JAMES PARKER

Medicine men

JAMES PARKER — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 23:08:36 GMT

Two Boston poets use their art for the good of the tribe
What if a poem had the power to heal loneliness?

What if a poem were a social force? Forget for a moment everything you know about poetry: forget the marooned beatnik at the open mic, and the tiny thoughts tattooed on white space in the New Yorker, and the voice reading something nice about apples on NPR. What if a poem had the power to heal loneliness — to leap between people in a kind of curative, relational flash? Imagine. Your average Red Line car at 4 pm is a laboratory of human estrangement: what if poetry could do something about that?

Boston poets Rafael Campo and Franz Wright are divergent, even contrasting, poetic animals. One is a doctor; the other has been, for significant stretches of his life, a patient. One writes metrically, with an appetite for form; the other brings up chunks of almost-unphraseable psychic experience. One is a lapsed Catholic; the other is a Catholic convert.

But both of them, through their work and their relation to the world, have laid bare a live wire between poetry and isolation — physical isolation, social isolation, spiritual isolation. Campo practices general internal medicine at Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, specializing in HIV-related conditions. As a gay man, he has trodden the stations of suffering from fearfulness to compassion, right through "the body's caves and slums."

"The AIDS ward where I worked was like a shipwreck," runs his poem "Night Has Fallen," "on some lost, quarantined island . . ."

Wright, a veteran of mental illness, delivered himself in part by mounting his own low-key ministry among the saddened and the lost. Who are, lest we forget, everywhere: "Someone in Hell is sitting beside you on the train./Somebody burning unnoticed walks past in the street" ("The Choice").

Tonally distinct, their poems are united in a common attempt to abolish separateness, to identify wholly and indivisibly with the other — be that other Jesus Christ, a homeless man with AIDS, or both. Campo, the physician, does it with expertise and quiet self-revelation; Wright, the patient, does it via a sort of reckless, illuminated hazarding of the ego. The un-heroic designation "local poet" is appropriate to neither of them — in our city, these two are a couple of medicine men.

The patient
Franz Wright buzzes me out to the Lincoln woods in his jaunty black Honda Civic Si, the car he bought with the Pulitzer money he won in 2004 for his collection Walking to Martha's Vineyard. "I don't do interviews anymore," he says. "Things always get distorted. But I like the Phoenix. I've always liked the Phoenix."

A smoker’s tale

JAMES PARKER — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 20:04:49 GMT

Will Self’s The Butt
Somehow one is surprised — if one is a semi-conscious literary journalist like me — by the discovery that Will Self has continued to produce books.

SILVER HAZE: The hoaxy, displaced, reality-TV feel is part of the recipe here — as is Henderson the Rain King.

The Butt | By Will Self | Bloomsbury | 368 pages | $26

Somehow one is surprised — if one is a semi-conscious literary journalist like me — by the discovery that Will Self has continued to produce books. So dashing and weird and telegenic a figure did he cut back in the early ’90s, when The Quantity Theory of Insanity and My Idea of Fun were coming out, that it seems he should have broken up by now, like a band, or passed onto some other, fresher phase of notoriety, like a housemate from The Surreal Life. Still, a writer writes, always (as Billy Crystal tells his students in Throw Momma from the Train), and here we are with his seventh novel, The Butt, the surprisingness of which is compounded by the fact that it’s very good indeed.

Tom Brodzinski, vacationing en famille in a Third World tourist trap, flicks his cigarette end off the hotel balcony; it lands with a flesh-creasing hiss upon the scalp of an elderly fellow guest, whereupon Tom is pitched into a netherworld of liability and tribal justice, attorneys and witch doctors. As part of the reparation proceedings, a local medicine man makes a ritual incision in Tom’s thigh: “The makkata closed in on Tom and knelt. He was clickety-clacking with his slack dry purse lips.”

Devout viewers of reality TV will of course be reminded of the Discovery Channel’s 2006 series Going Tribal and the famous “penis inversion” undergone by its host, Bruce Parry, among the Kombai tribesmen of West Papua. “The makkata’s breath was now on the front of his [Tom’s] shorts, and Tom could smell it despite the vegetal rot of the jungle.” The hoaxy, displaced, reality-TV feel is part of the recipe here. Add a dollop of Kafka’s The Trial, one small Joseph Conrad (peeled and sliced), half a Graham Greene, a squirt or two of Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King, and simmer it all over a low Flann O’Brien. . . . Mmm, tasty!

Baby fights the blues

JAMES PARKER — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 19:32:23 GMT

Juliana Hatfield is still standing. How a hometown guitar hero dodged the bullet, and then wrote a book about it
Evening slants in over the spires of Harvard, and Juliana Hatfield is watching me across the table.

Windows: An excerpt from Juliana Hatfield's new memoir, When I Grow Up, on her depression, and why Wal-Mart would have been blamed for her suicide.

