Dispatches from the Wolf's Den

my mortifying month

agrammar:

Here’s the question I’d like to put forth: Shouldn’t it be more possible — maybe even more common — for essays about music to be able to neutrally describe what “sources say,” or sources do, or sources listen to, without out trying to read behind that into what the author’s own tastes are?

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Yeah but the problem with your article is that there were no sources other than yourself and Jeff Tweedy.

So this afternoon I had a music class and I knew Jack had a music class next door so after my class finished I waited for his class to finish and then we went over to his house so he could help me with my CS homework. (It turns out x^2 in Java isn’t the same as x squared.) He fixed my wireless (it hadn’t been working) and ate the bread Nick had baked and he and Doug did math and I read about the mafia and the Daily. And then we moved to the living room, where he and Doug played X-Box and I downloaded rap records. I felt my smartphone vibrate and I looked and it didn’t illuminate like it does when I have a text so I checked my e-mail and then I looked at Morning Mail and saw that there was a lecture on Roman Satire at 5:30 and I looked back at my smartphone and it was 5:26 so I ran back to campus and into the room where the lecture was just beginning.

I sat next to the only other (I think) undergrad in the room. All the professors were in the front row, and graduate students were in the others. I was planning on going to another lecture at 6:30 so I had to check the time on my smartphone continually throughout the lecture, which was pretty rude but what could I do. The lecture finished at 6:30 and I realized there was a clock on the left wall. I had had two classes in that room before and should have remembered that there was a clock on the left wall.

Then I went to the other lecture, which was called “Local Knowledge” and was sponsored by my school’s center for public service and made me feel kinda guilty of being white. Also I was there so I could learn about things to write about, while everyone else there was already involved in cool community service stuff. After the lecture finished I went downstairs and saw my friend Jonathan, who’s having a party tonight. I told him to serve caipirinhas and that I was gonna send a couple e-mails, and then I opened my laptop and googled caipirinhas and my wireless wasn’t working. So I left and saw Benson and told him I was going home to write e-mails and he asked me for one so I sent him the Swanson pyramid of greatness and the video of Denim doing “Middle of the Road” on Later…with Jools Holland and the “Hey Ladies” video.

And then I tried to set up my online TV thing but it doesn’t work with Chrome so I had to launch Firefox and it didn’t start working until 9:06 and I was nervous I was missing Parks & Rec but it was only the Office. And then I watched Parks & Rec alone in my room and laughed really loud at a couple of jokes and tweeted one of them (the bit where Ron talks about the diner with the “four horsemeats of the egg-pork-olypse” or something like that) and texted my brother “This episode is amazing.” Except I think the romance between Ann Perkins and Rob Lowe’s character doesn’t really work. Like Ann Perkins isn’t an innately funny character and the writers have struggled to make her funny from the gitgo (I remember some funny stuff about her making Mark Brendaniwicz watch goofy romantic comedies with her, but that was a while ago.), and Rob Lowe’s character just talks in clipped rhythms, which was kind of funny at first but isn’t any more. And then I texted Jack “Wussup” and watched Jersey Shore and read Twitter in the commercial breaks.

And then it was 11:00 and I was about to text Jack again but I realized I had to hand in my CS homework. I tried to do it the fancy way but I couldn’t figure out which files to turn in so finally I made a .zip file and e-mailed it to myself and shaved in a much-needed shower.

When I got out of the shower it was 11:30 so I figured I had time to grab a slice of pizza on my way to the Computer Science department so I went to the Gate and got a slice of pizza but when I tried to pay with my school ID it didn’t work and the cashier gave me back my school ID and I realized it was my old idea which I had lost a year ago and had cancelled, but then someone found it and it still had money on the vending stripe (which didn’t get cancelled) so I kept it even though I had a new school ID. And then I offered the cashier cash or said she could just type in my ID number and she tried typing in my ID number and it didn’t work so finally she just took three of the four singles in my wallet

Then I went to the Computer Science department and handed in my homework and decided to go to the ATM in the campus center except when I got to the campus center I realized I needed my school ID to get into the campus center. And then I ran into some friends who invited me to come to a party with them but then the two of them who were dating wanted to go home and started walking ahead of everyone else and told me to come with them. And the boyfriend yelled at his friends to come and the girlfriend got mad at him for yelling. And then that happened again. None of them were wearing coats except for the boyfriend, who was wearing his girlfriend’s. Finally the couple decided to go home without everyone else so I headed to the party with the other two and told them my story and texted Kate to see if she could let me into our dorm (need a school ID for that too). (I had called her twice and she hadn’t picked up.)

