Goodbye, Nona Mecklenberg

Michelle Trachtenberg died last week – something that might not mean a lot to most people, but one of the first celebrities of my age cohort to die other than the obvious set of young overdoses and suicides. Her death was different – the death of someone, like myself, approaching middle age. Not that I was any particular fan, but I remembered her fondly as someone from my youth.

 The plaudits for her work were to be expected. She was much-remembered for her roles in Gossip Girl and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, neither of which were particularly on my radar, and also for her child-star performance in Harriet the Spy, which I mostly remember for being a story about the world’s most endearingly awful and judgmental tween who goes on a rampage of emotional revenge seemingly designed to give the girls in her class a lifetime’s worth of eating disorders.

But I would always know her as Nona Mecklenberg.

 

Not necessarily the best-known reference – but Nickelodeon’s The Adventures of Pete and Pete ran from 1993 to 1996. And few pieces of media have had as strong an effect on my outlook of the world.

What was it that made this show special among what I only later learned was a cult audience of bespectacled library girls and future wiseasses and class clowns? What did we all see in an otherwise little-known children’s show from the mid-‘90s? Why did it never get the branding push that accomplished other shows of the time on the same channel?

The premise is absurd from the beginning – two brothers, both named Pete – but this fact seems perfectly in tune with the setting, both pathologically normal (what name could be more normal than Pete?) and deeply surreal. The setting is Wellsville, State Unknown (the “Sideburn State,” per the license plates), but it’s strongly implied to be New Jersey, and the look and feel of the show is very much the look and feel of what journalist David Roth called the “old-growth suburbs” of North Jersey, hissing summer lawns and all.

 

 

But as David Lynch knew, that always hides deep weirdness. An episode of Pete and Pete feels like that childhood bike ride down an alley you’d never gone down, wondering what lurked inside, wondering if what your friend’s older brother told you was true.

What make the world of the show different from reality is that all of that playground lore is brought to the surface, front and center. Little Pete has naval tattoos. Their mom has a plate in her head that gets a frame in the intro credits. The mysterious, bizarre townsfolk are played by Michael Stipe, Iggy Pop, Kate Pierson, Debbie Harry, LL Cool J, with dulcet Magnetic Fields instrumentals humming in the background during the tender scenes. This might seem all too familiar in a world full of obnoxiously self-aware ostensible children’s cartoons that seem to be designed just as much for adults – and which I would say radically fail as grownup entertainment, and are perhaps a bit too on-the-nose to function well as children’s entertainment as well – but in the ‘90s, this was revolutionary.

Which meant that unlike most children’s media of the time period, it actually struck me as honest. There were no moralistic fairytales here, no condescension. There was only the understanding that the world is a strange, magical, baffling, fascinating place, ruled by the cruel dictates of adults who seem to operate on their own twisted logic (q.v. Little Pete’s war against adult swim at the local pool, or his attempt to tunnel to freedom to escape being grounded all summer, or the International Adult Conspiracy’s attempt to banish local superhero Artie, the Strongest Man in the World, from Wellsville). But through the spirit of discovery, exploration, and embrace of the weird, these dictates could and should be subverted, even if there’s a recognition that the magic is fleeting. Mr. Tastee, the mysterious ice cream vendor, has a whole other life to live. Summer will always end, and it will be back to the drudgery of school life. Artie will eventually leave Wellsville. You can’t live in a dream-world forever, no matter how hard you try.

“It was the story of a superhero and a kid, who ruled at dodgeball, waltzed the lunar landscape, and beat up the Atlantic Ocean. Until one day, the kid finally learned all there was to learn from this friend, and it was time for the superhero to move on.”

 And as magical as the world of Pete and Pete is, there’s a darkness that lurks in the corners. That pay phone that rings for years straight is as feared by the adults as by the kids. The bullies and creeps weren’t just funny, they were often actually frightening, with the grin of James Rebhorn’s evil vinyl siding salesman character Mr. McFlemp being just as sinister as that of Bobby Peru or Leland Palmer.

 

It’s a darkness that extends to love and sex too. It wasn’t something that I registered as a small child, but there’s a whole episode in which Big Pete borrows petty thug Endless Mike Hellstrom’s vintage Ford Mustang to take his best friend Ellen to the drive-in, fogs the windows, throws the seats back and tries to make a move… because he feels that’s what he’s supposed to do. And of course he fucks up and he winds up hurting the person he cares the most about. It might be the most honest treatment of teenage romantic confusion I know of.

All of this is why it never became part of the ‘90s marketing machine, vicious teenagers with pit stains described as “glandular freaks” are less likely to sell sugary snacks than the Rugrats were able to.

