Slimbo's Shelf

2012 - Predictions

2012-01-02T08:35:00.000-08:00

Will some massive piece of cosmic refuse smash us into stardust on December 21st, 2012? Well, if I'm looking at victorious Romney/Gingrich ticket in November of 2012, I sure as hell hope so.

2012 - this is the year it's all supposed to end. Of course, being a fan of shorwave, I'm a little leary of predictions, given that freak Harold Camping's spectacular End of Times fail in 2011. Boy that was fun to watch. If you're looking for a great read, Tom Perrotta's The Leftovers is an amusing take on The Rapture. In his scenario, the Rapture takes a randomly chosen and relatively small group of people, leaving non-believers of the town of Mapleton befuddled and its hard-core believers enraged. I'm almost done with Leftovers and am still trying to figure out what the Rapture, (which is secularized as 'The Sudden Departure') means in Perrotta's novel. Are the varying reactions of the citizens of Mapleton somehow indicative of our national reactions and obsessions with 9/11, its 10 year anniversary or the conspiratorial hysteria that plagues it?

I've got a lot I'm going to accomplish this year - good small resolutions: drink less / exercise more / floss / blah / blah / blah... But the only resolutions I ever really stick to are my reading lists.

So here's how 2012 shapes up for me:

Fear & Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72 - Hunter S. Thompson - - I really am angry that Hunter S. Thompson killed himself (as a fan, I refuse to use the language of other worshipers who say he 'made his exit'. Bullshit, Johnny Depp - he killed himself). I appreciate that the good doctor lived his life his own way and it was a life that extended further than he ever imagined it would. I appreciate and respect anyone who lives their life entirely by their own terms. But dammit, we need him right now. I know I'm being selfish here, but one need just take a peak at the GOP contenders and the ineffectual Editor of the Harvard Law Review who lives in the White House - and realize that the Fear and Loathing of the 2012 Campaign will eclipse anything that preceded it.

Fear of Dreaming - Jim Carroll - - I read Nick Hornby make this claim, but I'll make it myself as well - I am one of maybe eight people on planet earth who goes to a bookstore and buys poetry.

Anthony Powell - A Question of Upbringing
Marcel Proust - Place Names - The Place

All for now. Happy New Year.

Troubling Events at 75 Meters

2011-12-29T17:21:00.000-08:00

I listen to shortwave radio. I realize this is an odd anachronistic hobby for a 39 year-old suburbanite who should be empowering himself with yoga, reality television and crap purchased from the Apple Store. But long ago I had a shortwave radio in high school, a time before the interwebs were capable of delivering live streaming of any radio station you could fathom. Perhaps I listen to shortwave radio now to re-experience the wonderment that I felt then, alone in my room, pulling in signals that seemed to arrive from anywhere and everywhere, as though through some magical cypher.

I have a Grundig G3. It is an amazing little machine, and well worth the $129 it costs. It is able to pull in many international broadcasts as well as aeronautical communications and amateur broadcasts. I must confess to being most intrigued by what I might find discussed by Ham Radio operators. As I got back into shorwave, it was easy to presuppose that amateur broadcasts were ocean of anti-government Obama-haters, writhing in the seats of their remote Ham Shacks, imploring any and all who might be listening to prepare for the End of Times.

I spend most of my time on shortwave listening to Hams. I track their call signs and document everything I hear. I do this mostly out of curiosity - it's interesting to see the vast distances from which I can pull in a signal on such an unsophisticated receiver. And to my surprise, most Hams are enormously likable and listenable men (I've only heard one female amateur operator). Rather than spewing venomous political crap, they mostly are looking to make connections with other Hams to discuss the shortwave conditions in the ionosphere and the effectiveness of their antennae. And once these connections are made, Hams generally just converse about their lives - what they're doing that day, how the weather is, what they're planning to do next summer.

I've been listening and documenting religiously for almost a year now. But now, due perhaps to the oncoming shift and uncertainty popular culture believes Planet Earth will endure in 2012, the Ham universe has taken a decidedly darker direction.

On December 11th, I was listening at 3827 kHz on the lower side band. A Ham operator was delivering a long religious speech, which at times seemed mildly anti-Semitic. Other Hams were trying to break into his broadcast, either by speaking or by sending out Morse code. Still, other Hams began attacking those Hams who were looking to disrupt this broadcast. A consistent voice trying to counter the religious broadcast was met with another countering voice decrying his attempts by repeating: "That's an ARRL Member jamming a legal QSO" (meaning 'hey - that's a licenced operator trying to disrupt a legal broadcast').

It was all very unsettling. Since then, I've encountered other hotbeds for political diatribes, most infamous being 14313 kHz during the daytime. These exchanges are nothing more than verbal versions of any anonymous internet comment board. But there's something scary and sinister here. Hearing the actual voices of their adversaries doesn't seem to deter the anger these men feel. One would assume that the anger a man might feel for another man who does not share his viewpoint might be assuaged if the two men, rather than conversing through the blindness of an internet chat room, could actually hear one another's real voices. This is not the case, unfortunately.

Best Reads of 2011

2011-12-28T19:03:00.000-08:00

It's been a little over three years since I started Slimbo's Shelf. I never really gave any thought to how long it would last when I started this blog. This, of course, was a time when blogs were relevant. Now, amid the constant flurry of ever-changing interweb social media, blogs seem to have gone the way of the cassette tape or fax machine.

Yet I carry on. The only alternative to writing on this blog is to continually write in my notebooks. I have a stack of these spiral notebooks in my closet. One might mistaken them for artifacts of my old school days, but oh no, sir. These are the ramblings of a contemporary suburban madman. I don't remember what's been written in half of them, but they are densely packed with my words. Occasionally, I'll mine out an idea from these dusty tomes, perhaps to transpose into an idea I'll work through here, on this blog where it goes unread amid the ocean of unread blogs that now populate our fair planet.

Ah, fuck it. Let's talk about what Slimbo read in 2011.

Super Sad True Love Story - Gary Shteyngart. Written between 2006-2009, this story portrays a New York riddled with materialistic protagonists obsessed with their hand held devices trying to understand love amid a New York severed by income inequality protests while the US Government defaults on its debt. This work is oddly prophetic of our current lives, as we pretend to be amused by Occupy's theatrics, all the while commandeered by whatever devices Apple tells us we must possess on cue.

At Madame Swann's - Marcel Proust. As noted before, I am continuing my lifelong quest to read all of Proust's work. In this installment, young Marcel finds love with Gilberte, loses his love for Gilbert and eventually transitions into his love of Albertine. In the midst of all this, he spends WAY too much time obsessing on dresses and flowers. Just sayin', sports fans. Sometimes, I read Proust believing I'm ingesting the greatest writing ever executed in any language. Sometimes I want to smack him. I'd like to think you, my imaginary readership, feel the same about me.

The Bishop - Anton Chekhov. Free on Kindle - download it now! This story chronicles the last thoughts of a bishop marooned in a country parish as he lives out his final days. Death comes to him suddenly. Palm Sunday, he is fine but by Easter he will be dead. His terrible and beautiful musings are juxtapositioned against the rituals and mystical comforts of Holy Week. The Bishop is one of the most moving stories I've ever read. It is a simple, albeit heavily Russian, exploration of life's meaning written as Chekhov himself was dying.

Yondering - Louis L'Amour. I picked this up in Utah and it seemed fitting to read rugged old school man-fiction while I was out there absorbing the mysterious power of those towering Rockies and windswept plains. For an East Coast guy, being there was exhilarating (Wow, I think I grew a few hairs on my chest just writing that - call it Slimbo reaching out to Red State readers). I've got a soft spot for L'Amour. He toiled in the WPA Writers Project with Jim Thompson, whom I hold in enormously high regard. I over-idealize men like these two. I'm too ready to romanticize about the obstacles they faced as they were maligned as Reds by the years that followed WW2 as the Red Scare choked off the oxygen to the gray matter of our national intelligence. In reality, these were just two guys looking to make a buck, any which way they could. Thompson never made the bucks he should have, but L'Amour tapped into the post-war machismo volcano that yearned for his Westerns - validations of American manliness, once the M-1 rifles went silent in 1945.

Yondering is not typical L'Amour, though. These are short stories of varying settings, but all adventures pitting strong hard men against indomitable odds, scoffing at death. Each story is a homage to Hemingway and/or Jack London. Each story avoids the need to explain the existential meaningless of violence and each story veers ever so gently to some formulaic articulation of American exceptionalism and red/white/blue righteousness. Ah shit, who am I to judge? Reading this made me want to go back in time and be 19 again. These stories made me want to piss away all the plastic conventions and scour planet Earth inch by every nasty inch.

Conquest of the Useless - Werner Herzog. This is a painstakingly detailed account of the filming of Fitzcaraldo, as gleaned from the journals of German director Werner Herzog. The Shelf offered a slice of Conquest's offerings in this post. To complete Herzog's unbelievable vision for Fitzcaraldo, wherein he executed the impossible feat of towing a ship over a mountain, Herzog had to navigate the "obscenity of the jungle" while also manage the departure of his initial leading man, Jason Robards for the blessed, yet cursed presence of Robard's replacement, the ever insane Klaus Kinski.

Hey Look, it's the World's 7th Largest Army

2011-12-10T11:13:00.000-08:00

Mattathias Schwartz reported something astonishing in a recent article in The New Yorker. He reported that just as Mayor Bloomberg was sending in the world's 7th largest army to break up the Occupy encampment at Zuccoti Park, the Occupy Movement's leaders were themselves preparing to break down camp for the winter and call it a victorious 2011.

But now, thanks to the heavy-handed tactics endured, the circus must continue for Occupy to save face. All in all, I've been following Occupy with the same detached bemusement I hold while watching my New York Mets play the Yankees. I know it's all going to end bad for the good guys, so why bother getting excited about anything.

Still, I think Occupy can claim victory right now. Just this week, the President (finally!) gave an impassioned speech addressing the vast polarization of wealth and power in this nation that is likely going to bring the end of our democracy if something drastic is not done. Did the enduring presence of Occupy finally enable Obama to find his spinal structure? We don't know.

On a more local level, some jackbooted brainwashed freak is going around my town and posting up signs that say, "Don't Believe the Liberal Media". I find the rhetoric delivered by these signs ironically parallels Mao's playbook from the Cultural Revolution. This horseshit really annoys me. It's one thing to make the conscious decision to turn on Fox News and allow a plutocratic fascist like Roger Ailes to fill your brains with hourly inputs of batshit. But to bring the narrative onto the telephone poles in my town is an affront to my pursuit of happiness (it's also a violation of section 110.3 of the town code). Tag sales and lost kittens - that's what telephone pole postings are for, and if that freakshow Michael Moore ever tried to post something here, I'd be ranting the same rant.

Now it seems, some ambitious countering bastard is going to each one of these signs and spray painting over it. Or at least he (or she) is spray painting over the words 'Liberal Media'. So the signs just say, "Don't Believe". Rather a dour outlook on the human condition isn't it?

And everything does look dour. 2012 is almost here and good God what a hell of a year it's going to be. We're going to have to watch as all of America must choose between giving the editor of the Harvard Law Review another four years to do whatever the hell it is he does; or do we hand the nation over some morally bankrupt enabler of the aristocratic corporate class?

I'm beginning to hope those Mayans were right and that 2012 holds nothing more for us than to be blasted into stardust by some roving rouge asteroid. But I am still undone by this unanswerable question: if the Mayans were so great at predicting the end of our world, how come the sucked so bad at foreseeing the end of their world?

Insane Propagation

2011-10-12T11:02:00.000-07:00

I don't know what's going on but I'm finding I'm getting VHF/UHF reception I've never gotten before. On just my little Radio Shackl Pro-404 scanner, I was able to pick up a repeater from Southern Florida on 420.692 MHz. Hams from California, Tucson and the Carolina's could be heard clearly. On top of that, I heard this while listening to the scanner in my car - I didn't even have a mobile antenna hooked onto the scanner, just a ducky (albeit, a 800 MHz antenna, slight upgrade from the ducky that came with the unit). Anybody who has any idea what's going on, let me know.

12/29 Footnote - what I was picking up was repeater network. Radio geeks can read about it here.

Why No One Is Hiring

2011-09-12T06:33:00.001-07:00

This article is old, but it's worth another look. To summarize, John Allison, chairman of BB&T loves Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. I mean he LOVES IT!!! So much so that he makes his executives read it. And BB&T donates millions to the 'Ayn Rand Institute', whatever the hell that is.

Now, I don't own any stock in BB&T, but if I did, I'd sell it immediately. Christopher Hitchens perhaps put it best about Ayn Rand - Americans don't need further instruction on being selfish. It's in our DNA. But I would not want anything to do with any organization, especially a corporation, that operates on the premise that the individual takes priority over the collective.

Allison seems to think that if he breeds a culture of self-righteous government-haters, he's going to yield optimum results. That may make for some cute Carolina water-cooler banter with lively comparisons of our president to Mao levied some lovely starched shirt corporate scratch-golfing Glenn Beck jackboots. But if I were to commit the grave sin of imagining myself as a business owner, I'd be a little bit concerned if all my best employees were nihilistic self-servers.

We have a major problem. No one is hiring. A company that had 20 employees in 2007 fired five of them. Now the remaining 15 do the work of 20. And corporate profits are strong, incredibly strong throughout America. Shareholders snicker and feed bullshit to the executive boards of the corporations that serve as their personal ATM machines. Don't hire anyone back - claim it's still a crisis. All bullshit. The economy has returned but the 1% who own a quarter of America are itching to claim a full half of it.

It looks as though President Barack Obama has given up fighting. And it may very well be that our nation's next leader might be yet another Texas governor who conveys his worth by way of his inarticulation and intellectual disinterest. 1% of our nation commands 25% of its wealth. Corporate profits have enjoyed six straight quarters of double-digit growth, yet our population has been brainwashed to believe we need yet another Texan of sub-par intelligence to deliver us from an evil president who spends his days plotting to persecute America's precious yacht owners.

Conservatives love to lament an alleged cultural relativism that existed briefly in the 1960's. But now we're reaping the ill effects of an enduring moral relativism that infests our nation's boardrooms that masks itself as free-market righteousness.

Obama has given up. The dream is dead. We're doomed.

New York Films - 9/11/11

2011-09-09T16:41:00.001-07:00

THE NIGHT BEFORE

On the night of September 10th, 2001, I was making my way across lower Manhattan to a small theatre where a short film was premiering which my cousin had edited. My office was in the World Financial Center (across the street from 1 World Trade Center), and I figured I'd walk the journey to the East Village because back then, no logical transportation route (symbolically enough) connected the financial district of Manhattan to it's (then) most raw artistic center.

This proved to be a mistake. The skies opened up in a torrential downpour. I sprinted from awning to awning, all the way my feet slogged through six inches of water. Having lived in Manhattan (thank you God) for six years, I can honestly put forth that Mother Nature never levied an onslaught onto Manhattan as she did the evening of September 10th, 2001.