I pointed out that my friends weren’t wearing coats and they said they had come from a dress-up party and I said “You wear jeans to a dress-up party?” and they said it was a ’90s hip hop themed party and they were dressed as the Beastie Boys. And I thought “the Beastie Boys didn’t wear skinny jeans” but I didn’t say it. And then we went to the party and I didn’t know anyone there but I knew of them because they were either rich Europeans or had gone to lame New York private schools. So I finished my drink and left and Kate called me back and I walked home and she let me in and I wrote this while listening to Divine Styler’s Spiral Walls Containing Autumns of Light. It took about 50 minutes.

Something I wanted to talk about in my last post but then forgot was the idea of “inside/outside,” which I know Derrida supposedly destroyed decades ago, but one thing I’ve been thinking about recently is how binaries are still useful even when they aren’t necessarily tenable. I think this is basically Frank Kogan’s take on deconstruction, which I’ve been trying to understand for years (mainly as a way to avoid having to read Derrida). And I think Kogan got it from Richard Rorty, as did Louis Menand, who lead me to read this essay last year but I don’t remember anything I got from it. And I think Rorty derives from Wittgenstein, whom I tried to read this summer but gave up. I’m sorry if this is all just basic pragmatism, but they haven’t offered any courses on it at school so I don’t know much about it. I took my dad’s copy of The Metaphysical Club down from the shelf the other day but I don’t think I’ll get around to reading it for another couple years. Maybe I’ll talk about meeting Louis Menand later in this post.

Kogan likes to use the example that “a cold star is 2,000 degrees above zero and a high-temperature superconductor is a couple hundred degrees below zero, the comparison being to other stars and other superconductors,” acknowledging that “hot/cold” is still a useful binary even though their definitions are kinda fluid; we just have to trust our common sense to recognize when something is “hot” or “cold.” Actually thinking about this now, that philosophy seems like the type of irrationality that could lead to fascism or something. I’ve had this file on my desktop for about a year or so but I’m not sure it relates.

And so when I was visiting Kenneth he told me he was pissed that Tom Stoppard denounced other people’s interpretations of his work at a lecture, and I told Kenneth how Dr. Keller was pissed that Daniel Mendelsohn denounced Stoppard’s interpretation of his own work in the Letters page of the New York Review of Books. I told Kenneth that maybe sometimes authors don’t control the meanings of their work and maybe sometimes (as in the case of Tom Stoppard, who seems to know what he’s doing) they do. This is maybe what Kogan means when he derides “[t]he mugwump who misreads [Richard] Meltzer’s ‘pertinence can be just anywhere at all’ as meaning ‘pertinence is just anywhere at all,” a distinction I consciously ignored when I was writing my high school senior thesis.

[Kogan also has this to say of Meltzer: “Basically, after reading Meltzer I can’t write for a day without picking up his style, it’s so strong.” The same thing is probably true of me and David. I’m gonna try to dial down the “like basically”s and “anyway”s and “and so”s, and I figure if I keep this up long enough I’ll develop a more distinct blogging voice or whatever, but be patient.]

[This has been the first time I’ve really missed my copy of Real Punks Don’t Wear Black, which I’m pretty sure Nick returned after I loaned it to him in 2008. I thought I had most of it memorized by now, but I’ve been relying on Google Books for the quotes. I already recommended the book to David and now I’m recommending it to you: if you haven’t read it already, click on that link and order it. It’s way better than this Tumblr.]