Likewise, few of the show’s stars went on to do much afterwards. Both Petes had acting credits for years afterwards, but I doubt I’ve seen them in anything else. Michelle Trachtenberg was the only one who became anything resembling a household name, and how she, too, is gone.  

And so, Nona, I hope you’re frantically dancing to Luscious Jackson in a better place.

 

The Horror of Positive Thinking

 A few weeks ago, one of the leading lights of the American left, Barbara Ehrenreich, died of cancer. She would have preferred that wording – “died of cancer,” I suspect, and not the euphemistic “passed away,” as she was a bitter opponent of all forms of bullshit, particularly those delivered with sanctimony. She's probably best known for her masterful journalism about life at minimum wage in Nickel and Dimed, but real heads will also know she coined the term “professional managerial class,” or about the brief fracas after she said about Marie Kondo's heavily accented TV English: 

“It’s OK with me that she doesn’t speak English to her huge American audience but it does suggest that America is in decline as a superpower.” 

… precipitating a histrionic response by a purple-haired chick with a mermaid emoji in her name, who then gave us one of the world's silliest copypastas (sing it with me!):

“You did a racism. You did an imperialism. You did a xenophobia. You did a white fragility. You did a weak apology. You did no growth. This makes it abundantly clear you don't even understand the intersectionality of the multiplicity of your offenses.” 

But to me, the thing that Barbara Ehrenreich did that resonated the most was not her Wigan Pier-style reportage, it was her writing about the ways in which the American ideology of positivity damages the soul and reflects an atomized society.

To sum up, Ehrenreich got diagnosed with breast cancer, a particularly cruel twist considering that she didn't have any of the major risk factors. However, instead of empathy with suffering, what Ehrenreich found, over and over again, was an attempt to turn rain into liquid sunshine. She was repulsed by the way she wasn't suffering, she was “fighting,” she wasn't a victim, she was a “survivor,” all of which at the end of the day made her feel lonelier, more isolated, and more shushed, discouraged even from feeling panic and grief at the very real chance of her own imminent mortality. It didn't help that with her particular diagnosis of breast cancer, the pink-ribbon capitalists were among the people she had most vigorously criticized.

This is something I'd suspected for a long time, wet blanket that I am. My 7th grade science teacher liked to remind us moody tweens that a frown required us to work more muscles than a smile. I cannot think of a more crystal-clear example of sunny idiocy.

Of course, back then, I didn't know why I felt the way I did. I just knew that something about my teacher's comment seemed very fundamentally wrong-headed.

Yet the examples hit like a barrage, again and again, throughout my adolescence and afterwards. George W. Bush's premature-cumshot mission accomplished? The runaway success of The Secret and the revival of “positive thinking,” more or less a glorification of how four year olds see the world? The 2010s influencers preaching positivity and wellness against a millennial-pink and sage-green background? They all seemed to be indicators of that same sunny idiocy I encountered back in the piss-reek corridors of my town's middle school.

It wasn't just that it was cringe (although cringe it was). But as Ehrenreich elucidated, there really is a dark side to all that positivity – it does preclude empathy, it does gloss over actual problems that may exist in the world and with oneself. And this in turn makes it the handmaiden of a social doctrine whereby every problem one has is one's own fault, whereby any misery is just laziness, an ideology that is, like so many others throughout the Anglo-American world, the descendant of some of the worst parts of Protestantism.

I'm glad the term “toxic positivity” has gained some traction over the past year or two, as shit has seemed more fucked. Because facing down the twists and turns of a global pandemic, the inevitable threat of climate change, spiraling wealth inequality, revanchist nationalism, and other assorted general bad vibes, how can anyone not be experiencing some kind of angst?

And in those moments, if you're anything like me, you don't want someone to say you're looking at the world with tired eyes, or that you can start by going vegan and not using plastic straws, or – and this is truly some hellworld shit – that you need to start practicing mindfulness and (that sickliest of words) gratitude. You want someone to pass you the joint and simply say “I feel you, man.”

Which is what I got when I read Barbara Ehrenreich's books and essays. And to you, dear reader, no matter where you are – I feel you, man.

Hideous Interviews With Men in Briefs

When one self-describes as an “introvert,” certain assumptions are made, both by people who identify as such and people who do not. It seems to me most people who call themselves introverts are just assholes hiding behind the language of clinical psychology, but I'd like to think I'm a true introvert – someone who gets their energy from being alone, and someone for whom a weekend cheek-by-jowl with another human, even one I love, is a strain, despite the fact that I like spending time with those around me.

