Are my eyes really blue?

(cross-posted from Anchor of Gold)

The Tennessean is now making it official: Lafonte Thorogood, possibly the most heralded name in the whirlwind 2011 James Franklin recruiting derby, is leaving the Commodores. Thorogood, who was described at the time by one knucklehead blogger as “the four-star recruit with the five-star name,” started off as the future of the QB position for the ‘Dores – but when Jordan Rodgers broke out big, Austyn Carta-Samuels transferred in from Wyoming, Josh Grady proved to be a deadly threat under center despite being listed at WR and Patton Robinette made the move from UNC at the last moment, the Virginia Beach product found himself at 5th on the depth chart. So he moved to RB, where he found himself stuck behind breakout star Zac Stacy, returning one-time SEC Freshman of the Year Warren Norman, changeup-back-extraordinare Jerrod Seymour, and the bright star of the 2012 class, Brian “Got Running Away From A Porsche Speed” Kimbrow – a lineup so deep that Wesley Tate moved to wideout at one point.

At this point, having redshirted, Thorogood has four years to play three pretty much anywhere in the country he likes; there’s no indication that there are any strings tied to where he might transfer. There’s nothing to indicate that he has been anything other than a fine player and student; it’s merely a case of not enough chairs left when the music stops. But looking at the verbal of Johnathon McCrary on top of the Rodgers-ACS-Grady-Robinette lineup, I suspect LT still has ambitions of playing quarterback. And given that he was a four-star dual-threat-QB prospect, one can hardly blame him for seeking someplace where he can go under center.

Two thoughts here:

1) How much have things changed when we have so much depth at critical offensive positions that a four-star prospect is leaving Vanderbilt for playing time elsewhere?

2) No Vandy player who never played a down did more for this program than Lafonte Thorogood did, just by signing and coming here. The fact that a prospect that well-regarded would turn down an perennial BCS bowl contender in Virginia Tech to sign with the new regime at Vanderbilt was the shot heard ’round college football, and did more than all the inspiring press conferences to give James Franklin’s new order a dose of instant credibility.

I’m glad he came. I hope wherever he winds up, he gets his shot and sets the world on fire (though I’d rather not see it across from our defense). No matter what, though, when they write the history of the Franklin era at Vanderbilt, you’ll see the name Lafonte Thorogood. It may not seem like he did very much, but he did the most important thing: he believed in the future of Vanderbilt football. And for that, we owe him our thanks.

Looks like they’re at it again.

Memo to the President, to Congress, hell, to everyone: they have not learned.  They will never learn. The only way you advance in finance is by being a big swinging dick who thinks he is so important that the world will bend over backwards to save him (thus “too big to fail”).  It is the purest version of the Whiffle Life, and they are convinced that what they do is more important than anything else on Earth.

Overregulated? FUCK. YOU.  I want Jamie Dimon to have to go to the Securities and Exchange Commission to sign out every time he wants to take a piss.  I want TSA agents at the doors of Bank of America patting down staff in the evenings to make sure they’re not walking out with cash in their socks.  I want every bank with assets over a billion dollars to spend its existence in what I can only describe as a permanent prostate exam.

If a dog won’t stop humping your leg, fine, that’s in his nature, but eventually you cut his balls off.  It’s long past time to cut the balls off American finance, and when Obama drives to the airport for the last time as president, I want it to be with Wall Street’s testicles hung like Truck Nutz from the back bumper of the limo.

So in the wake of North Carolina’s incredibly asshole move yesterday, the President is finally stepping out and saying that he thinks same-sex marriage should be legal.  Which should come as a shock to absolutely nobody, quite frankly.