Anyway I’ve also been thinking about the “inside/outside” thing because the people in the Spy book are really into touting the magazine’s “insider/outsider dynamic” (p. 55) and right now I’m gonna loop back and contradict myself and say that living in New York makes you both an insider and an outsider. My first school was in Chinatown, where there were maybe two other white kids, and my second was on the Upper West Side, where there were maybe two other kids who lived below 34th Street. The whole time I was going there I refused to identify with the school’s preppy stereotype, but I didn’t really have any life outside of it (by which I mean any hipster friends). But then Vampire Weekend and Gossip Girl came out and I decided it was cool to be preppy but I couldn’t get into Harvard or Yale so I ended up at the Ivy League school for “trustafarians and children of celebrities who major in drum circles and semiotics” (I’m not any of those things either). And then I wrote a punk song where I rhymed “Chuck Bass” with “Cambridge, Mass.”

It’s kinda like how in the Spy book they say, “[T]he misapprehension that we were rich New York preppies always rankled us: The two founding editors and Susan Morrison were all products of provincial middle-class families and public-school educations;” or like how Ezra Koenig’s parents are middle-class Jews. I wrote this post a week ago and forgot what else I was gonna say so I’m gonna publish it now.

OK I’m having trouble figuring out how to structure this post but I did a lot of thinking today and decided to get back in the Tumblr game. Not thinking as in prevaricating about whether or not to start up the Tumblr but thinking as in stuff to put on the Tumblr (and then thinking about that decision).

It’s been two years since Alex B@lk nearly scared me off Tumblr, and though I still check in occasionally, my Dashboard is always filled with incomprehensible Summer of Megadeth posts (I just clicked that link and now I don’t know whether Alan Moore is dead or alive). But I guess I was just a really early adopter, because when I hung out with them (separately) over winter break, my best friends Kenneth and Anonymous told me about their new Tumblrs and encouraged my return. Then I texted Emily and she showed me her old Tumblr.

Anonymous urged me to post about my distastes for David Foster Wallace and My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, which I might get around to doing this week, and complained about people who only post pictures. Then we talked about how we both applied to intern for David, and how he didn’t get back to either of us. After I showed Kenneth this post, I had to explain to him that TR was one of the first Tumblrs I followed (not to mention one of the first to follow me), thanks to Evan, and how they were also responsible for the Balk fiasco. I guess this is where I should mention that I think I saw Alex Carnevale at the Strand on the first day of winter break but I didn’t say anything because I didn’t want to have to cop to Facebook-stalking him. When I logged into Tumblr to try to recommend Kenneth people to follow, he clicked on my drafts folder, where I keep a post from the end of this summer about recognizing famous bloggers at Refresh Refresh Refresh.

Kenneth also showed me Special Factoids, from the guy who brought you Headfoot and Alt85, but in a more personal vein. I’ve always wondered about keeping a journal, mostly out of fear of forgetting. I was particularly scared by an Alt85 post (I can’t find it now) with a list of every book Alex hass read since age 20 (there’s also a scary Jane Dark post I can’t find where s/he estimates the number of books he’s ever read). If you haven’t figured it out from the Balk link, I just turned 21. Yesterday was my first day back from visiting Kenneth and Anonymous in Connecticut, and I spent it with a copy of Spy: The Funny Years that I had ordered as a birthday present for myself weeks ago. Even though Kurt Andersen and Graydon Carter have their names on the cover, the body of the book is written by this dude George Kalogerakis, who cites his journals fairly frequently, and they seemed like good things to have.

And then today I was walking back from the DMV and thinking about Chinese food. I’ve lived in Chinatown my whole life (although I used to say “Lower East Side”), and there are basically four Chinese restaurants I go to:

• Vegetarian Dim Sum House
• Vanessa’s Dumplings
• Sheng Wang
• Xi’an Famous Foods

I’ve been going to the first two with my parents forever, and I discovered the second two from the critic Calvin Trillin calls “my man Sietsema.” When Kate moved to the East Village, I sent her this link about Xi’an’s newest location (where I took Sean on the first day of winter break between going to the Strand and seeing Black Swan). Later, Kate and I went to this, where, after getting us lost on the way to Prospect Park, I participated in a performance piece by putting on a blindfold and swinging at objects hanging from a tarp. It took me quite a while to hit the requisite three objects; more than once I nearly walked out of the tarp. After Kate asked the guy whether most participants took so long, he guided me to a couple of the hanging objects and told my fortune: I was impulsive, and didn’t need blogs to tell me “the best noodle shop.” Kate and I had a good laugh. Or at least she did: I felt pretty emasculated, by my navigational incompetence as well as by my web addiction and the fact that this groovy bearded hipster artist guy got to share a laugh with her at my expense.

