated forms." The drawing in question is on page 18, "Tus Derechos." Guía del Migrante Mexicano. At least they're approaching the subject with candor.

When she's walking through the field of hearts, it's cool

When I was little kid, I used to say I wanted to marry my cat, who was real nice. I didn't mean it though. Bjork actually did it though. The new video, by Spike Jonze (via stereogum) is so amazing. At the end, when the cat becomes life-sized. What?

Even before this there was something Godard-ian

Louis has an op-ed in The International Herald Tribune about his experience in the Congo. I think this is a first for any of my friends (An article, in a major paper, that's not in the Style section?) May it be the first of many.

The gumby videos especially

My new favorite thing in the world. I hadn't looked at this site for a while (it's all Providence kids). We were watching it at work today for a minute, and it made the morning better for sure.

On to grander things

I finish my job at the OA in two weeks, a voluntary termination date to focus more on my own writing. This will involve discipline. Lots of it. And a part-time job. Thus far I have applied to the Brazilian restaurant all my friends work at and at the "living history" department of the Historic Arkansas Museum. The latter could potentially involve churning butter and wearing bonnets. My friendster profile gets more hits than my web log does. I just read Delta Wedding, by Eudora Welty, for a book club I'm in. Very nice, like a Southern Virginia Woolfe. I'm also halfway through I Am Charlotte Simmons which was tolerable at first but in the last hundred pages has started to get tedious, odious, and actually totally vile. In fact, I hate it, but unless I'm too late I was going to review it for the Localist. Supposedly we now have a drummer for our band. I haven't met him yet. Before we were using a drum machine and a synthesizer that when you press certain keys actually hollers at you. It's like, "Whoop!"

Recent endeavors

Lawrence and I have started a band. I play keyboards and he plays guitar. Our friend Dustin plays bass. I've never been in a band before, but was surprised to find that if you're playing keyboards with people who are good at the other things, you only have to know your chords. Our second rehearsal is tonight. We are as yet unnamed, although sometimes go casually by the name Exchange Student.

A good day

I got a letter today at the magazine from a woman in Beebe, AR saying my elephant story was "so touching." She wrote all about the Thai elephants who helped clear debris after the tsunami and sensed the danger long before it came. I was so touched. I sort of teared up.

Sad things

My mom's best friend, from whom I receive my middle name of Elizabeth, has a son who is a Marine stationed in Iraq. On New Years Day he was shot and has since had his arm amputated. He gets to return home to his wife and 4 year-old son alive though, and as he is a mechanical engineer he is apparently already designing his own prosthesis. His pop was a Marine in Vietnam, his Grandfather in the CIA... It was interesting though, as I was reading his company's web log about the incident, I learned that Joe Sacco happened to be the journalist imbedded with them. Apparently his experience will be in Guardian sometime forthcoming.

New Year's Resolution

During my recent trip back to New York, a couple people actually expressed annoyance that I don't write so much anymore. It's quite a problematic arrangement: first, this has been an embarrassing endeavor from the beginning, started when I was working as a copywriter at a shit advertising agency in Manhattan, where the quantity of work was vastly inferior to the quantity of workday. And, lets all be very frank with ourselves, it had a little to do with forming alternative communicative arrangements, since the metaphorical river had been dammed. Either way, it's such a fucking nerdjob arrangement, I'm embarassed of the poor quality of writing on here, and I can't seem to call it quits.

But people want to know more about Arkansas, I will attempt to do a better job at conveying Arkansas to them. As I've mentioned before, Arkansas is difficult to explain, and even more difficult to explain is myself in the context of Arkansas, and the two are rather inseparable. Particularly when we consider what I now feel fairly sure of, based on my last trip back, that living in Providence and New York made a crazy person out of me, as most of my readers (and dearest friends) have a fairly nuanced awareness of. See, the realization that I thought had been made by going to Chile in high school was that cultural geography matters very little and own's own attitude towards things matters very greatly but what has confused me a little about Arkansas is that it appears that where one is, and not just where one's mind is, does actually make a large difference.

Arkansas has proven to me two very important things: 1)The whole depression thing was not necessarily ontological, but potentially conditional. This makes me bitter and I feel like I got cheated, although in the end one only has oneself to blame. 2) In the Ivy league success stories are narrowly defined. Leslie Thornton told me, before graduation, that if I moved to New York I would wake up one morning and be thirty and, she said dismissively, "working on my screenplay." I think that she meant "working on my screenplay" as euphemism for "being a loser." So. She was my favorite professor. Some of you probably knew that already, that New York City is not necessarily the best place to get artistic things done, but I've always been a bit slow to the punch. I continue to be a little pissed at anyone who might make the whole smaller pond bigger fish analogy. It's not like that. That's what's hardest to explain to people, that it's not like you move somewhere smaller and the world's standards are lower. Absolutely not. Unfortunately, living in New York does not make one smarter, a better writer, musician or anything else. It's pretty fucking stupid to think that might be the case. Realization (2) might seem an oxymoron to realization (1) but really mediocrity is rampant in metropolises both large and small. And this is the Marshall Frady quote I kept spouting to people last week, if you were curious:

I've never been too sure that it is benign for a writer to spend any great length of time in the company of New York's estate of appraisers from afar and traffickers in reactions and responses. Because maybe you start after awhile writing from those secondary vibrations, instead of from the primary pulses and shocks you can't afford to lose. Perhaps writers ought to be scattered out over the land...that way you're writing out of what you're living in, there can be that energy and immediacy and very flash of life in your work. All the while, covertly, you're actually a kind of undercover agent, stranded out in the cold and sending dispatches from those far brawlings of life to Dickens, Twain, Gogol, Balzac, Cervantes, telling them what's going on now -- Let me tell you what these people did. Let me tell you what this character is like and what he did and what happened to him...

Why don't any of you whiners ever post comments?