And when I go out into the world, it's far less draining to talk to those who don't know me, to those who don't have any expectations. I don't know whether it's latent charisma or, more likely, the relative social isolation of the past couple years that has made people more talkative around me over the past couple of years. To meet the myriad weirdos of the public sphere – there are basically no stakes. As the teenage-boy fantasy movie I saw like 10 times put it, single-serving friends. They can be saintly and sweethearted. They can be absolute cunts. Sometimes they buy me drinks, not necessarily with the intention of boning me down (those that wish to bone me down, I'm leaving out of this brief musing). Sometimes they buy me drinks because it makes me more obligated to listen to their bullshit. Regardless, I walk away from the situation, to be forgotten by the parties in question in a matter of days.

So let this be a compendium of sorts, with the caveat that it's mostly going to be the gloomier of these myriad weirdos – it's much less interesting to talk about the kind, friendly, wholly ordinary people, or the simply boring people, or even the majority of the cruel and ignorant, who are simply cruel and ignorant, and about whom that's about all there is to say. But if David Foster Wallace took the diseased strains of the human ego and turned it into something both bitterly real and empathetic in his Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, then these are my hideous interviews with men in briefs.

Case No. 1:

He, in theory, knows at least some of the same people I do, and he seems several years older than me. At first, the chat is pleasant. It seems we share similar taste in wine and movies, and he seems to fall into one of the most universal categories – a good dude. And yet as the evening continues, I can see him starting to crumble a bit, he starts throwing out phrases like “everyone says I'm an asshole,” and I'm not sure if this is typical Northern European self-deprecation, or whether he is admitting the fact that he is an asshole, or an asshole with a persecution complex who finds other people's interpretation of their asshole behavior to be evidence of their interlocutors' stupidity, and I have to wonder whether or not I should vacate the premises. I slowly sidle away, talking to someone else, until he mutters something a little too loudly to not be noticed, a little too softly to not be audible over the soundsystem, before going back to frowning into his old fashioned. What was it that he muttered? Was it that he felt slighted in some way? Did he feel the world's opinion of him was confirmed? Was this more on the evidence pile? And in my bitter moments, am I any fucking better?

Case No. 2:

He's a tourist here, but a regular tourist – we get them a lot in this part of the world, people for whom Thailand is the standard escape. Many are retirees looking to get a bit of sunshine before returning to higher latitudes, many are the standard sex tourists, a remarkably high number are various flavors of queer people from various countries who enjoy being able to publicly show affection without fear of state-sanctioned violence, and some are a bit cagier in their reasoning. This man is one of them. He's in his fifties, with the muscled-running-to-fat look of aging athletes. I should have known he would start making political points with me, to which I responded as I normally do – state my position, point out why I believe what I do, and push back as appropriate. Of course, he was a Tory, which is to be expected, and pivoted to a different subject the minute that a counter-argument was presented and contradicting himself often enough. And of course he talked about how glad he was we could have a “civil discussion,” and more or less sucked his own dick talking about how civil he was being. I would have left earlier, but the edibles were kicking in and it was raining out. But the more he talked, the more he mentioned his boyhood as the son of an English schoolmaster, I started to feel a bit bad. I imagined a childhood of Protestant morals, in which athletic prowess and high test scores as a child and financial success as an adult had long since become stand-ins for any kind of divine grace, in which law and order had substituted for righteous justice. The jowly middle-class product of a childhood of gray meat and caning. I used to have to listen to The Smiths and read Philip Larkin to encounter this sort of personality.

Case No. 3:

He invites me over for a drink, with a very uniquely Israeli sort of enthusiasm, asking me for advice on writing. I try my best to offer a few succinct pointers, but he's not having it, demanding more, and in exchange he promises me he can teach me how to get any girl I want. I hadn't heard that particular line in a while. It turns out he's in the porn industry, and he's more or less exactly how I imagine an Israeli pornographer to be – someone who's 50 and still seems pretty into hookers, molly, and trance music. He is perplexed as to why I cannot recommend a preferred bordelle.

Case No. 4:

He is a small Thai man of indeterminate age – definitely over 30, but could be anywhere between there and 60, although context clues suggest an age around 40. He's been at some event, and is moderately shitfaced, and strikes up a conversation about cocktails with me – I am, as always, happy to discuss my passion for the Angel Face, the Last Word, and all those other concoctions that conjure up lost worlds in my mind, but he's more focused on a perceived exclusivity. Unfortunately, he claims to know my boss – not my actual boss, but one of the top partners. He points out that whenever he goes to New York, he stays with a friend on Park Avenue. “You've got money too, I know” he says with a smile, as if that's true, and as if that's supposed to be a compliment, a recognition that we can look down on the plebs together. It's a reminder that in this part of the world, the elites make no attempts to humanize their image. There's no Bill Gates proudly driving a Subaru, no Mark Zuckerberg handing out grilled cheese sandwiches at Burning Man. There is only the man with tobacco-stained teeth showing off his skrilla (and god help me, I just looked up how to spell “skrilla,” because it occurs to me I've never actually heard that word written down). I politely decline a night of clubbing with him. On a Sunday.