By the time I got to the premier, the film was over. My uncle (my cousin-editor's dad) approached me cautiously. He took one look at me and seemed unsettled by my soggy appearance. And with a voice loaded with concern, and perhaps something else, something possibly foreboding, he held the back of my neck and asked, "Are you okay?"

THE DAY OF

I watch clips on YouTube. Just as it has become the informal repository of a wide reaching tapestry of our culture, it has also become a peripheral chronicler of history. There are hundreds of clips uploaded about The Day. And most, unfortunately, are compilations of the systematic hysteria of America's lust for conspiracy: the tragic 'inside job' pornography. I had to sit through endless misfires of these abominations but then I finally found what I was looking for. There is only one film clip I've ever encountered that does it - that captures the sound that the planes made. It is a deafening sound that I can only describe as a manhole cover being dropped on your head.

We talk about the life before and the life after. When everything changed. And so I cling onto films - not films of The Day, but films that captured New York before The Day. There is a brief blessed time when something is yours, before your big boom and film helps us to soak in the artifacts that unleash memory. There was a time when New York was mine, and I was the king of the universe and we all, all of ignorant sleeping America, felt we could walk through the raindrops.

SOME TIME EARLIER

In the past few weeks, thanks to my insomnia, I've lucked upon a number of my favorite New York films on late night cable: Hannah and Her Sisters, Mo'Better Blues, Moonstruck, Bright Lights Big City. These capture a New York a little over a decade before September 11th, when the city was just emerging from the abyss of the 1970's and the Guilianification of the 1990's was a long ways off. I remember seeing these films when I was marooned in Memphis, incongruously forging a new identify as a Southern teenager. These films brought be back to my roots and planted seeds for where I wanted my future to be.

There is a precious time capsule in the backdrops of these films. Films set in cities do this for us. When Michael J. Fox is standing outside a Fifth Avenue department store window gazing up at the mannequin molded after the wife who has left him, I now just look at the cars going by in the background and am fascinated at the flowing river of the automotive past. It's incredibly refreshing to see a New York where stores and restaurants were not overrun by national chains (there's not a Starbucks in sight and characters are (gasp!) forced to patronize local delis and eateries). Furthermore it's most refreshing to watch New Yorkers working at desks without computers and sustaining existence without handheld electronic devices.

A Severed Head

2011-09-08T17:12:00.000-07:00

Iris Murdoch's A Severed Head is the third of her books I've read (the other two being The Black Prince and The Sea, The Sea).

Severed Head is essentially a heady, intellectual, painfully English version of Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice. Murdoch presents, as she always does, inordinately interesting and intelligent characters so above you and I in all matters with the exception of their inability NOT to be driven insane by love.

Martin has both a mistress and a wife he loves. Much to Martin's surprise, his wife tells him that she is leaving him for her therapist. Martin is devastated. But why? Should he not just build a new life with his mistress? Of course not. Because love is not about the other, but about the elevation of the self. And romantic happiness, in Murdoch's world, is entirely rooted in the self. Happiness comes not from what two people can give to one another, but from something far more pessimistic. It's a blunt but not unrealistic view of the reality of relationships.

Love is a complex and semi-diabolical landscape in Murdoch's work. The blunt mechanics of sex are almost entirely absent in her stories - even the suggestion of it is hard to extract. But the all encompassing obsessiveness which love unwittingly inflicts on humanity pervades her stories and nearly derails the lives of her characters. The reader, at least this one, is always left with a tremendous sense of unease. I love her work - being an unabashed anglophile helps.

From Frederick

2011-09-08T16:59:00.000-07:00

"You missed a very dull TV show about Auschwitz. More gruesome film clips. And more puzzled intellectuals declaring their mystification at the systematic murder of millions. The reason why they can never answer the question How could this happen? is that it's the wrong question. Given what people are, they question is Why doesn't it happen more often? Of course, it does - it subtler forms.

"It's been ages since I sat in front of the TV, just changing channels to find something. You see the whole culture: Nazis, deodorant salesmen, wrestlers, beauty contests, the talk shows...eh, can you imagine the level of a mind that watches wrestling?

"But the worst are the fundamentalist preachers - third rate con men convincing the poor suckers that watch them that they speak for Gee-sus. And to please send money - money, money, money, money.

"If Jesus came back today and saw what was going on in his name...he would never stop throwing up."

Slimbo's Sports Update

2011-09-05T13:58:00.000-07:00

Summer is over. The New York Mets are, as they so often in the month of August and September, entirely out of the contention for post-season action. Furthermore, thanks to the Wilpon's dealings with Bernie Madoff, the franchise continues to be financially adrift, most likely to be sold to the first poor bastard who thinks this $1 billion nightmare is a good bet.

So what else is there for Slimbo to cogitate upon? What else is there to distract him from the mountains of rejection letters, and stacks of paintings which have all congealed into one sticky stack amid the summertime storeroom heat?

Well, hockey has presented an interesting conundrum. Due to the geography of my birth I have long declared my allegiances to the New York Islanders. Now, rightfully so, the citizens of Long Island have declared that they do not want to refurbish my team's god-awful arena with taxpayer dollars. And so, logic would dictate that we should not expect the Isles to stay with us, considering the deserving citizens of Quebec who lustily wish to give the Islanders a new home. Ca va, I suppose. [By the way - I'd appreciate if all 2.5 of you Slimbo's Shelf readers could take a moment and see the poll on the right. Help me pick my new National Hockey League club. (Who the hell am I kidding? No one reads this fucking blog, except for graduate students looking to pilfer my genius as they complete their paper on Heinrich Boll) Okay, Rolf, pick a team then!!]

It doesn't matter. I don't even think I like hockey. Hell, I just think I started rooting for the Islanders when I began my lost years on Wall Street, laboring for the overlords, all of whom where NY Rangers fans. I was clearly turning my back and stomping on the graves of the proletariat working-class sensibilities that had brought me and my family forth from centuries of impoverished oblivion. Whether toting golf clubs or building databases, I have done nothing with my professional life but betray every ennobling tenet of Christianity and democracy that has made Western Civilization tenable. All I ever seem to do is whore myself out to the bad guys. I guess rooting for the NY Islanders gave me me some slight wedge upon which I can maybe, just maybe feel as though I was siding with the good guys for a change.

But what about the New York Football Giants? Hell, I don't know. And I don't think I care, really. All of New York is abuzz for the New York Jets right now. This makes sense. The Jets have a formidable team, an outsized identity and that elusive muse: momentum, the most important key to success in the NFL. The Giants are sputtering, hoping for the best, while praying to elude the tapestry of injuries that has become the franchise's annual Waterloo.

When I was a kid growing up, my father and older brother were passionate Jets fans. Unfortunately, my choosing the Giants lacks any noble source other than the need to differentiate myself from the two older males in the house. Still, I am glad I chose the Giants. Sometimes people (very reasonably) point out the contradictory identity of being both a Mets and Giants fan. That's fair. I wish the ubiquitous Jets-Yankees hybrids with whom I share Westchester County were subject to an equal scrutiny but I shouldn't be bitter.

I will say this - to equate the New York Giants with the New York Yankees bears no logic whatsoever. Aligning the two might have made sense in the 1950's, however in the past few decades, there could be no two dissimilar entities. In their present incarnation, the New York Yankees are the black hole of parity in the Majors. The Giants, on the other hand, helped to usher in the modern day profit sharing structure of the NFL, owing much to the vision of late owner Wellington Mara. The Yankees are all that is worth hating about New York: hubris, greed and entitlement. The New York Football Giants on the other hand, are a throwback to a more gentlemanly atmosphere, sometimes to detriment of their own success.

But the most important sport on the immediate horizon is my son's soccer team, for which I am an assistant coach. Last year they went undefeated in the fall season and then never won again once they'd been bumped up into the upper division in the Spring. No task is worse than facing eleven nine year-olds after a loss and regurgitating the worst of lies: 'it doesn't matter who wins' and 'it's just as important how you play as if you win'. I wish like hell that those things were true but they're not and my kids see right through me as kids always do. They already seem to know that the bully who kicked their shins and knocked them over to score the game winner that beat them will most likely succeed in life without recompense. They know it all already and see I'm full of shit. I just hope they believe me when I tell them I love them. And that I'm proud of them.

Slimbo's Proust Update

2011-09-05T13:42:00.000-07:00

Some time ago, I announced my intention to read every volume of Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time. I'm proud to say that unlike all my other endeavors in the arts, I have not given up on this one.

I decided to read Lost Time shortly after I gave up on my training for the NYC Half Marathon. Since then, it seems I've given up on a lot of things: drawing, writing fiction, painting. I find I'm unable to do anything anymore except cook meals, chase after my children and bide my time, laden with guilt, watching the years clip away amid the benevolent soul-crushing reality of office work.

But I'm still reading Proust.

And thus far, I've completed:

Combray

Swann in Love

Place-Names: The Name

At Mme Swann's

I am also keeping a journal of the most memorable quotes, which some time in the future, I'd like to chronicle further here, however I'll share just one.

Marcel, when pondering the death of his romance with Gilberte, the pretty young girl he saw through the Hawthorns at Combray who has now grown to into the young girl who torments his days in Paris, Marcel puts forth this wisdom encapsulating the quandary of being a teenager in love: "Because you are now in love with someone who will one day mean nothing to you, you refuse out of hand to meet someone who means nothing to you now, but whom you will one day come to love, someone whom you might have loved sooner if you had agreed to an earlier meeting, who might have curtailed your present sufferings (before replacing them, of course, with others)."

We Aint' Got Time For Burger King!!!

2011-08-20T14:28:00.001-07:00

You find odd things on YouTube. We all do. For whatever reason, your searches take you places you didn't think imaginable. It's not unlike life itself. I won't go into how I found Angry Grandpa. I just did. That's all that really needs to be said.

Somewhere in South Carolina, a young man realized the profound entertainment value of his very profane and undiagnosed bi-polar father. A website now exists filled with short films of a man now known as Angry Grandpa. Some of these films are simply five or six minutes of Grandpa speaking to the camera about current events. Sometimes they are (staged) events - Grandpa gets his washing machine repossessed, Grandpa has his cigarettes entombed in Jell-O, Grandma leaves Grandpa. Usually the highlight of the film is Grandpa launching off into an epic screaming fit of transcendent rage.

These short films fall under the genre of do-it-yourself reality television, the underside of the artistic democracy afforded by the web. And in the great American entrepreneurial spirit, this young man has created a product from nothing and now (hopefully) reaps some reward.

Reality television in its mainstream, corporate media network manifestations is a horrendous abomination. Sometimes I think network executives sit in offices envisioning new ways to feed images of vapid, self-absorbed bourgeois cretins to a populace whom they must believe to be in some long-sustained coma of mental inactivity. And to be fair, Angry Grandpa videos often serve to present an even baser goal. Events unfold in his trailer park in rural South Carolina, so we all get to point our fingers and ferment our own self importance.

But THIS FILM (<- click to play on YouTube), is different. (Warning - there is generous profanity in this film).

The film captures Angry Grandpa on a grocery shopping excursion with his son (filming the sequences) along with his grandsons. I don't know why, maybe they just did a good job, but the events don't feel scripted. The mundane agenda of the story allows for the personality of Grandpa to organically present itself. And despite the obtusely troubling sight of small children witnessing and absorbing such titanic amounts of profane language and hostile behavior, I find in Grandpa, an elusive yet palatable warmth. I can't help liking him.

The West Memphis 3 and Mass Hysteria

2011-08-19T18:48:00.000-07:00

Today, the West Memphis 3 -Jesse Misskelley, Damien Echols and Jason Baldwin, are free men. They are men now, just a few years younger than I am, though their entire adult life has been spent behind bars after having been convicted for the 1993 murders of 3 young boys in West Memphis, Arkansas.

Without going into great specifics, the mutilated bodies of three second grade boys were found in a patch of woods just south of Interstate-40 as it passes north over the sparse housing that makes up West Memphis, Arkansas. West Memphis lies on what I can only describe as the flattest patch of America the imagination can conceive. Travelling east, you leave the elevated bluff of downtown Memphis to arrive at West Memphis, a conglomeration of rest stops, truck facilities, fast food joints and budget motels. Beyond this oasis, the eye looks to the horizon and no matter what the time of year, a blurring haze prevents you from ever seeing an end to this steepe of stagnation.

Jesse Misskelley was the first link to the apprehension and conviction of the West Memphis 3. The case was beyond anything the West Memphis Police had ever handled. A female informant steered them to the 16 year-old Misskelley, a boy beset by learning disabilities and a 72 IQ. Misskelley confessed to the murder after a 12 hour interrogation session, of which only the last 45 minutes were recorded. No member of Misskelley's family were present nor was any legal representation. From Misskelley's 'confession' Jason Baldwin was implicated as was Damian Echols who ultimately would be portrayed as the ringleader of this horrific act. The prosecution put forth alleged satanic worship as the motive for the murders, though not one shread of physical evidence, DNA or otherwise, linked the three the the crime scene.

I was home for the summer in Memphis, Tennessee when all this happened in May and June of 1993. I was between my junior and senior years at Syracuse University. Though still technically living there, I was beginning to distance myself from Memphis and the South in general. Our time together was coming to an end. There were elements of the South I loved, its pockets of authenticity and soulfulness, yet my East Coast wanderlust had enacted a divorcing mechanism that brought me, perhaps wrongly, to compartmentalize what had been my home into stereotype and hyperbole.

So when the West Memphis 3 had been captured, I paid little attention to the story, despite the hysterical coverage from local television and The Commercial Appeal. But the photograph above, I do remember. This picture was taken from an abandoned cotton gin in the vicinity of West Memphis. As is often the case, this derelict place had become a magnet for local teenagers drinking or doing drugs. But it was here, locals alleged, that satanic rituals occurred.

In the South I recall there was a voyeuristic cultural obsession with teenage sin undeniably derived from the region's evangelical undercurrents. Teenagers, heavily segregated from a racial standpoint, were further homogenized by a restrictive culture of conformity. Within this environment, teenagers seeking to stand out and receive attention found a ready means to provoke with the occult. Black clothing, pentagrams and the like, served as the greatest shock value in a community that is so focused on Judgement Day.

There are many horrors here. The death of three children, of course at the forefront. Three men, convicted by the court of popular opinion, lost the best years of their lives. And then there is the pervading reality that had the three boys apprehended been the children of millionaires, there is no question that they would not have served a day in jail. But they were from one of America's poorest communities where it was acceptable to convict them based the clothes they wore and the music they listened to, and then forget them entirely.

The release of the West Memphis 3 is mostly attributable to HBO Films' production, Paradise Lost. This documentary gave a brutally honest portrayal of the vapidity of the case against the three boys and the stark reality of life in West Memphis. Most of all, the acclaim the film received galvanized a world-wide effort to free the West Memphis 3. It is an incredible example of what art can achieve.

The convenient conviction of the West Memphis 3 enabled a backwater mentality to point its fingers, thump its bibles and congratulate itself on its piety. And all the while, the local media outlets could publish photos like the one above, feed the beast of hysteria and poison justice.

