Memos from the Moon http://www.shunn.net/memos/ A modest collection of personal essays en Copyright 2013 Tue, 27 Dec 2011 01:12:41 -0600 http://www.sixapart.com/movabletype/ http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss New Year's Eve The following piece was written in February 1997, under the pseudonym "Daedalus," for Alexis Massie's now-defunct Web site Pandora's Box of Tricks.Manhattan. Brick and concrete—trench bottom. Nose, mouth: streamers of breath break for the surface. Idling tourist buses: exhaust clouds wrestle like dragons in the street, red-lit, bellies pulsing fire. Black air, too many people. Concert at the Garden, one hour. Time to kill. Wander. Hands in pockets, eyes on sidewalk, cold in lungs with tiny ripping teeth. Them: pairs, schools, packs—oblivious, shrill. Me: wraith, alone. Belly a fast-food rock—still hungry, not for food. Wander. West 33rd. Red neon, lurid, magnetic—half a block. Walk past, don't look. Sidewalk sign, peripheral glimpse: XXX, private booths, live fantasy. Hungry. Too many people. Keep walking. Streets: rich kids in clumps, fuzz-mustached cops, scraggly arms waving cups, frowning evening-wear elders, glint-eyed scalpers, open-mouthed tourists, taxis like sharks, outcroppings of thugs. Traffic. Noise. Cold. West 33rd. Red neon. Full circle. Me: comet, moth. Shit. Paper cup in my face. No thought—quarter, clink. Bum: gap smile, thank you happy new year god bless, bow—underworld doorman. Inside. Fluorescent white light, cloying sweet air. Yards of glassed-in shelves—sleaze for sale on video. Customers: male, middle-aged, Caucasian—quiet, detached, like art patrons. Exception: young couple, giggling, embarrassed, excited. Clerks: male, middle-aged, Middle Eastern—guns under counter? Of course, don't be stupid. Stairs, glance up—balcony landing, dim. Doors painted red. Woman on stool, legs on railing: thighs like fat loaves of bread. Sign: fantasy booths. Glance down. Browse: Nasty Sluts Who Like to Eat Cum #28, Nasty Sluts Who Like to Eat Cum #29, Red Hot Snatches, Anal Cheerleaders, Lez Be Friends. Stomach churn. Eyes to balcony. Fat woman on stool looking down: hey, baby, come on up. Shit. Look away. Lungs: no breath. Out out out out out! Cold air. Got away. Me: good! Good: me! Concert at the Garden: forty-five minutes. Wander. Crowds, lights, traffic, noise. 7th Avenue, Times Square, Broadway, Sixth Avenue ... West 33rd. Red neon. Ellipse. Shit. Inside, up stairs, fat woman on stool: dingy panties, dingy bra, dingy huddled shawl. Fat woman, standing, soulless smile: here for a show? Quick nod. Fat woman: that's five dollars for tokens, thanks honey, go there into booth D. In booth, close door, lock knob. Coin slot, full-length glass panel, opaque cover: who is on the other side? Me: eagerness, despair, loathing, eagerness, despair. Who? Voice from speaker grille: put the tokens in the slot. Clink, clink, clink, clink, clink. Cover slide open, through glass—fat woman from stool. Idiot me. Of course. Loathing, despair. Telegram from soul: leave, leave, leave! Deer in headlights, rabbit in snare. Fat woman: ten dollars for topless, twenty for all nude, thirty for dildo. Autonomous hands: ten dollars through slot. Don't have twenty. Bra off. Fat woman: take down your pants. No, no, no! Autonomous hands: obey her, disobey me. Through glass: fat hands fondle mudpie breasts, expressionless eyes. Me: nothing, limp. Shiver, ice. Loathing. Two minutes? Five? Ten? Eternity. Cover slide shut. Unfreeze. Buckle pants, zip, tuck: out out out! Fat woman: already back on stool, spider settling in web. Stupid residual courtesy: thank you. From her, radaring back—hostility, scorn, nothing else. Flash down stairs, outrun the scorn, outside—arrow toward the Garden. Cold air. Traffic. Crowds. Noise. Resolution: never again. Resolution: know self, like self, respect self. Resolution: fix self. Scorn clinging to my back, didn't outrun it after all. Scorn whispers: only one fix. Scorn whispers: disappear, vanish. Scorn whispers: end it. Me: fuck you, scorn! Fuck you! Fuck you! Tough words, magic words. Scorn shivers apart and flees, flees into a darker place than this city, this night, this world. But it will stitch itself together and return. Always does. Hope: hope my own stitches will hold. Concert at the Garden. Half hour. Go. Thaw. Dance. Live.]]> http://www.shunn.net/memos/2011/12/new_years_eve.html http://www.shunn.net/memos/2011/12/new_years_eve.html Tue, 27 Dec 2011 01:12:41 -0600 Hacking reality The following remarks were delivered June 24, 2010, at the Wine Loft in Flagstaff, Arizona, as part of "Science + Fantasy = Science Fiction," a panel discussion on how science inspires science fiction and vice versa. My view of science is pretty well summed up in a conversation between two characters in the novel I'm working on now, Endgame. This is the story of two teenage friends named Hasta and Ivan who develop seemingly magical powers--except that they don't automatically accept magic as the explanation for what has happened to them. Instead they set about using the scientific methods of theorizing and repeated testing to get to the bottom of things. Here, as they investigate Hasta's ability to teleport objects, they talk about magic and science:
"I wonder what the cost will turn out to be," said Hasta, sitting back on the track and stretching her arms. Ivan had finished setting up the blocks again and moved back to squat next to her. "The cost of what?" he asked. Hasta regarded him through narrowed eyes. "The cost of this magic. In all the books, the magic never comes for free. There's always a cost." "Like a dragon demanding a pound of flesh," Ivan said, chuckling, "or our souls starting to rot inside us?" "Something like that." He shook his head. "This isn't magic," he said. "It's just physics. It has to be. There's an energy expenditure, obviously, but maybe that's just why we feel tired and wrung out afterwards. Like when you exercise to build muscle." "Moving a grown man half a mile? I paid attention in physics, Ivan. That takes a lot of energy." "Sure it does," Ivan said, "but there are plenty of ways to hack around that requirement. What else do you think physics is?" "Physics is hacking?" "Totally. See, a hack is basically just a shortcut for getting something done, so you don't have to waste a lot of time and effort on it. Or resources. Like, you might hack into a record company's servers so you don't have to waste resources buying their music." "You might," Hasta said. "Hypothetically," Ivan granted. "Or you might write some code that monitors all a bank's transactions and diverts the rounded-off fractions of cents into a secret account. Those would be different kinds of computer hacks." "Sure," said Hasta, motioning for him to keep going already. "Okay, then you have what I think of as reality hacks, which are tricks the smartest of us monkeys have been figuring out for all of recorded history. Like, I could never move a giant boulder by myself, no matter how hard I pushed against it. I just physically can't muster enough force. But if I employ the hack we call a lever, suddenly my pathetic amount of force is multiplied. In fact, there's an immutable formula you can work out that tells you exactly how much extra force you get depending on the length of the lever and the distance of each end from the fulcrum. With the right lever positioned correctly, I can move that boulder!" "That's basic physics," Hasta said. "But I guess I never really thought of it as a hack before." "We hack reality in so many ways, it isn't even funny," Ivan said. "Levers and pulleys and screws to multiply force. Optics to bend light the way we want it to go. Turbines to generate electricity, and water, wind, and fossil-fuel power to turn the turbines. Conductors to move the electrons from one place to another. Battery chemistry to store and release that energy. Airfoils for lift so we can ply the atmosphere. Clever hacks, every one of them, all designed to save us time and effort and make our lives easier."
So that's my philosophy of science right there--reality hacking. I see scientists as the ultimate hackers--women and men who work hard to figure out how the physical world around us works, so they can then take that knowledge and find shortcuts for performing tasks we want and need done more easily than we could otherwise do them. That's where I get the inspiration for a lot of the different ideas I end up using in my fiction. What do I want or need done more easily? What sorts of things would make my life easier or better? Maybe I'm an avid hiker, and I'd like to be able to go out into the wilderness for days on end without worrying about how I'm going to carry in all the food I need. Well, I can imagine that maybe there's a way I could engineer my body to use chlorophyll like a plant does to convert sunlight into sugar. Maybe when I get back from my hike, there's a black tie wine bar science gala that's black tie only, and it would sure make my life easier if I didn't have to run back home and change into my tuxedo. Well, maybe I can imagine a way that my hiking clothes were made out of reprogrammable fabric, and by downloading an open-source pattern from the Internet I can tell my clothing to change color and shape until I have on the proper evening wear without having to change. Maybe at that black tie gala my friend Greg tells me about a book he's read recently that sounds really great--like say Nation by Terry Pratchett--and I'd like to be able to start reading it tonight without worrying about trying to find an open bookstore. Maybe I can imagine a way that I could read books on a screen instead of... Well, actually, that happened last night, and within three minutes I had bought the book and downloaded it to my iPhone. Now, the trick to good science fiction is to not just make these wish fulfillment stories. The trick is to know enough about the way the world works, and the way people work, to make some guesses about how your fictional invention would affect the world in unexpected ways, and not just in the way you originally intend. Like, what would it be like to live in a world of people with green skin who didn't necessarily have to grow food or slaughter animals to get nutrition. What would happen to farmers? How would people migrate and where would they live. (Hint: Maybe chlorophyll people really wouldn't want to live in Chicago, where we can go a full month during the winter without seeing the sun.) And what other scientific advances and social changes, both good and bad, would be necessary in order to support that change? The bottom line for me is that writing science fiction is my way of hacking reality, and by imagining the world I would like to live in, I hope I'm helping to inspire the people who are actually smart and dedicated enough to make that world real.