And what sticks out about all of these cases is the way in which they reflect my own particular failures – the misanthrope, the self-righteous grandstander, the nihilistic sensualist, the endless consumer. And that in and of itself could constitute a whole set of other failures – the allure of fatalism, a difficulty to self-forgive, and a dreadful terror at the thought that destiny might be real.

I would say it sounds pompous if I quote Hermann Hesse, but fuck it, let's go: “If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself. What isn't part of ourselves doesn't disturb us.” – Hermann Hesse, Demian

There but for the grace of god, go I, I think. Maybe you would think you go too.

I try my best to find the wounded heart – the logic that leads these people to where they were, and it's not hard to identify the lines of environment and nation and religion and history, of upbringing and inputs, of the infinitely complex contours of the human mind. And you have to wonder, could they have turned out any different? Could any of us? 

A moment of terror that passed the other day: at lunchtime, I see an man of maybe 80 or 85 shuffling down Silom Road with a walker – he looks exhausted, you can almost feel him squinting through his sunglasses against the glaring midday tropical sun. About my height, dressed not too differently from me. And with the same fucking tattoo in the same fucking place.

I move past, my heart racing, I look back, my elderly doppelganger walking away from me, and I look in the mirrored window of an office tower. Exhaustion on my face. The image of the city reflected and distorted behind me.

Death in the Age of Twitter

When I first heard about the not-untimely but decidedly time-unfortunate death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, I did the worst possible thing – I went to social media. This is akin to checking WebMD when you experience an innocuous discomfort of one kind or another, and come out thinking you have lymphoma.

A depressingly large number of Twitter liberals' automatic response was (natch) to blame the left. The name “Jill Stein” was trotted out yet again as a reason for why the world sucks (much like Nader back during the Bush years), because instead of actually, you know, interrogating why people don't trust a party that has walked back every attempt at economic justice it's made by cozying up to Wall Street. Because if there's one thing you need in an election year, apparently it's by wagging fingers and alienating potential allies. If Trump is reelected, I'm fully expecting the Blame Bernie Brigade to come back in full force, and I'm expecting to be nagged for my lack of party loyalty.

And of course there were weird, angry takes (second stage of grief and all that). One that struck me as particularly bizarre was a seemingly widespread finger-wag against people using the phrase “rest in power” for white people. If you believe this, you have a stupid opinion. I hold you in a certain measure of contempt for having that opinion. Your entertaining this opinion and other associated flavors of histrionics and umbrage is a symptom of a broader problem with the American left. You might still be a lovely dinner guest though.

But ultimately, the depressing fact is that the Supreme Court was already lost for a generation ever since Brett Kavanaugh slithered his way into the chamber.

I also had to ask myself what Justice Ginsburg really did for the left, and I suspect many of her most ardent supporters would be hard-pressed to name actual policies she pushed through during her tenure (there were some of note, but they were relatively few). Rather, people are more familiar with her jeremiad dissents, which while eloquently phrased statements of purpose, are at the end of the day the rallying cry of the defeated.

And this is perhaps mirrored by the fact that, given the recalcitrant American right, the center left's response has been to less eloquently screech “THAT'S NOT FAIR!” at every repugnant thing McConnell and Co. do.

At the end of the day this is another reduction of politics to bien-pensant aesthetics. Lacking real victories, nice American liberals have simply been content over the past 20 years to rest on their own smugness. I remember the feeling of paralytic horror at watching The Daily Show in my teens, during the Iraq War, and the general attitude of “Well, look at THOSE dumbasses” towards the local yokels baying for Arab blood while ignoring the fact that the New York Times editorial staff and their colleagues (Frum, Friedman, and the rest) attempted to provide intellectual scaffolding for imperialist idiocy. At my most cynical moments, it's an attitude that seems to represent an almost Weimar-level phobia of and disgust towards mass politics, with results that invariably bite liberalism in its ass.