Thoughts:

1) Maybe now the Professional Indignant Left will STFU. Not expecting it to happen, but it would be nice.  Politics is the art of the possible, and while Presidential leadership is nice, the current political environment means that the only federal movement on this for at least two years would be in the form of a Supreme Court case.  You’re not going to get a DOMA repeal with the GOP in control of Congress – and as long as the Democrats don’t have sixty reliable votes in the Senate, then yes, the GOP has control of Congress.  So no matter what Obama thinks, his only real power at this point is whatever influence he might have on public opinion; his de jure authority over the matter is effectively nil. So…

2) This is basically a “fuck it, as well hanged for a sheep as a lamb” move.  The kind of places where the President’s approval of gay marriage is going to be an issue are, by and large, states that will never vote for him anyway.  (Case in point: last night, one-third of West Virginia Democrats voted for a white incarcerated felon over a black sitting President.  Fuck you, hillbillies.)  Did Obama win North Carolina in 2008?  Yes, but right now the math suggests that it’s not critical to the path to 270. More to the point, there are thirty states with gay marriage bans, and Obama got elected on the same night California passed Prop 8, so I doubt it’s a 1-to-1 relationship where he will lose any state with a ban automatically.  That said…

3) Not that we needed it, but this is red-flag-to-the-bull material for the GOP, and you can be assured that the holy rollers will reach a higher level of froth than ever that this Satanic atheistic Muslim foreigner will not be satisfied until the United States is [INSERT SPITTLE-FLECKED HYPERBOLE HERE].  This is probably going to be a free gift to a GOP that was having trouble firing up the base to support Multiple Choice Mitt.  Again, though, it’s mainly going to drive turnout among holy rollers in states that Obama never had a prayer of winning.  Mainly.  But…

4) Where it does potentially become a problem is in a few swing states like Colorado or Virginia.  To a certain extent, it’s possible that a big boost among rural God-floggers will be enough to offset less socially benighted votes in Arlington or Denver.  The counter-argument, by contrast, is that this – and the student-loan push – might be sufficient to push the young voters of 2008 into believing and turning out again.  Could be a wash, I don’t know. And when I say I don’t know, I mean…

5) I don’t know.  From my cynical professional standpoint, I don’t see a whole lot of upside to this.  Anyone with a post-medieval position on the topic of homosexuality should be supporting Obama over any Republican at this point – not on the principal of “lesser of two evils” but on the principle of “first do no harm.”  Obama’s not out there working to make things worse for the LGBT community.  Any GOP President will effectively be an enabler for the GOP Congress, which is as backward, racist and ultimately harmful a legislative body as ever crawled out of the Deep South.  So if Obama’s not leading the first float in the Pride parade, well, it sucks, but that guy’s not running.  The choice isn’t between the magical spawn of Harvey Milk and Barney Frank versus the status quo, it’s between a largely sympathizing figure and somebody who will hold the coats of the Philistines.

I don’t know.  I just don’t know.  I know what’s right, but given how bad things will be in 2013 if a Republican is in the White House, I live in dread of the right thing to do also being the losing thing.  

Ultimately, I suppose, it’s a question of how much faith you have in the American people. I have none.

I’ll be honest, I had my doubts.  When they attached Joss Whedon to this picture, I cringed – TV guy, very good for genre shows that get whored by Fox, excellent at empowered young women but overly fond of gratuitously killing supporting characters for the sake of a cheap jolt – but absolutely nothing on his CV suggested that he should be given the controls for the crowning piece of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the payoff of five (FIVE!) interconnected movies over the last four years…it looked like a cheap-out move by a studio that didn’t want to pay Jon Favreau, like a move designed to say “we’ll just fanboy it up and milk the nerds for all they’re worth instead of trying to draw the broader audience.”

Mea culpa. Mea culpa.  Mea maxima culpa.

Easily the best superhero movie since the first Iron Man. Maybe the best…well, ever.  A movie that actually felt like it was paying off five lead-ins. A movie that gave us character development and plausible relationships and a sufficiently feasible “save the world” story. (Even if Joss did fall back on his one predictable crutch.) Basically it was exactly what one reviewer described: “a Transformers movie with brains, heart and a working sense of humor.”

Everyone knows by now that Robert Downey Jr was put on this earth to play Tony Stark.  We knew he was going to be incredible.  What stole the movie, I think, was Mark Ruffalo as Dr. Bruce Banner, who knows damn well what he has inside him and knows how important it is to keep the other guy bottled up. Until it’s time not to.

I think of this because of work.  