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]]> http://www.shunn.net/memos/2010/09/hacking_reality.html http://www.shunn.net/memos/2010/09/hacking_reality.html magic physics science science fiction Wed, 08 Sep 2010 10:31:59 -0600 Anatomy of a (Nearly) Singlehanded Victory somewhere, so you just got voted my confessor. Lucky you. So Laura and I started playing Wednesday nights in a pub trivia league late last spring. It's a uniform game that takes place in different bars not just all over Chicago but in several cities around the country. Our first few outings were dismal, but gradually we improved to the point where we took several firsts at our home bar, and we regularly place near the top of the pack. During this past season, our team—then known as The Reigning Cats and Dogs—did well enough to get invited to the city league championship match on February 13th. We placed 15th out of about 25 teams. Using cell phones to look up answers is strictly forbidden, and we never cheat on that score. Sometimes, though, if we're nervous about a question, we'll look up the answer after we've already turned in our response. We're there to have fun, but we also love winning, and we can get pretty competitive with the other regular teams. It's a friendly competition, though. Besides Laura and me, we have a few regulars on the team, most consistently Diane and Chuck. On a normal night, we have three or four players. There is no real limit on team size, though. We've had as many as six and as few as two. Everyone has categories they're strong and weak in. Laura does great at business and advertising and celebrity questions. Diane has TV and politics. I'm good at music and science and geography. Chuck has history, and he's pretty good at sports too. We generally dread sports questions, though, and there are usually a lot of them, so we recently recruited a new player, Randy, to help shore up that weak area. Also, we have a regular waitress at the bar who's taken a liking to our team. I'll call her Devin. She likes to get in on the act too, so sometimes when we're stuck on a question she'll drop by, under cover of taking our beer order, and brainstorm with us on the answer. She has saved our bacon on more than one occasion. Last Wednesday night, for the first time, I was the only team member able to attend. I considered blowing it off, but I wanted to get out of the house and have a few beers, and playing alone sounded like an epic challenge. For the new season we've changed our team name to Question Authority, but as long as our assigned league number is on our answer slips, we can call ourselves whatever we like on any given evening, so that night I called my team of one the Lone Punman. Nervously, and not without a great deal of self-consciousness, I settled in at our regular table to wait for the game to start. I usually send a few Twitter updates from the matches, and much has been made there and on Facebook about my performance that evening. But I'm here to semi-publicly confess something that my teammates already know—I'm not as amazing as I've led people to think I am. Here is a detailed recap of the evening's match, from my perspective, that I wrote up the next day for my fellow Question Authorities. (I've inserted some annotations along the way on how gameplay proceeds.)
As the game gets close to starting, a few people including the bar owner Freddy and our quizmaster Hank (not their real names) stop by my table to ask me where everyone else is. "They all abandoned me tonight," I say. Our waitress Devin, on the QT, promises to drop by and lend a hand when she can. [Our trivia game is played in six rounds of three questions each. At the start of each round, the quizmaster announces the three categories that will be used. Teams have three different point values they can assign to the questions in the round—5, 3 and 1. Each can only be used once. For example, if a team uses their 5-point value for the first question, they have 3 points and 1 point left to use on the two remaining questions. The quizmaster reads each question, then plays a four-minute song. Teams write their answers down on slips of paper, together with their point value, team name and league number, and turn their slips in to the quizmaster before the end of the song. Questions start easy and get harder as the round proceed. In addition, the answer to one question for the night, but not the question itself, has been revealed that day on the league's web site—if you've played before and know to look.]
ROUND 1
American History
Classic TV
Music Lineup
1. What was first recited in unison by American schoolchildren on October 11, 1892?
5 points. Hank reports everyone got it right.
2. On the television series "Green Acres," what big city did Oliver and Lisa Douglas leave to move to the old Haney place?
I have never seen "Green Acres," so for me this one was a stab in the dark. This is only the first time I wish the whole team was around, because I know all the rest of Question Authority would have known the answer. I base my guess on the idea that it's supposed to be an easy question, and I give it 1 point. Hank reports that everyone got it right, which makes me relieved that I didn't become the only person to miss it.
3. Which of the following Gibb brothers was not a member of the Bee Gees? Is it Andy, Barry, Robin or Maurice?
Slam dunk. 3 points.
ROUND 2
Money
Opera
U.S. Geography
Whew! Still no sports! How long can this luck hold out?
1. The back of what U.S. state's commemorative quarter features an ear of corn, a wheel of cheese, and a cow?
This is a guess but not a difficult one. 5 points. Hank reports that everyone got it right.
2. What insect appears in the title of a popular opera by Giacomo Puccini?
Now I'm really wishing Laura and her opera brain were around. I know this should be simple, but somehow I get my head hung up on Strauss's Die Fledermaus, which I know is a bat and not an insect. Still, I can only think of creepy crawly things. Devin drops by and, under cover of asking if I need another beer, whispers the answer. 3 points. Everyone gets it right.
3. The Canadian provinces of British Columbia, Alberta and Saskatchewan all border what U.S. state?
Having a spent a very formative (if brief) portion of my life in southern Alberta, this one is a slam dunk. I obnoxiously turn my answer in before the music starts. 1 point, but hopefully it will be an important 1 point.
ROUND 3
The Olympics
Business
Music
The Olympics?! Isn't that, like, sports? Oh, no!
1. What was the last U.S. city to host the Winter Olympics?
I can hardly believe that the first sorta sports-related question of the game is one I can answer easily. 5 points.
2. What international restaurant chain's slogan is "Love all, serve all"?
"And it's not IHOP," Hank adds. This gets me thinking about all kinds of chains that probably aren't correct. I don't have a clue, and I'm trying to justify Denny's as an answer in my head when Devin comes by to see if I'm okay on beer. She whispers an answer. "I think," she says. I put it down for 1 point, wait a bit, then turn it in. Devin comes back. "I'm wrong," she says. Actually, she isn't wrong, and she's one of the few who isn't wrong, to judge by the groans from around the bar.
3. What alternative rock band's forthcoming album Teargarden by Kaleidoscope will consist of 44 tracks released one at a time as digital downloads? Is it Coldplay, My Chemical Romance, Smashing Pumpkins or the White Stripes?
I've started writing the answer to this one before Hank even gets to the part where he makes clear it's a multiple-choice question. Fortunately, my answer turns out to be one of the choices. I turn it in obnoxiously fast. 3 points. [The halftime bonus round, also known as the "shots round," consists of one four-part question. A correct answer for each part is worth 2 points, for a total of up to 8 points. The team with the most points on the halftime bonus question is awarded a round of free shots, courtesy of Freddy. Teams have the length of two songs to turn in their answers.]
HALFTIME BONUS QUESTION
Geography
For each of the following, name the island nation by its capital city:
  • Manila
  • Reykjavik
  • Santo Domingo
  • Suva
I have no trouble with the first three, but as other teams start turning in their answers I realize I have no clue about Suva. Devin to the rescue. I end up in a 5-way tie for the shots. [In the case of a tie for first place on the bonus question, one representative from each contending team is sent to the front of the room with an answer slip and a pencil. The tiebreaker question has a numerical answer. The team to come closest to the actual value wins the free shots.]
HALFTIME BONUS QUESTION TIE-BREAKER
Theme Parks
In what year did the Black Widow roller coaster make its debut at Six Flags New England?
"Yes, there is a Six Flags New England," says Hank. My guess of 2002 is not even close. I no longer recall which team won, but their guess of 1991 is much closer to the correct answer of 1977. (I will add that back in 1977, as it turns out, that park was not yet called Six Flags New England. In fact, the Black Widow was removed around the same time that Six Flags bought Riverside Park in Massachusetts.) It's all good, though. I have the 8 points, and I really didn't need the shot. [Going into the second half of play, the quizmaster reports the current standings.]
SCORES AT THE HALF
8th - 29 points - Flavor Stripe
7th - 31 points - Dangling Participles
5th - 32 points - Succotash My Balzac, Pound Puppies
3rd - 34 points - DB(?), LeVar Burton Love Explosion
1st - 35 points - Old Song, Lone Punman
Now Hank points out to everyone that the Lone Punman is tied for first and playing alone. Um, gee, thanks for the added pressure! [In the second half, the available point values for each round of questions increase to 6, 4 and 2 points.]
ROUND 4
Actors
Movie Plots
Nicknames
Categories for this round look pretty good, and I can't believe no hardcore sports category has appeared. I breathe a sigh of relief. But I also remind myself of the evening's secret answer, "Black Widow," and try to stay alert for the question it goes with. The secret answer usually but not always shows up in the fourth round.
1. Who is the only actor from any television series in the Star Trek franchise to have been knighted?
I don't know this one for sure, but I can only think of one reasonable candidate. 4 points. Relieved to be right.
2. What Clint Eastwood movie was loosely based on the real-life Zodiac killings?
Though I'm not sure everyone hears, some ninny at the front of the bar shouts out an answer. Hank says, "Hey! No shouting out answers." Unfortunately, the ninny shouted out the same answer I was thinking, which makes me start second-guessing it. In the end, after four minutes of agonizing and considering other Clint movies, I go with my gut. 6 points, because, when in doubt, as Chuck likes to exhort us when he's here, "go big, go strong." Me and the ninny and many other people get it right.
3. What nickname is shared by both billiards champion Jeanette Lee and competitive eater Sonya Thomas?
Okay, this has to be the secret answer of the night! 2 points. It still seems to stump about half the teams, though, and one team apparently misunderstood what the web site said, because when revealing the answers Hank pointedly tells them, "Not 'Black Hole.'"
ROUND 5
Shakespeare
Vocabulary
Science Fiction
I'm excited when I hear the categories for this round. All good categories for me, and still no sports!
1. What is the name of the king that Macbeth killed?
Uh-oh. Though I've read "Macbeth" multiple times and seen it performed, somehow I'm not at all certain of the answer that comes reluctantly to mind for this question. Devin is nowhere in sight, so I go with my gut but assign it only 2 points. What the hell, the other categories look to be more my speed. After I turn in my answer sheet, Devin swings by to offer an answer. "I wasn't sure," I said, "but that's what I put. I already turned it in." We're right, but so are several others.
2. What word for a solution of water and salt can be applied to seawater or the liquid in a jar of pickles?
Once again I turn in my answer obnoxiously quickly (it's a tactic to psych everyone else out, you know?), but I'm not the only one who does. Most folks don't seem to have any trouble with this one. 6 points.
3. What 1979 sci-fi/horror movie featured a spaceship called the Nostromo?
Hank spends some time arguing with the LeVar Burton Love Explosion about how Nostromo is pronounced. "Nuh-STROH-moh," they say. "NAW-struh-moh," Hank says. "Nuh-STROH-moh," they say. "NAW-struh-moh, bitch," Hank says into the mike. The crowd oo-oo-oohs. Again with the obnoxiously fast answer. 4 points.
ROUND 6
Cars
Baseball
Mythology
A perfect game so far, with only three hints from Devin. I'm very nervous at this point, and I realize with this set of categories that my sports luck has finally run out. I'm not too sure about the car category, either. In fact, the only category I like at all is mythology. "Is your perfect streak still going?" one of the LeVar Burton women asks me from the next table. "Yes, but I'm pretty sure it's about to end," I say. I just hope I have enough of a lead built up to weather this round and stay out front.