Not surprisingly, like all things in the public area, the release of the West Memphis 3 has been politicized, just as the Casey Anthony trial was. A quick scan of the reader comments submitted to FoxNews.com and commercialappeal.com reveal claims that a miscarriage of justice has occurred, all attributable to the seditious effect of liberalism in our nation today. The celebrity attention the case brought has been met with suspicion, further fueling a cultural divide. Will the hysteria ever end?

A Return to the Past

2011-07-27T18:41:00.001-07:00

Above, you will see the opening match of WWE's Smackdown World Tour's visit to the Westchester County Center in White Plains, NY. What you see here is a 12 man, Over-the -Top-Rope Battle Royal. The winner of this endeavor (who happened to be a gentleman named, Heat Slayer) got to fight Ezekiel Jackson for the WWE Intercontinental Championship.

I don't know how familiar you are with the WWE (World Wrestling Entertainment). I don't even know if anyone actually reads Slimbo's Shelf. I tend to think no one does, but if I do net a reader or two, I imagine him to be a beleaguered graduate student in the wee small hours, lusting after my pointless pontifications on unloved literature to complete some seemingly pointless assignment. (Well, I don't know if that's always the case, but for all you bastards in Warwickshire, UK who had to write about Heinrich Boll, you're welcome!).

So here I am: Slimbo - the lonely voice amid America's saturated fat of ignorance - the man all five of you have pinned your intellectual hopes upon. Now he has created a post on Vince McMahon's evil empire of gratuitous violence.

Well, not exactly. The truth is, my father took me to see wrestling (then called the 'WWF') at the Westchester County Center in 1983. I saw Jimmy 'Superfly' Snuka fight Don "Magnificent' Muroco and at that point, it was the highlight of my existence.

I'm entirely okay with my son watching wrestling. There is, ingrained in every boy's DNA, a need for superhero mythology. Wrestling takes comic books into three dimensional entities, offering a world where there are clear-cut good guys and villains who all battle out scripted bloodless bouts. If I had any complaint with today's incarnation of the WWE, it is that is that there are too many drama side stories and far too much pyrotechnics.

So our recent evening at the Westchester County Center offered a fantastic surprise. I should preface this by saying that the County Center is an ancient building holding only a few thousand seats. In light of the enormity of the WWE, I didn't expect they'd send any wrestlers of note for such a small venue. To my surprise, almost all their main headliners were there - Wade Barrett, Shamus, Ezekiel Jackson, Mark Henry, Heat Slayer and Ted DiBiassi Jr. The evening was capped off with a fantastically scripted match between WWE Heavyweight Champion Christian and the viscerally entertaining Randy Orton (Christian retained the title via disqualification).

But the greatest element of the evening was the simplicity of the setting. There were no excessive video screens and fireworks and the smallness of the venue forced the performers onto the audience. This was most satisfying with the villains whose sneers and shouts of 'shut up!' could be clearly felt by all. Mark Henry even ripped up a sign a small child had made while delivering a glare that could turn blood into ice. It was wonderful. I could close my eyes, and if only the air could have been filled with cigarette smoke, I'd have said it was 1983 all over again.

Mike Gibson's Bluegrass Gospel Hour

2011-07-10T07:24:00.000-07:00

In our digital world, it makes no sense to listen to shortwave radio. But listening to WBCQ's broadcast of the Mike Gibson Bluegrass Gospel Hour, broadcast from Bessemer, Alabama is precisely why I listen to shortwave.

Gibson's voice is akin to Garland Bunting's (of Bull Durham fame) and his calm, folksy delivery is a welcome change from the usual voices of Biblical shortwave radio, consumed with righteous venom and lusting for armageddon. Gibson speaks very little and is there to present the music, not to preach.

His selections feel right out of the soundtrack to O Brother Where Art Thou. This is sublime, beautiful and pure Americana. These broadcasts are transportive and listening to them delivers the sense that you've stepped back in time. I wouldn't want to listen to these broadcasts on any digital or streaming device. My receiver, pulling in at 5050 kHz from a thousand miles away, with all it's atmospheric static, is the best way to listen to Mike Gibson.

Overwhelming and Collective Murder

2011-07-08T14:16:00.001-07:00

If you've never seen a German having a bad day, I'd invite you now to watch this video of director Werner Herzog describing the jungles of South America. Granted, if you were stuck in the jungle with Klaus Kinski, you'd be pretty grumpy too.

I love just about everything Herzog does and could listen to him speak for hours. This clip was taken while Herzog was shooting Fitzcaraldo, an endeavor beset by every kind of mayhem you might imagine. Herzog's main point is that we have over-idealized nature and made it cute, denying its essential texture which, if truly understood, would horrify us from our suburban perspective. My favorite bits:

"...the birds are in misery. I don't think they sing, they just screech in pain."

"A land that God, if he exists, has created in anger."

My friend Kafka

2011-07-07T19:26:00.000-07:00

Lately, I haven't been writing at all. The Shelf has been woefully neglected. I'm not sure if this neglect has brought any real static to any one's life. Either way, I am now skulking back to you. There has been a tapestry of consternation that has kept me from you dear reader, and I can only describe as 'Kafka-esque'.

Some weeks ago, I went to my magnificent, taxpayer-supported public library and picked up Kafka's Dairies 1914-1923. My only lament was that I had to return this book which I have now decided is an essential text for me as I continue with you all on this planet, trudging through our collective mortal coil. Again and again, Kafka's inner thoughts echo my own: I can't do it, I can't do it, there's just no way...

Kafka's diaries absolutely and beautifully articulate a pain, doubt, ennui and anger that keeps any artist from executing a consistent and constructive product. Kafka was a beautiful spirit, burdened by his inability to escape life's banalities and dark spots. Yet somehow, through some blessed intervention, his voice has been heard.

A note on this copy - bought off of Amazon for $.01 plus $3.99 shipping. It's old and smelly. Just as it should be.

A Summons to Memphis

2011-05-17T19:04:00.000-07:00

When I learned that Philip Carver, the protagonist of Peter Taylor's A Summons to Memphis, had moved to Memphis, Tennessee when he was thirteen years old as a result of his father's job, I knew I had to read this book. I'd learned of Taylor by listening to NPR's program Selected Shorts which featured his short story Porte Cochere. I was spellbound by Taylor's anachronistically formal yet soothing Southern cadence. Listening made me reconnect with my own time living in The South, a time where so much happened so quickly, where I'd ultimately transition into the blessed larva stage of American manhood. Yet this phase was so fleeting and so disjointed from core processes that would eventually define me. So my memories of Memphis are intense yet ephemeral. They are frustratingly difficult to conjure. They come to me as cryptic missives from the other side of a wall that is loaded with potential danger and ultimately, unconquerable.

The Carver family of Summons have settled in Memphis as Father Carver has been defrauded out of a business partnership in Nashville. My own family settled in Memphis from the more distant world of New York. And it was not failure that brought us there but rather, a lucrative opportunity for my father. There is little that parallels Phillip Carver's story and my own - other than the abyss felt by a boy headed to an alien Memphis, understanding that he must somehow make peace with the place that would be his new home, for better or for worse.

Father Carver then proceeds to derail the respective happiness of his children as they bloom into adulthood. The story begins later with this patriarch now wishing to remarry after the death of the Carver matriarch. As the story unfolds, all the Carver family ghosts unravels slowly, indicating the root of the offspring's hostility surrounding this old man's final peaceful desires. Phillip has removed himself as much as possible, living in New York, but his two sisters are hellbent on thwarting their father's last oasis of happiness and demand that Phillip make an appearance to aid them.

Phillip and I are inexplicably intertwined. Memphis is a place that we both fled for New York. Still, something claws us back. For Phillip, there are immediate fires in Memphis that need his attention. For me, the fires have long extinguished, yet in my own Proustian quest, I kick the embers, hoping for some small spark that might replicate experience and sensation.

Radio Shack Scanner 404

2011-05-17T18:51:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago, my family went to Hawaii to visit my in-laws. I could not join them as work forbade me (quite literally, I should add) to join them. While they were gone, I was quite lonely so for reasons that are not entirely clear, I bought a Radio Shack Scanner 404.

The scanner's features boast that it can deftly pick up police, fire, aircraft, maritime as well as amateur radio activity. The truth of the matter is you get a good deal of police and fire coverage, sporadic amateur traffic and limited aircraft activity if you happen to be sitting in the parking lot of an airport.

Nonetheless, still a good pick up. I'd recommend to all you writers out there with writer's block. Sometimes, everything I hear seems to be nothing more than administrative codes, but then you hear stories of runaways, or calls for police to assist a woman whose apartment door was open and now she's too afraid to go in. It's all real and happening right now.

Broken Ships

2011-05-10T19:48:00.000-07:00

I was first hired by Lehman Brothers in 2001. For Wall Street, Lehman was a somewhat egalitarian place to be. I relished that I worked in the working man's Wall Street firm. My job was in expense management. They let me retreat into my life's centering identity: the little boy in the basement building models. For Lehman, I would construct mathematical labyrinths that would reveal where the firm could save money.

The culture of Lehman was such that no one should do one job for more that three or four years, lest they become jaded and stale. This was one of their few clairvoyant cultural tenants. So after four years in expense management, I had to find something different to do in the organization.

In 2004, Lehman acquired the asset management firm, Neuberger Berman. For years Neuberger Berman had been primping itself for acquisition and now finally, it was complete. Their CEO who'd orchestrated this enveloping quickly cashed out and left town, leaving behind a company filled with bitter employees who despised this Lehman Brothers who'd acquired them.

It was decided my next career path would be that of Lehman's ambassador to Neuberger Berman. I would entrench myself with them and facilitate the mechanics of their new environment. It was a disastrous move.

All from Neuberger Berman who encountered me despised me and repelled my attempts to integrate their process into the new Lehman order. I was hated by everyone at Neuberger Berman and their public stoning left me viewed as incompetent by all I'd left behind at Lehman.

Perhaps my memory's only redeeming attribute of Neuberger Berman is Roy Neuberger's dynamic support of the arts. He once said his two passions were art and finance. (I've never understood this statement as to me, it is akin to claiming passion for animal slaughter and vegetarianism in the same breath. Yet, I will forgive him for this as the offices of Neuberger Berman were filled with wonderful works of art).

Among these works were several enlarged photographs of giant tanker ships being broken up on the shores of India. These photographs were in a conference room on an upper floor. I first saw these while attending a meeting hosted by man whose throat upon which I wished I could mercilessly drive my foot. Seeing the images of broken, beached behemoths made me reflect on the enormity of my own disappointment. I'd been brought into this world by creators of enduring benevolence, and yet here I was giving the best years of my life to some of planet earth's worst denizens.

Those broken ships were enormous. And they were me. And then I painted this.

The Death of bin Laden

2011-05-04T18:02:00.000-07:00

My recent post discussing the first baseball game in New York after the 9/11 attacks dealt with the collective experience of 9/11 but only in a very peripheral sense. Of course, now circumstances are such that I must again discuss this event, something I'm never completely comfortable doing. Although my experience that day was not insignificant, there are so many others whose loss, horror and transcendence from this tragedy has been articulated with more eloquence than anything I might offer up.

Osama bin Laden is dead. On the morning of 9/11, as I was fleeing the World Financial Center, after everyone had concluded that the act of flying two jetliners into a building was not the result of profound negligence, I tried to imagine who was responsible. Saddham Hussein or Osama bin Laden - these were the obvious culprits we all discussed as we made our way north up the West Side.

I'd made my way out of 3 World Financial Center with Donal Lanaghan, a barrel chested Irishman. "I'll tell you one 'ting," Donal offered in his sandpaper Dublin accent, "we're going to step on someone's neck for 'dis!"

Later as we got closer to Chelsea Peers, a man was standing in the median of the West Side Highway screaming. He'd passed into a zone where he was communicating to no one but himself, doing so at the top of his lungs. "We gonna take those mutha'fuckahs out TO-NIGHT!"

His was a primal outpouring, enormously necessary. Although the shock of the events of the past hour had not yet worn off, I could not help but to ask the question in my mind, "who exactly are we going to take out and where are they?"

It was almost exactly at this moment that I watched the South Tower go down. It was an all encompassing sight; a waterfall of debris and deafening sound. A jet fighter (I believe an F-15) split the sky above us and despite the fact that we'd just witnessed one of the world's most massive buildings collapse within seconds, the crowd on the sidewalk erupted into fist pumping frenzy. At this point I looked to the Hudson River, imagining that if the end of the world was now upon us, I should just leap into the water and submerge myself as the flames of Armageddon raged above me.

SUNDAY

I was nursing a beer Sunday night when a good friend, a producer for CBS News, sent me an email which read: 'turn on the news - something big is about to go down'. I yawned at this message, turned off my Blackberry and went to bed.

Of course the next morning, I'd realize all that had happened. Like everyone, I immersed myself in the ocean of news reports and commentary. As the details unfolded, they seemed more unreal. The operation seemed so flawless, as though it'd been contained in PlayStation 3 rather than the world of our shared reality where nothing is ever easy and clean.

That night I watched wrestling with my son. I have no problem with my son's adoration of the WWE - at his age I was enthralled with wrestling. It is a Jungian expression of the collective pre-adolescent fixation of superhero mythology. Between the comic-book unreality of childhood and the harsh reality of adulthood, that barren wasteland devoid of superpowers - there exists wrestling, a world populated by players who are clearly defined as good or evil in a flesh and blood semi-reality enjoying scripted outcomes and bloodless battles.

Monday night, all WWE performances were sure to incorporate bin Laden's death into their bombastic routines, ultimately resulting in fist-pumping 'USA' chants. My son watched all this and asked me who bin Laden was. Fighting against the imagery of the wrestling I found it near impossible to succinctly explain to him who bin Laden was: a son of a millionaire who'd fallen under the spell of extremism. A man who some thirty years ago fought in Afghanistan against Russia, America's then enemy now ally. A man who declared war against America, a nation where he'd eventually unleash a horrific terrorist attack using plane crashes - America the nation where his own father died in his childhood. From a plane crash.

The WWE program's fist pumping patriotism was gratuitous and boundless. It echoed in an audience filled with young men, many of whom were children on the morning of 9/11. On Sunday night we also saw spontaneous celebrations on college campuses as a result of bin Laden's death. Again, these kids have no recollection of 9/11, yet seem to most acutely revel in his death. Perhaps in his death they see a cure for the amorphous and implacable malaise that has permeated our culture in the last decade.

I think back to that screaming man in the median of the West Side Highway on that September morning. His rage articulated the start of an ellipse that would require completion. And despite the questionable tactical significance of bin Laden's death, his dramatic demise completes our national anger. A new chapter of heroic mythology is created. And it would be impossible to carry on without it.

