. Work in Progress (Detail) , With…

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Work in Progress (Detail)
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With seasonal hook.

Happy Halloween,
Vanx

. Off to "The Show" . This is that week in late O…

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Off to “The Show”
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This is that week in late October/early November when the Northeast News Bureau (1) travels to the home office in Washington, DC (2). I will spend the next few days in that quiet space in my head.

Disclaimer: To be honest, I don’t feel I have truly broken hiatus, other than for “Ask Vanx,” in that most of what I am tossing up here lately is a toss-up. I am still on psychological spacewalk. And I still have the greatest confidence in the mission. So, sit down calmly, take a stress pill, and think things over.

Daisy, Daisy, etc.
Vanx

1) Business writers in New Jersey.
2) Dedicated science writers who, unlike a certain mercenary element of the Northeast New Bureau, would not write about shoes if it paid more.

Divine InterventionOn Saturday night, all of our d…

Divine Intervention

On Saturday night, all of our daughters’ godparents showed up in our kitchen. At Happy Hour, of course. They brought salad and cake. Then they tried to take the hell over.

Actually, it was Maggie’s confirmation party. Guess which godparent isn’t Catholic. And don’t let Grandma and Grandpa get wind of it!

Editor’s note to self: Oh, what the Hiatus!

. New Exploding Coke . Ce…

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New Exploding Coke
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Celebrant: On the footstoop of your ambulant city…
Congregation: All Cash must stay Right!
Celebrant: …I am down with Zero Love.
Congregation: Fluorescent-shot video survey!
Celebrant: Thus, I show Late with no Ticket.
All: Cold Business!
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File under Hiatus Interruptus

. Ask Vanx! _______ Witless Acts Expected at Poll…

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Ask Vanx!
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Witless Acts
Expected at Polls

Dear Vanx,

The Democrats are surprising even themselves with their newfound strength in this midterm election. Of course, it’s all on the backs of the chickens coming home to roost at the Bush White House. Still, we’ll take it any way we can get it, right? What d’ya think? Could this be “our year”?

Hopefully,
Timmy
Whippany, New Jersey

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Dear Timmy,

Of course not. Here’s why.

There is something called the Republican Voter Psyche. Basically it works like this. The “wronger” Republican leadership is proven to be, the “madder” Republican voters get. And when Republican voters get mad, they vote Republican “real hard.”

Sure, it’s mindless and brutal, but it’s how elections are won under our two-party system. And don’t kid yourself about the mindless part, Timmy. There is enough of that to go around. Maybe if the so-called “Democrat” party dealt with its Joe Lieberman problem with the savvy that the “Republic” party brought to its Lincoln Chafee problem, you would be able to claim the intellectual high ground. As it is, American politics has been reduced to a Democrat-endorsed low-comedy mud wrassle. So…you lose!

Don’t be upset, Timmy. There are a lot of coping mechanisms that you can use to deal with a future of wall-to-wall shutout. I, for example, have chosen to become a prophet. And when you’re a prophet, voting is a conflict of interest. You have no dog in the race, no skin in the game, and nothing hurts anymore! You just sit back and listen to the crunch of humanity under the boot heel of 20th Century Part Two and simply say, “See, I told ya.”

I highly recommend it!
Vanx

Edit0r’s note to self: Who the Hell takes a laptop on hiatuszzzzzzzzzz?

Photo grabbed from WFMU

. Hiatus! (Gesundheit!) . I’m takin…

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Hiatus!
(Gesundheit!)
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I’m taking a little break here. I thought I’d leave you with my photo tribute to David Lynch (see hydrants below), but after a swing around to my solid-down blog buddies’ places, I decided to go the Guermantes way instead with this photo I took at the Luxembourg Gardens. I took a break there too. Then I came back.

Of course, if you prefer the darker world of mystery and hand holding, skip down one.

Vanxzzzzzzzzzzzzz

. Greetings from Suburban Hell! Fire Walk With Me …

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Greetings from Suburban Hell!
Fire Walk With Me
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Photo by Vanx

. The Blinding Lake I drove to the southern tip o…

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The Blinding Lake

I drove to the southern tip of New Jersey and sat on the beach. There were no waves, no breakers. The Atlantic was a blinding lake in the late afternoon sun with a few fat gulls riding swells near the shore.

I’d been to visit my dying uncle who is nearly 100 years old and wasted beyond the point I thought possible. Though he refuses to eat, he bites at the air and chews nothing, weakly pulling the bed clothes and the nurse call-button to his mouth. The conscious and subconscious are at odds. He’s completely blind now. He breathes on his own. Aunt Ches, who is becoming more and more tired and confused as the weeks drag on, lately refers to Uncle Bert’s living will as his “will to live.”

She says Uncle Bert came around for just a moment on Saturday when she visited him. “We don’t live together anymore, do we,” he said. That was it. When I visited him with Aunt Ches on Sunday, Uncle Bert didn’t talk to us at all.