1. In 2007, what international car maker became the first company to sell a million vehicles in one year in China?
No. Freaking. Clue. The first answer that comes to mind is Toyota. Then I start thinking about how the Chinese and Japanese feel about each other, and I fixate on Volkswagen. I keep going back and forth between those two. Finally I write down Volkswagen, certain I'm wrong, and take my answer sheet up. Someone is conferring with Hank about something, though, and I realize there is no point value written on my sheet. I head back to my table and sit down. Devin stops by as I'm writing a 4 on the sheet. She whispers the answer. "No shit?" I say, and order another beer. "Pretty sure," she says. I scrap my VW answer sheet and stuff the crumpled paper into my shoulder bag. I write down her answer and give it 4 points because, hey, baseball is coming up, but so is mythology. I wait a decent interval, then take my sheet up to Hank. From the cheers, most teams, including the Lone Punman, got this one right. That was a close call!
2. What is the only current National League team to never win a pennant or NLCS?
That's National League Championship Series, for those who don't know—like me. Of course, something else I don't know is what team this could possibly be. (I also fail to note the "National League" distinction in the question, not that it would have meant much to me.) Where the crap are Hank and Randy, anyway? I consider the Texas Rangers, maybe because that was Bush's team, but that's just a wild guess. Then the Colorado Rockies pop into my mind. I mentally try out a bunch of other teams that I know, but the Rockies are the only team that sound like total losers to me. I write it down. Then Devin comes by and says, "The Rangers." "You sure?" I say. "Yeah," she says. I write it down for 2 points, wait a minute, and hustle it up to Hank as the music ends. He reveals the correct answer. Gee, we were both wrong. What a surprise. And, in a strange way, what a relief!
3. In Greek mythology, what kind of creature was Polyphemus?
The Odyssey is, like, one of my favorite books ever. It's always risky to save your biggest point value for the last question in the round, but this time it pays off. I take the answer up obnoxiously fast and slap it down on Hank's table just as the music starts. More psychological warfare. But a couple other people are right behind me. 6 points. [At the end of regular play, the quizmaster reports the current standings again.]
SCORES AT THE END OF REGULAR PLAY
8th - 49 points - Dangling Participles
6th - 60 points - DB(?), Succotash My Balzac
5th - 61 points - Flavor Stripe
4th - 62 points - LeVar Burton Love Explosion
3rd - 63 points - Old Song
2nd - 66 points - Pound Puppies
1st - 69 points - Lone Punman
Three-point lead! But given the wagering system on the final question, everyone is within striking distance of first place, especially if it turns out to be one of those extraordinarily hard ones... [Teams are allowed to wager anywhere from 0 to 15 points on the final question. If they turn in a correct answer, the point wager is added to their score. But if they turn in an incorrect answer, that wager is deducted from their score.]
FINAL QUESTION Games
Place the following in order from greatest to least:
  • Number of pawns a player starts with in chess.
  • Highest possible value of a hand in baccarat.
  • Number of $20 bills a player starts with in Monopoly.
  • Numerical value assigned to the left fielder position in baseball stats.
Oh, snap! Only one of these is something I know offhand, and it's the number of pawns. I have a guess for the left fielder number, which sort of pops into my head from picturing a diagram of a baseball field. I'm not sure it's right, but I'm going to go with it. Usually with these sorts of questions, the answers all cluster together in a tight group, which means these numbers must all be very close. I'm not sure about the Monopoly money, but I figure there's no reason to start with more than about five twenties. That gives me a good cluster to work with. I have no clue about the baccarat number, but with the other values in place I can make an educated guess as to where it fits in. Within a minute or so, I've written down my answers in order and wagered 13 points, the minimum I need to stay ahead of Pound Puppies if they bet 15. I turn in my answer. Then, during the second song, Devin stops by to check on my beer situation. She rattles off an answer to the question, with dead certainty, that is entirely different from mine. "Yikes, that's not at all what I put down," I say, "but I was only guessing." "Well, there's sixteen pawns in chess, right?" Devin says. "I thought it was the number of pawns on one side," I say. Devin goes up to talk to Hank. I sweat. The song ends. Hank prolongs the agony with thanks and so forth before slowly reading off the right answers in order. My first answer is right. My second answer is right. My knuckles are white. Third answer is right! Cheers start going up all around the room, but it doesn't matter. With the wager I made, no one can touch me. I slump back in my seat. It's over. I'm a rock star. I'm a legend.
FINAL SCORES
8th - 45 points - DB(?) (was tied for 6th, down 15 points)
7th - 46 points - Flavor Stripe (was 5th, down 15 points)
6th - 48 points - Old Song (was 3rd, down 15 points)
5th - 60 points - LeVar Burton Love Explosion (was 4th, down 2 points)
4th - 64 points - Dangling Participles (was 8th, up 15 points)
3rd - 75 points - Succotash My Balzac (was tied for 6th, up 15 points)
2nd - 81 points - Pound Puppies (place unchanged, up 15 points)
1st - 82 points - Lone Punman (place unchanged, up 13 points)
And that's my confession. I took first place last Wednesday night, but I didn't quite do it alone—as I would have admitted on Twitter except that I didn't want Devin to get in any trouble. I learned a valuable lesson in the process, though. It may be gratifying to appear to win alone, but it's more fun to play team trivia as part of an actual team. Well, tomorrow it will be, anyway. Last Wednesday night was awesome. I don't regret a bit of it.]]> http://www.shunn.net/memos/2010/03/anatomy_of_a_nearly_singlehand.html http://www.shunn.net/memos/2010/03/anatomy_of_a_nearly_singlehand.html Mon, 29 Mar 2010 12:53:09 -0600 Le Mot Juiced I read the following essay, which appears in somewhat different form in the epilogue to The Accidental Terrorist, in the Essay Fiesta series at The Book Cellar in Chicago, on December 21, 2009. There is no worse feeling than, five minutes after some unpleasant confrontation has left you tongue-tied, humiliated and confused, smacking yourself on the forehead and exclaiming, "Oh, my God! That's what I should have said!" This is not that kind of a story. This is the story of how I once delivered the perfect rejoinder, in the moment, when it counted. I tell it not to demonstrate how smart, suave, or clever I am, but because it so rarely happens that way with me. In fact, this may be the only story of its kind I have. This happened in December 2003, at a Christmas party my wife Laura and I threw at our apartment in Queens, New York. Our parties, if I do say so, were legendary, always with an interesting mix of people, and always with good booze, and plenty of it. Among the many invitees were my old, old friend Katrina and her new husband Bernard. Katrina and I had gone to high school together in Utah, dated seriously for a while afterward, and stayed in touch over the intervening years. Bernard was Dutch, and nine years her junior. They met in graduate school at the University of Fairbanks, where Katrina finished a master's degree in microbiology. They had just moved to Connecticut and taken jobs with a big pharmaceutical company. Our Christmas party was my first time meeting Bernard. He struck me as a nice enough fellow when I took his coat and hat at the door, if a little reticent. I put it down to the nerves you get at a party where you don't know anyone. But an hour of sampling our beverage offerings loosened Bernard's tongue considerably. Did I say "sampling" our offerings? A better word might have been "plundering." I was talking with a small group of friends in a corner of the kitchen when the young Dutchman—a newly minted doctor of chemical engineering—came sauntering over and inserted himself in the conversation. In a slurred accent, he said, "You know what I just found out that I did not know before? I found out in the car on the way down here. This guy here"—he indicated me with the wineglass in his hand—"he used to be engaged to my wife." I looked around the small group I'd been chatting with. It included my long-time friend Bob, and also my friend Elizabeth, who is blind. "Well, this is awkward," I said. "Yeah," Bernard went on, "he like got engaged to her at some airport." This was true. It was the Salt Lake International Airport, seventeen years earlier. I was about to get on a plane and leave for two years as a missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—the Mormons. Katrina and I had only been dating for a few weeks at the time, but we had fallen desperately in love—as people often do when an attraction manifests and the time to act on it is short. I wanted her to wait for me while I was away saving souls in the wilds of . . . Canada, and she had been dropping big hints that a certain question might serve to seal that deal. I didn't like the intent look on Bernard's face, nor his belligerent tone. I hadn't been in a fight since junior high (Jason Peterson), but I really didn't want Elizabeth caught in the middle if things were about to turn violent. I tried to play it casual. "That was a really long time ago," I said. "We were kids. I was nineteen." "Yeah," said Bernard, "and my wife was twenty." "Time to change the subject, Bill," said Bob, who among other jobs had worked as a merchant seaman. "You're only digging a deeper hole." "Can you believe this?" Bernard said to the group at large, spreading his arms and sloshing some of his wine on the floor. "I only just found out. That's a pretty big thing." I suffer, I'm afraid, from the delusion that reason and calm words can actually make a difference in the world. "Not really, it's not," I said in an offhand tone. "It didn't mean anything. To Mormons, getting engaged is like a pastime. It's a sport, it's just what you do. It's not the same as for other people." This, also, was true. Mormons so heavily stress finding a mate and getting married that women are considered old maids at 21. But by the same token, engagements made under that intense pressure can also be rather fragile. I myself was engaged no less than five more times before it finally took, which didn't even match my father's record of seven engagements, one marriage. Of course, by the time I did get married, I had long abandoned the LDS faith, as you might have deduced from the copious alcohol at our Christmas party. Which had somehow gotten me into this tense and uncomfortable conversation. Bernard was undaunted by my footnotes to his pronouncements. Unfazed, he addressed the group at large, unsteady on his feet. "You know what else I found out? There was something about a ring, this ring—made out of wrapping paper?" I looked around the group again. "Foil," I said. "It was the foil wrapper from a stick of chewing gum." I was nineteen, had never lived away from home, and was about to embark on a two-year experiment in poverty. No way I could afford a real ring. So when I got down on one knee in front of Katrina in that airport departure lounge, I pulled out a foil gum wrapper folded twice lengthwise, wrapped it around her ring finger to size it, tore off the excess length, and fastened the ends together with a piece of Scotch tape I had stuck to the ATM card in my wallet. Voila! Instant engagement ring. Of course, it was worth about as much as I'd paid for the gum. I came home two years later only to have Katrina tell me that she'd met someone else while I was away. (That ended up being her first husband, whom I'll call . . . Jerkface.) "Yeah, yeah, that was it," said Bernard, wagging a finger at me. "A gum wrapper. And you know what else?" He leaned in close enough for me to gag on his breath, but without lowering his voice any. "She still has it. She still has that ring." I was stunned, completely stunned, but I tried not to let it show as I delivered my verbal judo flip, my coup de grâce. "That's nothing, Bernard," I said, patting him on the shoulder. "I still have the gum." For a second there, Bernard looked like he believed me. Then everyone laughed good-naturedly, and he did too. The situation was defused. Bernard wandered peacefully away in search of other entertainment. "You really dodged a bullet there, pal," Bob told me. As I watched poor Bernard drift around the party showing people his stomach tattoo, I realized that I probably had. Back in 1988, that is, when Katrina broke up with me.]]