11175 kHz EAM

2011-04-19T08:05:00.000-07:00

Last night I was dialing on the shortwave and came across an Emergency Action Message from Andrews Air Force Base similar to this one. Creepy

9/21/01

2011-03-23T19:39:00.000-07:00

A few days after September 11th, I was sitting on a cardboard box, sharing a cubicle with a co-worker in Jersey City. The company I worked for had been located mainly in the World Financial Center with a few floors in the North Tower of 1 World Trade Center. A corner of 3 World Financial Center had been lopped off by the collapse of 1 WTC and we would never return there. The phone rang and I picked it up. "Hello?" a southern female voice asked. "How are you?" "Just fine, how are you today?" I answered. "How are you? Are you okay?" the voice plaintively asked back. She was from Georgia and she worked for a company that leased us our photo copiers. She'd given herself a week, and was now taking to the unfortunate task of asking how many, if any of her copiers were still around. Midway through our conversation, she apologized for having to call for this matter and started to break down crying pleading to me that she and everyone she knew were thinking about us all the time. I didn't quite know how to react other than to thank her and give her a few minutes. On September 21, 2001, the City of New York hosted its first major public event since the 9/11 attacks that felled the Twin Towers. As is fitting for Gotham's great metropolis, this event was a baseball game.

And even more fitting that this game should be played between the New York Mets and the Atlanta Braves. Normally this match-up delivers bowel-distending unease but something happened before this game started that made me, your neurotic and psychotic Mets fan, take pause.

Before the game, both teams were announced and they took the field along the baselines - the Mets along the first base side, the Braves along the third base side, aligning with their respective home and visiting dugouts. Much to Major League Baseball's dismay, the Mets were wearing FDNY and NYPD caps in lieu of their uniform caps. They would wear these for the duration of the season.

During the national anthem ceremonies which paid tribute to all who'd lost their lives on 9/11, the back outfield opened up and dozens of bagpipers marched onto the field playing 'Amazing Grace'. Everyone wept. Watching at home, I wept. Fans in the stands wept. Mike Piazza wept. And then, just before the game began, I saw something I never knew possible - the Mets and the Atlanta Braves met in the infield and embraced one another. I thought of the woman from Georgia who'd I'd spoken to on the phone and I hoped that she was a Braves fan and that she'd be watching right there at that moment.

That night delivered a great game. The Braves were winning 2-1 going into the eighth inning until Mike Piazza delivered a 2-run blast to left-center. It is, to me, the most significant home run by a New York Metropolitan. Ever.

And more miraculous was Armando Benitez being able to shut the Braves down in the ninth. Among his strikeouts was BJ Surhoff, shown here taking a bat to the Shea Stadium visitors' dugout after the game. Class.

From Pete Hamill

2011-03-15T06:26:00.000-07:00

"Willie Mays ran the bases, carrying all those summers on the forty-one-year-old shoulders, jogging in silence, while people in the stands pumped their arms at the skies and hugged each other and even, here and there, cried. It was a glittering moment of repair, in a city that has been starved too long for joy. Don't tell me New York isn't going to make it. Willie Mays is home."

Shame

2011-03-10T08:34:00.000-08:00

Representative Peter King (R-Long Island) has opened up his dog & pony show 'hearing' on the threat of homegrown Islamic terrorism. The threat of homegrown terrorism is real, however considering they just arrested the neo-nazi who planted a bomb at a MLK Day parade in Spokane (which fortunately didn't go off), it'd make sense that King open his inquisition to the radical right as well. Don't hold your breath, though.

(Separately, thank you mom and dad for getting us the hell out of Long Island).

A New Antenna

2011-03-05T13:13:00.001-08:00

This didn't work out so well. I've had some success improving my receiver by attaching some lengths of wire to the built in telescopic antenna. So I figure, more wire, better reception, right? Not quite.

Here in this picture you can see I have about 25 feet of 18 gauge stranded wire attached to the built-in antenna via an alligator clip. I then have the wire headed into a tree off my deck.

It all seemed like a good idea but I think it was too much to overload the small receiver (Grundig G8). Guess I'll have to buy a bigger receiver!!

Other recent shortwave listening highlights:

I mentioned bizarre weather reports on my last post that I was hearing at 3413kHz and 3484kHz. I've since learned these are aeronautical weather broadcasts from Shannon, Ireland and New York, respectively.
Last night at 3:05UTC, I was listening to two lunatics broadcasting at 3215kHz. Their show was essentially a long rant against Canada. Canada, really? Have insane radio hounds run out of things to hate that they have to go against Canada?
3880-3880kHz - picked up Hams from Missouri and Colorado.
AM900 CHML - vintage radio broadcast.
14280-14347kHz - another mystery. It's too garbled for me to make out but it sounds like broadcasters in dialogue, quickly, somewhat urgently responding back to one another. One kept repeating a phrase, almost in cadence. I'm stumped so drop me a comment if you have a clue.

The Leather Man

2011-03-03T19:29:00.001-08:00

I first inflicted the Leather Man upon my family some thirty years ago. I was in third grade at Wampus Elementary School in Armonk, New York. We'd had an assembly in the cafeteria that day. An odd looking man stood before us, as we students were chatting away, clearly not ready to give this gentlemen our full attention. He had shaggy hair and wore a long woolly sweater. Although our visitor was from a local historical society, he looked as though he was from another time and place.

Finally our guest held up a large turtle shell, about the size of a manhole cover. He then pulled out a thick stick and struck the shell three times. The strikes reverberated throughout the room, even over the sounds of a hundred chattering children.

"That is the sound you would hear...when the Leather Man would come upon your home!" Our assembly became deathly silent. It is a testament to the power of effective story tellers because I don't know who this man was, or if he still is lives, but because of that seizing introduction, I have never forgotten the Leather Man.

Who was the Leather Man? He soon became somewhat of a joke in our family because I came home to my family dinner table that night and gave a breathless word-for-word replication of that amazing man's story. The Leather Man was a hermit who lived in the late nineteenth century. He made his rounds in upper Westchester County and western Connecticut, constantly wandering from farm to farm. He'd beg for food by day and sleep in caves by night.

The Leather Man spoke little and tended to communicate through gestures and grunts. He was presumed to be French based upon a prayer book he carried with him. No one knew where exactly he came from, what his name was or why he wandered. If he were asked a personal question, he was most likely to quickly make his exit.

In absence of a formal name he was known as the Leather Man as his outfit, head to toe, was made of boot leather and was believed to have weighed 60 pounds. Some historians have theorized that the Leather Man was autistic or perhaps suffered from Asperger's, based on his inability to socialize while maintaining a wandering routine that became almost mathematical in its predictability.

The Leather Man died in Briarcliff Manor, just a few miles from my house. The small cave where they found his remains has now been overrun by developers building mansions for hedge-fund overlords. (Okay, I know that this is a bit extreme of me and I don't know the exact spot where the Leather Man's final cave was, but I do know that Trump mowed over a large swath of Briarcliff Manor to build a golf course and housing pods for the magnanimous).

A recent article appeared in the New York Times prompted a frantic phone call from my mother: "Slimbo, it's the Leather Man!" She was delighted to see her whimsical boy's obsession manifest itself decades later. It appears someone wants to exhume the Leather Man to see if testing his remains could provide some answers about his life. Many people believe this to be a severe violation of the one thing the Leather Man treasured: his secrets.

I tend to agree. The world needs the Leather Man as he was - an enigmatic wanderer who, amid all our national obession with industriousness and convention, chose simply to exist on his terms and live inside himself. Some mysteries don't merit solving as they are beautiful in and of themselves.

Some Nice Shortwave Surprises

2011-03-03T17:58:00.000-08:00

Since my last posts about shortwave radio, I've come across some nice surprises:

3413 hHz / 3485 kHz - In my last post, I spoke of these frequencies as being enigmatic and mysterious. I've since learned that these are aeronautical weather reports broadcast from Shannon, Ireland (3413 kHz) and New York (3485 kHz).
5050 kHz - WWRB (from Manchester, TN) - Saturday night seems to be when all the ultra right wing religious squakers take a break, perhaps gearing up for their Sunday jihad. So Saturday night, I happened upon some beautiful vintage bluegrass gospel music on WWRB. It was like a time capsule coming through the ether. I heard a wonderful rendition of Precious Lord, Lead Me Home (which by the way, I would like sung at my funeral, should anyone be keeping track).

5755 kHz - WTWW from Lebanon, TN - again the Saturday night mellow existed here as well. Some slightly more contemporary religious music, but still very beautiful and non-pretentious.
AM 1120 - Picked up a broadcast of a hockey game - Buffalo Sabres vs. Edminton Oilers.

7285 kHz - China Radio International - a young hip broadcast called Roundtable Discussion. The struggles of gentrification in urban areas and the suddenly unaffordable rents for ordinary working folk and young struggling workers. Gentrification in Beijing. They speak of it as though they'd just discovered an exotic animal in a rain forest. Welcome to capitalism, kids. I guess it ain't all Happy Meals and small business loans.

9625 kHz - been picking this up in the early morning hours. CBC (Canadian) broadcast in Inuktitut coming from Sackville, New Brunswick. They almost sound Russian. I doubted my trusty frequency guide when it clued me into that this was CBC - then I heard the broadcaster give a weather report and I heard them say "minus 41".

AM 1260 - I think...I think...I may have picked up WDKN from Dickson, TN. That would be a pretty epic feat for a little Grundig G8.

Shortwave Radio Update

2011-02-18T19:09:00.001-08:00

Earlier, I announced that I'm back into listening to shortwave radio. Most Shelf readers at this point are saying, 'oh, great...Slimbo has finally lost it'. Female Shelf readers might be logging off for good as I've confirmed the worst of their nerd fears.

Intense solar storms are interfering with shortwave radio transmissions right now so I suppose it's a good time to follow up on this topic.

The image above adorns page one of my shortwave listening log. You have to keep a log of what you hear, when you hear it and at what frequency you received it. Otherwise, you can not make sense of anything. Here's goes:

1. What I've found on my radio falls into three categories: (1) AM stations I would never find normally, (2) Ham Radio operators in my general area and (3) world band broadcasts from around the globe.

2. The illustration above was inspired by the endless religious fanatics who broadcast on shortwave, all lusting for the End of Times / 2012 / New World Order.

3. As I browse through my log, here are some highlights:

9980kHz - As I mentioned, shortwave frequencies are filled with apocalyptic, droning biblical doomsday fanatics. They all hate President Obama and the end of the world is a'comin'. But then there is Brother Stair. Check out his Wiki page, then come back to me.

You're back? Awesome. I don't know what it is about Brother Stair - maybe it is the ancient cadence in his voice. I just find him so listenable. He claims to be broadcasting from "a farm in South Carolina". Sometimes he has a gaggle of followers with him who emphatically yell 'Amen, Brother, yes!' whether Stair is describing the end of times or a trip to the store.

11820kHz - Now on the other end of the spectrum is the recitation of the Holy Quran, as broadcast on this frequency most afternoons from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Mixture of spoken word and cantation.

7415kHz - WBCQ, The Planet. Great show on the weekend called Trailer Trash Radio. This show alleges that it is broadcast from an actual trailer somewhere in the woods of western Massachusetts. One show was a conversation between members of the janitorial staff of Amherst College. Another show played various versions of Tex Williams' vintage country ditty, Smoke, Smoke, Smoke That Cigarette.

6000kHz - And again on the opposite end of the spectrum, Radio Havana, Cuba's English language broadcast. This is Castro's version of Voice of America, blasted towards American in full force - always a very strong signal here on the East Coast. Most of the broadcasts either document mundane agricultural updates or the failings of the United States. (One is reminded of Garrett Morris's Chico Escuela: Bad Stuff 'Bout The Mets.)

AM Band - late at night I'm able to pull in a crazy array of AM stations:

AM700 - WLW Cincinnati
AM 720 WGN Chicago
AM 750 WSB Atlanta
AM 760 WJR Detroit
AM 780 WBM Chicago
AM 800 CKLW Windsor, Ontario
AM 810 WEDO Pittsburgh
AM 840 WHAS Louisville
AM 860 CJBC Toronto
AM 900 CHML Hamilton
AM 1020 WKOK Pittsburgh
AM 1030 WBZ Boston
AM 1060 W(cbs) Philadelphia
AM 1090 WBAL Baltimore
AM 1110 WBT Charlotte
AM 1120 W(cbs) St Louis
AM 1140 WRVA Richmond
AM 1180 WHAM Rochester
AM 1210 WPHT Philadelphia
AM 1440 WDOW Dowagiac, MI

As you can see, I've pulled in a lot and there's still plenty of holes amid the frequencies I've yet to fill in. Of course, you don't need to have dozens of AM stations in America because (with a few valued exceptions) AM programming is essentially all the same - (i) what to be afraid of, and (ii) shit that's just plain ol' made up.

3875kHz - 3885kHz - This appears to be the best range of frequencies to pick up Ham Radio (Amateur) Operators (licenced folks who transmit from home). I got spoiled in my first real opportunity to listen to Hams in early February as a Transmitter Rally was underway. I heard from amateur broadcasters checking in their call signs from New Hampshire, Upstate NY, the Ohio Valley, West Virginia, all the way down to Tampa and Alabama. Very impressive - and interesting personalities.

As with anything, the great mysteries exist between the official frequencies. There are allegedly several active numbers stations, but I have as of yet to find them. At kHz, 3415 and 3485, I can barely make out a droning voice rendering weather report, but have no idea from where it originates. Sometimes while dialing I'll just come across a massive data transference that sounds somewhere between a fax machine, a satellite dial-up and a machine gun. Some frequency rages are just jammed intentionally. What's there?

Another Giant Head

2011-02-17T14:07:00.001-08:00

It is said that Donald Trump is mulling an ownership stake in the New York Mets.

I want to make this perfectly clear. The only swollen, bloated head I want in Citi Field is Mr. Met.

Seriously - between this and his CPAC appearance wherein he hinted at running for President, I'm not sure which terrifies me more. It is unfortunate that with the passing of George Steinbrenner, Trump feels the need to replace the role of insane plutocratic, narcissistic New York baseball owner.

February 2011

2011-02-13T11:44:00.000-08:00

This painting has been sitting in my basement for months, unfinished. I got sick of looking at it. I didn't paint from an actual set-up, just the quick sketch I did at the bottom. It takes me so long to finish a piece that fruit usually rots by the time I get any progress done.

For Sale. Not Cheap.

2011-02-05T08:01:00.001-08:00

The New York Times has run a series of articles today about the NY Mets and their unfortunately deep ties with Bernie Madoff. It seems that the Mets, breathtakingly inept at most everything, seem to be one of the few Madoff investors to make money. A lot of it, in fact.

Now a $1 billion dollar lawsuit is being brought against the owning Wilpon family.

The real heartbreak doesn't come with a prospective sale of the team. For me, the heartbreak is this: The Yankees built their new stadium drawing upon tax dollars, and the Mets did not. But now it seems their ability to build that stadium (a stadium mind you, so ornate that I can no longer afford to visit with my children) on the backs of defrauded investors.

Mets Seek Right-handed Pitiching!