Evening slants in over the spires of Harvard, and Juliana Hatfield is watching me across the table. Her eyes are blue — a wary and exposed blue. Buried after-chimes of “Feelin’ Massachusetts” begin to go off in my head: Take me to the ocean and leave me there. . . Pling, plong. That bubble of simplicity in her voice. Suppliant spirits jostle around me like ghosts from fanboy Hades: Juliana, they lisp. Juli-a-na. . .

Will I be rendered idiotic in this woman’s presence? She’s dressed darkly, chic-ly, like an existentialist. But I am a professional. “What is your relationship,” I ask her sternly, “with heavy metal?” She is silent, poised over the cup of herbal tea. “Do you have a relationship with heavy metal?” “Not really,” she says at last. “I mean, I like Black Sabbath . . . ?”

There’s something in the character of the ex-celebrity that corresponds to Walker Percy’s conception of the ex-suicide, and Hatfield — after her fashion — is both. “And you, an ex-suicide, lying on the beach,” wrote Percy in Lost in the Cosmos, “in what way have you been freed by the serious entertainment of your hypothetical suicide? Are you not free for the first time in your life to consider the folly of man, the most absurd of all the species, and to contemplate the cosmic mystery of your own existence?” Snatched out of Boston and into stardom by the post-grunge boom, downgraded to cult status by its subsequent bust, dogged all the while by a depression that turned acute on tour in the mid ’90s and required treatment, Hatfield has come through.

And now she’s contemplating the cosmic mystery of her own existence in a memoir, When I Grow Up, published this month by Wiley. The book records her progress from Duxbury teen to Berklee student to indie apprentice (with the Blake Babies) to solo alterna-idol to the distinctive creature we know today: one of the last princesses of her musical generation. Lots of rock-and-roll in there, lots of stinky clubs and vans in motion, but it’s a mordant and detached piece of work, the product of a floating mind, closer to Steve Martin’s Born Standing Up than Lemmy’s White Line Fever. Playing at the Middle East, she fucks up a guitar solo: “I felt brain-damaged . . . . Was it the year on Zoloft? Was it too many Bloody Marys? Valium? Ambien? Was it the time, when I was two years old, that Dad threw me in the pool to see if I would swim, and I sank to the bottom? Was it lack of adequate nutrition? Not enough meat? Was it pesticide runoff in my drinking water? Lead paint? Was it the DDT in the bug spray? Too much masturbation? Aliens?”

Blood sucks

JAMES PARKER — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 19:45:20 GMT

HBO does the ‘Southern Vampire’
With regard to this whole nouveau vampire thing, this revitalized appreciation for the undead, I should declare myself at the outset a more or less complete philistine.

BLEACHED: As Sookie Stackhouse, True Blood’s telepathic waitress heroine, Anna Paquin seems a little lost.

With regard to this whole nouveau vampire thing, this revitalized appreciation for the undead, I should declare myself at the outset a more or less complete philistine. There’s very little goth in my veins; I have no feel for the crypt or the curlicue. The vampire, as a figure, attracts me only in a remote and æstheticized sort of a way — like an Impressionist, say, or a Bolshevik. So I haven’t read Anne Rice, and I haven’t read Stephenie Meyer, and I haven’t read Charlaine Harris, on whose “Southern Vampire” series HBO’s new drama True Blood is based. I have seen Harris’s picture, however, and she looks like a lovely, jolly, un-vampiric woman.

Were you a fan of Six Feet Under? Because True Blood (which premieres this Sunday, September 7, at 9 pm) is written by Alan (American Beauty) Ball, who also directs a few of the episodes. The opening credits are great — bottleneck-blues thump over fretted images of snakehandlers, swamp shacks, midnight roads, trembling Pentecostalists, etc. And the premise is . . . interesting: after thousands of years of stakes-through-the-heart and garlic bulbs shaken in their faces like maracas, the vampires are comin’ out. They want respect, they want to lead normal lives. Above a liquor-store counter, a TV is making shrunken chat-show noises — Bill Maher is on screen, archly quizzing one of the brides of Nosferatu. “We’re citizens,” she insists, “We pay taxes, we deserve equal rights.” What? Rights for vampires? Surely this is liberalism run mad! “But doesn’t your race have a rather sordid history?” asks Bill, voicing the obvious concern. “Well, now that Japanese have perfected synthetic blood. . . . ” Ah, the Japanese. Bless their industrious hearts.

So the vampires are like . . . outsiders. Marginalized. Discriminated against. “GOD HATES FANGS,” proclaims a roadside sign. Ho-ho. And now they’re entering society. People are having sex with them, and not just that droopy vampire sex you see in the movies.

In recent years, the erotics of vampirehood have tended to function as a corrective to the hegemony of porn, privileging pallor, languor, swooning, and submission over the sunbed glow and the hard-on that never sets. The vampires of True Blood are raunchier than that. Nastier, if you will. Grrrr.