> http://www.shunn.net/memos/2009/12/le_mot_juiced_1.html http://www.shunn.net/memos/2009/12/le_mot_juiced_1.html Mon, 21 Dec 2009 19:29:03 -0600 Care and Feeding of Your Backups Last April I wrote the first draft of a story called "Care and Feeding of Your Piano." It's a short, humorous piece written entirely as excerpts from the interactive instruction manual for a bioengineered piano*. Armed with some suggestions from my writing group, I sat in my Baltimore-area hotel room a month and a half later and spent two hours applying some heavy revisions to the sucker, which including reordering many chunks of text to achieve more comic juxtapositions. I sync'd the laptop with the USB memory stick I always carried as backup—at least, I presume I did, because that had long been my habit—then rushed over to Balticon for my scheduled reading. I read that story and one called "Timesink" (which was then and is still forthcoming in Electric Velocipede) directly from my computer screen. The reading seemed to go over pretty well, at least according to Jamie Rubin, who was there. In June, as I prepared to attend the Blue Heaven workshop, I got frustrated with all the cruft slowing down my laptop, so I wiped it and reinstalled Windows XP. At the end of that month, we moved to Chicago. As we unpacked, I became more and more uneasy the longer my black Manhattan Portage shoulder bag, which I was looking for, failed to turn up. I always carried my USB memory stick in a little Velcro'd pocket on the front of it. The shoulder bag has never turned up, one of the very few casualties of our move. It wasn't until we'd been here a month or more that I went to the desktop machine to take another look at my revised version of "Care and Feeding." I was going to give it a quick polish-and-trim and get it out there—first stop, New Yorker "Shouts & Murmurs" submission. (Why not, right?) But what appeared before my eyes was not my lovely revised version of the story but my first draft. Apparently, in all the excitement of preparing for the move, I had never sync'd the memory stick to my desktop machine. Fine, I figured, I'll just have to get it off the laptop. But it wasn't there either. That's when I remembered I had wiped the machine in June, and the story directory there was identical to the one on the desktop machine. With mounting horror, I tried a couple of different low-level scans on the laptop, but to no avail. The revised draft was gone. It took me about another six months to work up the energy to tackle re-revising my first draft. That's what I did Sunday, taking a break from the minor revisions to The Accidental Terrorist that are my focus here for the next week or so. It took me all day to achieve what felt like a reasonably successful recreation of what I did in that Baltimore hotel room, far longer than those original revisions had taken. At the end of the day, I printed out the story and read it aloud to Laura while she cooked. I made some notes on the manuscript as I read, as I usually do. Yesterday I went to the desktop machine to pull up the story and fix the elements I'd noted. What appeared before me was the original, untouched first draft. I was puzzled. I clearly recalled syncing the laptop to the desktop machine after printing the manuscript the day before, but perhaps I had goofed something up. I turned on the laptop, which is where I had done the revisions. I brought up the story. I felt a knot in my stomach at the realization that this, too, was the original draft. I had sync'd the wrong way, overwriting my revised draft with the original. I swear, something in my subconscious is out to get this story. At least this time I have a printout of what I did. All I need to do is type it back in. (No scanner here for an OCR shortcut.) Of course, all the stalling blogging I've done so far today will demonstrate how mountainous even that simple task seems to me right now.
The Maedong & Daughters pNano® cG Mark VI.2, to be precise, the only autotropic concert grand piano with true Biostatic Action™.]]> http://www.shunn.net/memos/2008/02/care_and_feeding_of_your_backu.html http://www.shunn.net/memos/2008/02/care_and_feeding_of_your_backu.html Tue, 19 Feb 2008 14:19:31 -0600 Shaggy Dog Story is a story about a runaway spaniel, and I was reminded of it by the absence of the agency dog. This happened this past Saturday night, as Laura and I were on our way to a wedding celebration. We had just left the house. It was cold and dark and windy and wet out, and when we reached the corner a brown and white adult spaniel of some sort, probably a Cavalier King Charles, was wandering around. Its person was not in evidence. "Hello, little puppy," said Laura, bending down. A woman in black was hurrying toward us. "I was just trying to catch it," she said. "I don't see its owner." "Let's see if it has a tag," I said. The dog was dragging a sparkly silver leash. Laura reached for the leash, but the dog ran out into the street against the light. A car was coming. I yelled—it wasn't a word, just a loud primal sound. The dog came three feet or less from running right under the tires of an SUV. It got to the far corner before the next car could squash it. Relieved, Laura and I dashed across the street (when traffic allowed), and she caught the dog half a block down. I turned and flashed the lady in black a thumbs-up. "It has a tag," I shouted. We walked the dog farther down the block to where we could read the tag in the light from an Eckerd. It was a rabies tag. The only contact info was the phone number of the vet. "What do we do?" Laura said. "I'm not sure," I said. Then we realized that we had both left our cell phones home. Not that the vet was likely to be open at that hour. "Maybe take it to the pet store?" We were on our way to a wedding, remember. "They might be able to keep it until they can contact the vet." "I wouldn't take it there. Maybe that vet down Steinway is open?" "Okay." We started walking. The spaniel was not a quick walker, not like Ella, and it was whimpering and maybe limping a little, so after a bit I picked it up and carried it. We didn't like the vet idea, really, but was also didn't want to leave the dog at our apartment unattended, not unsupervised with a dog of our own. But the farther we walked from where we first saw it, the more the dog began to whine and squirm. Finally Laura suggested we take the dog back the way we had come. We would see if maybe the owner was somewhere around looking for it. If not, we would close the dog in one of our rooms with the door closed, and with water. It would drive Ella nuts, but we didn't know what else to do. As we approached the corner where we had first seen the spaniel, we could see about four people. The woman in black was there, as was a long-haired woman in her mid-twenties. The long-haired woman had her back against a wall, and a man in a big black coat was standing very close to her, talking. There was also a kid of about twenty, standing near the entrance of a little store around the corner. "Here they are!" said the woman in black. Laura and I both saw that the long-haired woman had tears running down her cheeks. "Is this your dog?" I asked. The woman burst our sobbing and took the dog from me. "Oh, I thought you were gone!" She clutched the dog to her chest and slid down the wall until she was sitting. The woman in black said, "I told her the dog almost got runned over, but a nice couple went after it." Laura had squatted down beside the long-haired woman and was making comforting small talk. I noticed the dog was standing next to the sobbing woman. "For God's sake!" I told the sobbing woman. "Keep that leash in your hand and don't let go!" According to Laura, when I yelled, the woman wrapped the leash around her hand several times. Also according to Laura, the woman was on something. When the long-haired woman had calmed down some and was standing up again, she said, "Where did that man go?" "What man?" said the woman in black. "The policeman. He was talking to me right here. He has my wallet." Indeed, the man in the black coat had somehow slipped away in the confusion of returning the dog. "Why does he have your wallet?" asked the woman in black. "He said he was a policeman," said the long-haired woman. "He asked for my wallet." "Did he show you any I.D.?" "No, but he said he was a policeman." "That guy took her wallet," said the woman in black. "Did anyone see where he went?" The kid near the store said, "I think maybe he lives upstairs?" Another kid had come out of the store by now. "We need to call the police," said the woman in black. "The real police. Who has a phone?" We didn't, but the kids outside the store went inside to call. Laura was already hurrying up the block, trying to see if a man walking up the sidewalk was the same one who had been at the corner. He wasn't, but that didn't keep me from worrying that Laura was going to get herself shot peering into people car windows. We returned to the group on the corner, reported that the man in the black coat was nowhere in sight, wished the long-hair woman good luck, said goodbye to the spaniel, and rushed off to our wedding. We don't know what happened next. Moral of the story? Um, if your dog is missing, don't give your wallet to a random stranger? And for God's sake, don't let go of the leash!]]> http://www.shunn.net/memos/2007/02/shaggy_dog_story.html http://www.shunn.net/memos/2007/02/shaggy_dog_story.html Memos from the Moon Fri, 23 Feb 2007 16:53:00 -0600 If This Had Been an Actual Emergency... ConEd immediately, having a vague memory of a similar situation in my Brooklyn apartment and being made to understand by the man who came to check it out that I had been kind of silly not to know this wasn't the dangerous kind of gas smell. So I called up ConEd very late this morning, from work. In the voicemail treet, I deliberately did not choose the emergency options. I waited for a customer service representative. I said I might have smelled a little gas in my kitchen. "What's your address, sir?" I gave it, expecting that next we would schedule a little confab for later in the week at which I would sit home for hours wondering what time the gas man would deign to arrive, and the gas man would fritter away his day and finally show up with five minutes to spare before the end of the agreed-upon appointment window. "Thank you," said the customer service guy. "Someone will arrive within forty-five minutes." "Um." My brain shut down. "It was just— I was expecting— I'm not home. I'm calling from work." "Sir, we take gas leaks seriously. They're very dangerous. We treat them as emergencies." "But, I thought— I'm not—" "Is someone home?" "No." "Is there a neighbor? A landlord?" "No, there's not— I'm— Can't you—?" "Sir, we dispatch these calls immediately. If they arrive and no one is home, they will break down the door. We treat these as emergencies." I finally got my head around it. "So they're on their way." "Yes, sir. Where are you?" "In the city. How long do I have?" "Zero to forty-five minutes, depending. Sir, I suggest you get there if you don't want your door broken down." I dashed off a terse email to Paul Witcover, with whom I was supposed to have lunch, and dashed out the door. The elevator refused to come, so I ran down the stairs. I grabbed a cab on Park Avenue and directed it homeward. As we flew up Park Avenue, I tried calling Laura, but she was doing presentations at work and didn't answer. I tried calling a friend who lives nearby to see if she was home or working today, but got no reply. I would have tried calling our other friends who might both have been home because they are moving out of state soon, but I needed to talk to the first friend to get their number. I was thinking less about the doors to the building and the apartment than about Ella, and whether she would end up wandering the streets after the ConEd men burst through the splintered portals like Big Brother's henchmen. The cab seemed to crawl. It was like a race against time from a movie, except it never seemed to end. Everything that could possibly get in the way did. Trucks backed up into intersections. People abandoned cars in the street. Vehicles failed