2011-02-05T08:00:00.001-08:00

Grundig G8 Traveller II

2011-01-25T19:40:00.000-08:00

My mother tells the tale. When I was a baby, it was near impossible to get me to go back to sleep after my midnight feeding. Now being a parent, I understand this dark void that overtakes you when exhaustion grips your very sense of being and the child in your arms simply will not sleep. But a few times when my mother would regale this motherhood battle story, an interesting detail would be included and it has always stuck with me.

"I'd listen to the radio," she'd say, "and at that hour of the night, I got a very interesting station from North Carolina." I'd always remembered this strange detail and it's left me with a sort of awe that the now antiquated science of radio could, in the wee small hours when the whole wide world was fast asleep, circumvented the ionosphere and sent an exhausted lady in Long Island a distant, mysterious message.

I only bring this up now because inexplicably, I've bought myself a world band radio: a Grundig G8 Traveller II. I'd owned a world band radio once before. It was a gift from a girlfriend (really, why would a girlfriend give this as a gift? But who cares - it was clairvoyant in a way.) I'd no clue what to make of the thing when I got it but I soon fell in love with the meditative practice of putting on headphones and getting lost in its orchestra of frequencies. I brought this first radio with me when I moved to NYC in 1994 but two months after I moved in, my apartment was robbed. Almost everything I owned (which wasn't much) was stolen, this radio included.

And now, sixteen years later, I have finally replaced the world band radio with this Grundig G8. I suppose I can best describe listening to shortwave radio as casting a net. You may get Radio Bulgaria or Voice of Croatia. You may get Radio Havana. You may get China Radio International or Radio Taiwan International. You may get a crazy redneck broadcasting from a bunker in Kentucky. You don't know what you will get, but you will get something.

The logical question follows - why listen to shortwave radio when essentially any radio station can now be accessed on the web? This is a valid question. I suppose it all boils down to this: whatever you want to find is on the internet. You create wishes and then you seek solutions, often picking through a choice of solutions that best aligns with your initial expectations.

- With shortwave DX'ing (and that means 'dialing' - new lingo I've learned), you don't know what it is you're looking for. You have to give in to the calming, patient process of moving through the kilohertz. You'll come upon something. Maybe it's a ham radio operator in Ontario. Maybe it's Deutcshe Welle. You have to figure this out. The internet exists to spoonfeed you exactly what it is that you want. Shortwave has now come forward as a place where you don't want anything, you just seek for the sake of seeking.

- Amid the fuzz something may come through. Is it just the cold mechanical ping of data transference or is it a voice? For me, I get lost in the numerology of frequencies - which are active during the day? Which ones do I track at night? There are infinite points of data to memorize and my mind finds this calming. Though I am in the safe confines of my home, I am hashing through the ether, seeking out some form of answer to the age-old question that has plagued man since he first emerged from the cave to look out at the stars - 'is there anybody out there?'

Lexington Avenue

2011-01-12T18:54:00.000-08:00

I moved to New York City in 1994, when the city was in a massive state of social and economical metamorphosis. Now it is 2011, and New York, though it is the place of my birth, has become a foreign entity to me. This is what this blessed city does. It belongs to you for a very brief spell and then it is gone. The place I knew, the place where I dropped the anchor of my budding adulthood, is now unrecognizable. New York. 1994. I look for any artifacts available to replicate the experience of being 21 and free. And most often, nothing materializes to satiate this longing.

But there is YouTube. Yes, YouTube. I took the above image as a screen-grab from a home movie someone took of their trip to NY in 1992. So there it is. My longing is kept at bay via the archival efforts of another.

And based upon that I sketched / painted the below:

Still Lifes

2011-01-12T09:51:00.001-08:00

Paintings

2011-01-12T09:47:00.001-08:00

The New Graffiti

2010-10-05T18:56:00.000-07:00

The thing about New York City is this - if you leave it for more than six months, don't expect it to be the same when you come back.

Last Saturday night, I took a Metro North Train into the city for a friend's birthday. It had been about eight months since I'd be in the city, so I knew I should brace for some change or another. And it didn't take long, either. After basking in the familiar, enveloping majesty of Grand Central Terminal, I made my way down to the subway to take the Shuttle to Times Square. And that's where New York's latest change smacked me right between the eyes.

It's called wrap advertising. I'd seen this on buses for years, but I'd never seen it on a subway train until last Saturday night. Wrap advertising is this - an advertisement covers an entire bus or subway train, windows and all. It's intention is to impress upon your senses via the boldness and enormity of its scope.

When I moved to New York in 1994, widespread urban graffiti was just about dead. A new culture had snuffed graffiti out as a quality of life crime. The New York I moved into of the early nineties was a far cry from the chaotic urban wilderness I'd recalled from my youth. I was moving into the nascent years of alleged reform. A new optimism crept into the city and the seemingly overnight vanquishing of graffiti on subways accompanyed the sterilization of Times Square and a newfound limitless excess of Wall Street. In hindsight, I wonder if we'd all have been as enthusiastic, had we known that the economic and social juggernaut that overtook New York would also vanquish the city's personality as deftly as it took away it's cosmetic undesirables.

Perhaps it's because we look at graffiti artists differently now. When the city was rounding the corner on graffiti in the late 1980's, a countering school of thought came forward to view graffiti as an art form. Some graffiti artists, such as Seen or more notably Jean-Michel Basquiant would be embraced by mainstream art culture. People began to see that graffiti was complex - as much a performance art as it was a visual art.

But back to wrap advertising - and I'll be blunt. I fail to see how this newfound commandeering of a subway car by a corporation is any different that the commandeering of a subway car by a graffiti artist. I know I possess somewhat liberal sensibilities. And I fully realize that corporations that place these advertisements on subways provide revenue to the city that citizens ultimately benefit from. I get that.

But back to the concept of graffiti as a quality of life crime. The arguments that always shouted down graffiti artists during their 70's/80's heyday was - "why should everyday citizens have to be subjected to that?" A fair argument.

And now I'll ask it again. Just because a television network pays advertising dollars to the city...from a purely aesthetic point of view...why should I have to be subjected to the sensory experience of being overwhelmed by the advertisement for some horrid cable television program that I'd rather die than give an hour of my life to?

Ultimately...how is this:

....a crime, and this:

is okay????

2010-10-01T18:58:00.001-07:00

I've added a few more images from the project I'm working on: Uncle Slimbo's Book of Saints, Primitives and Fearfully Ignorant Animals.

This is next

2010-09-30T18:54:00.001-07:00

I've started a project called Uncle Slimbo's Book of Saints, Primitives, and Fearfully Ignorant Animals. I don't know what all this will mean. I'm just letting it all happen. I'll let you know once I know what's what.

Rodeo

2010-09-08T18:24:00.000-07:00

I suppose I'd forgotten what they do at rodeos. Our family was up at Lake George, NY for the Labor Day Weekend, and the Rodeo at nearby Lake Luzerne seemed like a good idea. Early on in the proceedings, the calf roping event got underway and I realized I hadn't prepped my kids for the sight of a calf being roped, jolted rearwards, thrown to the ground and then given the humiliating leg tie as a finale. My son and daughter recoiled at this sight, looking to me for answers for what all this meant. I came up empty.

Don't get me wrong. I eat veal like anybody else, but midway through this rodeo, I started rooting for the animals along with my children. But here's why:

As we initially got to our seats, a rather lengthy opening ceremony was just getting underway. A mounted cowboy emcee was asking for all veterans to stand and be recognized. I was happy to chime in with the well deserved applause of appreciation. But then things got weird.

The emcee then announced that it was time to bring out a lady who'd been around for over two hundred and forty years (Old Glory, the Stars & Stripes). At this time, one end of the pen opened up and a woman, bedazzled in a flashing red, white and blue cowgirl outfit came racing out on horseback holding an American flag. Well deserved whoops and hollers greeted her.

But the national anthem I was expecting at this time had to wait as the mounted emcee began a long address about what the spirit of the stars and stripes really meant. And you know what? I'm all for a good American patriotically rendered boo-yah, but when his address led to gratuitous September 11th gravitas, I had to take exception.

I'm willing to wager a fair sum that of all the contestants and spectators at that rodeo that night, no one there had as hellish a 9/11 as I did. I don't want to say this to put myself on some sort of pedestal as there are so many who endured worse than I did that day and who've told their tale far more eloquently than I can. But I was across the street from the North Tower. My desk shook when American Flight 11 slammed into the North Tower. I went running in the streets with the crowds wondering if this was the end of the world. So...that lecturing cowboy with the microphone at the Painted Pony Rodeo? I don't know where he was that day. But I know where I was.

So, needless to say, I didn't appreciate the sloppy layering of 9/11 into his opening remarks. And I could tolerate it until the point when his lecture blasted: "it's the spirit found in that man who called his wife that day and told her 'you tell my daughter every day that her daddy loves her' just before he and those brave men brought that plane down in Shanksville, PA.")

His address ended with the trite macho declaration: "These colors DON'T RUN!!", delivered with a pro-wrestling cadence. I couldn't help but to be relieved that he didn't add: and they don't have to press 1 for English!

By this time, our National Anthem was a welcome relief. But as soon as that beautiful song concluded our emcee came back with this: "Now we're gonna exercise OUR FREEDOM OF RELIGION and say a prayer for all our contestants tonight!!"

Now, I was completely exasperated. I just wanted to shout out, "Dude, I just wanted to show my kids some cowboys. Can you ease off on the fabricated culture war crusade?"

This was my breaking point. If he'd just said, "Hey everybody, let's all bow our heads and say a quick prayer for our contestants..." - I would have been fine. But this whole bellowing (again with pro-wrestling cadence) 'freedom of religion' thing reeked of self-pitying right-wing nonsense. I went there that night with the expectation that we'd just take in some great rodeo. But suddenly we'd been thrust into the pathetic agenda of someone wanting to turn this event into some diorama of an isolated, imagined America that's never really existed. It was sad.

Thankfully, the competitions got underway and the bombastic rhetoric eased. Though the emcee made a muted Obama remark I wished I'd caught. (Another Expedia commenter had remarked that an anti-Hillary comment had blessed her visit).

So anyway...if you're visiting Lake George, NY....AVOID the Painted Pony Rodeo.

Oh yeah, their BBQ buffet beforehand was overpriced, the service was rude and the food was awful.

Slimbo's post on These Places

2010-09-03T12:59:00.000-07:00

Check out my post on These Places about New York City.

Restoring America's Honor

2010-08-29T08:33:00.001-07:00

Yesterday, Glenn Beck led a rally on the very sight, on the very date of Dr. Martin Luther King's I Have a Dream speech. Thousands of people showed up fueled by the Tea Party ranks who have swelled the heartland's population as of late.

The day was titled "Restoring Honor". This event was planned as being apolitical, and largely seemed so as it was mostly punctuated by an endless stream of amorphous battle cries for 'Freedom' and 'Liberty' - the shouted, veiled language that the American Right use when unable to constructively address the complex issues facing us today.

Reverend Al Sharpton has been the most vocal of opponents to this event, claiming that Beck's presence on this spot, on this day, goes against everything Dr. King stood for - namely social justice. Beck, who has decried 'social justice' as evil and who has said that President Barack Obama is a racist (with a "deep seated hatred for...the white culture"), has been given a complete free pass on his latest comments that he wants to "reclaim the civil rights movement".

Conservatives will point to Sharpton's opposition and declare he is merely trying to keep and old wound open, or perhaps deriding African Americans as trying to claim a proprietary right over Dr. King's legacy. But these voices are missing something entirely, and Sharpton has not been exacting enough in articulating why we who love Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. are so saddened by Beck's defilement of this day.

Before Dr. King died, he'd been working with severely disenfranchised sanitation workers in Memphis, TN. He saw this fight as part of a greater war against poverty and for the dignity for the working poor. He'd planned the Poor People's Campaign, whereby he was going to organize a million poor and marginalized people from the worlds richest nation to descend upon Capitol Hill and raise awareness of unacceptable realities. King wanted to press Congress to declare an Economic Bill of Rights. For this, he was absently labeled a communist, most notably by J. Edgar Hoover who harbored an obsession on Dr. King which ultimately contributed to King's death.

Dr. King's message of peace and social justice, for the dignity of ALL people was directed by the Gospels, not Moscow. Somehow, the criminal act of those who labeled him a communist has eluded history. And now it seems a torch has been passed to Beck, to flippantly label anyone and everyone he sees fit, 'communist'. He cleaves the nation into sides, declaring some communists and others as his brethren.

Yesterday, Beck, to his credit, toned down the crazy and turned up the humility. But he also received yet another free pass at explaining where exactly America lost her honor. Oh, he'll point to some amorphous 'turning away from God', but this is more Right-wing code words for 'Democratic leadership'.

Recently, a construction site in Murfreesboro, Tennessee was vandalized and equipment was burned. A mosque was going to be built there for Muslims who'd been living in the community for decades. This event occurred while our nation's unquenchable thirst for rage has been directed at incinerating the plans for a community center in New York City, blocks away and unseen from Ground Zero.

But now it seems a candlelight vigil has been planned by people of all faiths in Murfreesboro as a sign of solidarity with the Muslim community there.

Mr. Beck, while you bankroll millions by preying upon America's lowest fears, more of America's honor is being restored by that vigil than by anything you can fabricate.

A few more paintings

2010-08-23T20:17:00.001-07:00

Brother Steven

2010-08-23T20:05:00.000-07:00

I received an invitation today for the 20th anniversary of my high school graduation. This blessed event is taking place in Memphis, Tennessee. Slimbo, being a New Yorker, will be unable to attend. But this invitation did conjure memories of the great Brother Steven, who I've represented here.

I feel this work's colors and tone are a bit too severe in light of the fact that I recall this man with great affection. He recognized an intelligence in me that rote suburban obedience had almost demolished. He taught English. And in his class I, for once, experienced the sensation of being able to work in a discourse of ideas. And I did this in a way that distinguished me from the rest of the mindless herd. For once I was no longer just that pathetic entity skulking in the shadows, hoping no one would fuck with him amid the gladitorian hallways of an all-boys Catholic school. He helped me see that I was better than all those bastards. He was a great teacher. And I'll never forget him.

Self-portrait discussing clothes

2010-08-23T20:01:00.000-07:00

Paintings II

2010-08-06T18:55:00.000-07:00

I'm going on vacation next week - not that I've been a dutiful blogging daddy for you. So I'll leave you with another painting whilst I go away to tropic shores, hoping my Mets implode gracefully and hoping my nation's short attention span doesn't quickly fell us under the authoritarian nightmare of the regressive theocrat from Wasilla.

Paintings

2010-07-30T19:50:00.000-07:00

I've started painting again. I painted nonstop between 2006 and 2007 and then I stopped. In 2008 I started writing again, and thus was born The Shelf. But now I am painting again, and thus, you Shelf readers (numbering in the single digits - but I love you!) have not been hearing much from me in the past few months.

