Sunday, January 29, 2006

Not to be redundant or anything.

Wednesday, January 18, 2006. Customer service desk. Barnes and Noble.

Jimmy Two-times1: 1776. [Smiling, indicates the David McCullough bestseller on prominent display at the desk.] This is probably the most revolutionary book in the store. Not to be redundant or anything. [Smiles again, expectantly.]

Me: [After prolonged period of awkard silence.] Uh huh.

Jimmy Two-times: [Walks away.]

Thursday, January 26, 2006. Customer service desk. Barnes and Noble.

Jimmy Two-times1: 1776. [Smiling, indicates the David McCullough bestseller on prominent display at the desk.] This is probably the most revolutionary book in the store. Not to be redundant or anything. [Smiles again, expectantly.]

Me: [After prolonged period of awkard silence.] Uh huh.

Jimmy Two-times: [Walks away.]

I wish I were making this up.

1 Obviously this is not the customer's real name.

Thursday, January 26, 2006

James Frey, in a skirt, on a ladder.

Days like this I wish I had a working TV, and, I dunno, a job that allowed me to work from home. I'm sure torrents of James Frey's appearance on Oprah today are already all over the usual outlets, but for now I'll have to content myself with the transcript of what seems like a fascinating hour of television.

My first response, when I found out about two hours ago that Oprah had invited Frey back to her show not to further defend him but to excoriate him in public, was something along the lines of "What a punk that Oprah is! She already came out in support of him, saying that the Smoking Gun's revelations were 'much ado about nothing,' and now she feels betrayed by him? Pick a lane and drive, woman!"

My view softened, however, after I read the transcript. Part of it was realizing that my initial reaction was rooted in the time I spent as a member of a violent street gang in Brownsville, TX1, a time when loyalty was, as far as I was concerned, the greatest virtue a human could possess. After the harrowing period following my departure from the gang, from which I emerged with neither my left eye nor my anal virginity2, I realized that "loyalty" is generally speaking not all it's cracked up to be, and in that spirit, I recognize that "Oprah should stand by her man" was something of a knee-jerk. The transcript shows an extremely embarassed and not a little angry woman who is taking the highly unusual step of going on national TV and admitting that she was wrong. Think about how rare it is for a famous and influential person to admit to a mistake to the entire country. Hell, think of how rare it is for you to admit to your friends that you've made a mistake. It takes guts, and I appreciate that.

I do think, and this is going to sound strange coming from me, that in her wrath Oprah went a little too far into attack-dog mode. The hay Oprah made about Frey's changing the manner of his girlfriend's death (he says in the book that she hanged herself; in reality, she slit her wrists) is exactly the sort of meaningless hairsplitting that Oprah initially accused the Smoking Gun of. In this case, I agree with the "emotional truth" defense: the point is not that she hanged herself, the point is that she committed suicide. It's like when my best friend Pato got killed in a drive-by3: in the immediate aftermath of Pato's shooting, there was a question of whether he was the intended victim or if he just happened to get hit in the crossfire. But as Xavier, the leader of my crew, pointed out, it didn't matter whether or not they meant to kill Pato; what mattered was that Pato was dead. If Frey says that he altered the details of his girlfriend's suicide to protect her identity, I'm inclined to believe that. Assuming, of course, that there was a girlfriend. And that she did in fact kill herself. How's that slippery slope treating you, Big Jim?

1 As related in my upcoming memoir, Sangre Hermosa: A Border Story.
2 For all this and more, be sure to pick up my upcoming memoir, Sangre Hermosa: A Border Story.
3 The story of Pato's tragic life and violent death can be found, along with many other gritty tales of life in the the barrio, in my upcoming memoir, Sangre Hermosa: A Border Story.

Saturday, January 21, 2006

Interlude.

So on a whim I did a Google search for "drew barrymore he's just not'.

Lo and behold, it turns out that Drew Barrymore is producing a movie version of the hit self-help book He's Just Not That Into You.

The reason I did the search in the first place is that I helped her find that book when she came into the store a few months ago. At the time I figured that guy from Franz Ferdinand or whatever had dumped her, but I guess she was doing research.

More gawk to come.

Osama's book club.