The truth is up there

JAMES PARKER — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 18:58:32 GMT

Clouds, sun dogs, and the dream of an atmospheric education . . . How one former TV reporter brought his sky gospel to the people
The sky’s on the move again, he can feel it.

Clouds, "Motion of the Ocean" (from We Are Above You) (mp3)

Slideshow: Cloud life: Cameraphone cloud pics from around town. By k bonami.

The sky’s on the move again, he can feel it. Mute, significant dramas of cloud in the late summer — huge manifestations, each one different, churned by its own bucking thermals and pockets of glare.

“This has just been the lengthiest skein of towering cumulus clouds,” says Jack. “In 30 years of almost excessive sky watching, I’ve never seen anything like it.”

And as to his mission, his vocation, there have been the usual celestial hints. Drifting serendipities. Prods of light, directing him.

“That’s the way it’s always worked with this thing,” he says. “Sometimes it’s like going up a glass mountain in Vaseline shoes. But there are connections, things falling into place, constantly. And then you have to follow them.”

There’s the organization — For Spacious Skies, a culturally mobile philosophical/meteorological think tank dedicated to the promotion of “sky awareness” — and then there’s the man: Jack Borden. And at this point, three decades into the story, there’s really no telling them apart. Who hasn’t Jack talked to, lectured, belabored, over the years, in his stop-start jazzy/professional cadences? Who hasn’t he laid his sky trip on? Educators, aviators, politicians, weathermen, mental-health professionals, prison administrators, conservationists; TV, radio, print . . . he’s crisscrossed the continent, pitching for the heavens, puffing his cloud patter. And the message? It’s really very simple.

“There are benefits — moral and aesthetic and educational benefits — to be derived from just being aware of what’s going on over your head.” Borden’s slogan Number One: “No kid who appreciates the beauty of the sky is ever going to mug a Cumberland Farms cashier!”

Jack, at 80, is avid, dogmatic, wry, ebullient, tireless. At 50, he must have been formidable; at 30, a maniac. His conversation is fast-moving and tangential. He has crystalline recall. We pass six overheated and talk-filled hours as interviewer and subject, in the course of which I fortify myself with (tallying it all up) a PowerBar, a mug of tea, a bottle of water, a swordfish steak, a Caesar salad, a Heineken, and two French rolls. Jack’s total intake: a cup of coffee and a root beer.

Beijing sting

JAMES PARKER — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 19:48:00 GMT

Exposed: A top-secret government memorandum, obtained this past week by the Phoenix, gives the games away
Greetings, faithful steward of information!

FROM General Administration of Press and Publication, Communist Party of the People’s Republic of China

TO All organs of the National Press

8.8.08

Greetings, faithful steward of information!

On this auspicious day, this day of mighty augury, replete with the promise of the lucky number “8,” we commence the noble proceedings that will most certainly not be remembered by all the world as the Clusterfuck Olympics, Worst Idea Ever, Historic Environmental/Sporting Disaster, etc.

Beijing 2008: Special Issue: China, Tibet, and the Olympics

Beijing is ready! The air sparkles with asbestos crystals, mighty industrial hoses are sluicing the public toilets, and in the Olympic Village, the apartment buildings that fell down last night have already been rebuilt. All dissent has now been neutralized! Four million pollution-producing vehicles have been impounded. The embargo against hair-dryer use continues to be energetically enforced. And the People’s Internet remains secure — the glorious firewall whose protective coils encircle our Republic like those of the celestial dragon Tianlong will never be breached, never!

What, you ask, can you do? What is your part in this magnificent popular effort? Read this handout carefully, comrade. Read it again, even more carefully. As the “eyes of the world” turn upon China, you have an important role to play! “No news is good news,” says the American. He is incorrect. All news is good news, and the Republic looks to you, as a state-approved news propagator, to draw the attention of our international guests to the famous “silver lining.”

No doubt by now it has not rained upon the opening ceremonies, drowning the occasion in sulphurous yellow-dog precipitation that raises a strange foam upon the scalp. Thanks to the preventive actions of our farseeing Weather Modification Program, whose stirring and masculine arsenal of silver-iodide rockets already will have been fired into the looming clouds to “empty” them, such an eventuality will assuredly have been avoided!

But if not, it will be your job as a journalist/news outlet to emphasize the distinctively Chinese character of the ensuing downpour — its plum-scented richness and softness, and its hygienic properties! The choreographed appearance of 80,000 government-issue umbrellas will also be splendid beyond imagining. All press officers have been issued with a copy of “Rain,” by our great seventh-century poet To Fu: “Bright drops descend/Lacing with jewels my lonely pomegranate bush./ Generous heavens,/ Send this old man a bride, will you? Damn!” For your convenience, the poem has been translated into 47 languages.

Visions from Lilliput

JAMES PARKER — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 21:46:43 GMT

The rise of the minisode
In a sense, every successful portmanteau word represents a narrow escape.