It was about this time nine years ago that I was well and truly embarked on my MVP year at the first job.  It was the year that taught me Hanlon’s Razor: “Never attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity.” And Grey’s Law: “Any sufficiently advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from malice.”  Combine that with some very real mendacity and some outright willful obstruction from many different angles, and it’s not surprising in retrospect that I was driven by rage – the very real burning fury at the people who were trying to beat us, trying to prevail on us, trying to tell me how to do my job – or worse yet, trying to be allowed to do my job instead of me.  I burned like a supernova for a year and change, and I burned hot and I burned bright. And ultimately I burned out.

Since then, I’ve tried hard not to make my job too much of what I am and what I want to be.  I can’t afford to have my happiness, my core friendships and my ultimate sense of identity dependent on a mere job, no matter how much of my waking life it takes up.  And I’ve managed to keep a fairly even keel and plug along, marking time and clocking in and out and basing my happiness on things that have nothing to do with my daily grind.

And yet.  

All that dark rage is still there, in a bottle on the mantlepiece with a label that says “IN CASE OF MOST DIRE EMERGENCY BREAK GLASS.” And today – when I was being threatened by some other user because a completely different group had failed to do their job, despite my prompting and best effort and doing 100% of what I could do – I admit openly and without shame that I had my hand on the bottle and my arm raised and I was about five seconds from smashing it and going full-bore 2003 Dark Hulk.

I didn’t smash it.  I might have pulled the cork out for a couple minutes, but I didn’t smash it.  I don’t really want to go down that road again, especially without the kind of in-house support team and best-friend-as-manager cover I had in the old country.

Less Bruce Banner.  More Tony Stark.  

Maybe I just need a better budget for armor.

So Filson is offering their green Levi’s-designed trucker jacket for almost half off.  This is the jacket that I tried on in New York City – it looked pretty good, the wife was surprisingly pleased with it, but it has a critical flaw: no hand warmer pockets.  Instead, there are weird side-pouch things (you could wrap your arms around your chest and stick your hands in that way) and of course the double-zippered game bag in back for that rabbit you shot on the way to the bar or whatever…wait, what?

Here now a more in-depth breakdown of the jacket:

* It’s $150, down from $278.  You can see it here.  The thing is, I’m not convinced it’s the same thing as what I saw in New York, which is here.

* Not to be confused with this one, mind you.  Which has the not-inconsequential advantage of swapping the game bag pockets for, you know, normal pockets.  Although it’s possible those enormous circular pockets MIGHT take an iPad on the green ones…

* What is this jacket for?  Basically it’s meant for weather that’s not cold enough for the peacoat but too cold for the shell or one of the cotton jackets.  Think roughly 40-60 degrees with mild precipitation – which is to say, winter in the Bay Area.

* This would basically displace at least four jackets in current rotation: the Vandy soft-shell, the oilcloth engineer’s jacket, the leather Indy jacket and the suede (I KNOW STOP IT) trucker jacket.  

This would be a much easier call if I hadn’t just laid down $90 for 3 jackets in NYC (none of which is going to be much help in precipitation or temps below about 55 degrees).  As it is, my instinct is to hold off until about November or so and put it on the Christmas list if it looks like wearing…

It’s been fifteen years now.

Fifteen years since the last week at Vanderbilt, when despite my studying and false bravado I knew damn well I wasn’t going to make it this time.  After three years of barely pulling my ass out of the fire over and over, getting progressively more singed every time, I was going down for good. And I knew it.  I couldn’t admit it, even to myself in the darkest hours, because I didn’t have a clue what would happen next, but I knew the end was near. My inability to deal with Horrible, to cut her out of my life, had sunk what should have been a reasonably promising career in political science.  And her increasingly erratic behavior had made things worse and worse, to the point where I finally decided that I’d had enough. Granted, that point was only a couple hours after taking (and as it turns out failing) the second prelim exam, so the barn door was locked pretty much after the horse burned it down, but still…

I was bereft. My high school friends were long since scattered to the winds.  I didn’t have any college friends; the person from undergrad I was closest to was the one I was desperately trying to break up with.  Flunking out pretty much confused and alienated my family, who didn’t exactly have a track record of knowing and understanding me anyway.  And there I was, falling off the cliff.  So when a rope appeared, I grabbed it without really caring about who might be holding the other end. As it turned out, the other end was a small knot of an Internet community that would become the kernel of my rebuilt life.  I started over in a new town, with a new career, and a new girlfriend.  I suppose if you want to be technical about it, she was my as-yet-uncounted third (and final) collegiate girlfriend, because she overlapped my last days at grad school by – a week?  Maybe?