to move in time at traffic lights and we missed our chances. Traffic snarled and gridlocked. Traffic actually got worse in Queens the closer we got to home, and I watched the time edge past 25 minutes. At 30 minutes, after I'd been calculating for some blocks at what point it would be faster to just hop out of the cab and run the rest of the way, we finally turned onto my street. I had 22 bucks already in my hand, my shoulder bag strapped around me, and my door keys at the ready. Heart in throat, I spied a ConEd van pulled over at the curb opposite our apartment. I scanned the front of the building from half a block away, but didn't think I could see any door-busting damage. Then as we slowed down and I tossed the money at the driver through the plexiglas window, I saw one lone ConEd man loitering by the van. He wore a visored cap and had a long gray mustache. I hopped out of the cab almost before it had stopped and ran to the door, greeting the ConEd man over my shoulder. As I hurriedly shoved aside the stack of mail that had been shoved through the door slot, I asked the ConEd man, "Have you been waiting long?" "Just got here," he said. He looked to me as if he had been loitering for a bit, but I was grateful and relieved (though my hands were still shaking) and I didn't want to push it. I warned him about the dog, burst into the apartment, shoved a very confused Ella out into the back yard and shut the door on her. I was doing everything in movie-hero time. The taciturn ConEd man checked the stove and told me we had a pilot light out. He relit it, then used a length of rubber hose connected to what looked like a small car battery with an LCD readout to check for natural gas. "Negative," he said. "You're fine." And he left. And I joined the dog in the back yard, where she flung herself at me repeatedly and covered my head with licks while I let the jammering of my nerves dissipate. Then it came to me. That's what the other guy had told me in Brooklyn that one time. One of my pilot lights had gone out then too, and he had shown me how to light it again. I wonder if I'll still remember this by the next time it happens.]]> http://www.shunn.net/memos/2006/04/if_this_had_been_an_actual_eme.html http://www.shunn.net/memos/2006/04/if_this_had_been_an_actual_eme.html Memos from the Moon Wed, 12 Apr 2006 00:00:00 -0600 Coming of Age Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine. Back in 1983, when I was almost 16 years old, my father brought a copy home for me after it became clear to him that writing SF was just simply going to be something that I did, and there would be no use complaining about it. He found the magazine at a 7-Eleven and showed me the address for fiction submissions. It was a generous gesture on his part, especially since a few years earlier he had forbidden me to read the evil stuff. Asimov's Science Fiction, June 1983 That first issue had a Fred Pohl story on the cover, I recall, "The High Test." I read the magazine greedily, then called the phone number inside to subscribe. The woman on the other side of the line wanted me to give a credit card number. It took some doing, but I convinced her to enter my subscription without one, and to bill me later. I'm not sure why I didn't just mail in a subscription card. I think I was just too excited to get my subscription started. Before long, I had my first rejection in hand—a photocopied sheet of possible reasons my story was not of use to Asimov's, with editor Shawna McCarthy's second-generation signature at the bottom. Crushed but undeterred, I sent in another story. Same outcome. Every time the new issue arrived, I would read it cover to cover. Those pages are where I first read Lucius Shepard, Bruce Sterling, James Patrick Kelly, Kim Stanley Robinson, John Kessel, Michael Swanwick, Nancy Kress, Connie Willis, Michael Bishop, Norman Spinrad, Dan Simmons, and a host of other exemplary short fiction writers I'm forgetting now. I still have many of those issues, the ones with the stories that affected me most. "Speech Sounds" by Octavia Butler is one of the first that comes to mind. More even than the novels I had long read, those stories were my first real education in the art and craft of writing science fiction. Asimov's Science Fiction, April/May 2006 I would lie in bed some nights and picture myself in that company. I would picture my name on the cover of Asimov's. Years went by. Editors changed. I kept writing and submitting stories. Eventually I started making sales—to other magazines. I made a lot. I even landed Shawna McCarthy as my agent and received a Nebula nod. And still that stack of Asimov's rejections got higher and higher. Something like 50 sheets high. Then last year an email came from Sheila Williams, the newest Asimov's editor. She had received, read, and wanted to buy my novella "Inclination." The streak was officially broken. Today Associate Editor Brian Bieniowski dropped by my office. He hand-carried me my contributor's copies of the April/May 2006 Asimov's, which should be available on newsstands early next week. (I do have the tremendous good fortune of working ridiculously close to the Dell Magazines offices.) Twenty-three years later, my name is on the cover of Asimov's. I will admit to having to swallow a lump in my throat. I'm glad that young, starry-eyed kid is still around to see this—especially in an issue that Sheila describes in her editorial as coming-of-age–themed.]]> http://www.shunn.net/memos/2006/02/coming_of_age.html http://www.shunn.net/memos/2006/02/coming_of_age.html Memos from the Moon Tue, 28 Feb 2006 00:00:00 -0600 Frey in Hell James Frey and his partially made-up memoir than we are about domestic wiretaps, freedom of information in China, and terrorists taking power in Palestine. And it makes sense to me why. Countless hordes of people feel like they were lied to by James Frey. The reason this is more upsetting than being lied to by the President and his cronies—which happens and continues to happen on a regular basis—is that we're used to being lied to by politicians. We may be appalled by it, but we take this as expected behavior. Writers, however, are a breed apart. Yes, their main job is to entertain us, but when they're doing their job well they are saying something true to us about what it means to be human, something that resonates in us, the readers, to our very cores. Thousands upon thousands of people felt that James Frey had told them something very resonant and true about their own lives, only now it's come out that what he said was, in many ways, made up. Of course people are upset. Of course they feel betrayed. On some level it must feel like finding out your spouse has been leading a double life. I feel betrayed as well, but not because I read and believed A Million Little Pieces. I have not read the book. I feel betrayed as a writer on behalf of my profession. James Frey's responsibility as a writer was to tell the truth, and he failed to live up to that responsibility. But what do I mean by "telling the truth"? Certainly writers of fiction do not "tell the truth" in the conventional sense of the phrase. They make up stories. But the stories they make up should speak to a deeper truth, saying something true about the way the world and the human soul work. The best fiction is made up from whole cloth yet woven from the fabric of reality. It is true in a way more meaningful that mere facts can be. But a memoir is a different case. It's a work that stakes a claim to a different sort of territory. By saying "This really happened to me," the memoirist sets up a different set of rules for himself. His job is still to entertain and to illuminate the truth of the human condition, but even as he employs some of the same tools as the novelist, he has excluded himself from using a certain other subset of those tools—namely, the right to freely invent incidents and events. Note that I say "freely." No memoir can possibly be unimpeachably factual in its every aspect. Conversations from years past can never be reconstructed accurately, for instance—unless they happen to have been recorded—and would likely make for less than compelling reading if they were. Events in the real world rarely have the dramatic arc of compelling fiction. Participants in those events may be less than thrilled to see themselves portrayed in all their factual warty glory. The memoirist deploys the novelist's tools insofar as he chooses what events to emphasize and how, in what ways to distill amalgams of old conversations to their most readable, meaningful essence, and what balance between literal reportage and obfuscating detail to employ in order to avoid embarrassing the real participants—or prodding them to legal action. What the memoirist definitively cannot do is make up events without letting the reader know.1 To do so is to shatter the delicate surface tension between real-world facts and the amount of distortion they can bear while still rendering a more deeply truthful report of the world. Or, if not to shatter it immediately, certainly to set up conditions to make it more likely to be shattered at some point in the future. As has happened with James Frey and A Million Little Pieces. Never has a book's title reflected the state of its pretense to truth more accurately. For all that I feel betrayed as a writer, I can understand and even sympathize with what happened to Frey. He says he tried marketing his manuscript as a novel originally. And perhaps as a novel A Million Little Pieces could have survived as a work that speaks to a core truth. But the moment Frey decided to call the book a memoir instead, he changed the nature of relationship between the outer and inner worlds of the work. Whatever truths lay at its heart were now subject to a different set of torsions from without, were now viewed through a different prism—choose what metaphor you will. The work changed. The work changed in a way that no doubt made it easier for him to sell to a publisher, and consequently made it easier for a publisher to sell to the public. It had to have been a very tempting and even easy choice to make—but once made it led, as lies will, to even bigger lies, and then to bigger lies still. At what point does to stop seeming possible to reverse the avalanche you've started? How much effort must it take to keep trying to outdistance it? I don't envy James Frey the last couple of years, let alone the past few weeks. I'll come clean here. Part of what pisses me off about the whole situation is that Frey, at least at the moment, is continuing to make money off his big lie, big money. He may be taking a world of shit, but you know what? At the end of it all, he still has the wherewithal to write—a pursuit for which he obviously has vast talent—full-time. And he has the wherewithal for all the therapy and/or rehab he still so richly needs. And still The Accidental Terrorist, over which I labored hard, and in which I went to exquisite pains to adhere to the truth as best I could, sits unsold, while I sit here in a 7th floor office in Manhattan doing a job that merely pays the bills and doesn't feed my soul. Okay, whatever. We all have it tough, and I feel real sympathy for James Frey and the hole he's dug for himself. I live in fear of the mere thought of the accusations of lying that may be leveled at me by pissed-off Mormons when my memoir finally sees print. Hell, I have moments when I fear that I did make up the whole story of my arrest and conviction. Being caught out and called to task can't be a very pleasant experience. But that doesn't change the fact that James Frey lied and lied his way to the top of the bestseller lists, and if the worst he has to endure as a consequence is a stern tongue-lashing from Oprah, well boo fucking hoo. We should all be so well rewarded for our bad decisions. That doesn't mean Oprah herself get a free pass on this one. I'm sure she feels genuinely pissed off at James Frey, but I doubt very much it comes from a personal sense of betrayal. No, James Frey put her precious Book Club in jeopardy. Do you think Oprah would have chosen Elie Wiesel's Night as her latest club selection, let alone announced a high school essay contest about it, if she didn't need to distract us from the unpleasant little storm brewing over A Million Little Pieces? Not a chance. Frey taking his lumps on television yesterday was all business. Bank on it. I'll buy Oprah's sincerity when she gets someone like George Bush on her show and lambastes him for lies that matter to something more than just our feelings.