In a sense, every successful portmanteau word represents a narrow escape. The adventurous designers of the combination spoon/fork, for example, could easily have called their invention a foon. And the gaffes available to Sony Pictures Television, when it decided last year to produce five-minute Web-friendly versions of a heap of popular shows, were without limit: tinyvision, teewee, the dinkyNet. . . But sound æsthetics prevailed, and just as the fork with spikes was named a spork, the condensed TV episode enters the language in righteousness as a minisode.

One could argue, however boringly, that in the phenomenon of the minisode — which proclaims its retention of the “full narrative arc” of its original, even as it scrunches that into near-nonsense — our culture is presenting yet another symptom of intellectual decline, creeping ADD, capitalist brain acceleration, or what have you. Twenty-five minutes with the Minisode Network on YouTube (it also runs on MySpace, Crackle, Joost, AOL Video, and Verizon Wireless) were enough to convince me otherwise: the minisode is its own thing, a kind of minimal, calligraphic rendition of the original story, rather illuminating in the spareness of its strokes. Did I say strokes? An episode of Diff’rent Strokes came in at just over four minutes and still seemed purgatorially long. Most of the old-school comedy dramas, in fact, are mercilessly deconstructed by the minisode, each one boiled down to its rag of a plot and its three haggard jokes. Larry Hagman frowns and jiggles the ice in his drink in I Dream of Jeannie; Edna Garrett mugs maternally through The Facts of Life; almost nothing else seems to be happening. The form rejects filler, but what if filler is all there is?

The kind of TV that adapts itself most readily to the minisode, in fact, is resilient mutant super-trash TV — daytime talk shows, soaps. Ricki Lake was more or less made to be minisoded: from premise (“The bitch gave me chlamydia!”) to moral (“This is not an easy show to sum up, but I think we can all agree that the children are of the utmost importance. . . . ”) all in 4:57 or less. A minisode of The Young and the Restless in which Nicki and Victor exchanged vows while Ashley recorded a tearful video message for Abby seemed to me an admirable display of dramatic economy. The plot moved smartly. The characters were vivid and alive. The posters in the YouTube comments box certainly seemed to dig it: “I hate his new wh*re of a wife she a gold digger why can’t he see that?” wondered MoonGoddessFox. Equally immune to abbreviation is the obstacular ugliness and frenzy of The Three Stooges: the minisode, in fact, might be the format that finally permits me to get to grips with this very unsettling body of work.

Me and my tattoos

JAMES PARKER — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 18:25:38 GMT

One Man’s Inky Voyage Toward Meaning
I know that most people get their first tattoo when they’re drunk, or infatuated, or when there’s a race war on their cellblock and they have to quickly join a gang — but not me.

I know that most people get their first tattoo when they’re drunk, or infatuated, or when there’s a race war on their cellblock and they have to quickly join a gang — but not me. My first session with Donny (who does all my work)? He never even took out his tattoo gun! We just talked and looked at pictures — it actually got pretty deep. Donny’s a libertarian Odinist with degrees in unicycling and hand-to-hand combat, and he had a lot of empathy for my life situation. I told him how I’d recently received a lower-than-expected tax refund, plus I was fighting off a bad cold, and I felt like I really needed to get out of this slump that I was in: I wanted something on my forearm that would symbolize the power of rebirth. Donny suggested a snow leopard in clown makeup with a yin/yang sign in its mouth. “But don’t get it now,” he said. “Sleep on it.” So I did. And that night I dreamed of . . . a snow leopard in clown makeup with a yin/yang sign in its mouth. When I got to Donny’s shop the next morning, I didn’t have to say a word.

So you see, for me, every tattoo tells a story . . .

UPPER BACK: KUNDUN. I got this right after I saw the film Kundun, directed by Martin Scorsese, all about the young Dalai Lama and his flight from Tibet. I went straight over to Donny’s shop and told him to write the word across my shoulders in some kind of cool Asiatic script. The idea of this person who is so special that all the world should listen to his message of peace and spirituality, but instead he gets chased out of his palace — I really related to that as I’d just had my six-month review at work (not good).

MIDDLE BACK: The Eye of Horus. This is a big piece. Wikipedia says that the Eye of Horus is “an ancient Egyptian symbol of protection and royal power from deities, in this case from Horus or Ra.” What a great name for a deity — Ra! I got this when I thought I’d left my iPod on the T and I was really bumming. A couple of days after Donny put the finishing touches on the Eye, guess what? I found my iPod at the bottom of my bag. I was pretty freaked out.

Chris + Don: A Love Story

JAMES PARKER — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 18:24:26 GMT

The faithful and imaginative love story of Isherwood and Bachardy
When Christopher Isherwood spotted the teenage Don Bachardy on a Santa Monica beach in 1952, he did not hesitate to enact the most hallowed of gay archetypes.