It was weird enough when people came in asking for Rogue State, and I thought they were asking for this book by Noam Chomsky. But then I found out that they were actually asking for this, and that the reason for the sudden surge of interest was due to a recommendation from Osama bin Laden.

Next time: an entry for those of you who wonder why this blog can't be more like Gawker.

Friday, January 20, 2006

The love song of Mr. Jittery.

I am putting off Actual Work in order to write this, I'll have you know.

I saw Shopgirl in the theater, and I sort of liked it1, but any woman who's worked in retail knows that it is rarely a good thing when a customer attempts to cross the invisible line that separates service workers from the people they serve. Picture to yourself a guy that you'd think of as the type to approach a sales clerk and try to strike up a conversation. Not a pretty sight, is it?

Whatever you imagined, it probably wasn't as bad as Mr. Jittery. He's one of those older guys whose disregard for the way he looks has rendered him, appearance-wise, just a short step up from "homeless": a long, unkempt beard, greasy hair, bit of a slouch, shabby clothes that could use a round or two in the wash. He is jittery, and so I refer to him as Mr. Jittery, and the jittery words that come out of his jittery mouth turn mildly disturbing in no time at all.

"I, I talked to somebody earlier, and I was looking for Selina2, and the guy I talked to said she'd called in late, and then I went to her section, and, they said she doesn't work here anymore. And, I, I just want to know, which is it, because I made some decisions based on what the guy told me..."

This is one of those situations where I don't need to get a manager, but I consult with one for show. I tell Mr. Jittery that I'm going to ask a manager what's up, but the only manager on the floor is busy with a customer so I tell him to hold on. Mr. Jittery takes this as a signal to continue talking.

"I bought a book--"

"Okay, I'm getting a manager, hold on..."

"And, and a card--"

I'm thoroughly creeped out now but I once again tell him to hold on.

"I think I talked to the black guy," and the emphasis in that sentence is used here to denote an undertone of intense and undying racial hatred that if not for the constraints of law and cowardice would manifest itself in lynchings and beatings and spontaneous blackface minstrel shows. It is possible that I am imagining this.

"Okay well, hold on," I repeat, and I can't deal with Mr. Jittery anymore so I decide to just break into the conversation the manager is having with the customer to ask her if there's a Selina working in the store.

She gives me a quizzical look. "I don't think so...do you mean Serena3?" It seems pretty obvious at this point that The Black Guy simply misheard "Selina," the name of somone who no longer works at the store, as "Serena," the name of somebody who called in late on Wednesday.

"It's possible, I dunno. In any case, this nutjob over here is looking for her and he says he was told she doesn't work here anymore, so I'm just gonna confirm that, okay?"

I get the go-ahead and return to the desk to give the bad news to Mr. Jittery, who gives me a look that I imagine would have been the preface to a hangin' back in the old days.

"Well," he pulls out a bag, "I need to return this," and out of the bag he produces a book, gift-wrapped by one of our talented BN cashiers. On the wrapping paper, in big, child-like letters, is written "SELINA". It has exactly the right mixture of utter guilelessness and abject desperation that screams "this guy follows girls home and hallucinates that he's marrying them as he mutilates their vaginas."

"Okay, you can return it at the cashiers."

"I need to return the card, too," he continues. "But I wrote on it. Can I return a card if I wrote on it?"

It's all I can do to keep from laughing. "No, sir. If you wrote on it they won't let you return it."

"They won't?" There's that look again. The if-you-were-my-servant-I-would-whip-you-for-this look.

One of the great pleasures of my job is telling people, unambiguously, "no." No other options, no number you can call, no manager to plead with. Just "no." So I do it.

Mr. Jittery just stands there as if pondering the cruel hand that life has dealt him. I decide that this guy's creepy and crazy and I might as well just see what I can get away with.

"What'd you get her?"4

He straightens up and tells me it's none of my business, obviously shocked at my temerity. Evidently deciding that I can no longer help him, Mr. Jittery proceeds to the cashiers to conduct his business.

"It's never good-looking guys, either," a manager laments as soon as Mr. J is out of earshot.

"Well," I say by way of attempting to put it all in perspective, "you can be attractive and still be crazy."