1 It's common practice for memoirists to state clearly at the outset of the book to what degree they have taken liberty with the facts. The work that comes to mind immediately is the addiction memoir Dry, by Augusten Burroughs, which states on the copyright page: "This memoir is based on my experiences over a ten-year period. Names have been changed, characters combined, and events compressed. Certain episodes are imaginative re-creation, and those episodes are not intended to portray actual events." The caveat disappointed me when I noticed it, having already made it more than halfway through, and diminished my enjoyment of the book, but didn't prod me to pick up a pitchfork.]]> http://www.shunn.net/memos/2006/01/frey_in_hell.html http://www.shunn.net/memos/2006/01/frey_in_hell.html Memos from the Moon Fri, 27 Jan 2006 00:00:00 -0600 Catch-None shunn.net, one of the pleasures of that vanity acquisition was catch-all email forwarding. What this meant was that any email sent to shunn.net—whether hunkylitfox@shunn.net, scumsuckingasswipe@shunn.net or mr.mxyzptlk@shunn.net—would end up in my inbox. In essence, I had an infinite set of email addresses to call my own.* This was back in those heady days when spam was still a relatively scarce and benign offense, though even then the prudent were being warned not to put "mailto" URLs on their web sites, owing to the many robots out harvesting just such creatures to feed into their nefarious spam machines. Over the years, as the tide of spam has risen, I've applied an increasing rigorous series of filters to hold back the onslaught. I've watched my daily spam intake increase logarithmically—maybe one a day back in the day, then ten, then a hundred, then a thousand. Yes, a thousand. Part of this was due, I admit, to having placed many of those pesky bill@shunn.net links on my site. By the time I realized I seriously needed to scour them, the damage was done. My email address was out there, prominently listed amongst the ingredients for spam. But that was not all of it. Spammers grew more clever by leaps and bounds. They took to running whole dictionaries of common and not-so-common first names through their software, pairing each with domain names that anyone could glean from a handy DNS server. I received spam targeted at everyone from aaron@shunn.net to zusu@shunn.net. I began filtering for spam at the client level, but then the spammers started targeting long lists of last names. smith@shunn.net, jones@shunn.net, and hickenlooper@shunn.net all were wooed with offers of low remortgaging, ch34p v14gr4, and penile enhancement. I erected my fortress walls higher, applying filters at the server level as well as at the client level. Still the floodwaters continued to rise as spammers came up with ever-cleverer techniques for foiling the ever-cleverer filters. But even as good as the filters became, if I didn't leave my email client running all night, it could take upward of half an hour for my software to download and process all the messages that arrived in the course of eight short hours. I finally shut down bill@shunn.net entirely, shifting the burden of my personal correspondence to a different address that I'm not stupid enough to print here. Still the levels rose. I'm not sure quite why I waited so long—perhaps because I was loath to lose any of the increasingly rare real email messages suspended in that rising tide. But today something snapped, as I awoke to the prospect of downloading more than three thousand email messages to find the wheat amidst the chaff. Projected out over a full day, that's ten thousand emails in 24 hours. That's just unsupportable. My catch-all forwarding is no more. I have set up a bare handful of email addresses where messages can actually get through to me, but everything else at shunn.net, and indeed at any of the other domains I now own, but everything else will bounce. And the bounces contain a message that wishes the ingestion of shards of fused silicon dioxide and subsequent painful expiration upon the senders of unsolicited commercial email. So far today, since slamming the fortress gates shut this morning, exactly two spam messages have gotten through. I feel as if, having lain awake at night for months upon months while the neighbors run heavy excavation and construction equipment, they've finally been evicted and I can hear the crickets chirping again. Ah, blissful quiet! If only I wasn't certain those two messages represent the leading edge of another slow logarithmic assault.
* This, of course, is not literally true. There is an upper limit on the allowable length of an email address, which means the set isn't really infinite. It's just really fucking big.]]> http://www.shunn.net/memos/2004/10/catchnone.html http://www.shunn.net/memos/2004/10/catchnone.html Memos from the Moon Fri, 08 Oct 2004 00:00:00 -0600 Airing Things Out Homo sapiens. It's all in the construction of the pelvis bone, you see. The way our femurs connect makes the leg turn naturally outward when sitting. To draw our knees together, our thigh muscles must flex, must perform work, must burn actual calories. I say this not to excuse our troglodytishness but merely to explain that our wretched behavior is directed at you only on a genetic level, not a conscious one, and that when our, er, birthday parcels are pointing your way we've merely momentarily relaxed our vigilence, if indeed we possessed any in the first place, in exhaustion. With knees locked firmly together and thighs a-tremble, I remain yr humble servant]]> http://www.shunn.net/memos/2004/09/airing_things_out.html http://www.shunn.net/memos/2004/09/airing_things_out.html Memos from the Moon Mon, 27 Sep 2004 00:00:00 -0600 A Tribute to the Class of '84 The following remarks were delivered at the Sheraton City Center in Salt Lake City, Utah, on the occasion of the Davis High School (Kaysville) 1984 class reunion. The opening paragraph is in response to master of ceremonies Jodi Allison, my employment by the National Council on the Aging having prompted from her some mordant comment or another. I'll tell you how I'm doing with that aging thing, Jodi. I'm still 36. At least until tomorrow. I hope you'll forgive me if I read from my notes. I'm afraid if I wing it I'll start talking like a New Yorker from sheer nerves. Anyway, it's an honor and a humbling experience to stand before you on this beautiful Friday the 13th and remember the Davis High School Class of '84. Looking out over this crowd—man, a lot's changed since high school. Speaking for myself, I don't think I'd even fit in my locker anymore. But that's why we're here tonight—change. We've come together to celebrate not just old times but having survived all the changes between then and now. So when Cheri asked me to speak, I started thinking what it was like in that year George Orwell made ominous, 1984, and how different our world is two decades later from the one we knew then. Let's go back to May of 1984 for a few minutes and try to remember what it was like. Ronald Reagan was in the White House and we didn't know for sure about the Alzheimer's yet, and Walter Mondale was shortly to chose Geraldine Ferraro as the first (and so far only) woman to run for vice-president on a major-party ticket. The Iran-Contra scandal was still two years from breaking, the Berlin Wall was five years from falling, and the Soviet Union, the only significant threat to world peace most of us could imagine, was seven years from collapsing under its own weight. The space shuttles Challenger and Columbia were both still flying, and the president would not use the term "AIDS" in public for another year. Closer to home, Scott Matheson was governor of the state. Today his son is running for the same office, against the son of chemical mogul Jon Huntsman. In sports, John Stockton had just been drafted from Gonzaga by the Utah Jazz. Karl Malone would be drafted from Louisiana Tech the following year. The Billboard #1 hits so far that year were "Owner of a Lonely Heart" by Yes, "Karma Chameleon" by Culture Club, "Jump" by Van Halen, "Footloose" by Kenny Loggins, "Against All Odds" by Phil Collins, "Hello" by Lionel Richie, and, the week we graduated, "Let's Hear It for the Boy" by Deniece Williams. The Police were the most popular band in the world, Sting was still cool, and Darin Goff was the only one in the school who'd heard of R.E.M. (And Darin, you'll be pleased to hear my father still doesn't like me hanging out with you.) You could like new wave or hair metal but not both, and no one would ever have guessed that in 2004 you could put on your white socks and sandals and sign up for a week-long Caribbean cruise with Styx, Journey, and REO Speedwagon. Oh, yeah, and we mostly listened to this stuff on cassette or LP. The compact disc had been around for a year or two, but most of what you could buy on CD was classical music. In movies, the Star Wars saga had ended the year before—or so we thought. The top flicks the year so far had been Footloose, Police Academy ... One, Romancing the Stone, and the one I cut seminary to see, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. The Kaysville Theater was a year away from getting picketed when it showed its first R-rated movie, Beverly Hills Cop, and still to come that summer were Star Trek III, Ghostbusters, Gremlins, The Karate Kid, and Purple Rain. (Purple Rain. Man. Last month my wife and I had front row seats at Madison Square Garden to see Prince, together with Morris Day & The Time. What a show. It's funny how nostalgic we get for music we didn't even listen to when it was new.) On television the top shows were Dallas, Dynasty, and The A-Team. M*A*S*H had been over for a year, and Cheers was only two years old. Seinfeld was still six years in the future, Friends ten, and The Sopranos was, you know, fuhgeddaboutit. The state of the art in home computers was the Apple IIe, which had a ceiling of a whopping 128 kilobytes of memory. Today I carry one thousand times as much storage capacity on my wrist, in the form of a USB drive built into my watch, and at least fifty times as much as what existed in the entire computer lab at Davis High. And even that is just a tiny fraction of what comes today with the lowest-end home computer. The Internet existed in 1984, but it linked only government, university, and research institutions. If you went online, you were probably dialing into a bulletin-board system somewhere. On today's Internet, it may indeed seem that Big Brother is watching far us more closely than in 1984, but on the other hand we have a much better view of him. The sum total of human knowledge is at our fingertips, just a Google search away, right alongside and sometimes indistinguishable from warnings about organ-harvesting rings in Cabo San Lucas, pleas for help getting money out of Nigeria, and lists of what kids in 2004 no longer know that kids from 1984 did. Back then the research for this little summation would have taken me half a day at a good library. Instead I did it at my kitchen table in less than an hour while my laptop computer played Beethoven sonatas over a wireless network connection to my desktop computer in the next room. Okay, that's a little of what the world was like when we were in high school, but what about high school itself? In a way, every one of us went to a different high school, with different schedules and different teachers and different friends. That's one of the things that makes a reunion like this so interesting—comparing and contrasting our different memories to get a more complete picture of what that time was really like. So keeping in mind how subjective this is, I want to share some of the random things I remember from high school. I remember the teachers. I remember English class with Mrs. Storey, who made discussing Faulkner fun, and who always had personalized suggestions of great books that weren't on the curriculum but which she was pretty sure we'd enjoy reading anyway. I remember economics with Bryant Jensen, who made me feel as if I actually understood economics, at least for as long as he was explaining it, and who occasionally made me feel like the dumbest kid on the face of the earth, which was probably good for me. I remember chemistry with Frank Stevens, who we convinced ourselves