Our superheroes, ourselves

JAMES PARKER — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 20:27:29 GMT

What the current crop of comic-book action movies tells us about America's identity crisis
Is there a breed of person more tenderly optimistic, more winsomely hopeful for the best, more loyal to the possibility of good, than the American summer moviegoer?

Shrink wrapped: Gamma rays got you down? The doctor will see you now. By Dr. Robin S. Rosenberg

Is there a breed of person more tenderly optimistic, more winsomely hopeful for the best, more loyal to the possibility of good, than the American summer moviegoer? To put it another way, has there ever been a bigger sucker? Year after year, he stands in line and hands over his money, to receive, year after year, the same treatment: i.e., Hollywood shivering in icy gratification as it pisses on him from a great height. It’s become one of nature’s biorhythms, like the return of the swallows to Capistrano: the dog days come around, the asphalt softens in the heat, and the megaplexes begin to bloat and boom with big-budget idiocy.

And idiocy, being always the sequel to some other idiocy, is never original. You’ve seen it all before! National Treasure 14: Hell’s Gate. . . The Matrix Deionized. . . Son of Son of Fool’s Gold. . . No Way Can You Die This Fucking Hard. . . The product is poor, the contempt is palpable. If you bought it once, goes the thinking, you’ll buy it again. In fact you’ll never stop buying it — why should you?

This summer, however, things are a little different. True, we’re getting the usual rash of run-ons and sequelae — Hellboy II (opens this weekend), a second attempt at the Hulk (from a few weeks back), our seventh installment of Batman (next weekend) — but when you add Iron Man and Hancock (which have earned $312 million and $112 million so far, respectively) to the roster, a more interesting picture begins to emerge. There’s a certain thematic density to these nearly simultaneous releases. We seem . . . preoccupied. Indeed, we may be said to be obsessed. A sensitive interplanetary visitor, alighting at AMC Boston Common and watching a few of these movies back-to-back, might conclude that we are in the middle of a national nervous breakdown.

The lean green schizophrenia machine
Just take a look at the protagonists: Tony Stark (Iron Man) is a repentant billionaire arms dealer; Hellboy is a demon outgrowing his infernal beginnings; Bruce Banner is a cool-headed scientist incorporating a maddened green monster (that would be the Hulk); Hancock is a celestial being descending gnostically through bum-like levels of mortality and despair; and Batman . . . Batman broods on the turrets of Gotham, ears pricked, phobias squashed, dispensing terror to the bad guys. Common to all these movies is a CGI-blowout of an ending, in which the hero faces down his fear, his temptation, his vengefulness, his will-to-power, his not-self. Good Hulk battles Bad Hulk; Nice Iron Man battles Nasty Iron Man; red-and-blue Spiderman battles all-black Spiderman; Hellboy, who has been assiduously sanding down the stumps of his demon horns (see the hell sparks fly!), sprouts a whole new pair . . . and on and on.

Gimme some truth

JAMES PARKER — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 20:39:59 GMT

In praise of Ultimate Fighting
Can it be a coincidence, I ask rhetorically, that we have all of a sudden become very interested in watching highly trained men smack the shit out of each other?

VIDEO: Kimbo Slice vs. Sean Gannon

Judgment night for Doomsday: Roxbury-born fighter John Howard is climbing the ranks of mixed martial arts, one chokehold at a time. By Jonathan Seitz.

If America were a prescription medication, the TV spot would go something like this: a 70-year-old man running down the beach pulling a kite imprinted with the word ASS. A small child at the wheel of an SUV, his sandaled feet dangling over the pedals and a can of Red Bull in his hand. A Dalmatian puppy, expectant-eyed, barking joyfully into its cell-phone headset. Soaring hosannas of lite metal, and then the slogan: America. Because your comfort means everything. Finally, as the imagery climaxes with a montage of lake views, skydivers, apple blossoms, and smiling post-coital women, a low voice, talking very fast: “America is not for everybody. If you have a strong commitment to reality, ask your doctor before taking America. Possible side effects of America include: road rage, depersonalization, free-floating anxiety, compulsive blogging, gas, hives, and addiction to Internet pornography.”

This is a dangerous year for America. Next year will be worse. But look at us — spaced out by the everyday, lightheaded with triviality. Can it be a coincidence, I ask rhetorically, that we have all of a sudden become very interested in watching highly trained men smack the shit out of each other? In choke-outs, elbow strikes, and roundhouse kicks to the head? Behold the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) Octagon — the caged canvas, with blood spatters by Jackson Pollock, around which bazillions of Spike TV viewers are ringed in distantly baying terraces like a coliseum made of bong smoke. Is this the temple of the end? I say no. There are those who will tell you that Mixed Martial Arts (MMA), or Ultimate Fighting, is a symptom of imperial decline — Jessica Simpson on steroids. I tell you that, far from being a symptom, it is the beginnings of an antidote.