"Yeah, but, I mean, like, someone who looks like Tom Cruise, they're usually not psychos."

"Tom Cruise? Nice example."

She laughs, then is called to the cashiers. I find out a few minutes later that she was called there because Mr. Jittery insisted on getting a refund on the card he'd written on. He didn't get one.

1 Granted, I sort of have a thing for Claire Danes.
2 This name has been changed.
3 This name has also been changed.
4 A subsequent conversation with The Black Guy revealed that, had things not gone so horribly, horribly awry, Selina would have been the lucky recipient of The Tale of Genji.

Tuesday, January 17, 2006

Objective.

This post gets kind of shrill and self-righteous, and I apologize for that in advance. I blame the late hour; it is sometimes easy to confuse a dark night of the soul with just plain night.

The New York Times's oft-infuriating Michiko Kakutani says essentially what I said about James Frey and the devaluation of quaint notions like truth in modern society. She's much more thorough and eloquent about it than I was, of course. Nice to see, though, that I'm not the only one who sees parallels between the Frey's "exagerrations" and the cavalier manner in which (a) the White House lies to us and (b) we take it. See also this post on, of all places, Arianna Huffington's website. Also nice to see folks like William Zinsser and memoirist Mary Karr standing up against the pernicious notion, espoused even by this blog1, that a certain amount of fabrication is to be expected from a memoir.

In conversations with people, including co-workers at BN, where the whole James Frey thing has come up, I'm often greeted with something along the lines of "who cares?" There is a pervasive sense that there are so many more important things going on in the world that one writer making stuff up is not a big deal. Indeed, there are user comments to that effect on Huffington's site. I've spent quite a bit of time wondering why I care so much about this: I already despised both Frey's writing2 and the man himself (or at least his arrogant, narcissistic tough guy public persona, as I've obviously never met him), and it's not as if I feel he's destroying the grand tradition of the personal memoir. Hell, I'd be happy to see the entire genre disappear while I sleep tonight.

There are, of course, the troubling larger-scale implications that our willingness, as a country, to excuse Frey's lies carries; as I said before, it indicates nothing so much as a people that are comfortable with being lied to. That's why this is important, and that's why I won't shut up about it even when people have told me that they don't care. I have to believe that people aren't so gullible that they'll accept "subjectivity" as an excuse for lies, and that they won't reward charlatans for selling them a bill of goods. I have to believe it, because every time I look at the sales figures for A Million Little Pieces, I'm smacked in the face with evidence to the contrary. When it was merely a shitty writer getting rich off of people's lack of taste/willingness to be led around by the nose by Oprah3, that was one thing. But now, it's an entirely different ball game. Now, as Frey might say in defense of his using the tragic deaths of two young girls to stroke his own bottomless ego, it's personal.

1 In my defense, it should be noted that Girls in Skirts on Ladders couldn't care less about the vast majority of memoirs anyway.
2 As does Kakutani, who takes Frey down nicely in the above article.
3 Who, all this recent fuss notwithstanding, I genuinely do respect for her dedication to getting people to actually read books. Usually good ones, too.

Monday, January 16, 2006

Detonation Radio three: A million little detonations.

Obviously I've been really lax with what was supposed to be a weekly podcast. This is episode number three in about six weeks, the thought occured to me that raher than doing four thirty minute podcasts a month, how about two one hour podcasts a month? So that is the new, revised Detonation Radio plan.

As always, Detonation Radio can be had by directing your iTunes or other podcast catcher to http://totale.libsyn.com/rss, or by direct-downloading at the link that I've helpfully posted over to the right on this very page. Previous episodes are available there as well, so download away.

This week's Detonation Radio is dedicated to Big Jim Frey. If you don't understand how a given track relates to Mr. Frey and/or his work, that is your fault.

1. The Fall - "No Xmas for John Quays": I'm surprised this is The Fall's first appearance on DR1, as I've easily spent more money acquiring their recordings than I have on any other band. This is from their first Peel Session, which can of course be found on the six-disc box set collecting all of the band's sessions for the late BBC DJ.

