An exception to every rule

Because the year in books is a way to mark the passage of time. This year's literature round-up is frankly embarassing. First, because I didn't read very much. Second, because a lot of the books I did read were crappy and for work. And finally, because it has been a year of easy distraction and false ambitions. Certain of said ambitions (the LSAT, for example) took up a great deal of time that would have been better spent on literature.

As in 2006, the new year will not have the ambitious (for me) literary quota of 2005. Now is a time for writing. And changing place of employment. You know what? I think I will also start doing this for movies.

Key:
R=reading it again
W=read for work
*=really fucking good

1. The Orchid Thief, by Susan Orlean
2. The March, by E.L. Doctorow
3. Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace (R,*)
4. Consider the Lobster, Ibid.
5. Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro
6. Bridget Jones's Diary, by Helen Fielding*
7. The Good Soldier, by Ford Madox Ford
8. Inside the Wire, by Erik Saar and Viveka Novak (W)
9. Camille's Children, by Camille Geraldi (W)
10. Guantanamo: The war on human rights, by David Rose (W)
11. For God and Country, by James Yee (W)
12. The Information, by Martin Amis
13. Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro*
14. The End of the Affair, by Graham Greene*
15. Speak, Memory, by Vladimir Nabokov*
16. Faceless Killers, by Henning Mankell
17. Strange Affair, by Peter Robinson
18. Table of Contents, by John McPhee
19. The Namesake, by Jhumpa Lahiri
20. The Emperor's Children, by Claire Messud
21. The Year of Magical Thinking, by Joan Didion*
22. The Golden Compass, by Philip Pullman (R,*)
23. Elizabeth: the biography of Elizabeth Taylor, by J. Randy Taraborelli (W, don't ask)
24. Spy: the Funny Years, Various Authors*

One thing that I enjoyed immensely, though not technically a book:
n+1, Issue Four

Works in Progress, likely to be included in 2007 list:
Against the Day, by Thomas Pynchon
Blood Meridian, by Cormac McCarthy
[Both get * so far]

Last year's list can be read here.

Oh, blog! How I miss thee. Thy audience hath departed for greener pastures at thine own bidding.
If a tree falls in the woods...

Poppies... Poppies will make them sleep

I AM SORRY. Writing for fun isn't so fun anymore when you have to write for a living, especially since I now have to write inane online commentary for my newspaper.

WHEREAS, Robotic Tronic, though not dead yet, is entering a phase of hibernation.

WHEREAS, I have recently undertaken other activities, most importantly applying for a Fulbright to travel to Mozambique, that if realized will almost certainly be a catalyst to returning to Robotic Tronic. On a grimmer note, I am also applying to law school.

WHEREAS, the onset of prolonged cyber-sleepiness, while mostly due to the fact that I have no internet connection at home, is also related to bleak thoughts I have had lately about writing, namely that nobody reads anymore. This may have something to do with the plasticity of my immediate environment, but I do feel that I have dedicated myself to irrelevancy. I am not giving up, but something has withered.

WHEREAS, even with these dark thoughts, I persist. This and this forced me to admit that writing a play about murderous elephants and majoring in something silly in college were more prescient than I could have realized.

Nonetheless, a season of change has enveloped this robot.

THEREFORE, check back here in July 2007, when these wrinkles have smoothed themselves out.

All of that fuss came to nothing. Bo-ring.

Castro's dying, Tropical Storm Chris is brewing, Miami Vice is in the theaters...I just spent three hours at Cafe Versailles drinking cortaditos with former political prisoners amid a chorus of honking horns and waving flags. It's a little crazy here right now.

O jogo bonito

There's a scummy British pub in Miami incongruously placed in the heart of Little Haiti that features wall-sized screens and bangers and mash in a dark cave that would probably strike fear into the hearts of even cave-dwelling cockroach eaters. It's called Churchill's. I watched the World Cup there with an audience pretty evenly split along national lines (although the people nearest to me were the ones screeching "ALLEZ!") I was rooting for Italy, mostly because I have a crush on Pirlo.