Later that summer, Audrey came to visit, and we spent two evenings wandering around downtown as I tried to pick a restaurant she would like. The second night we went to Vegetarian Dim Sum House, and she loved it. Later I tried to take Zach and his friend Doug there but they wanted meat so we went to Great NY Noodle Town, which I have yet to really enjoy even though Sam Sifton and David Chang like it.

I place a certain amount lot of my self-worth in my knowledge of New York, and particularly of its restaurants, and particularly of those in Chinatown, but whenever I try to demonstrate it to out-of-towners I either fall on my face or fall back on the same couple places I found out about online. So then I was walking back from the DMV and thinking about how I was gonna go eat at Xi’an Famous Foods, but then I started thinking about how I need to try more Chinese restaurants, and how the new version of the Sifty Fifty included a place called New Chao Chow on Mott Street, and I was examining the menu of every Chinese restaurant with an endorsement from Zagat or Michelin, and then I started thinking, as I often do, about my own tentativeness and indecisiveness and need for people I respect to endorse decisions/tastes before I make/adopt them.

Like before I made it to Chinatown I had stopped in at J&R Music World where some CDs were two-for-$10 and had picked out a bunch of CDs and wanted to look at allmusic on my iPhone to see if they were worth getting but I couldn’t get on 3G in the store so I chose

• Nilsson Schmilsson by Harry Nilsson
• E.V.O.L. by Sonic Youth
• Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space by Spiritualized
• Live from Deep in the Heart of Texas by Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen

and I was already thinking about my confusion with music formats, like how I’m still not really comfortable pirating all my music both because I feel guilty (my parents have a friend in the music business who claims to be making half as much as he did fifteen years ago) and also because I’m nervous about getting low quality stuff, either with typos in the track names or with low bit rates, even though I really can’t hear any difference or discriminate among levels of sound quality.

Like I spent two days last week trying to figure out how to download Prince bootlegs from ?uestlove’s list and then one of them was in FLAC which seemed like higher quality than I would want and the other was in 128 kbps which seemed like lower quality than I would want. And I bought Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space even though I had already pirated it, but didn’t buy Surrealistic Pillow by Jefferson Airplane because I had already pirated it, and I didn’t buy any of the Prince CDs because I had ordered from eBay most of the Prince LPs my dad didn’t already have, but I had bought Marquee Moon by Television on CD even though my dad already had it on vinyl. Yesterday I thought I’d try to torrent a bunch of music before I got back to school (so I wouldn’t get caught torrenting there again) so I downloaded a client and a bunch of torrents (including the Nilsson one) but they’re all taking forever.

After J&R I walked through Chinatown but none of the restaurants looked appealing, like they were all sit-down and didn’t have lots of vegetarian options. The problem with most of these Chinese restaurants is that they have huge menus but you know only certain things are gonna be good and they tend not to be the vegetarian things. Like most people are into the ginger-scallion noodles at Great NY Noodle Town but they’re kind of boring to me, and like Kenneth and I went to Grand Sichuan a few weeks ago before going to Film Forum and ordered vegetable mei fun and vegetable chow fun (respectively) and they weren’t that great either. And so I realized that my favorite restaurants are cheap (like under $7) take-out places with solid vegetarian options. In addition to Xi’an Famous Foods (where I usually get the stir-fried liang pi), Sheng Wang (where I always get the fried peel noodle), and Vanessa’s (where I usually get the vegetable dumplings and the sesame pancake with tuna fish), which are all in my neighborhood, there are two places I like in midtown by where I “worked” (for free) the last two summers:

• Woo Ri Jip: Most things here are under $5, but I usually end up spending a little more than that at the salad bar, where I like to get zucchini pancakes, inari sushi, mackerel, and chinese broccoli.
• No. 7 Sub: Every sub is $9, and they charge tax, so it ends up more like $9.79 if you don’t order a drink, which I suggest you don’t because they put too much ice in them.