So anyway, I'm putting together a catalog of my paintings to send out to galleries. Here's a sampling:

Desk

2010-07-21T19:44:00.000-07:00

Eli Manning and the New York Giants

2010-07-21T18:47:00.000-07:00

If you have kids now or have ever had them in the past, you know how torturous the end of the day can be. My son is going into the 3rd grade and he needs to do some summer reading every night. It's tough...because sometimes, after a long day of work, when I have to sit down for book-time with the kids, I really do believe that monastic living might have been a good option.

Kvetching aside, my son (thank God) is a good reader but it is a struggle to get him to take to the task. Enter Matthew Sandler with Eli Manning and the New York Giants. The book gives a very basic, kid-friendly outline of Eli Manning's arc - the youngest of a dynastic football family, the struggles of playing in New York, the impossibility of the '07 New England Patriots and of course, the miraculous win in SuperBowl 42.

Of course, as much as I appreciate this book and its opportunity to indoctrinate my offspring with my own sports obsessions, it can not possibly deliver the sensation of what it was like to savor that Superbowl win.

For those Shelf readers who might not be sports savvy - I only ask you to watch THIS. This is like if Poland could have kicked Germany's ass in 1939.

(as an aside - for the record...when the Giants defeated the Packers in the NFC Championship Game that sent them to SB42...I was on an Air France flight to Paris. I missed the whole thing. I know. I hate myself enough for this.)

Harvey Pekar

2010-07-20T10:13:00.000-07:00

Last week I was in Ohio with my family, just north of Sandusky on Lake Erie. While on vacation, I tend not to check in with the news of the world or the bother with the exploits of whichever seasonal sports team I'm obsessed with. I find it cathartic to let all that go and just relax. Now I've just learned that while I was gone, Harvey Pekar died in his home in Cleveland on July 12th. I had no idea.

A lot has been made of the alleged malaise of Cleveland, unfairly fanned by the insignificant news of Le Bron James' circus-like decision to leave the Cavaliers for Miami. But as I drove through Ohio last week, pondering 'malaise' and 'Cleveland', my mind focused mostly on Pekar, unknowing of his passing.

Pekar was the creator and writer of American Splendor, an initially underground comic which took the medium from its original restrictive world of superheroes and fantasy, and moved it into the infinite possibilities of documenting regular life. His portrayal of a man struggling to make ends meet while working as a clerk for a VA Hospital gave voice to the overwhelming anonymity and numbing inauthenticity of working life. His writing was blunt but carried a consistent honesty that drew you in and counted you as an equal.

I loved Pekar because he was an outsider. He was an artist but never vaulted himself into our culture's whorish, self-congratulatory realm of exceptionism. In Slimbo's Shelf, I've often posted up my own attempts at illustrated narratives. Pekar was always in my mind when I made these attempts.

Pekar is often maligned as a depressive misanthrope intent on documenting only the negative of Americana's day to day mechanics. But I would contend that Pekar rose above this. He saw beyond the deadening drone of everyday life; that there will always be small pockets of beauty and magic, often unseen to most. If his work exuded angst it was because he knew that we lived in an infinitely beautiful universe and that most of the souls we encounter on a day to day basis were oblivious to that beauty.

Harvey, I will miss you. And I thank you.

K4976 Part II (a/k/a THEN, Part II)

2010-07-01T20:44:00.000-07:00

CBHS Bell Tower

2010-07-01T18:48:00.001-07:00

Last night while I was watching the Mets, I started sketching my old high school's bell tower. My hand just started doing this involuntarily. Perhaps the late 60's geometric symmetry I'd recalled in this structure made my subconscious navigate to this as a worthwhile exercise.

I pulled out my old yearbook to compare the accuracy of my drawing to the structure itself. I then found myself pouring through these old pages, suddenly struck by the subtle, unidentifiable bleakness in these images. This was something that I'd never before noticed and it seemed to be magnified by the inane captions that accompanied the photographs.

A few things

2010-06-23T14:25:00.001-07:00

USA won bracket C today. If we hadn't scored in the 91st minute as we did, the boys would be packing their bags right now. All of America should be really proud of these guys and I hope the soccer-hating media changes their course. These guys deserve serious recognition. Ghana is next and you can't help but to feel good about our chances - we got momentum.

The Mets are playing really, really well. My son and I have tickets for Friday night thanks to my inordinately generous cousin. I am ecstatically excited to hang with my guy at Citi Field.

I'm reading Kazuo Ishiguro's Nocturnes right now and it's really good. I'll keep it brief and spare you the usual Slimbo's Shelf review, but I will say Nocturnes is a collection of short stories that explore the strain time puts on romance. Music is a common salve amid these characters, sometimes a much needed buffer - sometimes a painful reminder. Ishiguro was featured in Granta's The Best of Young British Novelists back in 1983. In his author description it is written that he sleeps all day and then at night, he eats enormous quantities of food.

Happy Fathers Day

2010-06-18T20:16:00.000-07:00

More World Cup Thoughts

2010-06-18T19:30:00.000-07:00

I love soccer. And almost everyone who knows me knows I love soccer. And now they're all calling, asking me to explain the various scenarios by which the United States might advance from our group (England, Slovenia, Algeria) to the knock-out group of 16. Honestly, when I am called on the carpet to explain our chances, I just make it up.

1. SO! France lost. And why did France lose? Karma! Remember France should not even be here. A mysteriously uncalled handball facilitated a goal against the Republic of Ireland to get France into this World Cup. They don't deserve to be here, so payback's a bitch, ain't it? (Though, in all seriousness, Ireland should have cleared the ball and never let him get that faux Gaul goal).

I don't mean to malign France. I just saw Paris je t'aime, a wonderful film. And I am mulling the thought of writing a novel about the '68 student uprisings in France, as told from the perspective of a Gaulist policeman. Oh God, I love France. (And when I say I'm mulling a novel, I mean to say another eccentric, wildly unmarketable novel).
So England drew 0-0 against Algeria today. A few months ago, I had picked these guys to win the whole cup. But you know what? They're punchless. Honestly, they can't consummate the deal because their home nation puts such ungodly, malicious pressure on them, that they freeze up in the moment of truth. And I don't mean to malign the English. I love you guys. My children are part English - as much English as they are Irish. But you people are killing your own team.
Slimbo predicts Argentina takes The Cup. Holy crap, those kids are running on all cylanders. Plus, they are managed by a complete crazy person.

_______

Separately...the Mets just won their seventh in a row...beating the Yankees in Yankee Stadium (and by 'Yankee Stadium', I mean that new cold corporate monstrostity that was built to replace the now vanquished baseball temple).

My World Cup Thoughts Thus Far

2010-06-16T19:07:00.001-07:00

The Vuvuzelas make me want to claw my brains out. Awful.
Spain lost today to a defence-minded Swiss team. I love it. Just love it. I have to say that soccer and American Football are two sports where, dagnamit, defence alone can win you big games. (Uh, I play central defender Monday nights, in case you were wondering).
So...USA-England. 1-1. Holy Crap! First off, I feel terrible for Mark Green. He's a good guy and he plays for West Ham United, which is essentially like playing in London's version of the Bronx. Good luck Mark. Nice knowing you.
USA-England - not sure if anyone noticed this, but when the two teams came out for national anthems, they played God Save Our Queen first. All the England players stood apart from one another, hands behind their backs...just another day at the office. Because really - it wasn't USA-England that day. It was USA vs. Chelsea/Man Utd/Liverpool. When the Star Spangled Banner played, all the US players had their right hands over their hearts and their left hands on the right shoulder of the teammate to their left. It was beautiful (granted they all looked scared shitless, but I loved the show of camaraderie).
This is a beautiful event and all America's media seem capable of offering is a pathetic, shameful and embarrassing anti-soccer venom. We have a group of guys busting their asses right now in the name of our nation. You don't have to love this sport, but every time some assclown journalist shits on soccer, usually some cheap attempt to appeal to that fat git-'er-done segment of America who couldn't run ten yards without heaving up giant chunks of deep-fried onion blossum , we are kicking these brave World Cup warriors squarely in the nuts...and they don't derserve that. America's media need to lead the charge in showing support for this crew and they have failed miserably. Wake up America! Anti-soccer malaise during this intense tournament is small-minded, isolationist bullshit!

Simplified Strat-o-matic Redux

2010-06-16T18:48:00.000-07:00

I've written before about a simple baseball game my son and I created. On a green felt baseball diamond we lay out baseball cards we've chosen to be our teams. The team at bat rolls two die with the numbers 2 through 12 being assigned as outs, singles, doubles, homers, etc.

The pool of players we choose from are a combination of my son's baseball cards and my old cards. The resulting teams created are a wonderful, oddball mixture:

My Son's Team:
C - Joe Mauer (MIN)
1B - Eddie Murray (BAL)
2B - Jose Lopez (SEA)
SS - Jose Reyes (NYM)
3B - A-Rod (NYY)
OF - Mickey Mantle (NYY - don't get nuts...it's a 2009 Topps commemorative issue)
OF - Xavier Nady (NYY)
OF - Carlos Beltran (NYM)
P- Nolan Ryan (TEX - card given to him by his inordinately generous uncle)

My Team:
C- Sandy Alomar (SDP)
1B - Paul Konerko (CWS)
2B - Robby Thompson (SFG)(?)
SS - Ozzie Smith (STL)
3B - David Wright (NYM)
OF - Claudell Washington (NYY)
OF - Oscar Gamble (CLE)
OF - Carlos Quentin (CWS)
P - Jack McDowell (CWS)

He won 3-2.

Insomniac Movie Reviews - L'Age des tenebres

2010-06-08T18:32:00.000-07:00

(Apologies for the paragraph break problems. Google Blogger services seem incapable of properly placing spaces between paragraphs).

Dissatisfied upper-middle class suburbanite struggling with reality. Wife whose machinations have transformed her into a cold Real Estate shark. Teenage daughter doesn't want to acknowledge your existence. It all sounds like 1999's American Beauty, right?

Wrong. It's 2007's L'Age des tenebres (Days of Darkness) directed by Denis Arcand, a wonderful French Canadian response to its American counterpart. Yet, it's wrong to portray this film as a knock-off - there are definite differences. Beauty is a far more complex story, carefully taking you into each of the character's lives, forcing you to see how each has a superficial existence balanced against a far more complex inner world. L'Age des tenebres focuses almost exclusively on Jean-Marc and his grip on realty is far weaker than Spacey's Lester Burnham.

---L'Age's Kevin Spacey, this Jean-Marc LeBlanc, is played by Marc LeBreche. He works as a bureaucratic drone, more reminiscent of Terry Gilliam's Brazil, than of Spacey's hyper-corporate pigeonhole. While Lester Burnham's fantasy world is fixated on one of his daughter's friends, played by Mena Suvari, Jean-Marc's fantasies are far more abstract, almost comic book-like heroines, most often anchored on Diane Kruger, who plays a nymph-like companion who materializes before Jean-Marc whenever he is at his loneliest.

--- But whereas Spacey's Lester Burnham's fixation on his daughter's friend is rooted in a desire to redeem his own self worth by possessing a young girls as a sexual object, Jean-Marc's fantasies of Diane Kruger exist at another level. In a painful scene, Jean-Marc lies in bed as his wife fields work-related phone call after phone call. He has just had a painful visit with his mother who lives in a nursing home. He catches a moment between his wife's phone calls and tries to talk to her about the visit, but she brushes him off nonchalantly.

--- Jean-Marc's mind quickly transitions into his fantasy world and Diane Kruger now joins the scene. Suddenly she and Jean-Marc are sitting in front of a fire in silk pajamas. She strokes Jean-Marc's hair as he tells her of his anxieties of his mother's condition and how his mother is the only remaining link to some intangible plane where he once felt grounded and secure. Rather than launching into some ephemeral sexual release that Spacey's Lester might have been seeking, Kruger's character runs her hands through Jean-Marc's hair and says, 'this all must be very hard for you.'

---That's all he's wanting. His greatest desire is to be acknowledged.

Why We Will Win

2010-06-04T10:04:00.001-07:00

At 2:30pm EST on June 12, the United States faces England to begin the 2010 World Cup. England looks at this contest as an easy win. And that is why they will fail.

We will win because never before has our team spent so much time in the trenches of the best European leagues.

We will win because of the confidence we built up after beating Spain in the Confederations Cup and because of the way we played Brasil in the final.

We will win because Beckham, Rooney and Ferdinad are hurt (sorry, Wayne...sorry Rio).

We will win because England's third striker, Emile Heskey is older than I am.

We will win because England is putting David "Calamity" James in goal.

We will win because Tim Howard is the best keeper on Planet Earth.

We will win because it is our time.

Go USA.

Slimbo knows current events!

2010-06-02T20:19:00.000-07:00

Not sure if any of you Shelf readers remember this post I'd made about Terrence Malick's film The New World. Well anyway, looks like the actress who played that film's lead female role of Pocahontas, Q'orianka Kilcher, slipped a big dose of crazy into her Starbucks today, and tried to break into The White House. Read about it here.

Apparently it's all over some crazy shit about the President of Peru visiting President Obama, blah, blah, blah.

She's still stunning though.

Awesome Shea Cards - Part III; Bill Buckner

2010-06-01T18:51:00.000-07:00

Before you stands a young confident first baseman, William Joseph Buckner of Culver City, California. This card is from 1974, his Dodger days, which preclude his Cubs days, which preclude his Red Sox days, with one of those days being an awful, awful day. (For those non-baseball oriented Shelf readers, I offer you with this clip to explain Buckner's tragedy - a blown play at first base that would have sealed a Red Sox World Series. Eventually, the title would go to the bad guys: the Mets).

When Bill Buckner committed that error in the 1986 World Series, he was my age and I now find myself instinctively defending this man. "No 37 year-old could have fielded that play, that fast, against Mookie - the fastest Met ever". [I'm a Mets fan. I have no vested interest in Buckner's vindication. But as a poet, I can not turn a blind eye to his plight].

So I find myself looking at this 1974 card of Buckner. He offers us that smart, haughty look on his face as he stands amid a sun-drenched Shea Stadium, the place that, over a decade later, would host his greatest undoing. Could it be that maybe, just maybe, on the summer day captured in this snapshot, that young haughty William Joseph Buckner committed some egregious cardinal sin, some visceral desecration of the Shea soil I love so...and that the seeds of retribution were sowed then...laying in wait?

K4976 (Spaceman)

2010-05-25T19:30:00.001-07:00

From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil Frankenweiler

2010-05-23T18:38:00.000-07:00

By the time I'd read E.L. Konigsburg's From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs Basil E. Frankenweiler, I'd been to New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art many times. My parents took us there, mostly to amuse themselves. Looking back, I think they'd visit the museum in an attempt to break the crushing monotony of Long Island suburban living, an admirable goal. But I don't think they realized how those visits infused the imagination of a young boy who, perhaps they'd just brought along as luggage.

The Met was one of the first places that introduced me to the notion that human existence was perhaps something greater than the banal suburban landscape I'd known. The Egyptian wing, the hall of armour, the pseudo-sexual statue of Perseus holding Medusa's severed head, the lush, massive historical European murals - I processed all these things and although I did not understand their context and discourse...I understood that this palace-like building housed an experience providing a toehold into wonder and dreams.