Yes, I'm aware of his feathered hair. Anyway: the best moment of the game was obviously the head-butt, when the bar erupted in wonder. My friend, standing next to me in the glow of many screens replaying the incident, could only gaze forward and whisper, "That head-butt's going to be famous."




But while Zidane displayed remarkably unsportsmanlike behavior, (will we ever learn the words that provoked the rage of a charging bull?) his dramatic exit was probably the most street thing that's ever happened in soccer. With the head-butt, Zidane puts the most thuggish rapper to shame. His Count Von Count hairline is now justified by his actions. The mystical vision in the night that compelled him to return to the sport takes on another meaning: did perhaps the voice mean him harm? Is it improbable that Zidane was motivated to return not by a force of good, but by a force of evil? Did he sign a Faustian pact to propel his team onward that he suddenly rejected, only to be punished by Mephistophelian demons who took his head in their claws and used it as a battering ram against a fragile Italian solar plexus?

Whatever the answer, I'm glad his team lost. But in his fall from grace the former model of all things good, the family man, the elder statesman of French soccer, made his point in a way that had he used his hands or his legs or his elbows wouldn't have been nearly as impressive, nor as honorable. For one moment, Zidane showed us what the game is truly about. And he may have lost his head, but all athletes must be driven by a certain savagery that mere mortals lack (I, for one, get bored after about five minutes of playing any sport). It must be a struggle to maintain the facade of normalcy. You can't be angry with Mike Tyson for what he did, and you can't be angry with Zidane. And when Materazzi said, ''You make mistakes in life, but then you have to purify yourself, without seeking revenge. Everyone has their destiny,'' you sort of want to punch him in the face for being such a pious motherfucker.



I am really, really sad that the World Cup is over. Today is like the day after Christmas. Even the Italians honking their horns outside my window all night knew that morning would dawn bleakly.

Tour depants

"But the Jan does not do the transfusions of blood, or the micro-injections of EPO, or the eating of the horse testicles for strength.

The Jan is being a simple man. The Jan takes in schnitzel and beer, and outputs death and pain. It is being that simple."

No more Il Basso. No more Kaiser Jan. A sad day in sports.

MIAMI HEAT

I haven't lived in a city that's won a championship since the Twins in 1991. Yesterday was so fun.

I got quoted in the L.A. Times. Pretty embarrassing, actually.

Guantanamo article. [Update: They also put it on the Village Voice site. Yay!] I am in Little Rock. It's nice. Deciduous trees.

Ele esta de saco cheio

Adam's well-argued tirade on Brazil, Anderson Varejao, and the NBA on McSweeney's.

"Varejao's Brazilian lineage appears to be one of the main reasons he receives such special treatment. Just as Brazil—as a monolith—has been fetishized by American consumers of culture for its unattainably exotic (e.g., "Portuguese, not Spanish") and uncontrived (see, "primitive") "cool," Varejao, in the same manner, is fetishized for his exotic and uncontrived "uncool." Varejao's admirers, rather than noting any specific Brazilian aspect of his identity, see merely "Brazil," which translates to him possessing a quality both alien and special: as if he were unlike anything we had seen before...

Perhaps most irksome is that, were the fetishizing of a Brazilian player to be performed in congruence with the obsession over Seu Jorge's Bowie covers, Favela Funk (not really sure what that is), City of God, Snoop and Pharrell's "Beautiful" video, and the explosion of blue-green-yellow flip-flops and T-shirts that emerged following Brazil's 2002 World Cup victory, the logical candidate to become Brazil's most beloved would be the Suns' Leandro Barbosa. Would Rick Ross be so keen to observe that Anderson Varejao is merely the more commercially viable Sergio Mendes to Barbosa's slicker Jorge Ben? There is no doubt of it."

Epilogue

The day I left Gitmo was the day of suicides and uprising. This is the best article on the whole thing. It was odd: I tried to extend my stay until Friday, because there was a press session on Thursday I wanted to attend, but all the flights were full and I had to take an early Thursday flight. Nonetheless we were in Camp 4 two days prior. I can only wonder if any of the detainees that I saw walking around took part, which cell block it was, and what really happened. It changes the nature of the story I'm writing somewhat, but I'm not sure how. A fairly dramatic development nonetheless, especially coinciding with the UN's call to close the facility.