I also like Mahmoun’s on St. Mark’s and Saltie in Williamsburg (even though I’ve only been there once, it was that good) and the bagel with lox at Zabar’s (even better with fresh-squeezed o.j.). A couple weeks ago I would’ve recommended Artichoke, but I got really sick to my stomach after eating there last week and I’m pretty sure it has something to do with the facts that a) they got a “B” in their health inspection and b) they’ve started serving re-heated slices, something they used to never do.

So anyway I gave up on trying a new Chinese place and went to Sheng Wang and ordered the fried peel noodle, only when the woman brought it out it was covered with beef! And she saw that I was dismayed but I nodded because I was pretty sure she didn’t speak English and I didn’t know how to explain that I didn’t want beef in my noodles. Also I had been thinking about how my dietary restrictions were interfering with my love/knowledge of food, Chinese and other.

Basically I keep some form of “kosher” but I do it more out of habit than ideology. I wrote a paper about it freshman year that I’ll try to summarize right now. I don’t eat pork, shellfish, or meat that hasn’t been certified kosher, but I do eat milk, eggs, and fish, often prepared in kitchens that also prepare the things I don’t eat. And though I identify as Jewish and even “religious”, I still think keeping kosher isn’t really consistent with my identity. Like I have plenty of friends from more “religious” backgrounds who eat at McDonald’s, and there are plenty of Jewish laws I either don’t observe or don’t agree with (e.g., not using computers on the Sabbath, not letting people be gay with each other). I often think about going vegan or omnivore, but it never works out.

Like last night another family invited my family over to dinner, and my dad explained to them our eating habits, and instead of preparing something vegetarian they wrote back saying that they were preparing branzino fish and kosher chicken. And so I ate them both even though I think you’re not supposed to eat fish and meat together (this also happened on Thanksgiving when I put fish sauce vinaigrette on my brussel sprouts and told my mom that it didn’t have fish in it) and then my mom asked them how they did the chicken and the husband said “onion and rosemary” and the wife said, “Ooh and lots of butter!” and we all looked at our laps because you also can’t mix meat and dairy. But it was cool that I knew I had broken the rules because then I could have brownies (I’d already eaten dairy!) and pumpkin bread with cream cheese except my dad stopped me from eating the cream cheese because I guess he hadn’t heard about the butter. It’s funny too because he used to complain about how my (long-gone) refusal to eat cheese interfered with my gustatory pleasure, but so does his kashrut! (Actually the chicken last night was much worse than the kosher fowl cooked by my mom or the folks at Hillel.) Anyway that’s about as transgressive as I get.

So though I felt emboldened about getting noodles with (non-kosher) beef in them, I ended up just eating around the beef (which a lot of kosher people wouldn’t do) and got kind of pissed off that Sheng Wang had added meat to the one vegetarian item on the menu. And then I went to pay and the guy charged me $6 instead of $4, which I though was weird, and then I looked at the menu again and under “Fried Peel Noodle…$4” was “Beef Fried Peel Noodle…$6.” (I just noticed that Sifton, who has mocked pescetarians in the past, is pretty sympathetic to kosher diners in his latest column.)

So basically that’s the type of stupid, mundane, awkward stuff I’m gonna try post on this Tumblr from now on, only less tedious, because the stuff in this post has been building up for a while. I figure if I blog about my awkward, tentative, indecisive life, maybe I’ll be able to improve it, or cope with it, or at least entertain you with it.

Like I had gone to the DMV because I wanted a government ID to go to bars now that I’m 21. My folks don’t have a car and I was too lazy to sign up for Driver’s Ed so I never got a driver’s license and my college ID doesn’t have my D.O.B. so I got used to carrying my high school ID, even though it couldn’t get me into an 18+ show at Webster Hall and Anonymous told me it was illegal to not have government ID on you at all times. And then I got a fake ID and it only got rejected three or four times but I still get nervous whenever I use it. And now I can use my passport but I feel dumb bringing it to bars. And then a couple weeks ago someone told me I could get a state ID that wasn’t a driver’s license and I googled it and lo and behold and yada yada yada.