Testosterowned

JAMES PARKER — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 14:36:17 GMT

Only Living Witness at the Middle East Downstairs, June 21, 2008
Thirteen years is a long time in heavy metal, but as the eerie distended melody of Only Living Witness filled the Middle East downstairs on Saturday, time flickered and then collapsed.

Black Gold digs the crude

JAMES PARKER — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 18:20:48 GMT

Oiled up
If the poet John Milton were with us today and casting about for a theme epic enough to engage his imagination, I am confident that he would settle on oil .

ACTUALITY: “Don’t put your finger nowhere you wouldn’t put your pecker!” cautions one driller.

If the poet John Milton, author of Paradise Lost, were with us today and casting about for a theme epic enough to engage his Milky Way–sized imagination, I am confident that he would settle on oil. Its origins among the dinosaurs and its million-year maturation; its eruption into worldly affairs; its life-giving, death-dealing power; its depletion and final exhaustion, and the shuddering of empires that would thereupon ensue . . . These things he would show forth in majestic verse, of the kind that tattoos itself upon the scrolls of immortality.

Or maybe he’d just pour himself a cold one and watch truTV’s Black Gold, which premieres this Wednesday at 10 pm. Black Gold is brought to us by the producers of Discovery Channel’s magnificent Deadliest Catch, and their MO is, it’s clear, “If it ain’t broke don’t fix it.” Instead of three fishing boats scouring the Barents Sea for piscine booty, we have three drilling platforms thirstily breaking the West Texas crust in a race for oil. The hierarchy of the platform is near-identical to that of the fishing vessel, and the risks are similar: the wise old driller runs the rig, the roughnecks work it, and the “worms” or rookies get cursed at and hit in the head by whirling chains. “What in the bald-headed hell is going on out there?!” asks driller Wayne in Episode 2 upon noticing that the Texan flag is flying upside-down over his rig. “That’s a disgrace to the oilfield!” And as in Deadliest Catch, where empty nets and crab cages meant empty pockets, the brute economics of the situation are irrefutable: each rig costs $45,000 a day to run, so if the black gold is not punctually struck . . . “I love to gamble,” says one jolly Texan mogul/speculator, “and I can’t think of a better way to gamble than oil and gas!”

The roughnecks are husky gun lovers and barfighters, young gods of manual labor, but the drillers, in particular, are fascinating. Hollow-cheeked Gerald, missing a toe and a thumb, runs the ancient Longhorn rig with salty imprecations. “Don’t put your finger nowhere you wouldn’t put your pecker!” he cautions his crew. When a couple of improperly fastened lengths of pipe tumble out of their harnesses, Gerald observes that an accident like that can “kill everybody big enough to die.”

The great American (office) novel

JAMES PARKER — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 14:00:46 GMT

Thirteen fictional perspectives on your 9-5
They are coming regularly now, like buses, like bulletins — the great office novels of the 21st century.

I. They are coming regularly now, like buses, like bulletins — the great office novels of the 21st century. In 2007, it was Joshua Ferris’s Then We Came to the End (Little, Brown). The year before that it was Max Barry’s Company (Doubleday). This year, our office novelist is Ed Park, a founding editor of The Believer, whose Personal Days is published this month by Random House. They are all comedies, these books, because office life is always a comedy, even when you feel like shooting yourself — and perhaps especially then. And like a product in successive stages of development, each corrects the minor faults of its precursor: the occasional frivolity of Barry’s corporate satire is redeemed in Ferris’s treatment of depression, cancer, and murder, while Ferris’s more onerous bass tones are delightfully relieved by the linguistic hijinks of Park.

When the perfect office novel is finally written, will the office as we know it cease to exist? Vanish, as it were, in a puff of copier toner, its spell broken? All signs point to yes: even as the genre approaches its acme, an end-times recession looms. These books may memorialize office culture as we know it. The single general criticism I would make, and that very tenderly, is that they’re all a little bit too long. I mean, come on — we haven’t got all day here. There’s work to be done.

II. Your boss comes padding over to your cubicle and says, “I think this one might be right in your wheelhouse.” Swiftly you parry: “Looks interesting,” you say, “but this kind of thing — it’s really more Roger’s bailiwick than mine.” The outcome of this exchange, this attempt to get you to do something, will be determined by the relative strength of metaphor and counter-metaphor. In his “wheelhouse,” you are the captain of a tramp steamer, salt in your whiskers, rope-roughened hands on the wheel, half-drunk and game for anything. In your “bailiwick,” you are a bailiff in Tudor England, a sober enforcer scrupulously observing the boundaries of your Crown-appointed authority. Why all these metaphors? Because the blank face of the office breeds metaphors. You can feel them generating around you in the dryness, electrically: office life is a game, a martial art, a war, an experiment, a prison. It’s an experiment performed inside a prison, by martial artists, during a war. Finally, though, the office transcends all of these and floats off into the empyrean of pure symbol, because nothing so satisfies the metaphorical requirements of the office as . . . another office.