I drove Aunt Ches home. Afterward, I sat in the sand, squinting into the unusual stillness of the ancient, mortal Atlantic.

. A Doctor’s Born for a Purpose Part 1: I went to…

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A Doctor’s Born for a Purpose

Part 1: I went to the market to realize my soul

I was delighted to hear that the Turkish Novelist Orhan Pamuk won the Nobel prize for literature. I read his novel Snow a couple of years ago, right after my first trip to Turkey, and I am currently reading My Name is Red. I especially liked Snow. In that book, Pamuk creates a unique world for the reader, a snow-bound city of mystery and nostalgia in eastern Turkey. All great fiction establishes a kind of sublime world of subjective objectivity—a set-apart reflection of the so-called real world that individual readers relate to on the level of personal experience. Great books are fine items.

Pamuk, Turkey’s most popular novelist, has been in the news this year because of his recent arrest in Turkey on charges of insulting Turkish identity. The charges, which were dropped, arose from comments Pamuk made during a radio interview about the Armenian genocide, an atrocity that the Turkish state denies happened. Pamuk has been quite outspoken about the country’s need to come to terms with its relatively recent (20th century) past. But he is not a “political” writer. His books–and the Swedish Academy acknowledged this in announcing Pamuk’s award on Thursday–are an evocation of the soul of Turkey and of the amazing city of Istanbul. Unavoidably, the books explore the historic and current tension between Islam and the West. Pamuk, however, dismissed all questions about politics in interviews this week. “I think less than people think I do about politics,” he told The New York Times. “I care about writing. I am essentially a literary man who has fallen into a political situation.”

From what I’ve read of his work, I would say that Pamuk is not simply trying to dodge the subject and stay out of trouble. Pamuk, who is lecturing for a semester at Columbia University in New York, seems genuinely aggravated by questions about politics. In a National Public Radio interview yesterday evening, he got kind of nasty about it. I don’t blame him.

The Swedish Academy specifically states that politics has nothing to do with the award of the Nobel Prize in literature, and, even with last year’s award to Harold Pinter, I believe the Academy has yet to compromise that principle. With very few exception (see third item in today’s post), any conscious attempt to mix politics and art is doomed to failure, because the result is always politics. Scissors cut paper, rock smashes scissors, and politics compromises art. High school literature courses in the U.S. may have morphed into politically-correct world culture seminars, but the Nobel Prize for literature is still uncorrupted.

Part 2: On the route of the 19 bus…

Greil Marcus is such a bad writer that his work makes me read bad. I so expect to get knotted-up in his overwrought prose that I begin to see words that aren’t there and other words disguised in an offhand manner as words that they are not. Then I begin to write like him. Nonetheless, I’m slogging through his new book, The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy and the American Voice. I love his premise.

Marcus aptly views the United States in an Old Testiment context. It is a country based on a couple of documents that define freedom and certain rights that no worldly power can grant or take from us. These documents establish a covenant between their principles and the people. For years, Marcus argues, prophetic politicians and civic leaders—Marcus likens them to Amos in the Bible—pointed to breaches of the covenant, the most prominent being slavery, and warned of the dire consequences. The political line pretty much ended with Lincoln, who may have overstated his case in Marcus’ estimate. That left the artist, who has also played prophet in America, to reveal our transgressions and show us their inevitable end result.

Marcus looks closely in the book at the novelist Philip Roth, the filmmaker David Lynch, and the musician David Thomas of Pere Ubu. I am not extremely knowledgeable about Thomas, but I know how hard Roth and Lynch work to pull us out of our complacency and show us the horror—the ant war in the grass under our white picket fence next to the severed ear—that we should be focused on.

The Shape of Things to Come starts, as it must, with literary foreshadowing and reaction to September 11, 2001. The book touches, of course, on Bob Dylan, whose album Love and Theft was released on that very day. The record features a song called High Water (For Charlie Patton), which isn’t necessarily about a flood.

So, I will soldier through The Shape of Things to Come, paying attention to the words that aren’t there and unmasking those disguised. Could be Marcus is on to something.

Part 3: Then find a job at a paper

When I am not reading Orhan Pamuk or Greil Marcus—which is 99.3% of the time—I spend many hours watching rock ‘n’ roll documentaries. There are some good ones. This week I saw a great one called “Let’s Rock Again.” It’s about ex-Clash front man Joe Strummer trying to get his new band, The Mescaleros, off the ground in 2001, about a year before he died.

This was surprisingly hard work for a big star. We see Strummer standing on the boardwalk at Atlantic City handing out handscrawled fliers for his show at some Trump casino that night. He drops by a New Jersey classic rock radio station unannounced and tries to get in. He’s on the speakerphone at the front door: “Hi, my name is Joe Strummer and I have a rock ‘n’ roll band that’s playing tonight.” They finally let him in—yes the station manager has heard of him and has coincidentally cued up a Clash song, “Should I Stay or Should I Go,” a few songs ahead in the set he’s airing. “Well, now that’s serendipity,” says Strummer, obviously delighted that they let him in. He politely asks if they wouldn’t mind playing a song from the new Mescaleros CD and if they’d plug the Atlantic City gig.