That is actually something I don't quite understand. The explicit reasons for each detainee's detention should be made clear to them and to the world -- if these men are as horrible as the DOD would have us believe, it shouldn't be a problem to justify holding them through habeas corpus -- but closing the facility? Transferring people to other countries, particularly those with less than glowing human rights records, would not be a solution. It may be hypocritical of the U.S. to say they worry about people getting tortured upon transfer, but that doesn't make it less of a legitimate concern.

Whew. I was propellered back into Fort Lauderdale a few hours ago, safe and sound. Now to write everything up. In the meantime, I would like to wholeheartedly endorse the accuracy of this survey.

Tactical strategy

I am quite tired. If only I had a nickel for every response I got during an interview that began with, "That's an excellent question." For anyone who has never dealt with public affairs officers, said response is euphemism for either "I don't know" or "I can't answer that." The German public radio correspondent with us said she would keep a tally when reviewing her tapes. My guess is that her total will top fifty times in two days.

Tomorrow I go to my less cushy digs. (The ones I'm in right now are very very nice. Much nicer than my little beach studio in Miami, although the lizards appear to have followed me here. Where I am moving is more like a college dorm.) According to everyone here I won't have internet on the Leeward side, so this is the end of my newly-minted Gitmo blog. I'm sorry I've done such a poor job of describing the scenery. It merits a great deal of effort: enormous windmills slowly turning along mountainous ridges, spindly guard towers perched on cliffs overlooking the sea, the massive labyrinth of concertina wire known as Camp Delta. I have also failed to write about any of the people I've talked to and the things I've seen. I need a couple of days to mull over some things.

I almost bought a child-sized t-shirt today that said "Future behaviour modification instructor" in the NEX gift shop. Even viewed ironically, it was simply way too obnoxious.

Expect phone calls. That, it turns out, is much more easily accomplished here.

We substituted good grammar for intellect

The flight was in an 8-seat Air Sunshine plane, equipped with none of the usual buffers that serve to suspend the sensation of hurtling through the sky at hundreds of miles an hour. Sitting in the front seat, I was practically flying the plane, or at least close enough to see that the sun-cracked dashboard with its analogue buttons looked very, very old -- except for the pilot's small prayer plaque, which was in Arabic. He had nicely covered his seat in a large swath of gray fake fur. It went well with the overall ambience of protruding foam, cracked pleather, toxic fumes and deafening machinery. There was an Igloo mini-cooler with drinks on the floor. Due to the demands of bathroom scheduling, these were left untouched. When we landed they told us to look out for the propellers on the way down the ladder.

Then Gitmo: cacti, woodpeckers, and iguanas lounging in the shade. Much prettier than I thought it would be -- everything brown and pink and light blue.

Lots of new vocabulary words to learn and cages to visit. In one large cage: "The detainess co-recreate two at a time." Or in an old Camp X-Ray interrogation shack: "They are not interrogated Pavlovianly."

We look at lots of sample cells with little piles arranged on the beds. "Non-compliant detainee" pile includes orange jumpsuit and flip flops. "Very compliant detainee" gets prayer oils and backgammon. I have lots of pictures of small cots with boxes of soap, checkers, chess, and backgammon neatly laid out. These are called "comfort items." In some places, the detainees themselves sat in the shade, looking fairly bored, in spite of the basketball hoops and elliptical machines where they can co-recreate.

We are treated like babies: well-hydrated, air conditioned, transported, housed in little suites stocked with comfort items. The tour ends Thursday, when I am exiled Leeward. There are very few comfort items Leeward. Breeze, dust, cacti and sea. But there's a bar, it's quiet, I will be unescorted. And the NGOs arrive Monday for the commissions. But I keep hearing Demi Moore's voice in A Few Good Men. "Are you going to investigate at all?" she asks Tom on his visit to GTMO, "Or are you just here for the tour?"

I take it back though. Because it's different than that. We know that they messed up. They know that they messed up. But we pretend we're confident journalists, and they pretend they're proud soldiers. Not one person here has been here longer than eight months anyway, that we've met. The relationship of the journalists to the soldiers, and the soldiers to the detainees, is a lot like The Bluest Eye, the part Black Star quoted...