Second thoughts

JAMES PARKER — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 15:03:39 GMT

Amis yes and no
Amis hasn’t had this much press since he fell out with Julian Barnes.

MORE SALIENTLY: Pontificating, Amis has little time to view events as a simple spectator.

The Second Plane: September 11: Terror and Boredom | By Martin Amis | Knopf | 224 pages | $24

Naughty, naughty 9/11. Not only did you briefly prostrate Western civilization, you gave Martin Amis permission to go all world-historical on our asses. “If September 11 had to happen,” he admits huskily in the “Author’s Note” to The Second Plane, “then I am not at all sorry that it happened in my lifetime.” I should think not. It might be argued that the clash with radical Islam has provided Amis the writer with the very last thing he needed — license, that is, to crank his prose up to levels of nearly interstellar pomposity. But to Amis the author, the man of letters, it has been — if you’ll pardon the phrase — a godsend. Bumped out of the two-book rut of his previous obsession (Stalinism, which he grappled with in Koba the Dread and then House of Meetings), he has plunged head-first into the biggest issue of the day, more engagé than ever: nearly every one of the reviews, profiles, think pieces, and short stories collected here produced, upon its original appearance, a little media surge of assent or vituperation. He hasn’t had this much press since he fell out with Julian Barnes.

The prose in The Second Plane is militantly wordy, expressive of its author’s great disdain for the dumbed-down Western mind. Why write “on the other hand” when you can write “countervailingly”? Or “at the same time” when “co-synchronously” is on tap? The book’s argument might be broadly described as a literary elaboration of the position staked out by his old friend Christopher Hitchens. Religion: bad. “Religious belief is without reason and without dignity, and its record is near-universally dreadful.” Radical Islam: very bad, “insanely Dionysian . . . impossibly poisonous,” an outbreak of “death-estrus.”

The fiction has a wobbly, failed-experiment quality. I am completely unable, for example, to make my mind up about the following sentence, from “The Last Days of Muhammad Atta”: “More saliently, he had not moved his bowels since May.” I should explain that in this story Amis has given Muhammad Atta, lead terrorist of 9/11, a giant case of constipation. To what end? We are not sure. Perhaps to emphasize the terminal non-creativity of the jihadist: he can’t even take a decent shit. “More saliently, he had not moved his bowels since May.” Is that good or terrible? The grotesque conceit (five months of backed-upness!) and the pontifical language strain against one another in a stylistic simulation, I suppose, of long-term ass blockage — but it reads so badly.

Mile-high schlub

JAMES PARKER — Wed, 21 May 2008 16:48:32 GMT

We recall the 10 things we miss most from the Golden Age of Air Travel
Look your children in the eye, globetrotter, and tell them the truth: the Golden Age of Air Travel is over.

Look your children in the eye, globetrotter, and tell them the truth: the Golden Age of Air Travel is over. Terrorism, fuel prices, chronic overcrowding. The industry is taking a beating — and the beating is being handed on to you, the passenger. Why, just this month, United, American, and Northwest airlines, among others, started charging passengers fees for checking in a second piece of luggage, a service that, since commercial flights began, had been free! Airlines are crumpling left and right, going bankrupt or getting taken over: soon there will be only one enormous air-cruiser, piloted by Richard Branson and Rupert Murdoch, that goes ’round and ’round the world in stinking bus-like laps.

To fly anywhere at all is to put one’s dignity at risk: a New York City man is suing JetBlue for $2 million, claiming that a flight attendant deprived him of his seat and then confined him to the toilet for three hours.

Are we not the lucky ones, we who flew in the glory years? Yes and no. The young can submit more or less equably to the brutish conditions that now prevail — they have known nothing else. We, meanwhile, are pining for our vanished luxuries, weakly protesting each new symptom of decline. So join us now, with misty eyes, as we roll out our fondest memories: the 10 things we miss most from the Golden Age of Air Travel.

1) The hijackers
If your plane is hijacked in 2008, start bumming: chances are you’re being conscripted into the auto-immolating global jihad, and it’ll all be over in about 20 minutes. The Golden Age hijack, by contrast, was a protracted and lavishly psychological affair, often featuring an epic standoff in an exotic locale — Portugal, maybe, or Uganda! It was post-’60s radical theater, with chic, hard-faced women waving German handguns and men in khaki jackets making preposterous demands on behalf of organizations you’d never heard of. One of the “gang” was always sweaty and troubled looking, and you could wear him down by offering him some of your peanuts.

2) The airports
What happened to the airport? A Xanadu of leisure in the ’80s, it has become a totalitarian sausage factory. It seemed at one point as if the whole world was about to become an airport: sculpted, light-filled, flavored with the delirious scent of jet fuel. Now the airport is like the world — only worse. Those huge halls and concourses where the international playboys used to roam are stuffed with defeated-looking punters, standing in their socks, holding little plastic bags with toothpaste in them. And if you have a beard, you will be arrested.