Putting one's faith in an unelected court is cheering on your champions rather than taking part in the process of mass politics (not that I'm a model, I just do my best to fund where I can when I can... oh, and join the DSA, folks). Indeed, Ginsburg herself was critical of the process of Roe v. Wade, pointing out that by settling the matter of abortion in the courts during a time of liberalizing abortion laws rather than in the democratic sphere, a backlash was invited without sufficient public consensus to act as a counterbalance. Unsurprisingly, Jacobin published a fair amount of good analysis on this subject.

But to be a leftist is, unfortunately, by and large, setting yourself up for disappointments. Consistently. As someone who believes that working towards a socialist society is the necessary fulfillment of the mission of the Enlightenment, I have to accept that I will be unhappy more often than I am happy with the world at large, and it's because I know how much better it could be.

Political engagement is, to a certain degree, an utterly quixotic mission that will drive you fucking insane. Even those conservatives who have scored so many global victories over the past several years can't escape. Their worldview is fraught with a wild loathing of the world as it has become, as it has transformed into something that deviates from their myopic perspectives. At the ground level, American conservatives seem in particular seem far more occupied with stomping their feet at the perceived transgressions of liberals and socialists (and being completely unable to differentiate the two) than actually forming anything like a coherent perspective.

A sheriff, spitting through his mustache: “You know if you'd told me 20 years ago I'd see children walking the streets of our Texas towns with green hair, bones in their noses, I just flat out wouldn't have believed you.”

Tommy Lee Jones: “Signs and wonders.”

And so my conclusion is that an old lady who worked hard and did some good things has died. She will doubtless be replaced by some cross-clutching fuckwad who in any decent society would be stripped of their judicial power and forced to walk the streets wearing a barrel with shoulder straps holding up a sign saying “Will adjudicate for food.” But I can't perceive it as the apocalyptic event that so many liberals perceive it to be.

At this particularly stupid time in history, that baseline annoyance is to a certain degree something I expect. I had thought Trump and Hillary were the two worst presidential candidates of my lifetime. Nope, Trump and Biden. It can always get worse. I know that I will have a materially worse life than my parents. That sucks. But as it is something I have no control over, I accept it.

My only irrational hope left is that things will get better before the seas rise... too much... and that I can leave the world with it pointed in a different direction. Somewhat.

A Eulogy

I was hesitant to write anything about the recent death of my father. After all, the topic of the death of a parent in the long form just seems like such a heavily covered topic that has become one of the great banalities of the modern novel or New York Times-baiting work of creative nonfiction. Furthermore, it's such an intensely personal topic that to write about it at length seems somewhat dishonest, with the danger of turning the intense complexities of human life into a lame biography filled with platitudes. Conversely, to write a short-form reminiscence, while a seemingly more appropriate and universal expression of grief, just isn't me. I don't do brevity well.

And yet writing was the thing I did that my late father seemed proudest of, and to not cover the subject of his death – and I want to say death, not that horrifically deceptive term “passing” – would be a sin of omission, a failure to act when I was perhaps most obligated to do so.

So who was the late Giles Fowler? I could mention the inevitable boxes to be ticked – father, aesthete, professor, journalist, jazz lover, travel junkie, Southern gentleman – but all of these social roles come off as hollow, prepackaged tropes.

As his son, I saw everything through a son's eyes, the kind that start as fawning admiration, turn into a brief “fuck you” at some point in adolescence, before mellowing into something more nuanced. He wasn't a particularly closed-off man, and as anyone who knew him would tell you, he was always at the ready with a witty story from his long and varied life. But what I see still has an angle, an angle made up of personal memories, of old photos, of narratives told, of bits I wasn't supposed to see but saw anyway.

At some point, I picked up a dog-eared and forgotten book about Middle American culture written when Middle America was at its Keynesian peak, a kind of book we don't see too much of anymore – too functionalist or structuralist or old-school humanist in its analysis, too many claims to metanarratives, not enough pathos to find a mainstream publisher, not enough Foucauldian (on one side) or evo-psych (on the other) analysis to find an academic publisher. My answer as to why it was even there was a line I remember describing my old man as “Giles Fowler, one of America's young, hip, dangerous film critics.” And all I could think was him? The man shining his shoes in his sweatpants yelling “That fucking Rumsfeld!” at 60 Minutes.

All I can think of is the scene in the first season of Six Feet Under where Nate, reeling from the death of his father and trying to settle his accounts, smokes his late father's weed in his late father's secret man cave above an Indian restaurant, imagining his dad ripping bongs with bikers, getting a beej from a hooker, firing a sniper rifle from the windows as the Amboy Dukes' “Journey to the Center of the Mind” plays on an old record player, wondering who his dad was when his dad wasn't being a dad.