2. The Dicks - "Dicks Hate the Police": Texas punk from 1980 to 1983 or so may be my favorite all-time period for any type of music, and the Dicks were arguably the best of the bunch. This song was far better known back in the '90s as a staple of Mudhoney's live sets, but I think we can safely forget about that now.

3. Pissed Jeans - "I'm Sick": Allentown, PA upstarts who put me in the mind of two other favorites from the aforementioned glory days of Texas punk, Scratch Acid and Stickmen with Rayguns. Utterly bugfuck, as Harlan Ellison might say.

4. Skip James - "Drunken Spree"
5. Clinic - "Porno"
6. Codeine - "Jr"
7. Beat Happening - "Black Candy"
8. The Magnetic Fields - "Take Ecstasy with Me"

9. Cab Calloway - "The Man from Harlem": This is taken from Dope and Glory, a Trikont compilation of marijuana songs from the '30s and '40s. Two discs of jazz songs about pot.

10. Lifter Puller - "Roaming the Foam"
11. The Louvin Brothers - "The Drunkard's Doom"

12. Peter Laughner - "Calvary Cross": It's entirely possible that this will try your patience, but I feel that the power of the performance is such that concerns about length and recording fidelity are largely misplaced. And of course, it fits thematically; if you're not familiar with Mr. Laughner, he was an original member of Pere Ubu and the co-writer of many of the group's best songs. He never recorded a proper album after being kicked out and descending into the depths of the smack addiction that killed him; this track, a cover of one of my favorite Richard Thompson songs, is taken from the demos-and-live-tracks compilation Take the Guitar Player for a Ride.

13. The Gun Club - "She's Like Heroin to Me": Maybe a little obvious.

14. The Reverend I.B. Ware - "You Better Quit Drinking Shine"
15. Macha + Bedhead - "Never Underdose"

16. Hank Williams - "You Caused It All By Telling Lies": I think this was first released in the mammoth Hank Williams box set from a few years ago, then included on the compilation Alone with His Guitar. The abrupt start is presumably due to its nature as an acoustic demo.

And there you go. Happy MLK Day, everyone. Hope you didn't have to work.

1 As was almost immediately pointed out to me, not only is this not the first Fall song to grace Detonation Radio, but the previous one was in the second episode. This is why it's not good for me to wait so long between installments.

Thursday, January 12, 2006

The right to be lame.

I meant to post this link earlier in the week, but I got caught up in Frey-gate and forgot about it until earlier today, when an acquaintance described "everything Phil Collins has ever been involved with" as "total garbage."1 In the course of defending Mr. Collins, I remembered that I wanted to post the following article, found via Jason Gross of Perfect Sound Forever via New Yorker critic Alex Ross via the Mountain Goats mailing list: ...But Seriously by former NME writer turned Guardian writer2 Sara Dempster. As someone who some years ago stopped trying to convince myself that modern pop music in general has value, I thoroughly enjoyed her thoughtful analysis of why those of us who opt out of the pop music game end up doing so. Check it out, youngsters and oldsters alike.

1 Which is of course nonsense; not only is Phil an extremely accomplished drummer who played in the newly-hipster friendly prog-era Genesis, but much of the stuff on the post-Gabriel albums is classic pop. And let's not forget his impressive list of credits as a session musician, including playing on Brian Eno's Another Green World, Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy), and Before and After Science. In the words of James Frey, "let the haters hate, let the doubters doubt."
2 Talk about trading up, eh?

Wednesday, January 11, 2006

The Milli Vanillification of James Frey.

It begins. As noted by a comment on my previous post on the James Frey controversy, Random House has made an odd move for a company that "stand[s] in support"1 of Frey and his book: they are now offering refunds to disgruntled customers who bought A Million Little Pieces directly from the publisher, and telling others to seek a refund from the store at which it was purchased. I have no idea what Barnes & Noble policy is going to be regarding this2, but no matter what that policy ends up being, the potential for workplace amusement is extremely high.

The whole thing is turning into a comedy of mixed messages. Random House says they stand by their author, then they offer customers refunds. Frey, taking a page from the George W. Bush playbook, says he "won't dignify this bullshit with any sort of further response," but he's scheduled to discuss the controversy tonight on Larry King Live3. Random House claims it's standard policy for them to offer refunds, but those lovable scamps at Publisher's Weekly seem to think this is not only unusual but unprecedented. Now the publisher, astonishingly, is essentially saying it doesn't matter whether or not a book they published as non-fiction contains wild exaggerations and outright lies.