I say all this because just this past weekend she got married, some eleven and a half years after we figured out each of us was the wrong one for the other.  Fortunately, I was lucky enough to attend the wedding in the company of the right one – who I married seven years ago myself. Achievement unlocked. I also saw a bunch of people at this wedding who I haven’t seen in many years and some only sporadically then, so there was a lot of drinking and catching up and reminiscing and recriminating.  Which is what put my memory on this track to begin with.

See, everything I was and had been in April 1997 came to an end on the day I left Nashville in May. I couldn’t honestly claim Vanderbilt as my own for years after that, I had a huge black hole yawning open behind me, I had no idea who I was anymore – or who I could legitimately become.  So when I say that April 1997 felt like the end of everything, it’s because it really was. My year always seems keyed to the old patterns and rhythms of school anyway.  Fall equals new beginning, starting over (moving to DC in 1997, newly single in 2000, starting at Apple in 2004, changing jobs in 2007…) and spring is the end.  The end of the year, the early coming of summer heat, the cloud of allergy meds – and for fifteen years now, the annual echo of the closest thing I have to a near-death experience.

I remember walking around campus, lingering in the places I’d hurried through in months and years past, wondering if I’d ever see them again.  I made sure to update my Commodore Card to the new model, and made sure there was a little money left on it, just in case – and if the worst happened, there might still be utility in having an up-to-date college ID with my own name and picture on it.  A chance viewing of a snippet of a play on Headline News suddenly turned into stopping in Tower Record and buying the soundtrack to Les Miserables and playing “One Day More” on a loop.

And I flashed back to the premonition, turning uphill onto Hillsboro Road on the very first day I moved in, and suddenly being overcome with the sense that “I’m never going to find out what’s on the other side of that hill.”  Which, as it turns out, was absolutely correct.  Not that it made me feel any better to know that one of my psychic impulses had finally come true.  Instead, I lay in bed flipping around radio stations, playing follow-the-bouncing-ball with who had hired or fired Adam Dread this week and listening to Lightning 100 and Thunder 94 – the last time I would ever be so stuck into American terrestrial music radio. It was spring, as green and lush and lovely as I can ever remember Nashville being – the early-morning lawn by Central Library looked like you were nearing the turn at Augusta National – and my world was falling apart for the last time.

Ultimately, all I could do was retreat into my computer and the crazy Internet people on the other end. And yes, there were plenty of bumps and bruises along the way, but they all made it possible for me to regenerate and live to fight another day. Those people on the other end of the cable gave me friends, gave me chances, gave me something to keep my head above water during the long and agonizing process of becoming a new person.

They saved my life.

While in New York City, I finally had the chance to run into a branch of Uniqlo.  It’s easiest to think of as the Japanese version of the Gap – in fact, they specifically adopted the Gap’s operating strategy in 1997, selling only unisex casual clothing of their own manufacture.  They are apparently the largest clothing retailer in Japan by volume and profit alike, according to the Wikis, and their only US presence is in three stores in Manhattan.

I first heard of Uniqlo, predictably, through the writings of William Gibson.  The novelist/present-futurist is apparently a fan of theirs, and having been provoked heavily by the Bigend Trilogy in terms of my own fashion sense, I had to make a run. Not least because they had on offer a cotton peacoat that might just be the alternative to the heavy wool one that has since become my favorite winter outerwear (even though it rarely gets cold enough to wear it).

Unfortunately, the price was too high for me to justify taking the plunge on a garment that didn’t blow me away.  But I did buy three cotton jackets for $30 each.  One was a black blouson-type thing, with patch pockets at the chest and sides, which is that vaguely-BDU-ish sort of military look that you can’t really identify whether it’s a shirt or a jacket.  It’s also just a bit on the large side, so I deliberately washed it to see what would happen (we’ll find out as soon as it’s done drying over a chair in the garage).  But the other two items are both sport coats – simple cotton blazers, three-button, one in a light khaki and one in a dark blue.  And I’ve worn one every day this week.