But of course there were the stories I knew of my dad as my dad, the sorts that will live on fondly, that I'll tell other people, and while I'll probably never have children of my own, they are the sorts of stories I would tell them. Of him telling me the difference between a classic dry and a Gibson martini while he gave me a bath. Or how Hemingway's writing was like a Cézanne painting on the way to school. Or asking me as a college freshman if PCP-laced weed was still a thing, with the honest, non-judgmental curiosity of a man who had seen the beats, the hippies, and the punks all come and go, and assumed the bohemianism of my own generation would, like any other, have its own linguistic, sartorial, aesthetic, and narcotic standards, which he had been around the block too many times to be shocked by.

And last of all, of springing him for the night from the rehabilitation facility where he was, we thought, recovering from a nasty full-body infection, a faux-colonial building by the side of Highway 69 where ancient men in baseball caps watched reruns of Everybody Loves Raymond in a stupor in a lounge that smelled of instant mashed potatoes, to get him back to the world of the living and lift up his spirits, to take him out for a hanger steak and an illicit cognac sidecar. He talked about his prognosis, which was then looking quite positive, about his delight that he wasn't too ill to submit an absentee ballot against Steve King, about how glad he was that his two eldest sons, both of whom lived in other countries, could be back at the same time for a visit.

I flew out the next day, and a week later he was gone.

I'm now left with my memories, a fair bit of the sort of haze that comes in the wake of a loss, and I'm listening to a Coltrane album he loved, drinking Bulleit – a personal favorite of his – and I find one of his last emails, mentioning a trip he had just taken to see the homes and graves of his ancestors in Pettis County, Missouri, where his people come from:

“A lot of ghosts in that town – men in straw hats and white suits and women in filmy finery drinking highballs on the Staffords' lawn across the street from Granddad's. Strange that I was alive there.”

I'll miss you, Dad.

Memoriam Edition

Years ago, on a foggy morning in Aberdeen, Washington, I stopped at a small bridge over the Wishkah River. I went with the expectation of some kind of cosmic misery-mojo, the kind that comes with a slowly dying old logging town, a place once known as the “port of missing men” for its reputation as a place where a sailor could safely be robbed and murdered without too many people coming and looking for him, on an especially gloomy stretch of the Northwest Coast (more than twice the annual rainfall of Seattle), home of the Melvins, whose brand of sludgy metal would become profoundly influential in '90s rock music, particularly thanks to a tow-headed kid whom they inspired, who used to cry under this bridge on the Wishkah.

And what I got, and this shouldn't have surprised me, and didn't especially surprise me, were the paraphernalia of more steadfast pilgrims, half-burnt cheap candles, Sharpie graffiti from California gutter punks – “You changed my life, Kurt” – and things of that nature.

I wasn't sure then, and I'm not sure now, how I feel about all of this overt sentiment. On one hand, it does come off as corny and cliché, but on the other hand, it is the very legitimate expression of emotional honesty, even if it is a rather silly and confessionalist and very adolescent format, and it's the sort of emotional honesty that comes with the experience of loving someone's art who died too soon. And regardless of whatever the public memory is, there is an ineffable personal memory, one that can't be reduced to the image that is intentionally projected in a mediated society.

Cobain died when I was seven years old. I barely knew who he himself was, but I'd certainly heard plenty of Nirvana songs around. And some of those are so intimately connected to such hyper-specific early memories, to beaded covers over vinyl seats in someone's shitty, beat-up Chevy Caprice Classic.

This notion of the divide between personal and public memory has been at the forefront of my mind lately as I've seen the media response to the suicide of Anthony Bourdain, which is the first celebrity death in years I've actually cared about – hell, for that matter, for which my first thought hasn't been “how can I make this into a tasteless pun?” From what I've seen, the media has been fairly restrained in its treatment, and I haven't seen anyone try to translate the “cynicism” which he was often said to have (one of the many flagrant misuses of the word, whereby it is used as a catch-all for snarkiness, dark humor, or pretty much any emotional response other than Anglo-American earnestness) into a reading of his death. Which is refreshing... after all, it was only a few days that countless media sources were using Kate Spade's suicide as a simplistic fairy tale about how “money can't buy happiness.”

I'm sure plenty of people have ways that Bourdain did change their lives. He inspired them to travel more, to eat better, hopefully to enjoy the works of those who inspired him -- whether Antonioni, Joan Didion, or the New York Dolls -- and I can probably attribute a fair amount of my own fawning over classical French cuisine to his writings. So I won't leave a candle, I won't scrawl anything in Sharpie. But I will pour myself a goddamn Negroni.