I put off going because the DMV’s hours are 8:30-4 and I usually sleep til noon and I’d heard clichés about it taking forever so I figured I wouldn’t get there in time but yesterday I told my parents I’d go today even though a few days ago I’d told my mom I’d go out to lunch with her today. So she woke me up this morning and told me we could go to lunch after I went to the DMV, and I told her to let me sleep for ten more minutes, but then I checked my iPhone and I had two e-mails, including the Indy masthead for next semester, which I was excited about, so I stayed awake.

I got a little nervous because the masthead was like almost all sophomore girls, but I’m excited because I’m doing the Metro section with Malcolm and Alice, and so I can try to apply some of the stuff I’m picking up from Spy: The Funny Years about making a magazine city-specific. (I’m thinking lots of maps, and maybe a gossip column.)

And then I got everything together for the DMV and changed out of my Brown t-shirt because I didn’t want to have a Brown t-shirt in my ID photo for 8-9 years, and then I realized I also didn’t want to have a jewfro in my ID photo for 8-9 years, so I called up Frank’s Chop Shop but no one was there (this was 12:01 and their website says they open at noon). So then I listened to this record and called again and they had an opening at 1:00 so I made a quesadilla and got dressed and went.

It’s always strange when I go to the Chop Shop because Mr. B is usually having a really cool conversation with whoever’s hair he’s cutting and I feel obligated to have a similar conversation with my own barber but end up just eavesdropping instead. So today he was cutting a British dude’s hair and asking dumb questions about England, like “What exactly is a Cockney?” because he was in the middle of Life and even though he didn’t like the Stones that much he respected them for being kinda punk and authentic and listening to the blues and not dressing like the Beatles, and then they both agreed that the Stones were better than the Beatles because they were immersed in the blues and I wanted to object that the Stones all came from middle-class backgrounds while the Beatles were all dirt-poor and that the Beatles immersed themselves not only in the blues but in rockabilly and Brill Building and swamp pop but I was too shy. Then the British guy said that a friend of his used to strip out by LAX and had once gone home with Mick Jagger, who only wanted to urinate on her. “He must get so much ass, you know,” said Mr. B. It made me think of the post where David goes to the strip club.

So then I went to the DMV and waited on line for my picture. Even though I had gotten dressed for the picture in my blue Uniqlo cardigan and my dad’s white v-neck, I noticed that no one else was taking off their coats for their picture, so I kept my huge parka on. I signed a form and Ms. Hernandez gave me a slip of paper with the code “B339” and told me to wait for it. There were several boards, each of which had one column listing similar codes and one column listing numbers. I thought that the numbers indicated your spot on line, so that when “B339” showed up next to “11” I figured I had to wait for ten more people.

I was happy to wait because I was engrossed in the last chapter of The Possessed, another birthday gift from myself. People know that The Possessed is about grad school, but I don’t think anyone has noted how ripe it is for literary study. Throughout the book Batuman mentions her failed novel, setting up The Possessed as a sort of consolation prize. In fact, the book marries my favorite literary forms: the essay collection and the meta-textual novel. Not just a simple travelogue, The Possessed explores the relationship between real life and literature, developing its own literary theory. My favorite Spy magazine article so far (and less dated than most) is Bruce Handy’s deconstruction (j/k) of the term “postmodern.” Despite this, I find The Possessed postmodern in the best way.

Then I realized that the numbers next to the coes indicated the counter you were supposed to go to, but by that time they had gone on to “B341.” I went to the information desk and they gave me another slip with the code “B346.” When this was called I brought my forms up to a middle-aged Chinese guy who, after spending five minutes typing with one finger, asked me for $10 and gave me a temporary ID without my picture on it, useless for getting into bars. He told me my ID would come in 20 days. My parents will have to mail it to me. I’ll see how I look in my parka.

After Sheng Wang, I came home and wrote this post for four hours. Then I went to see my friends play music. When I showed the bouncer my passport, he skeptically asked me my birthday. Later he nearly beat up a kid for dancing.