Random House's defense is so insipid that it truly blows my mind that it was released; when I read it, I thought, It must be utter chaos over there if this is the best they can do. As quoted in the Times, Random House tries to excuse Frey's alleged fabrications by asserting that "By definition, [memoir] is highly personal. In the case of Mr. Frey, we decided 'A Million Little Pieces' was his story, told in his own way, and he represented to us that his version of events was true to his recollections."

So Random House is asking us to swallow the notion that James Frey not only somehow remembered a minor drunk driving arrest resulting in about five hours in holding as a booze and crack-fueled free-for-all between him and the entire police force of a small Ohio town that almost got him three years of federal time, but also that a huge discrepancy like that falls under the umbrella of the acceptable "personal" slant that is to be expected from any memoir4.

This, to put it bluntly, is horseshit of the highest order.

While I discussed this whole brou-ha-ha with an acquaintance today, said acquaintance asked the question that has undoubtedly been asked all over the country in the last few days: "Why not just pretend it's fiction?" Random House can't be quite that direct, but "just pretend it's fiction" is what a statement like "recent accusations against him notwithstanding, the power of the overall reading experience is such that the book remains a deeply inspiring and redemptive story for millions of readers" amounts to. More doubletalk from a desperate Random House, then: a "personal history" that need not be either personal or historical to be inspiring.

Again, horseshit. The memoir genre is utterly inseparable from the notion that what you are reading is, at the very least, a reasonable version of actual events. Indeed, a book like A Million Little Pieces, or Kathryn Harrison's incest memoir The Kiss, draws a substantial amount of its power from the assumption of truthfulness. You don't get the same sense of inspiration from "I made up a bunch of really fucked up shit" that you get from "I experienced all this fucked up shit, it all actually happened and I survived it."

That, presumably, is why Frey and/or his publisher decided to present the book as non-fiction. I will greet any customers wishing to return A Million Little Pieces tomorrow with a smile on my face and a song in my voice.

1 As quoted here, sixth paragraph.
2 A BN representative told CNN that it is standard policy to offer refunds to customers, which is sort of true and sort of not.
3 If you love me, you'll give me some sort of play-by-play on this, as I don't have cable.
4 Also note that the phrase, "he represented to us that his version of events was true to his recollections" reads an awful lot like an acknowledgment that Frey lied to them.

A billion little pieces. No! A trillion!

I won't deny it: The Smoking Gun's James Frey exposé may have found a credulous audience here at Girls in Skirts on Ladders HQ. I challenge anyone to hear:

"Do you have that book A Million Tiny Pieces?"
"Do you have that book A Thousand Little Pieces?"
"Do you have that book A Million Shattered Pieces?"
"Do you have that book In a Million Pieces?"
"Do you have the Oprah book? The blue one."

about fifty times a day and not come out of it wanting to throttle James Frey. I endeavor every day of my life not to judge writers or musicians or artists based on the shortcomings of their audiences, so I wouldn't really despise A Million Little Pieces unless I'd actually tried to read it, with the emphasis on the word "tried." I think what it really comes down to is that Frey's incessant capitalization of common nouns, like "Guys" and "Addict" and "Rehab" is one of the most irksome writerly tics I've ever encountered1. Capitalizing common nouns can be used, sparingly, to good effect, but when the effect is to make your book look like it might have been written by an astonishingly debauched 18th century ne'er-do-well, it's time to find a different gimmick.

Of course, if you believe The Smoking Gun, Frey's whole thing is a gimmick. There's really no substitute for reading the entire lengthy and damning article, but suffice it to say that after originally setting out to simply find Frey's mug shot for their collection, TSG ended up with law enforcement officials willing to go on record as stating that key plot points2 in A Million Little Pieces are either exagerrated or made up completely. Crucially, the crack-fueled melee that, in the book, results after Frey hits a police officer with his car and brings him very close to doing a good stretch in prison, appears never to have happened. There's a priceless moment in the article where the officer who finds the documentation of what actually happened is surprised to find that he himself was the arresting officer. You would think that a cop in a sleepy Ohio town would remember arresting a drug-crazed lunatic for a long list of charges, including the dreaded Felony Mayhem3.