On Celebrity Suicide

The Internet announced it was in mourning. It was in mourning for a comedian and actor whose work I honestly didn't appreciate for a long time, until I recently, within the past couple weeks, really, discovered his early stand-up career, before he became associated with a long string of what I always considered to be dreadfully sentimental films.

And I have to wonder why and how the hive mind mourns. It has always bothered me how people's lives become metaphor, and in the case of a suicide, the suicide becomes the central metaphor. If the person has enjoyed some level of fame, the media coverage of their death turns a complex and remote experience into something “personal” and “sincere” for the general public, a tidy little pill we can swallow. Take two after dinner to feel pathos.

In this case the central metaphor of his personality-- in public, that of the clown, privately maybe not so much, as intimated in the now-famous Marc Maron interview-- is hijacked and transformed into a Pagliaccio figure, the clown carrying inner pain, which, of all tropes in the media, is one of the laziest and most played out.

The notion of comedians as being funny on stage, but also depressed, addicted, or just generally fucked up should be a notion we're used to by now, 40 plus years after Richard Pryor and Lenny Bruce made their mark. And it becomes too easy to construe comedians as inherently fucked up, or conversely, to view damage and darkness as a natural and necessary conduit for humor. This is a variation of the old conflation of personal disaster and creative genius, the fetish of countless teenage boys (self included) and a plotline that has somehow retained its mystique since Goethe and Keats introduced it.

Other sectors of the Internet mourning community have taken the opportunity to claim that depression is a disease like any other. Now, there is a certain truth to it (yes, it fits our definition of a disease) and a pragmatism to it (it's good to demystify mental illness, and to treat it as something that can be handled clinically). But it becomes too easy to medicalize our problems, to reduce thorny and difficult problems to something easily treatable with pharmaceuticals, which in empirical practice seems to only be sometimes useful, but is deeply in line with the American desire for quick fixes. And yet this line of thought, which should be more productive and more empirical, winds up leading to another form of mystification in the public consciousness. We take something difficult, and relegate it to the realm of expert knowledge, beyond comprehension. Which is perhaps, why, in eternally unsmiling and practically minded Hong Kong, the falling suicide of megastar Leslie Cheung was reported as “due to chemical imbalance.”

We don't want to confront the fact that at the end of the day, we are merely speculating, merely projecting fears and worldviews onto the unknowable and scary when it is suddenly thrust into the public spotlight. Instead of asking deep, serious questions, we impose our narrative on the material event, and damn the places where they don't synchronize.

I know that by writing about it, I am imposing my own narrative, taking this sort of cagey, oblique, postmodernist approach, out of my morbid curiosity about everyone else's morbid curiosity.

Which, like so many meta-approaches, leaves me with a sense of cold disconnectedness, of being trapped in an infinite mirror maze of language and sign and discourse. And I'll leave it there. I could extrapolate that to what the point of writing is at all, to what the world is, but I know well enough to leave those issues alone. I simply arrive at this point in said mirror maze. I feel like I'm somewhere important, but everyone probably does.

My Corpse

An industry of sorts has grown up around the memory of David Foster Wallace. There are the books of interviews, of B-side essays, the (rather dull) biography, the (repugnant and cloying) blank-page art book version of his Kenyon College commencement speech, the hundreds of thousands of views of his Youtube interviews, the accompanying comment threads.

Of course, I'm guilty of having consumed a great deal of it. As for so many of my generation, he has become transfigured as Saint David of Illinois, the secular beacon for the mopey and literary, someone we can project our angst and desire for sincerity onto, a figure-- as with all secular saints-- we can use to embody our perceptions of certain elements of ourselves.

However, he is by no means alone. All of us, anyone who makes some kind of impact on the world through having children, through art, etc., has to face the reality that, ultimately, other people will invest our death and a full-scope view of our life as a metaphor, and for all intents and purposes, use our corpses as puppets for their own egos.

A nightmare: from above, I see an open-casket funeral. I cannot see a face on the body, but I'm certain that it's me, embalmed and half-transformed into plastic, my body cavity stuffed with cotton, fluids replaced with formaldehyde and methanol, a doll version of myself. Some people look sad, most look bored. People who brought their kids who'd rather be at home playing Xbox.

Of course, there are also the more modern traditions. The modern funeral is supposed to be about life and the all-pervasive word “dignity,” not about death per se, I'm told, which strikes me as truly gruesome. In logical extension of the Protestant work ethic, my countrymen have turned catharsis into productivity.

The violation of one's own body and memory are, for oneself, completely hypothetical circumstances. By definition, you will never consciously experience either. And yet they produce this deep-seated primal nausea, something ancient and atavistic.