I'd read From the Mixed Up Files in seventh grade and never forgot it. Claudia decides her parents need a lesson in Claudia appreciation, so she decides to take her younger brother Jamie and run away to live in the Met. That's when this book hooked me. Besides the fact that there was a male character named Jamie (my name), the main characters were kids and they were fearless of the dangers of 1970's New York City.

As if I needed another reason to adore Wes Anderson's work, when I saw The Royal Tenebaums in 2001, I nearly leapt out of my seat and screamed during the film's opening sequences. Young Margot and Richie Tenebaum are shown camping out in the 'African Wing' of the 'City Archives' building. The beauty of The Mixed Up Files is that it captures the spirit of uncorrupted children seeking an adventurous sense of beauty before they are shackled with the stagnant doldrums of adulthood. (Anderson's Tenebaums is rooted in a Franny & Zooey-like exploration of the rigors of adult disappointment).

I checked this book out of my local library and raced through it. It was like remembering an old friend, from a simpler time. Considering I've been toiling through Proust's In Search of Lost Time. This was a light, welcome distraction.

All You Can Eat

2010-05-17T19:37:00.000-07:00

Pegged!

2010-05-10T06:41:00.000-07:00

I delude myself with the fabricated notion that there is only one me and no one is complex enough to understand the intricate and amazing Slimbo.

Then something comes along, whacks you between the eyes and tells you that you are actually one of a multitude and that all these attributes which you think compose your identity, are tracked, charted and even predicted as though you were just another hamster on a wheel in life's totalitarian laboratory.

On a very fun and superficial level, there is the wonderful list/website, Stuff White People Like. By the name you might think they're aiming for a sly dig at the low hanging fruit - NASCAR or trailer parks. But no, dear hipster reader, they're gunning for you and I. The uber-liberal, East Coast, highly educated, environmentally and politically conscious navel gazer is the prey SWPL aim to skewer, and skewer they do. What's on the list? - Yoga, tea, camping, humus, Bob Marley, Non-profit organizations, moleskin notebooks. Put on your painfully fashionable chic-framed reading glasses and take a look.

My initial amusement at SWPL quickly turned to panic, as their list went on and on because I realized that their portrait of the narcissistic Gen X'er felt familiar and repulsive at the same time. Oh crap, I begin to wonder, am I this much of a schmuck? The list went on and on, hitting home...public radio, The New Yorker, Claiming to Hate Television, Hating Corporations, loving Soccer. That's the brilliance of SWPL. It has put the harsh spotlight on my generation's cadre of self-righteous, insular urban hipsters and forced us to realize that perhaps, all we've done is conform to a culture of non-conformity that ultimately feeds into the machinations we claim to protest. All with a coffee in our hands that cost $2.69.

Then on Sunday, I open the 'Week in Review' section of The Times to find A.O. Scott's article, Gen X Has a Midlife Crisis. 'Oh crap, I'm gonna get skewered again', was all I could think.

So what is Generation X? I dunno. In the middle of the Twentieth Century, we had 'The Greatest Generation'. They survived the Great Depression and saved western civilization with their sacrifice in World War II. But unfortunately, they procreated. And the generation they spawned has engulfed America like a hostile alien invasion, intent on sucking all natural, financial and spiritual resources dry.

And then they had kids. Generation X, it is. A lousy label created by pompous ex-hippies; a sly dig intended to insinuate that we don't care or believe in anything. Bullshit. I'm tired of defending my generation against our parents' generation who abandoned all their faux counter-culture idealistic laurels to become divorce-mongrel, Gordon Gekkos, masking their shallow greed as 'ambition' and 'industriousness'.

But I digress. Generation X is getting older. We now have grey hair, and Scott's article explores the paradox that GenX'ers are aging despite the fact that their alleged identity is rooted in the claim that they've never actually grown up.

I'm not sure what caused me the greatest dyspepsia - the poignant portrayal of struggling with midlife:
[The driving impulse to shake the straight jacket of adulthood...when it happens to dad, it's a 'crisis'...when it happens to mom, it's an 'awakening'...].

Or was it the paradox inherent to GenX itself. We claim to ache for authenticity, ostentatiously rejecting the materialistic gods of the Baby Boomers (and finding The Big Chill insufferably precious), yet we ourselves are equally guilty of our parents' navel gazing.

Just as Stuff White People Like hit close to home, the following line from Scott's article cut me and put me in my place: "...two-thirds of GenX'ers have written memoirs that they dream of reciting on This American Life..."

Oh crap. They got me.

Mother's Day 2010

2010-05-09T20:07:00.001-07:00

Man in Car

2010-05-05T20:33:00.001-07:00

Nick Drake - Pink Moon

2010-05-03T18:54:00.000-07:00

So I'm sitting here watching the Mets tortuously take a game against the Reds into extra innings, with a golden opportunity unseen (the Cardinals are beating the Phillies).

What the hell was I going to talk about? Oh yeah, Nick Drake.

So I'm sitting there and a commercial comes on and I hear Nick Drake's From the Morning, the last track on Pink Moon. I've wanted to talk to you about Pink Moon for some time but I haven't found the right launching point. Now unfortunately, it's been forced upon me by a commercial for Verizon (or was it AT&T, or Sprint - it's all the same bullshit - either way, you can tell I despise the fact that whoever owns Drake's catalogue chose to sell out to this).

Drake himself could not release this song for this commercial because he's dead. He's been dead for almost as long as I've been alive. But whenever I hear the songs of Pink Moon, it feels as though a very beautiful and complex person has taken up residence with what I always assume to be an impenetrable emotional place. Drake's songs are moody explorations, meditating on life's utterly unanswerable questions. His vocals are accompanied only by his ponderous, lyrical guitar playing. This is early morning music. When I'm waiting for my coffee to make its way to my bloodstream and I seem capable of only blankly looking out a window, Pink Moon is what I'll listen to.

It's heartbreaking to know that this work of quiet magic has now become the stuff of boardrooms and focus groups. It's heartbreaking that the man who made this music lived in commercial and critical obscurity, lacking the egotistical machinations to escape anonymity. It's heartbreaking that Nick Drake took his own life at age 26.

Anyway, yeah cell phone coverage! Woohoo!

Awesome Shea Cards - Part Two

2010-04-27T20:09:00.001-07:00

When I was a kid, the Braves were never something you had to worry about. Eventually, the 1990's and beyond would change all that and the Braves have relentlessly haunted and humiliated the soul of every Met fan since.

But these cards come from those earlier innocuous years. Paul Zuvella's career stats boast a .222 batting average, just two home runs and 20 RBI's. His biggest claim to fame might be that spent time in the minors with the Durham Bulls (as in the film Bull Durham). I love this Shea card as its vantage point has you looking directly into the Shea visitor's dugout, which at the time was adorned with brown faux wood paneling, reminiscent of a suburban Long Island basement lounge.

Davey Johnson is another story entirely. At the time this card was made, Shea had not been kind to Davey Johnson. As an Oriole, he had made the last out to give the Mets the World Series title in 1969. In this card, we see yet another of Johnson's struggles. This card is often considered one of the most humiliating baseball cards ever made. We join Johnson mid swing, badly missing a ball which you see just to the right of him above his rump.

Johnson's card is perhaps a good life lesson. Here is a man we might assume to be beset by some Shea Stadium curse. But years would pass and circumstances would change. Johnson would become a manager. Of the Mets. And lead them to the world title in 1986.

Awesome Shea Cards - Part One

2010-04-27T19:30:00.000-07:00

I have written about baseball cards before, largely because Josh Wilker, owner of the blog, Cardboard Gods (and now author of the book Cardboard Gods), has inspired neurotic misfit baseball-obsessed writers like myself to do so. We thank you, Josh (even though I reluctantly must forgive you for making the transition from anonymous blogger to acknowledged, Times featured author). And as I am entirely locked up with a sort of H1N1 version of writer's block, I'm afraid you (few) faithful Shelf readers are going to be subjected to some more baseball card blather. You see, it's the end of April and the Mets are somehow in first place. So despite Slimbo's usually indomitable ennui, the Mets have infused a renegade hope that now batters about, lightening my landscape. So I turn to the baseball cards of my childhood and I write.

Shea Stadium is gone. Shea is where I saw my first baseball game as a 4 year-old (Mets vs. Padres - Mets lost). It is where my team won the World Series in 1986. It is where I spent many a night in the 1990's cheering on an immeasurably flawed but incongruously likeable team. And now it's all gone.

But in baseball cards, Shea lives forever.

Here we have the blessed, sun-drenched images of Dick Tidrow and Graig Nettles from the 74-75 season. Like-minded, obsessive baseball fans should be adequately disturbed by the sight of Yankee pinstripes against the backdrop of the Shea's vacuous curves. One must remember that this is the year that Yankee Stadium (the old one) was being renovated into the lifeless, neutered entity it would be from 1976 through its eventual, excessively fawned closure in 2008.

So these pictures come from the year when Shea Stadium somehow managed to host the Mets, Yankees, as well as the New York football Jets and New York football Giants.

But something bothers me about these two cards. These Yankee icons stand in the sunlight projecting an air of ownership and entitlement. The smug look on Tidrow's face seems to preclude the success he would experience while contributing to the Yankee's championships of '77 and '78. Nettles coils back, almost challenging you to tell him that Shea is not his.

For my Dad

2010-04-19T20:00:00.001-07:00

Today is my Dad's birthday. I did the above illustration as a gift. I've made my parents handmade cards since I was a kid and it looks as though I always will.

My dad does volunteer tax work. He helps folks who can't afford a tax accountant or who need that extra help to navigate the labyrinth of tax codes in order to maximize their credits and benefits.

It's interesting. I look at my dad and see all that he has achieved in the world of business. He created a life of comfort for our family as a result of hard work, keen instincts and a lot of luck.

I see so many men of his generation though, and when they'd attained the success my father achieved, they retreated into a world of material possessions and narrow minded convictions.

But my father isn't like that. He's different. In his retirement, he's gone back to school and committed countless hours to volunteer tax work. He's taken classes at his local college because he believes the world is an infinite place of wonder and no joy in life can replace the joy of knowledge. He does volunteer work because of his faith, and it's not a blind dogmatic faith, but a faith that believes we should always put up a fight against the darkness of our world despite humanity's immeasurable faults.

Maybe when he's doing tax returns for poor families, he remembers the times his family was broke and he had to live in an apartment with his grandparents, Irish immigrants from Galway. He knows that the slings and arrows of life can be random and senseless and that the last thing you should ever do is judge. When I was a young boy, he told me never to call anyone a 'loser'. I've never forgotten that. It's all because he knows, despite the success he attained, the last thing on earth anyone should ever do, is wall himself against the world around him and do nothing. And this is why he does tax returns for poor people.

So when I see the Tea Parties, and all the financially comfortable fat white people exhibitionistically whoring themselves into this nonsensical victim-discourse, wanting to 'take their country back', I think of my father. He's a man who's bold enough to say that despite the mountains he's conquered, he doesn't have all the answers and that maybe, the best thing to do is go back to the trenches, suspend judgement, and fight for the little guy.

Love you, dad.

Slimbo

The Green Genie

2010-04-19T19:57:00.001-07:00

I played my first game of soccer tonight. It's been about six months or so. I love the game. It delivers such a narcotic sense of being alive. It's one of the things that keeps the Green Genie away.

And Where Has Slimbo Been?

2010-04-16T18:25:00.000-07:00

I'm here, really I am.

A lot has been going on, so I'm going to give you some Slimbo's Shelf Cliff Notes in convenient Q&A format:

April 15th has come and gone. Why have we not been given the usual Slimbo diatribe about the importance of paying taxes as a by-product of the most rudimentary edicts of civic consciousness?

Because I fear Tea Baggers. The local paper I submit to, The Examiner, has frequently been giving immeasurable space to a local Tea Party jackboot named Bill B_____. Essentially I am afraid of the day he and his ilk show up at my doorstep.

Chicken?

Yes. Really, I'd keep kvetching on and on about Tea People if I could muster the energy but I've lost all energy for this nonsense. And I think that America has lost patience as well. Come November America's attention span for this will have fizzled out.

Charles M. Blow had this great article in today's Times about his experience attending a Tea Party in Texas.

Ahem...The New York Mets?

Oh, the Mets. People are panicking here in New York but I'm not. It's way to early to panic. But I do predict that Jerry Manuel's days are numbered, unfortunately. I liked him. Yes, I predict Manuel will be out and the Mets won't go to the post-season. Some panic at this, but I have just come to accept it.

What are you reading?

I'm halfway through Vol 1 of Proust's In Search of Lost Time. I'm hoping to finish all volumes before I turn 50, which is thirteen years away. (Holy shit, I turn 50 in thirteen years!)

I'm looking for something else to read while reading Proust. Do you ever read two books at once?

Who?

You.

Me?

Yeah.

No, I'm just the voice in your head asking you questions. I ask the questions here.

Sorry.

Are you painting?

No.

Are you writing?

No.

Nothing?

Well, I did submit an article about summer jobs I held back in my Memphis days. I submitted it to the Commercial Appeal but haven't heard back yet. I'll post a link if they pick it up.

Other than that, I got nothing.

You suck.

Thanks.

Diabeetuz

2010-04-10T19:30:00.000-07:00

I want to talk to you about your diabeetuz.

Highway 61

2010-04-08T17:54:00.000-07:00

It is universally understood that Highway 61, that stretch of road that extends south from Memphis into Mississippi, is sacred ground. This road has been immortalized many times, most famously by John Hammond's two trophy bookends, bluesman Robert Johnson and icon Bob Dylan. Should someone should ever ask you, 'hey, where you headed?' I'm not sure that any resident of Planet Earth could offer any answer cooler than: 'I'm headin' down Highway 61."

Highway 61 begins in Memphis - downtown Memphis. [The church I used to attend is there, St. Peter's, a Dominican parish]. Downtown Memphis has two Downtowns. The 'North End', also called 'the Pinch', was where the European immigrants (and there were many in the 1800's because of The River) settled. The 'South End was an African American neighborhood. This is where Beale Street could be found. This is where the Lorraine Motel is. This is where the real Highway 61 begins.

Heading south, Highway 61 quickly frees itself from the mechanics of downtown Memphis and an anonymous industrial area greets you next. Next is a fleeting abyss of strip malls, cheap hotels and temporary storage unit facilities. Then Highway 61 unfolds into the rolling rural stretch of road that I've tried to portray in this illustration.

[I write this having encapsulated this place as it was in 1992. That was almost two decades ago. God knows it must have changed. ]

There are Casinos in Tunica, Mississippi. They arrived in the early 90's. Casinos seemed to have infiltrated incongruous and legally ambiguous places throughout America and now I'm never surprised to stumble across one.