Even that, however, is small potatoes compared to Frey's allegedly inserting himself into the story of Melissa Sanders, a classmate who was killed when a train hit the car in which she was riding. Frey invents a minor but crucial part for himself in the tragedy that allows him to childishly spit venom at the community that supposedly blamed him, the self-styled outcast, for Sanders's death while sympathizing with the jock who drove the car. I imagine that, in the upcoming movie, the scenes of young Jimmy Frey being vilified will be intercut with scenes of him working out his aggression in ever more outlandish ways as Slipknot plays in the background.

I can't help but wonder if James Frey is going to end up being the Milli Vanilli of rehab memoirists. When I go into work tomorrow, will I have to deal with people wanting their money back? Will we institute a trade system? Will anyone even care? I feel like, as a society, we've gotten to the point where we not only don't get angry when the supposedly genuine is revealed to be fabricated, we actually sort of expect it. We're comfortable with it. Even Marianne Sanders, the mother of the girl whose death Frey appears to have cynically exploited to gain sympathy from his audience, looks to have shrugged it off: "When I read that I figured he was taking license...he's a writer, you know, they don't tell everything that's factual and true. I just figured he embroidered a few things...I mean I'm sure not every single thing he said in there is gonna be true, do you think?"

Frey has responded to the accusations predictably: posturing, followed by the more polite eqivalent of the probably fictional punches he takes such obvious delight in recounting in the pages of A Million Little Pieces, the threat of legal action. Even I was prepared to give Frey the benefit of the doubt when I saw that TSG was on the attack. Much like Marianne Sanders, I assumed Frey had probably just taken liberties with some facts, messed with timelines, conflated characters, etc, the kind of things all memoirists do. The Smoking Gun's report makes a compelling case that he went much, much further than that, and now that major outlets like The New York Times4 are picking up on the story, I'll be very interested to see whether Frey can maneuver, G. W. Bush-like, through the accusations without ever having to answer them, or if the whole house of cards will come tumbling down. I don't make a habit of wishing ill on other human beings, but I won't deny that there is a tiny part of me that would delight in Frey's ruination. Or should that be "Ruination"?

1 It could also be the narcissistic macho posturing, the evident pride in his alleged crack-fueled misbehaviors, the insufferable self-pity, and the coarse, lazy writing that did it.
2 An appropriate term to use, I think.
3 A charge which, it turns out, doesn't exist.
4 Also in Tuesday's Times: "A Night to See the Stars Actually Wearing Clothes," an article on the AVN adult video awards that features the following utterly marvelous paragraph: "[The award for best feature] went to 'Pirates,' a relatively high-budget story of a group of ragtag sailors who go searching for a crew of evil pirates who have a plan for world domination. Also, many of the characters in the movie have sex with one another."

Saturday, January 07, 2006

Trivial.

Thursday I took the bold step of leaving my apartment and going out to an Insound-sponsored music trivia contest at an American Apparel "pop-up shop" in Tribeca, and while I'm certainly not going to go out of my way to criticize an event that I enjoyed (albeit one that I didn't win1), I was disappointed, if not especially surprised, that "music trivia" really meant "indie rock trivia (2000-2005)." The email I got regarding the event said that the folks at the fine Dusted Magazine were going to be submitting questions, and I figured that'd keep all the questions from involving Clap Your Hands Say Yeah2, but when I got there it turned out that Dusted sadly wasn't involved after all.

But whatever, complaining that an event sponsored by Insound is too focused on indie rock is like complaining that The Source never writes about electroacoustic improv. When I was going over the event in my mind, thinking about how I'd improve it, it wasn't the focus on indie rock that I homed in on so much as the frequency of questions that weren't really about music at all, but rather about nonmusical minutiae that are the province of the trainspotting psychopath. Questions like "What video game-themed movie starred Jenny Lewis of Rilo Kiley?"3 (which I answered correctly), or "How many shows did Art Brut play when they first came to New York in November 2005?"4 (which I didn't) are outside the realm of what I consider "music trivia," although I'd never argue that such questions are invalid inclusions; that's just my personal preference, and I feel that the event would have been better without them. Someone competing in a music trivia contest shouldn't be penalized for not watching The OC.