Strummer was an extremely thoughtful guy. His observations throughout the film about the beauty and importance of experiencing the trip “from hero to zero,” as he puts it, are clearheaded and honest. He established himself as a rocker of the working class hero variety—despite his being the only member of the Clash raised in a middle class British family (his father was in the forgein service). And the Clash were an overtly political band. Strummer and bassist Paul Simenon grew up in various parts of the world, and the band coalesced in a rather tough neighborhood of London–under the shadow of the famous Westway elevated motorway. They had records with names like, Know Your Rights, and White Man in Hammersmith Palais. They incorporated all kinds of world music and covered songs like Bobby Fuller’s I Fought the Law (And the Law Won) and Junior Murvin’s Police and Thieves. Strummer, who died of a congenital heart condition in December, 2002, before “Let’s Rock Again” was released, would have balked at the tag, but he was essentially a Marxist.

Yes, the Clash put music and politics together and came out with music. And their politics made a difference to me and my friends. Terry Gross, on her NPR interview show, Fresh Air, once asked Strummer if he thought any of The Clash’s political statements were naïve in hindsight. It is the only post-Clash interview in which I’ve heard Strummer answer somebody rudely. In short, he did not think so. (Here is the best radio interview I’ve heard with Joe Strummer. It’s an hour-long show beginning with a lot of the Clash’s source music. A DJ named Hova on WFMU in Jersey City hosts.)

Watching “Let’s Rock Again,” I realized that Strummer was an artist who, like Pamuk, found himself in a political situation. He also had an incredible work ethic. Watching him slog through the tour with a kind of wistful optimism, satisfied with who he is fifteen years after the Clash disbanded, I was inspired to work harder, to create, and to trust my own voice…to be uncompromising in the quest for life. To water the houseplants, feed the hamster, take care of friends. To hug the kids.

Like any really good Marxist, Strummer was also a humanist. A humanist who rocked!

. Tell it on the Mountain The Monument at Gathland…

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Tell it on the Mountain
The Monument at Gathland

I didn’t know the United States had a War Correspondents Memorial until Todd sent me photographs of it. It’s in a place called Gathland State Park, near Crampton’s Gap and Burkittsville, MD. It was built by one of the many eccentric folk art visionaries that dot our history with their cracked pots and our landscape with things like the Watts Tower. They are a big part of what makes America great.

The War Correspondents Memorial was built by George Alfred Townsend. Born in 1841, Townsend is credited with being the youngest news correspondent during the U.S. Civil War. He wrote under the pen name of Gath, which he derived by adding an “h” to his initials. He claims to have been inspired to do so by this biblical passage: “Tell it not in Gath, publish it not in the streets of Askalon” (11 Samuel 1:20). Somewhat ironic, huh? In 1884 he purchased a tract of land on which he built his estate. He named it Gathland.

Townsend built about twenty monumental structures at Gathland, most with very practical purposes. He built his own mausoleum. This had a golden dog statue and an inscription over the door reading “Good Night Gath.” Like many of his other structures, the mausoleum toppled long before his death in 1914. Somebody stole the dog.

His most lasting architectural endeavor is the monument he built to his fellow war correspondents in 1886. It is described by Ruthanna Hindes in her biography of Townsend:

“In appearance the monument is quite odd. It is fifty feet high and forty feet broad. Above a Moorish arch sixteen feet high built of Hummelstown purple stone are super-imposed three Roman arches. These are flanked on one side with a square crenellated tower, producing a bizarre and picturesque effect. Niches in different places shelter the carving of two horses’ heads, and symbolic terra cotta statuettes of Mercury, Electricity and Poetry. Tables under the horses’ heads bear the suggestive words “Speed” and “Heed”; the heads are over the Roman arches. The three Roman arches are made of limestone from Creek Battlefield, Virginia, and each is nine feet high and six feet wide. These arches represent Description, Depiction and Photography.

The aforementioned tower contains a statue of Pan with the traditional pipes, and he is either half drawing or sheathing a Roman sword. Over a small turret on the opposite side of the tower is a gold vane of a pen bending a sword. (Note: This weather vane may now be seen in the Park Museum.)

At various places on the monument are quotations appropriate to the art of war correspondence. These are from a great variety of sources beginning with Old Testament verses.

Perhaps the most striking feature of all are the tablets inscribed with the names of 157 correspondents and war artists who saw and described in narrative and picture almost
all the events of the tour years of the war.”

The truth is besieged in wartime, as is the truth teller. The fact that battlefields still fill with artists, poets, reporters, photographers, and, now, bloggers says a lot about the persistence of the human spirit and the power of the truth. It’s good that someone thought to build a monument to war correspondents somewhere in our country. And it’s nice that it’s just a short drive from Washington DC–Gathland Park, not far from Antietam and other Civil War battlefields, is now managed by the Maryland State Parks Commission.

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Vanx

Photos: Todd Groesbeck