They’re the last thing I would have thought of glomming onto. Not water-resistant in the least (quite the opposite), sufficiently wrinkly to be impractical for stuffing in a bag, but ideal for summer in the greater San Francisco area when you need to turn the chill of the fog for a bit but not swelter with the thing in the afternoons.  And they’re sized just about perfectly – far more so than the Saboteur Invincible I spent way too much on.  These two combined cost an order of magnitude less than the Saboteur.

I feel different with this thing on – today is the navy one, over a short-sleeve button-up patterned shirt – and I can’t put a finger on how.  Older?  Not really; nothing about cotton sportcoat suggests “old” necessarily.  Younger? Eh, even though the blazer-jeans look was my go-to throughout grad school, I’m not feeling fifteen years knocked off (of which more later). Mature?  Possibly – who can tell?  Keeping the Nerf gun in one pocket might undercut that, though.

The other useful fashion news from this trip is that the Blundstones that I thought I wanted are just a hair too snug up front, and would almost certainly screw up my toe again.  Meanwhile, the forest-green Levi’s/Filson collaborative trucker jacket looks really good – but for $278, I need something with regular side pockets.

I suspect there’s going to be a pretty aggressive cull of the jacket rack before long.  The leather is going into storage for lack of utility unless something changes, and I’d like to put paid to the “performance outerwear” as much as possible and instead try to dress like somebody who doesn’t want you to think they hike and bike and run on the weekends, because, hi, have you met me?

Nope.  Plain $30 cotton blazer might just be who I am nowadays.

Of which, as I said, more later.

That ship has sailed, son.  The Occupy movement couldn’t keep their collective eye on the ball and, in the grand tradition of the professional left, let a movement that should have been tremendously motivating to the average working stiff in America get hijacked by the usual slaw of bong-watered granola-shavers and Free Mumia dipshits and International ANSWER Chomsky sophomores and Black Bloc gutterpunks.  As soon as the Oakland branch became the national focus of the movement, the game was up, and rightly so.

Back to the drawing board, kids.  Need to start over, need to come up with a new brand and a tight focus and no getting distracted by the barnacles that have glommed onto every remotely-progressive response movement for thirty years.  Load up on khakis and polos and try for a telegenic and inclusive movement for once.

Sleep No More is a play.  Sort of.  It is staged in a “hotel” in New York City.  You go in, go through the rooms and floors, walk through the “set” and experience the “actors” as the events happen around you in a very stylized and abstract way.  You open doors, crawl through windows if you like, take candy from the jar…you’re inside the show.  The whole thing is derived from Shakespeare and Hitchcock in similar measure, and it positively drips with the atmosphere of urban fantasy taken out of time in its blend of the 30s and Victoriana and God knows what else.  So if you think you might be down for this, don’t read on.

 

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(tribute to the old listserv days)

 

Ready?  Are you sitting comfortably?  Then I’ll begin…

 

They led us into the “hotel”, gave us a playing card as we “checked in,” took all our coats and bags and things, and sent us up the stairs to the lounge.  It turns out they’re serious: you do NOT need your coat and you DEFINITELY won’t want to be carrying a bag.  In fact, the most critical things you can do to be ready are to wear your running shoes and put in contacts rather than wearing glasses.

The lounge looks like half a dozen speakeasy bars: dark wood, thick scarlet velvet curtains, absinthe punch.  Fog, or mist, or haze, or something drifts through the tables around the small stage (piano, bass, drums).  No musicians yet, just the compere with his oily British accent calling our card numbers.  Your number comes up, your group shuffles out, and a similarly unctuous Brit-accented lady lounge singer hands out…masks.  Think plague masks as designed by Jason Voorhes.  And your instructions are strict: no talking after this, until you leave the show.  Everyone goes into the elevator, which rises – and then one person is grabbed and put off the elevator.  It then descends and everyone else is allowed off…

…into a sanitarium.  Or something.  Beds, bathtubs, medical instruments, and then the door and the window lead outside into a maze of thorny trees, with a hut off in one corner…and then people appear.  There’s a nurse in the hut.  There’s another one attending to somebody in a bathtub, and you can’t even really tell if it’s male or female or what age. It looks cold and creepy and yet the temperature is starting to climb, and when you’re trying to sidle your way up to whatever the hell’s going on in the middle of that maze with fifty other people, you can tell it’s going to get uncomfortably hot before the night’s out.