I also would have made the questions harder, dependent on having a knowledge of musicians who predate Modest Mouse and genres other than rock, and in some cases even subjective. Examples of questions that are by no means impossible, but in my humble opinion better than a lot of the ones we got Thursday night:

- Name two Black Sabbath lead singers besides Ozzy Osbourne.5
- Which famous blues musician admitted to having soiled himself after accidentally being locked inside a coffin?6
- Name five singers whose voices are less annoying than the singer from Clap Your Hands Say Yeah.7
- The magazine, Uncle Tupelo album, and alt-country movement No Depression all took their name from a song by which country act?8
- What does "S1W" stand for?9
- What is Paul McCartney credited as playing on the Beach Boys song "Vegetables"?10
- Name either of the two people who have done tape loop manipulations in Mission of Burma.11
- What primitivist garage band covered The Rolling Stones' Exile On Main Street in response to Sonic Youth's never-carried-out threat to cover the Beatles' White Album?12

Okay, I admit that the Clap Your Hands question was kind of a joke. Still, I'd get a laugh out of it.

1 My grief is tempered by the irrelevance of the questions I failed to answer correctly to any aspect of that which I consider either worthwhile music or worthwhile knowledge. A representative example is "The lead singer of Art Brut got into a fight with the lead singer of which band?"
2 In fairness, I'm pretty sure only one of the questions involved Clap Your Hands Say Yeah.
3 The Wizard, perhaps best known for containing the line "The Power Glove. It's so awesome.
4 Four.
5 Acceptable answers include Ronnie James Dio, Ian Gillan, Dave Donato, Glenn Hughes, Ray Gillen, Tony Martin, and, arguably, Jeff Fenholt. I would probably also accept "the guy from Deep Purple."
6 Screaming Jay Hawkins
7 Acceptable answers include John Darnielle of The Mountain Goats, Mark E. Smith of The Fall, Billy Corgan, Tiny Tim, Jandek, Jean Smith of Mecca Normal, John Flansburgh and John Linnell of They Might Be Giants, Calvin Johnson, and Jamie Stewart of Xiu Xiu.
8 The Carter Family
9 Security of the First World.
10 Carrot and celery.
11 Martin Swope or Bob Weston.
12 Pussy Galore.

Friday, January 06, 2006

Return of the Son of "Brokeback Mountain."

Two addenda to my recent post in which I pointed out the sheer thoughtlessness of buying the audience-soaking movie tie-in version of "Brokeback Mountain" as a gift.

1. It turns out that, at $9.95 for thirty pages of story stretched out to fifty-five, the paperback movie tie-in version of "Brokeback Mountain" is not the worst value in the store. That distinction goes to the $19.95 hardcover standalone movie tie-in version of "Brokeback Mountain."

2. I looked up the sales figures, and we sold over two hundred copies of "Brokeback Mountain" during the month of December. I would bet money that the vast majority of those were purchased as gifts. I will say again: IF YOU BUY "BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN" FOR SOMEONE, YOU ARE AN ASSHOLE1. Buy the goddamned collection for a whopping four extra dollars, cheapskate.

1 Unless it's one of those Secret Santa things where you're not supposed to spend more than ten dollars. Or you really don't care about the gift's recipient. I understand that.

Thursday, January 05, 2006

Sick day.

I decided to pretend to be sick today. I may hate my job, but the company is surprisingly generous when it comes to paid time off: I currently have an absurd number of sick days, an even more absurd number of vacations days, and even a couple of "personal" days. So taking a day off despite not actually being sick isn't such a big deal1.