"We honed our egos on her, padded our characters with her frailty, and yawned in the fantasy of our strength. And fantasy it was for were not strong, only aggressive; we were not free, merely licensed; we were not compassionate, we were polite; not good, but well behaved. We courted death in order to call ourselves brave..."

etc. etc. Thieves in the night, etc. Pore old Pecola... Genius Toni Morrison. I probably can't put that in any sort of article but that's all this seems to be. Embarassment disguised with Orwellian language and trumped up ceremony.

Upcoming travels

Yes, it's been a while. Last Sunday I had a big birthday barbecue on Key Biscayne with Krishna and another friend. We set up under a small stand of palm trees on the beach in Crandon Park, placed a portable table and a hibachi grill in the sand, put some Smokey Robinson on the jukebox, mixed some mango juice and rum, and stayed there for seven hours. I think I like it here, suddenly.

But Monday marks a descent into banana rats and iguanas, as I travel down to Gitmo to witness legal limbo and eat Jamaican food at the Jerk House. The original plan was the four-day media tour, where the public affairs office shows you the former Camp X-ray and the kitchens where prisoners' halal meals are prepared (the ones that aren't being force-fed.) At the suggestion of another reporter, I asked if I could stay over the weekend and attend the military commissions the following week (the "pre-trial hearings" for a couple of the 10 prisoners -- out of some 490 -- that are actually being charged with something.)

They agreed to let me stay, although I'm told I'll be alone on the Leeward side for the weekend. I'll be there ten days total. We fly down in a charter plane with no bathroom that one lawyer described as "a minivan with wings." It's a three hour flight because they take the long way around Cuba and back north. For reasons I can't quite explain, I'm a little frightened.

In addition, I worry that there is no real news to break on the subject.

For anyone who cares, I'll be in Little Rock in early June.

Three Weeks

In 2002 I spent the summer in New York and obsessively collected a little broadsheet newsletter called Three Weeks. I mailed copies of it to everyone I knew. I was devastated when I returned to the city that fall and picked up the issue that announced their demise.

Last year I e-mailed the editor (all four contributors wrote under pseudonyms) to see where they had disappeared to. He told me they were writing for the Philadelphia Independent. That has also now disbanded, so their whereabouts are unknown. But it was pretty exciting to discover this. All the old newsletters are on the site. I wonder who they are. I love them.

Stories stories

I get conflicted about posting these, because reading over them causes a sort of ringing in my ears and acute head pain. I mean to write better articles, someday. Let's leave it at that. In the meantime:

Kids with Down syndrome.
Telenovelas.
The American Princes.

Funny funny

Even though it's been months since I saw it, there are days when this movie rears its ugly head. Especially the part when Marnie is on a date and says, "I'm the opposite of parched." And her date says, "You mean saturated?"

From the medical journal Pediatrics:, one of the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit Network Neurobehavioral Scale Procedures.

H. Pick up Infant (States 4 and 5)
Cuddliness
This item is a summary measure of the infant’s response to being held in alert states. There are several components that are scored in response to the infant being held in a cuddled position both horizontally against your chest and vertically on your shoulder. The infant’s resistance to cuddling should be assessed as well as the ability to relax or mold, nestle, and cling to you. Give the infant a chance to initiate cuddling (~10 seconds). Facilitate cuddling only if there is no active participation on the part of the infant or if the infant is unable to relax or mold. If the infant initiates cuddling, score 5 and above. Cuddliness should not be administered with the infant swaddled. Also, refrain from talking to the infant during the administration of this maneuver. Assign separate scores for Cuddle in Arm (horizontal) and Cuddle on Shoulder (vertical).

The M3 Summit was fun, the little I could enjoy of it. (I have a nasty deadline tomorrow and couldn't get out much.) I saw Peaches though, and Hot Chip and the Juan Maclean. I might try to see Prefuse 73 and The Rub tonight, although this article just won't be done, or become what I want it to be. The sudden invasion by an army of German boys and San Franciscans in stylish glasses and windbreakers was a welcome change from the Spring Break crowd on South Beach I have to say.