Eventually you give up trying to make heads or tails of the sanitarium and just head downstairs…into an empty village.  There’s a tea shop, there’s a detective agency, there’s a candy store and you can actually nick the peppermints and butterscotch and licorice allsorts from the jars.  And then there’s a couple of people having a fight, or somebody crawling up the wall and suspending themselves against the ceiling, and then there’s an abandoned nightclub lounge that looks exactly like where you just came from, covered in dust and cobwebs, and all of a sudden there’s the witches’ scene from Macbeth reinterpreted as some kind of dubstep rave orgy strobelight nightmare, and before you can say “what the hell’s that?” everyone runs away.

On downstairs again, where there’s something – is that a hotel?  A dining room?  Does that let out into a backyard cemetery or is that a garden?  That statue isn’t moving, is it?  Is that another bathtub in the ballroom of that house?  Are those supposed to be Macbeth and Lady Macbeth in there?

You get the idea.  It turns out to be surreal and hallucinatory and dreamlike and impossible to follow.  And by the time it was over, with Macbeth hanged at the coronation feast, you’re equal parts “what the hell was that?” and “They need to bring that to San Francisco so I can see it again.”  It’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen as “theater” and I’d totally go again if given a chance…

Last week was spent in New York City and its environs.  We stayed uptown in Harlem, in the chic-for-cheap Aloft, and spent a good deal of time running up and down the A, or the B, or the D, or the 1, or…well, we got back and forth to Union Square quite a bit.  Illness slowed us up some, as did an unexpected blast from the past when we met up three times with one of my best friends from high school, as did weather and rain.  But we did get a lot of things accomplished, among which:

* Sleep No More.  About this more later, except that it was everything I could have hoped for; I just wish I’d had the sense my wife had to find out WHAT it was based on first.

* The Cathedral of St John the Divine, the incomplete Gothic monster in Morningside Heights that gives us something with the heft and throw-weight to keep up with the great cathedrals of Europe.  Which was oddly more affecting than I expected it to be, which I guess is the definition of art…

* The new park known as the High Line, where nature invaded the old overhead train tracks for thirty years only to be tamed into a unique park running up the lower part of the west side of Manhattan.  Never seen anything like it, and I love it.

* Brooklyn.  From the top of a cold bus on a windy day and only briefly, but nevertheless Brooklyn, and on the eve of the formal announcement of the Brooklyn Nets.

* The view from the top of Rockefeller Center, which is better than from the Empire State Building, not least because you can see the Empire State Building.

* Million Dollar Quartet, which as it turns out we could have waited to see in San Jose – but was totally worth a trip just for the closing shot.  If you know the history of rock ‘n roll, you know the one.

* Grand Central Station, complete with pics of Vanderbilt Avenue, a Magnolia cupcake (which is NYC’s way of saying “look, we all want to eat a huge gob of straight frosting but it’s starting to look bad”) and Mendy’s pastrami (which I had the presence of mind not to try to order with Swiss this time).  And Junior’s cheesecake, because nom.

But the biggest thing was just being in New York again – in my case, almost eight years to the day precisely since the weekend I proposed to my now-wife.  Since then, my world has opened up even more, with moving to Silicon Valley and spending time in San Francisco and going to London three times.  New York City has moved into that space where DC now resides and where I think New Orleans may have always been for me: a semi-mythical place made more so by the sense that it contains years and history going back to well before the Spanish set up that mission in Yerba Buena.  (A sense made stronger by reading a lot of Herbert Asbury and also Gotham again.)  A place where I know I’ve been (and in the case of DC, lived) and spent some quality time, but with a sort of museum-Disneyland quality to it.  I know that everyone who goes to New York starts wondering within 24 hours whether they could live there, but for the first time, I don’t think I got the urge.  And my wife definitely didn’t, gluten-free potstickers and Italian food notwithstanding.

In fact, if there was an overarching theme to the week (and the weekend), it was about tying up loose ends and drawing a line under the past.  Having gotten home, the urge to live in the now is fairly strong. Which I suppose is a good thing in any event.