was the lost seventh member of Monty Python. And there was his stuffed mole, which we kidnapped as often as we could from behind his increasingly paranoid security measures and held for ransom. I remember Lenzi Nelson, a great math teacher who always complained that in twenty years all we'd remember from his class was that he threw chalk. Well, I'm sure anyone who had him remembers the chalk, but he was my first computer teacher, and I'm still doing that today, so something else must have stuck from all those hours in his classes. I remember Mrs. Hill, who was the advisor to the Dart staff, who let Matt Kimball paint a giant ska man on the back wall of the Dart staff room. I wasn't even sure exactly what "ska" was, but I liked having that big black silhouette gazing down on us as Emilie Bean and I laid out the paper every month. I remember football games in the fall and winter, and how the social scene in the stands was almost as important as what was happening on the field. And then I remember the excitement of the state playoffs, going to see our team play at Rice Stadium, and showing up at those games in my black trenchcoat, long before black trenchcoats started becoming seen as a "danger sign." (Don't worry—there was no easy access to firearms at home.) But damn, that team was good, with Steve Sargent and Greg McNabb and everyone else, and not taking State was one of history's great tragedies. I remember the marquee out in front of the school, and the little jolt of anticipation wondering what the thing was going to say this time. Often as not, it was a message from someone to someone else asking if they'd go with them to the next school dance. I mean, how could you say no to the Davis High marquee? And that's another thing I remember—all the effort and elaborate planning that went into asking someone to a dance without actually walking up to them and doing it face-to-face. And every time, it had to be bigger and better than the time before. It was like Mutual Assured Destruction. The U.S. hires a skywriter, so Russia plans a fireworks display. Russia gets the Utah Jazz to deliver its message, so the U.S. gets the Utah Symphony. And the best part about it is the victim's reaction when the operation goes into effect. You come home and find that someone has brought in dump trucks to fill the entire basement of your house with Styrofoam packing peanuts, and the first thing out of your mouth, with genuine puzzlement, is, "Oh my heck! What's this?" So you spend the next three days cleaning it all out, and when you finally get that last final packing peanut out from under the couch and put it under your electron scanning microscope to find that someone has used a calligraphy brush made from the eyelash of a fruitfly to write "Will you go to Christmas Dance with me?" on it in ancient Chinese—then, then, you slap yourself on the forehead and say, "Oh, thank goodness. For a couple of days there I thought it might be Al Qaeda." I tell you, we should have gotten graded on asking people to dances. We should have gotten credit toward graduation for it. There are Pentagon generals who've never done as much logistical planning as went into asking someone to a dance. But I digress. There's more I remember, but most of all I remember people who are no longer with us. Who could forget, or hasn't tried to, the morning intercom announcements from Mr. Cook, which always wrapped up with a rundown of the lunch menu including that "one—half—pint—milk"? I remember hearing the news about Mr. Cook's passing many years ago, and I imagine he's now singing lustily with the heavenly choir—and goosing the other angels when no one's looking. ("What are you whining about, Chumley?") And then there's Mrs. Beattie, one of the most influential and most frustrating teachers I ever had, who passed away just this spring. As far as I know she never moved to Florence after she retired, which she always said she intended to, but she lived quite a life nonetheless, and left her mark on countless students through the years. There are no doubt others I don't know about, and there are classmates, too, who sadly are no longer with us, and who we miss. John Whicker, Kim Burton. Alan Rushforth, who's been gone for more than twenty years. If there are others, we're thinking of them all, and of the family and friends who no longer enjoy their company and presence. Finally, one monumental part of the Class of 1984 is longer with us. I've just driven along Main Street in Kaysville for the first time in a couple of years, and I saw there's a new building that's gone up where our Davis High School stood for nearly a century. It's funny how there are some buildings you spend so much time in, whose corridors you scurry through for so many years, but you take them for granted, and it isn't until they come down that you realize what an important symbol and landmark they were in the community while they still existed, and what a long shadow they cast. I'm sure the new school will serve its students just as well, but it's still strange to think of the town without our dear old Davis High School To close, I'd like to consider one of the great myths we tell ourselves about high school—that it's an either/or proposition, that it was either our glory days and the rest of life is all downhill, or it was hell on earth and we spend the remainder of life trying to recover from it. I think for most of us the truth is probably somewhere in between. I know it was for me, and I thank you, Class of '84, for helping to make my high school experience the good thing it was. I hope it was good for you, and that as the world has changed and our children have started taking our places, things have kept getting better from there. The fact that so many of us actually showed up tonight would seem to indicate that this is, indeed, the case. Thank you.]]> http://www.shunn.net/memos/2004/08/a_tribute_to_the_class_of_84.html http://www.shunn.net/memos/2004/08/a_tribute_to_the_class_of_84.html Memos from the Moon Fri, 13 Aug 2004 00:00:00 -0600 A Good Heart Alliance for Young Artists and Writers, and was at the studio helping prepare an opening for two days later of an exhibit of some of the prize-winning artwork from this year's competition. She told the cabbie there was a change of plan and directed him to the hospital. It was a godsend to see Laura appear in the ER. The only worry I really had was how worried she would be about me, and how inconvenient my illness had to be coming as it did at the start of her busiest work week of the year. She left me her copy of Family Circle—which drew sniggers from at least one nurse—so I would have something, anything, to read while she ran home to walk the dog. When she returned and sweet-talked the security guard into letting her visit me again, she had brought me a collection of Michael Bishop stories, which helped partially restore my sense of manliness. It was also a far more effective salve than Family Circle for the fact that I was only 40 pages away from finally finishing Cryptonomicon—and Cryptonomicon was sitting in my shoulder bag back at the office. The long and short of it was, I was admitted to the hospital and held there for nearly 24 hours while being subjected to every non-invasiave cardiac test known to man, and a few that I suspects the residents just made up for the fun of it. (Let me remark briefly on the bewildering array of doctors and technicians to whom one must rehearse one's case history when one is incarcerated in a teaching hospital. Let me remark also upon the bewildering percentage of said doctors and technicians who are, pardon the phrase, cute girls. Let me remark also upon the fact that one thinks the tall, leggy, blonde sonagram tech-in-training who runs six miles a day and got out of advertising after seven years because it was too stifling might possibly have been flirting with one. At any rate.) The final determination was that not only had I not suffered a heart attack but that my heart, cholesterol, and blood pressure were all in altogether fine and healthy condition. I was released late Tuesday afternoon with my affliction still undiagnosed. Let me remark briefly here on the sharklike feeding frenzy that is departing patients vying for cabs outside the NYU Medical Center. It's even worse than the spectacle of the gray-haired children of privilege who feel entitled to all the cabs outside Lincoln Center after the opera lets out, regardless of who might have had his hand out first. After having three cabs kited out from under me, I decided to walk to Third Avenue to catch a ride uptown rather than suffer a really coronary thrombosis under the hospital's front awning. The puppy was beside herself to see me back home. I still don't know what the problem was, but I am following up with my personal physician. Our friend Stephanie, having suffered similar symptoms in the past, suspects I may at last have succumbed to that scourge of longtime city dwellers: asthma. That is for a pulmonary specialist to say, but it would be preferable to the other scary options that occur to me late at night. I made the gallery opening Wednesday night at Diane von Furstenberg's studio, by the way, which went terrifically well as far as I could see. Laura's coworkers were startled to see me walking around in a suit in the 90-plus-degree humidity after my trip to the brink of death. Frau von F. offered a little toast (to the artists, not to me), and I even glimpsed what other people assured me was the back of Lauren Bacall as she crossed the room and entered the store. (Laura waited on Lauren Bacall once as a seasonal employee at the Williams-Sonoma on the Upper East Side a couple of years ago, and recognized her in a flash.) Anyway, that's why my homework is late.]]> http://www.shunn.net/memos/2004/06/a_good_heart.html http://www.shunn.net/memos/2004/06/a_good_heart.html Memos from the Moon Wed, 16 Jun 2004 00:00:00 -0600 Tarnished Iridium, or Strutting Peacock, or Elvis—Lost Fellow Iridium web site proudly trumpeted that, for one night only, the set would feature SPECIAL GUEST ELVIS COSTELLO. We were quite happy to be able to secure three reservations for the first set of the evening. Doors would open at 6:30, so I arrived at Broadway and 51st nice and early to queue up to secure a good table. I was fourth in line outside Iridium, in fact. A portly, hale fellow arrived shortly after me, and the line was not much longer when Lee and Emily got there and butted in line with me. While we caught up, a forest green BMW sedan with smoked-glass windows idled at the curb. Once or twice it drove off, only to return a few minutes later, apparently having circled the block. The guy behind us in line pointed it out and said, "That's Elvis Costello's car." "How do you know?" asked Lee. "I'm a huge fan. Been to a *lot* of shows, hung out, you know." Suddenly Elvis Costello himself was walking from the car to the front door of Iridium. Lee and Emily were looking the wrong way so I tapped their arms and nodded, trying not to be too obvious about the celebrity-spotting. Elvis looked fit in a muted plaid coat and his trademark horn-rims. He also looked somehow pained, distressed. He peeked inside the door of the club, looked around, said something—and then, rather than going inside, closed the door, spoke for a moment to the two women at the head of the line, then got back in his car. The Beemer disappeared in the chilly night. The woman said something to the guy ahead of me, who turned around to me and my brother and sister-in-law. "Apparently he's unhappy with the way the show was advertised," said the guy. "He says he was only supposed to do two songs." I shrugged. I didn't figure Elvis Costello was supposed to be the focus of the set, but I could see why he didn't like the advertising. I passed the word to the guy behind us. The message continued Telephone-like down the queue, which was still less than a dozen people long. We shivered in the cold for close to forty-five minutes more before being admitted to the club. By then the queue stretched all the way past Ellen's Stardust Diner. From what happened later that evening, I must surmise that Elvis's message didn't filter back to the newcomers. Hell, even those of us who heard it didn't read the subtext entirely correctly.