In the early 90's, I'd just relocated to Memphis. It was hard and I'd been consumed with an intransigent depression brought about by the pain of homesickness and the ache brought on by the absence of females in my all-boys school.

But then I found the guitar. My newfound love of blues music propelled me to align the guitar into my life and I realized I could play it well. Then I found Memphis' WEVL, a listener supported station that played blues standards deep into the night. I'd found blues. I'd found some something, and it made me feel that the abyss I carried about was not something penitentually unique but rather in sync with something cosmic, beyond me, perhaps an unseen discourse awaiting my participation.

______________________________

Drive south from Memphis. The hills will roll and the trees will close in. You will pass over a ridge. I'm hoping that my illustration gives you a fraction of what this moment might be like. You pass over this bluff. And shortly thereafter, your car bottoms out into the flattest place you'll ever know.

This is the Delta. But before you hit this point, your car negotiates these mystical bluffs, wondering what's coming next...

Inspired by Louis Simpson

2010-04-06T19:43:00.000-07:00

The following work was inspired by a poem by Louis Simpson called 'The Unwritten Poem". I made these drawings in 2006 when I was in a bit of a crisis. I knew I had to get away from Lehman Brothers, but I had no clue what else it was I could be doing with my life.

The final lines of Simpson's poem are:

You must rise to the sound of the alarm
and march to catch the 6:20-
watch as they ascend the station platform
and, grasping briefcases, pass beyond your gaze
and hurl themselves into the flames.

And so here is Slimbo's rendering:

In Search of Lost Time

2010-04-06T01:57:00.000-07:00

Since I dropped out of the NYC Half Marathon (with bad knees and ankles - that's my excuse) I'm reading all seven volumes of Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time, a marathon in its own right.

I've set no time limits and realize that this project will take me years to accomplish. But I plan on reading In Search of Lost Time while also reading other books as well. So no rush.

I've been feeling an nagging absence of accomplishment lately. I was supposed to have written a novel by now and have started two within the last six months, both of which died after 100 pages. Slimbo's Shelf readers still number in the single digits. And with 40 heading down the pike, I have the stinging realization that career-wise, I'll be at the same place at 40 that I was at 27. I've peaked and my peak is a foothill, so to speak.

Most people would Tony-Robbins themselves into some sort of reconstructive, empowering metamorphosis and seize this crossroads to transform into America's Next Great Success Story. But not me. Fuck that. I've decided to retreat into the world of a century-old 4,000+ page text.

What's your evasive means of coping with the onset of middle age? Do tell!

Opening Day

2010-04-06T01:38:00.000-07:00

Today was Opening Day for the New York Mets season. In grand fashion, they throttled the Marlins 7-1.

In honor of this event, I'd like to submit this video for your viewing pleasure. This is a home video taken by a pair of Mets fans in 1982. The ten minute clip encapsulates their drive into Shea Stadium, shows some snippets of the game and then takes you to the wonderful world of the post-game parking lot. Try and get past the annoying narration because there are a few important things I want you to take note of here:

1. In the first few minutes, you're in the car with them going over the Whitestone bridge. Look at the cars. Listen to the radio. This is a wonderful time capsule.

2. At minute 2:23, they show you people brazenly breaking into Shea Stadium. The malaise of 1970's New York City hadn't quite worn off yet. In the world of Generalisimo Giuliani's New York, these men would have been shot on sight. (And then I ask you - which world is better?)

3. At minute 5:33 - yup, that's Pete Rose in his brief stint on the Phillies.

4. Minute 7:50 -Okay, so we're back outside the stadium after the game. One of the film's two narrators is giving an amateur post-game wrap-up. The camera pans out and you see a fan urinating against a fence. In the background you hear heckling and the Number 7 train. Just awesome!

5. Minute 8:20 - Our filmmakers are driving away now, but before they do, they capture the image of a group of young men trying to free a pickup truck from the mud. In the background you see Shea Stadium, newly stripped of its once-famous blue and orange panels. Over the radio, listen to that wonderful post-game music. Sure, those guys will free that vehicle from the mud, but then where do they go?

Zenith Radio

2010-04-03T20:00:00.001-07:00

The Trouble With Ben

2010-04-02T19:01:00.001-07:00

Harriet and David have four children. They've always wanted a house full of children, even if the administration of such a life might put a strain on their finances. They'd met during the swinging 60's when the traditional bountiful home life they envisioned was out of vogue.

All initially goes well. They have four beautiful, gifted, gentle children. Then Harriet becomes pregnant again and the child in her womb is clearly different. He mercilessly terrorizes Harriet from within. Harriet is relieved to finally give birth to this new child, Ben, but Ben's raucous prenatal treatment is nothing compared to what comes next.

David and Harriet's fifth child is different and they clearly have no idea how to handle him. He is a monstrous baby who is never sated when fed and seems immune to the calming benefits of affection. What are they to do? Ben grows and grows into a troll-like child and he possesses a physical strength that is juxtapositioned against a demeanor that appears impervious to human tenderness or empathy.

Professionals are called in but none of them seem able to comprehend Harriet and David's horror. They seem to either want to mindlessly exterminate Ben or vilify Harriet and David for not accommodating this fifth child with love even though he doesn't conform to their first four children's characteristics.

This is a horrifying story and incredibly haunting. Lessing is accomplishing a couple of key points with this book. First, she is trying to illustrate the all-encompassing world of having a special-needs child. The arrival of Ben initially consumes Harriet but soon infiltrates each member of the family. Could the family's eventual unravelling have been avoided?

Secondly, the placement of Ben's birth and upbringing makes him a metaphor for Britain in the 1980's. The staid world of Harriet and David, rooted in England's hierarchical traditions can not make sense of the nihilistic violence seen in those elements of post-war Britain that manifested itself in the Punk movement or the methodical, systematic plague of football hooliganism.

Monumento

2010-04-01T22:39:00.000-07:00

More from Spaceman Spaceman

2010-04-01T22:37:00.000-07:00

Marshall Frog

2010-04-01T22:33:00.000-07:00

I drew this for my daughter one rainy afternoon when we had nothing to do. Marshall Frog was a stuffed animal I had when I was a kid. I've often been told that I should be creating children's books but..I don't know. I thought about it after finishing this work, but the thought of devoting the next three months to drawing frogs and toads overwhelmed me. I'm not sure that my world view is best suited for creating nourishing content for future minds.

I'm off to the Redneck Hajj

2010-03-26T09:45:00.001-07:00

I'll let you know how it all works out.

The Butler did it!

2010-03-25T19:35:00.001-07:00

Oh crap...Ooooooh, crap.

As a Syracuse man, I am obliged to collapse into the hysteria of the moment. Yesterday, I was among the faithful believing that another NCAA title was within reach. Now - not so much.

Here's the deal. I've been here before. I was (emotionally, not physically) there when my Alma mater won it all in 2003. I've also experienced that aching death when Syracuse lost The Tournament to Kentucky in the finals of 1996. Separately, in related sports obsessions, I've been fortunate enough to experience that narcotic euphoria when the NY Giants captured SuperBowl 42. But still, this just barely counters the other side of life's continuum. I'll never forget our(Giants') evisceration at the hands of the Ravens in 2001. And let's not forget how I somehow, had to find a way to keep on living when in fall of 2000 both Al Gore and the Mets lost to George W. Bush and the NY Yankees, both embodiments of all that I wish I could change about America.

We load all this emotional capital into sports - but, win or lose, heaven or hell, not much changes. When the Yankees beat the Mets in the 2000 Series, I thought I was literally going to die, But then the next day, I got up, shaved, and went to work.

Chronic City

2010-03-25T17:45:00.001-07:00

When asked to describe Chronic City, author Jonathan Lethem said, 'it's very long, and very strange.'

He wasn't kidding. It is long and strange but immeasurably enjoyable. Though I have to admit, I wonder non-New Yorkers can love it the way I did. It definitely has a sort of insider's perspective and having that perspective enabled me to overlook Chronic City's structural flaws and get lost in the tapestry of indigenous City totems.

I lived in Manhattan between 1994 and 2000. Perhaps these was the meatiest years of America's collective brain-death sabbatical. I lived a very privileged, insular and fortunate life. But something strange was always afoot. It took me a few years to identify it, but after a while, some anomaly would process in my consciousness. Months would pass and I'd realize I hadn't left the island. Not just the island of Manhattan, but I hadn't left Mid-Town. And then I came to realize something incredible - though I lived in the most amazing, dynamic cosmopolitan city on Planet Earth, I led an incredibly isolated existence.

So now we have Lethem's Manhattan. It is a decidedly post-9/11 Manhattan. There are a few hyperbolic fantasy elements: an indecipherable gray mist covers lower downtown and an escaped 'tiger' is on the loose, inflicting guerrilla attacks on random sections of the city. Amid this chaos, a friendship emerges between Chase Insteadman, a former 1980's rat-pack teen actor, and Perkus Tooth, a hermetic writer.

These two form a friendship that primarily exists in Perkus' apartment, where they get very high (on a pot called 'Chronic') while launching into expansive thinking sessions that circumnavigate pop culture and current events. Perkus mostly delivers ideas and Chase receives them gratefully.

Chronic City does three things. In a nod to Don DeLillo, Lethem creates a fantastical unreality to argue that a thinly veiled madness lies underneath our popular culture.

This book also explores something that art has not yet fully dissected - the mood of New York in the Post-9/11 phase. Perkus expounds: Something happened, Chase, there was some rupture in this city. Since then, time's been fragmented. Might have to do with the gray fog, or some other disaster. Whatever the cause, ever since we've been living in a place that's a replica of itself, a fragile simulacrum, full of gaps and glitches. A theme park, really!

Lastly, Lethem is using Perkus and Chase to show two sides of himself. Chase is his public self - the known celebrity. Perkus is his private world, the lone thinker, his wellspring of ideas. Creating Perkus frees Lethem. It also allowed him to take a sly dig at Malcolm Gladwell on page 221.

Spaceman again

2010-03-23T20:47:00.001-07:00

I don't know what any of this means.

Meet Spaceman Spaceman

2010-03-22T19:55:00.001-07:00

Blue on Green

2010-03-20T07:21:00.001-07:00

Illustrations from 2006

2010-03-19T04:30:00.001-07:00

Street Scene

2010-03-18T19:10:00.001-07:00

Texas Fold'em

2010-03-15T21:21:00.000-07:00

Well, it looks like the State of Texas is sending history another kill shot from its depository of Texas schoolbooks.

The Texas Board of Education has gone and changed the standards required for its textbooks. Why? Because liberals are undermining America and taking away our freedoms, of course.

So to help you understand these changes, Slimbo's Shelf has provided the following helpful guide with an additional rating scale so you can see what changes are mildly crazy, completely crazy and totally, utterly, mind-bogglingly batshit crazy.

White Sox players who look like Postal Workers

2010-03-12T18:58:00.001-08:00

The White Sox have always been a team struggling with an identity crisis. Here we see a collection of players deep from the jungle of malaise that held this franchise hostage between the scandal of 1919 and the redemption of 2005. Look at these men. They seem resigned that whatever goodness life may bring is going to be a long ways off. The day-in and day-out grind of it all seems to be wearing them down, much like Chuck Bukowski's Hank Chinalski.

These are the faces of the Post Office. Until redemption comes, what will become of us?

Storm

2010-03-12T18:56:00.001-08:00

Slimbo painted this in late 2005. At the time, he was still working for Lehman Brothers but had grown increasingly aware that he was either going to have to quit or else be forced out. Just the year before, he'd seen his second child born, beautiful little Alex. As happy as this made him, something else had come into his conciousness, making him very distressed. Working at Lehman had made him realize that despite the material comforts he'd afforded his family, he'd completely gravitated away from becoming the man he should be - a man of ideas and a man who lived the tenets of his faith and convictions. He wouldn't have the guts to take action on this crisis until two years later. Still, I think this painting captures his initial acceptance that something big was coming. Something that was going to change things

Post Office

2010-03-12T12:55:00.000-08:00

"The streets were full of insane and dull people. The voices of the people were the same, no matter where you carried the mail you heard the same things over and over."

You know, Anthony Trollope was a postal worker. They say he'd rise at 5am, write steadily for three hours, and then go to work. My sister-in-law recently remarked that if he'd finish a novel after hour number two, he'd use hour three to start the next novel. You can't help but to look at such a regimen and believe it to be nothing more than robotics rather than a creative process. Either way, being a postal worker seems not to have phased Trollope too much.

Now at the opposite end of the spectrum you have Chuck Bukowski. In Post Office, we read how the job almost swallows him whole - and let me tell you, this was not a man who rose at 5am, ready for work. You always have to wonder how much of Chuck Bukowski is real. Because how can one man drink and whore himself into oblivion yet still return intact to our shared reality to write about it? As is often the case with skid row poets, (like Tom Waits), you have to wonder what's real and what's affectation.

Post Office was Bukowski's first novel, published in 1971. In this book, Bukowski describes the life as a novice postal worker as a horrific, powerless and soul crushing existence. Supervisors are sadistic, shifts are short on manpower and long on hours, customers are ghastly at best and days seem to be controlled by either torrential rains or scorching sunlight. Between shifts, Bukowski's alter ego, Hank Chinalski wallows away in the world of copious booze and random sex that was late-60's Los Angeles.

There is a good deal of poetry in this work though. Despite his seemingly nihilistic behavior, Chinalski is a man searching for something, some shred of meaning in world gone uncaring and insane.

For the next post, I'll be presenting Chicago White Sox players who look like postal workers. --C.C.

Heath Care Reform Facts

2010-03-11T12:44:00.001-08:00

Click HERE to get the facts on Health Care Reform.

by C.C.

The Cuse Curse of #1

2010-03-11T11:20:00.001-08:00

Not good. Not good at all. Seems like only yesterday, Syracuse was going ride into that big dance sunset with that big #1 ranking on their back with only a regular season game against Louisville and a Big East Tourney jaunt standing in their way.

And now they haven't won since. The real enemy here was the first round bye in the Big East Tournament. That killed them. Coming off a loss to Louisville, that killed them. And now they'll head to the NCAA Tourney with even more time playing Wii, hitting the bars on M Street, not studying and NOT playing ball.

Hate to say it folks....this ain't gonna help Slimbo recover any time soon.

C.C.

West Fens, MA

Hello! My Name is Cornelius C.

2010-03-11T08:18:00.000-08:00

Hello, there Slimbo's Shelf readers!

My name is Cornelius C. and while Slimbo is recovering, he's asked that I fill in to keep Slimbo's Shelf going. You know, like a lot of you, I got pretty damn mad when I read the last post where Slimbo announced he'd had it with writing.

So I look forward to bringing you the material you depend on, right here where you always come looking for it.

All for now.

C.C.

West Fens, MA

2010-03-07T14:45:00.001-08:00

Slimbo's Shelf is going off the air..or line, or whatever.

Thanks to all you readers out there.

If The Shelf comes back on-line, I can notify you. Shoot me an email at Slimbo3000@gmail.com and I can notify you if I fire this old jalopy back up again.

Be well.

Slimbo