I've updated my links. If you read this and you have a blog tell me.

Holler

Did anybody else notice the Lucero t-shirt Shelby wears at the end of Hustle & Flow? That made me happy, for Little Rock, for Memphis, for the greater good.

National Magazine Awards

The Oxford American is nominated for two. Best single topic issue for the summer music issue and best feature for "Love and Death in the Cape Fear Serpentarium," by Wendy Brenner. I fact-checked that! Dubious claim to fame I suppose, but still, I'm proud.
The other finalists are here.

Moving Up

My friends are so smart!

The very clever and funny basketball blog my friend Adam W. works on with some friends, Free Darko, is the recipient of a weekly spot on McSweeney's. The blog mostly follows the varied careers of imported European players but it is also amusing to the basketball illiterate.

Volkswagen's new mascot designed and manufactured by Tim.

And Jamie E. was in my play first!

R.I.P.

Saturday on South Beach

My friend Mariah was dropping me off. She pulled the car over by my house when we both caught sight of a well-figured female in a spectacular white tennis outfit. We were both gushing over the tennis outfit, how cute it was, how we could never pull it off, when the woman and her boyfriend saw us staring at them. Embarrassed, we looked away, but the boyfriend came over to the car as I was getting out.
“How are you?” he asked, with a British accent. He had gelled hair and wore one of those shirts of light cotton embroidered with flowers, a popular item with a certain kind of man on the Beach.
I was confused.
“I haven’t seen you in such a great while!” he proclaimed, like, starry-eyed.
“I don’t think I know you,” I ventured carefully.
“Ah…” he replied, suddenly straight-faced. “I don’t know you either, but you were looking at me like we should know each other.”
“No,” I said. “We just like your girlfriend’s shorts.”
“Oh never mind,” he huffed, and walked away.

No internet in my apartment makes this project much less enjoyable. In the absence of any postings from me, please enjoy this instead. The weather in Miami right now is too lovely to even be called weather. Palms and sun during the day, a slight chill at night. It's perfect.

I went up to NYC last weekend and did very little worth reporting (although it was very nice seeing folks.) The Rauschenberg exhibit at the Met was excellent, and not even worth linking to because his work is of the sort that must only be viewed in person. Each combine is a little kit of perfect things.

What else: I have been rigorously studying every telenovela filmed in Miami and spending lots of time on sets with leading ladies in various shades of spray tan. I love novelas, and think they are underrated by English-speaking U.S. of Americans.

My editor wants to send me to Gitmo. What I can accomplish there seems almost pointless, (a complex process of signing away the right to free speech must be undertaken before visiting,) but I hope it works out.

Job

MNT is hiring a music editor. Look here. It's kind of a difficult job.

I was sitting in the part of a nightclub that's supposed to look like the interior of an airplane, drinking to Depeche Mode, when a drag queen asked me to ghostwrite his/her memoirs. I gave him/her a business card.

Yesterday I went on a little hike in the Everglades. There were piles of alligators everywhere, and ibis, great blue herons, cormorants, egrets, cranes... teeming is an understatement. My favorite bird is the anhinga. When it dives, its tail fans out under the water. Very pretty.

My boot camp story.

Learn Portuguese with Arnold

Carnival in Rio with Arnold Schwarzenegger. Rebecca sent me this. The best words to describe this are Arnold's own: "I can totally understand why Brazil is devoted to my favorite body part: the ass."

So

New Year's Eve was a surfeit of surf and turf (claws, fire-roasted animals, roe, tails, shells.) Snoop Dogg and Ludacris performed. Billy Joel stood in a corner and smoked cigarettes. The go-go dancers wore wings and the waiters dressed like tennis pros, but carried Dom Perignon instead of rackets.

Jaime Foxx shook my hand. He was covered in distracting surfaces (mirrored sunglasses, diamond earrings, polka-dotted shirt.) He tilted his head in a way that made him look like an Oscar-winning blind man for real. He said, "2006 is going to be a very good year. An excellent year."

I said: "Yeah, man." Then he was gone.