#
The doors opened at six-thirty, as promised. After a check of our names on the reservation list, we descended a narrow stair to the basement and were shown to a table with seats right at the corner of the tiny stage. This was a long banquet-style table; three or four had been set up in rows perpendicular to the front of the stage. We were seated right down front. Lee and Emily were on the outside, looking straight onto the stage. I was seated on the inside, so that I had to turn my head or sit sideways to look at even the left side of the stage. I practically had to break my neck to see stage right. I also practically had to break my legs to get out of my seat to visit the men's room, the patrons were packed so close together down each row. The back part of the club, filled with little round tables, was just a crowded. I doubt Iridium gets that full even on Monday nights when Les Paul plays. We placed our dinner orders and rubbernecked as Bill Frisell sloped through the crowd on his way to the backstage door, looking relaxed, low-key, and a little befuddled. I sipped a nice Balvenie 12-year double wood with my burger, and was still nursing it when the show began. Lee Konitz at 76 is a portly fireplug who looks a little like Colonel Sanders cast as a Fisher-Price toy. He plays with his alto extended to the limit of its leash, in front of his stomach. Bill Frisell, 52 (whose face I practically had to look straight up to see), is fuzz-haired, bespectacled, and mild-looking, and seems awkward even as he cranks out his strangely angular and distinctive electric licks. Gary Peacock, 68, is gaunt, wiry, and weathered; put a cowboy hat on his head and he wouldn't look out of place in his hometown of Burley, Idaho. His eyes are so hooded that when he closes them while he plays you're hard-pressed to tell he isn't blind. Sitting in for Paul Motian (who, Konitz mentioned in the space between the set's two long improvisations, was out getting his "metronome" adjusted) was avant-garde drummer Matt Wilson, 39, who wouldn't look out of place behind the kit for a jam band like String Cheese Incident. The set was jazz in a defiantly free mode. Konitz and Frisell didn't play leads so much as trade cryptic lines, as if taking turns talking to each other about two entirely different subjects. Two or three times I recognized a snippet of some standard melody in Konitz's parts, as if in the course of throwing shirts out of his closet he occasionally came across one emblazoned with a commercial logo. As much as I enjoyed the set, I felt myself drifting sometimes, particularly during the first half, and I sort of halfway understood what they were doing onstage, and had even come expecting it. I had the sense that large portions of the audience were simply baffled. The second half of the set meandered around before settling into a startlingly funky (if low-key) groove that Peacock and Wilson somehow plucked out of the swirling oil-and-water tones of the lead instruments. The rhythm section's joy was palpable; Peacock in particular looked like one of the Happy Haunts from Disneyland's Haunted Mansion. The mother was having one hell of a good time. At last the jam came in for a landing (as did the Chimay that followed up my whisky), and the musicians accepted their applause and filed through the backstage door. The lights came up, and we kept applauding, all anticipating the band's return accompanied by Elvis Costello. Minutes went by. The band didn't return. The crowd murmured. We gradually became aware of an escalating commotion at one of the first round tables, near the middle of the club. Someone yelled something sharp and angry. We turned our heads, thinking some table had gotten a little carried away with their joking. No. It was obviously club management, flanked by some muscle, trying to calm down a table of angry patrons. "That's not what was advertised!" yelled one man. "You *knew* he wasn't going on, and you didn't say anything before the show!" More yelling, back and forth, as the crowd's murmur turned ugly. Granted, I'm quick to jump to the conclusion that a situation like that one is going to turn violent, but that's how the atmosphere felt. I was acutely conscious that I had a brother and his three-months-pregnant wife under my care (as my out-of-town guests, you know). I was trying to figure out what the best exit would be (answer: none, as I had already determined when scouting the fire exits as we first took our seats) when the yelling man stalked his way to the front exit. "Demand your money back!" he adjured the crowd as he crossed the room. "They knew he wasn't performing and they didn't say a word!" Then the room dissolved in cacophony. Everyone was trying to attract his waitperson to get the music charge removed from his bill. At our table, everyone near us was asking each other whether they were here to see Lee Konitz or Elvis Costello, as if to reassure ourselves of our superior jazz cred. It looked to me as if most of the rest of the room had trucked themselves in from Jersey on the promise of an intimate club gig with Declan MacManus himself. They weren't happy to have been rooked. People were moving around in places where they didn't need to be. Over my sister-in-law's shoulder I watched some guy with a droopy black mustache and long black hair shouting down into Lee Konitz's face. "You tell that motherfucker he'll never play in this town again!" he shouted, punctuating his words with finger jabs in the old man's chest. "Tell him yourself. The door's right there," said Konitz calmly. "I just will!" shouted the man, and tore through the backstage door. I thought he was referring to Elvis Costello, but my brother Lee heard more of the exchange and reports that they were talking about Gary Peacock. Similar confrontations seemed to be taking place around the room, though none came to blows. While the three of us dithered about whether or not to pay our bill, whether or not to stick around or just get out, the manager finally made an announcement about how people could see their waitperson to get the music charge removed from their bills, and how there would be passes available at the exit which would be good for free admission to any show Tuesdays through Thursdays. He didn't apologize for the advertising, nor for the lack of a pre-show announcement. The crowd members who were through with their waiters began struggling toward the exit, many of them grumbling about how passes for a free jazz show were worthless to them. Lee and Emily and I paid our full bill and joined the queue that was forming to talk to the manager and (we thought) get our free passes. The manager, a 20-some Brit with a shiny pale suit and suspect good looks, was hearing petitions right next to the exit to the stairs up to the street. When our turn was almost up, a livid Gary Peacock suddenly appeared from the stairwell, pushing himself up in the manager's face. I don't recall a lot of what was said, but it included Peacock inviting the manager out to the alley behind the club to settle this right now. "Look, mate, I'm dealing with a lot of angry customers right now, thank you very much," said the manager. "When that's taken care of, fuck yeah, any time, any place, I'll meet you." I thought Peacock was going to pop the manager one right there, but another club employee appeared to usher him toward the bar, not without some resistance. When our turn with the manager came, we asked for our passes. "I'm just reversing credit card charges here," said the manager. "You can get the passes upstairs as you leave. We've got a lot of good shows coming up. Ahmad Jamal. McCoy Tyner. Jack-o Pastorius. Plenty." "Jaco?" I said incredulously. I couldn't believe what I'd just heard. I wondered if the manager were deliberately fucking with me, to see whether I was a real jazz aficianado or just philistine VH1-addicted clubtrash. "Yeah, Jack-o." "You mean, the dead musician," said my brother Lee. "It's a tribute band," said the manager, sneering like we'd soiled his spats. "All right, whatever," I said, and we headed up the stairs. Sadly, Lee and I had to go back down in the melee to retrieve our coats from the coat check. And then Lee had to go down again to look for a lost glove. Which he found. But we all made it out alive—no thanks to Iridium, who advertised the show so crassly, nor to the bulk of the audience, who were too ignorant even to reason out what the words "Special Guest" mean in the context of a jazz show. Turns out, as I learned later that week from the New York Times, Elvis Costello was supposed to bring out a birthday cake for Lee Konitz at set's end and sing "Someone Took the Words Away" from his new album North. Apparently Gary Peacock didn't want to play backup for that and an argument during soundcheck resulted in Elvis walking out. If he'd just come out and told us that in the first place. Jesus, these sensitive artist types.
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For less dramatic reportage of the fateful Iridium show, see this NY Times review: A $400 Cake Wasn't Served, but the Band Played On (Free registration required to view story.)]]> http://www.shunn.net/memos/2003/12/tarnished_iridium_or_strutting.html http://www.shunn.net/memos/2003/12/tarnished_iridium_or_strutting.html Memos from the Moon Tue, 09 Dec 2003 00:00:00 -0600 How I Spent My Summer Blackout Boy, did I have a memorable birthday yesterday. Really, I'm glad everyone turned out to celebrate, but I didn't mean for us all to take over the Queensborough Bridge like that.... I was at work in Manhattan when the lights went out. It was an odd thing—they didn't snap off so much as slowly give up the ghost, occasionally reviving a bit, over the course of two or three minutes. I tried urging my officemates to leave almost immediately, but we dithered so much as a committee that we didn't pick our way down the fire stairs (pitch dark at some landings) until more than half an hour later. Our phone system relied on office electricity, and none of us could get a call out on our cell phones. I work at Park and 32nd. I bent my course straight downtown to Union Square (Park and 17th, more or less), where Laura and I have arranged to meet in case of emergency. I walked with two officemates, one of whom was listening to a portable radio with headphones and issuing such reports as that power was out all the way to Ohio and Ottawa. A little disconcerting. Laura was waiting at our prearranged spot, bless her soul, and the two of us walked across to 2nd Avenue and then uptown. At first we were salmon—everyone seemed to be coming downtown. Some businesses were giving out water (though Laura and I had both filled bottles before leaving). Around 35th or 36th, we bought very soft ice cream cones from Baskin-Robbins. At first, there was almost a festive atmosphere. People were gradually spilling into the streets, and vehicular traffic was gradually disappearing. Whether this was because of foot traffic or because the police were blocking off streets, I don't know. But when we crested the rise at 45th Street and looked uptown, the sight was amazing. Second Avenue was filled with a sea of people, as far uptown as we could see. Occasional cars and buses made their way down the street, but mostly it was a pedestrian game. The bars along the street were full and spilling out onto the pavement, and men in shirts and ties were ambling down the street with open 40s of Bud in their hands. Laura suggested stopping for beer, but I pointed out that the temperature was in the 90s and it would taste real cold and good until we started walking again and found we were dehydrated. When we got to 58th, we realized that people weren't just using the pedestrian walkway on the Queensborough Bridge to get across to Queens. People were walking onto the roadways, along with the cars. We decided we may as well take the upper roadway—when would we ever get a chance to walk across the bridge like this again? Before long we decided this had been a mistake, but it seemed like a worse idea to try to turn around and go back down the onramp. For the first quarter mile or so of the bridge, the cars were putting along in both eastbound lanes. Further along, though, the pedestrians had basically forced all the traffic into the left lane, and by the time we reached the midpoint of the bridge the pedestrians had taken over both lanes. If I looked back, I could see the cars still moving along, more slowly than the pedestrians. Unfortunately, by this time most of the people were wearing out and getting more short-tempered. I felt like a grain of dust in the air of a wheat silo—one spark and we could all explode. The trek down the far side of the bridge was pretty tense, but the tension dissipated as we curved down the offramp to 21st Street in Queens. From there it was just a long slog north. I've just looked up the figures on Mapquest, and in all it would appear that we each walked over six miles. We were both wearing sandals, though Laura was far more used to hers than I was to mine. The last mile and a half was brutal, with the thong digging between my first two toes. But at 7 pm we arrived home and blessedly kicked off our shoes. My feet were numb. (Note to self: Next time there's a disaster, wear comfortable walking shoes.) Our power was off in Astoria, of course, but the water and beer in the fridge were all still sufficiently cool and stayed that way throughout the evening. I unplugged all the appliances and electronics. I got a call from our friends Andrew and Stephanie, with whom we had planned to go out for dinner that evening for my birthday. Andrew had just arrived home after his long walk. We decided we would regroup for dinner another day. All the residents of the house (an apartment on each of three floors) eventually congregated in the back yard, and eventually Laura defrosted some steaks from the freezer by sealing them in Zip-Loc bags and floating them in a sink full of hot water. In darkness, with stars overhead, beers in our hands, and a battery-powered boombox tuned to WNYC, I cooked four steaks on the propane grill out back, which we ate on the patio with Jason from upstairs and his girlfriend Kristin, who contibuted a green salad. Laura, Jason and Kristin cleaned up, insisting that I, the birthday boy, stay out back and relax. I put the cover back on the grill, then was surprised by a procession from the house led by a Hostess Cupcake with a candle stuck in it. I endured the inevitable birthday song and blew out the candle successfully, a feat eerily reminiscent of the afternoon's events. Then we each ate a cupcake. We retired by eleven, and fell asleep to the strains of the Mister Softee truck idling in the street outside, doing brisk business. This morning our power is back on. I'm not getting a TV signal, not even enough of one to set the time on the cable box, though our Internet connection seems to be fine (strange, because it's on the same cable as the TV). The subways are still out of commission, though the bus routes that aren't feeder lines to the subways are running. They're telling us on the radio not to go into the city if we can help it, and we're only too happy to comply. In fact, I think I'll go now and crawl back into bed. http://www.shunn.net/memos/2003/08/how_i_spent_my_summer_blackout.html http://www.shunn.net/memos/2003/08/how_i_spent_my_summer_blackout.html Memos from the Moon Fri, 15 Aug 2003 00:00:00 -0600