I've mentioned before that you have to be profoundly stupid and/or engage in some truly horrific bastardry to get fired from Barnes & Noble. This week, I accidentally tested the limits of this theory. New Year's Eve is obviously not anyone's favorite day to work, and even though the store was closing at 6:00, I still couldn't get out of the store soon enough and so, as I often do on boring days and/or days when I especially don't want to be there, I amused myself by answering the phone as various characters, such as Cactus Bob, the cattle rancher from Nacogdoches, Jerry the Stuttering Drunk, Stoned Eddie, Enrique Ignacio Suarez de Contreras, and of course Tweaker Bob. Tweaker Bob was the one that got me in trouble, as Tweaker Bob is the one that talks really, really fast. And so when Tweaker Bob answered the phone in a blur of verbiage that I'm pretty sure contained the words "Barnes" and "Noble" in there somewhere, the voice on the other end cautioned me to "slow down, for the customers."

The thing is, Tweaker Bob likes to keep his hands busy, and at that moment I was busy twirling a pen. Just as the person on the line told me to slow down, the pen slipped out of my hand, and in the attempt to catch it2, I accidentally hit another line. This, of course, had the effect of hanging up on the guy to whom I was talking.

No big deal, though. I mean, it happens, and it's not like I wanted to talk to some disgruntled customer anyway. Minutes afterward, I was joking about it with my fellow desk-drones, even embellishing it to make it sound like I'd hung up on the guy intentionally. All in good fun, until a manager called me over and told me that the person I'd hung up on was the store manager. In the context of the conversation, I have to say that it definitely looked like I'd intentionally hung up on him, and I didn't expect him to believe me, but at the same time I knew I had to stick to my story or I might very well be out of a job. There's a happy ending here, as the manager's retribution has been limited to busting my chops about the whole thing, but he understandably doesn't believe that I didn't intentionally hang up on him. Would you?

The option to hang up on customers who walk into the store does not, alas, exist, and so on the frequent occasions when I get someone who is stupid or an asshole or just pain crazy, I just have to take it. Being a store in the middle of Manhattan, we get more than our fair share of crazy people, and I generally don't mind dealing with them because it amuses me to do so3. Every once in a while, though, a customer blurs the line between stupidity and insanity in a way that leaves me a bit unsure of what to think. This particular woman was working on her third chin and in dire need of a shave, but she put on the airs of a sophisticate when she asked me if we "might have any books on" -- and the next two words were enunciated very, very carefully so as not to overwhelm my poor ignorant minority brain -- "moral relativism. From both sides of the argument." The haughty pseudointellectual tone is a dead giveaway that someone doesn't know what the fuck they're talking about and might be crazy, but it got better.

"For example," she continued, "would you choose to see a doctor who looks hot in scrubs, but who cheated on all of his tests, and has a poor bedside manner, and whose patients tend to die? Or would you go to a doctor who -- pardon my French -- studied his ass off, worked hard, has a warm, friendly bedside manner, and is a good doctor?"

Obviously, one thing was clear almost immediately after she started talking: this woman had no fucking clue what moral relativism is. Hell, the supposed dilemma she was presenting to me wouldn't even make decent bar conversation because the answer is so blindingly obvious. When she made it clear that her question was not rhetorical, I replied -- shocka -- that I would choose a doctor who knew what he4 was doing over one who was hot. She looked at me like I'd just said something really profound and said, "Hmmmmmmmmm. Why is that?"

I glanced to my left and saw one of my managers helping two customers; all three of them looked on flabbergastedly, mouths agape, seemingly unable to decide whether this was funny or just sad. Another co-worker actually had to leave the desk so she wouldn't lose it right in front of the customer. "Well, I'm not really that into hot doctors," I replied.

"And the good bedside manner," she said, "it's very important, or you won't heal. The mind-body connection."

"Right."

"Because some doctors, they don't know how to treat people and they lose them."

"Right."

I directed her to the philosophy section, where I sincerely hope she found a book that explains in very simple terms what "moral relativism" means.

"And they don't even care, because the insurance pays for it."

"Right."

1 Remind me of this sentence in six months when I really am sick and don't have any sick days left.
2 Which failed, by the way.
3 If for no other reason than that I know I can say anything I want to, say, the utterly insane woman who comes in periodically to request printed lists of all the books pertaining to a wide variety of topics chosen seemingly at random. Last time I dealt with her, I told her that someone had stolen all the printers in the store.
4 Or she. Sorry ladies.