Much is made of the human desire for immortality, and this feeling seems to be a sort of variation on that. The notion of immortality, exclusively through the terms of others, seems like a long-term postmortem slavery. So we try, in life, to align how we will be remembered with the value systems we hold dear, whether that's through religious ritual, organ donation, or leaving one's assets to beloved children or worthy charities or what have you.

But why should I expect anything more from death than I have in life? It's not like I live my life on my terms and mine alone, or that anyone does. If none of us have a monopoly on how we are perceived in our lives-- try as we might-- why can we expect the same in death?

Alternatively, we can take the opposite route, to try to be forgotten-- common courtesy in certain Amazonian societies which forbid even saying the names of the dead, but harder in the contemporary Western world. A less extreme example is found in the funeral practice of Mongolian lamas, who, in a final act of compassion, have their corpses dragged to mountaintops to feed the birds of the steppe.

All of this being said, death is by its very nature an abstraction, something we can come close to, but never touch until the absolute moment. Try as we might, we can never control it-- even suicides rarely go as planned. And the people who have the healthiest relationships to death probably recognize this, whether consciously or not, and accept its abstract nature.

And so my line of analysis leaves me back where I started, with a void. Which, in turn, is all I can ask for. An emptiness that I have to learn to be comfortable with.

Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial

I recently reread Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial, a meditation on an archaeological site published by the sadly rarely read, but always revered Thomas Browne in 1658. I don't reread books often-- there seem to be too many things I haven't read once to get around to reading something twice-- but it's quite short, and things were slow. The clouds were gathering over the city, in more ways than one, and it seemed the perfect time to read something dark and quiet and half-remembered.

I can remember so distinctly when I first read Thomas Browne, when I was staying for a week at a couple of friends' apartment on Queen Anne Hill in Seattle. And I can remember the way the light cast down on the paper, the Italic headings in an old 19^th Century copy of Browne's complete works from the library. The recurring mental image was of two men, with pointed beards and black cloaks, on a chilly autumn morning, with ravens in naked trees on the flat plains of Norfolk, standing before an open pit in the black earth, a broken ceramic jar at the bottom lying in a pool of stagnant water, maybe a workman with a rough country accent digging through the sandy soil. Browne-- or at least the face engraved on the frontispiece-- staring up at a gray English sky, watching the birds fly upwards. His melancholy, his facing the tombs of dead pagans, immediately confronting his faith in the Protestant God and the emerging scientific practice that marked the dawning Age of Reason, which he believed to be symbolized in the eternal quincunx, the latticed form that he believed marked the soul of all things.

It was about a year after that cold day in Seattle that I stood in a field on the Plain of Jars in Northern Laos, with the first burial urns I recognized as such, or rather things generally figured by the archaeologists to be burial urns-- the local people believed them to be where the gods and giants kept their lao khao, the harsh, grainy rice wine of Laos and Thailand, which I'd drank that morning, scalding hot from a still.

Did I think of my image of Thomas Browne in his field on that day? Or was the sunlight, the clang of cowbells on high mountain meadows, the high spirits of a holiday, even in a necropolis, strong enough to dissuade me?

And when I think, now, of Thomas Browne, I am not thinking of him amid ancient ruins. My thoughts wander in that direction on days when the sunset seems sickly, when there's a sourness in the pit of my stomach, when my apartment seems a sepulcher.

And was that image based on anything? For all I know, Browne could have visited his urns on a bright summer day, with skylarks instead of ravens and trees full of flowers. My image of Thomas Browne is more informed by his followers-- the morose wanderer W.G. Sebald, the blind librarian Jorge Luis Borges, the sensitive suicide Virginia Woolf. And on the whole, images of death, such as this, are probably more at home in Hollywood than in our lives.

I did feel a distinct sense of death in the jars, as I walked delicately along the margins of rice paddies. This area, a plateau in the Lao highlands was made briefly infamous by Lyndon Johnson's clandestine use of the local Hmong people as a proxy army as part of America's decade-long folly in Southeast Asia. The burial urns now share space with minefields and caved-in Pathet Lao trenches. Missile casings are turned into fenceposts, hotels keep rusty Kalashnikovs as souvenirs. The death I felt there was not cosmic, but immediate, the very real possibility that I would meet a sudden, violent end if I strayed from the marked path.

Which tells me how separate death is from its avatars. We dress up death in images, turn it into mossy churchyards and widows in black crepe. Death is irrational, unbounded by human metaphor. It is the full catheter and labored breathing of a much-loved relative in a chilly hospital room, the idiotic expression of a corpse by a roadside, half-seen through a car window.