Revolution (age) 9

JAMES PARKER — Wed, 14 May 2008 13:47:18 GMT

Brookline Music School at Northeastern's Blackman Theatre, May 11
Brookline Music School Takes On “The White Album”

Going ape

JAMES PARKER — Mon, 12 May 2008 21:31:40 GMT

Animal Planet’s Escape to Chimp Eden
The truth is the truth, and we hacks must face up to it: it is no longer amusing to come up with ideas for hypothetical reality shows.

PRIMATE POLITICS: Cussons rehabs mistreated chimps by placing himself in the hierarchy.

The truth is the truth, and we hacks must face up to it: it is no longer amusing to come up with ideas for hypothetical reality shows. It may even be dangerous. They’ll all get made, sooner or later, and chattering about them in advance serves only to inflate the ballooning, light-blocking potentiality of the reality sphere. So let me soberly predict, then, the one-of-these-days arrival of a show called Tough Nuts, in which Bear Grylls of Man vs. Wild and Les Stroud of Survivorman are joined by Eugene Cussons of Escape to Chimp Eden for some kind of pan-disciplinary contest in wilderness living. Dump these hard men in a desert, or some fuming patch of jungle, and see who lasts longest. Cussons will be the dark horse here. The excitable Grylls has all of his tricks, of course, his urine-soaked T-shirts knotted around the head and so on, and Stroud will be dourly cognizant of the various environmental necessities. But Cussons — he may not be as much of a forager or a fire starter as those guys, but he can talk to the animals.

Escape to Chimp Eden, which wrapped up its first season this past Friday on Animal Planet, was a showcase for Cussons’s Dr. Dolittle skills. His mission in life is most honorable: he rescues captive chimpanzees from abusive situations, takes them back to his Chimp Eden sanctuary in Mpumalanga, South Africa, and rehabilitates them. Is it inhuman to treat an ape badly? It appears to be very human indeed. Zac was kept on a chain for 17 years outside a factory: the workers gave him beer and smokes. Xena’s owners held her down and shaved her. Sampa was imprisoned in a floorless cage, sleeping across the bars, tormented through the daylight hours by a pack of malevolent children. The eyes of these chimps, reddish-black in caverns of wrinkled flesh, hold an extraordinary mixture of rage and pathos. Cussons is their redeemer: once he has them back at Chimp Eden he coaxes, protects, and disciplines the traumatized animals until they have no need of him anymore. “If chimps do not have respect for you on the ground,” he says, “they might have it in the trees.” And up he goes, swinging from limb to limb, making soothing little grunts and huffing sounds. The apes drape their arms gratefully over his khaki-shirted shoulders.

Springtime for Darwin

JAMES PARKER — Wed, 07 May 2008 21:28:14 GMT

The wars of evolution are louder than ever. What Ben Stein, Bad Religion, and a physics professor from Quincy can tell you about where you came from.
There are two stories, and two stories only.

VIDEO: Greg Graffin receives the 2008 Award for Outstanding Lifetime Achievement in the Field of Cultural Humanism.

There are two stories, and two stories only.

In the first story, which takes place about 10,000 years ago, a beneficent Creator makes the Earth — mantles it with ozone, sets the birds a-flapping, and in the middle of it places his special project, the brainy biped known as Man. Things go along splendidly until Man, in the first recorded exercise of his famous free will, injures the Creator’s trust. Thereafter all is disharmony, albeit a disharmony that is mysteriously enfolded within the total harmonious being of the Creator, to whom Man — that tragic asshole — now addresses prayers along the lines of “Where are you?” and “What’s going on?”

Our second story begins in the distant eons, on the shores of nothingness, where a random spoke of electricity from a passing dust cloud has momentarily lanced a couple of slumbering proteins. Stung into life, they writhe and knot themselves into the first self-replicating molecule: existence begets itself, and begets, and keeps on begetting. Is somebody — or Somebody — watching? Nope. Colossal wastage is the law. Agony follows agony in this fatherless world, mutation grinding upon mutation, until 4.5 billion years later Richard Dawkins types the last sentence of The God Delusion (“Even better, we may eventually discover that there are no limits.”), hits Send, and sits back in his chair.

Two accounts of our origins. Two perspectives. Two options. Perhaps you find the second no more congenial to your sense of personhood than the first. Too bad. This is America in 2008. Pick one and move along.

Fresh Pond Mall, where worlds collide
“Ever get that feeling like you just kicked Lucifer in the face and got away with it?!” Roy F. Moore of Woburn grimaces in triumph against the broad afternoon light. “That’s the feeling I get from that movie.”

We’re outside the Fresh Pond 10 — most desolate of Cambridge’s multi-screens, wedged in the southeast corner of the Fresh Pond Mall between a boarded-up acupuncture center and the railroad track. It’s one of the four places in Massachusetts where you can see the anti-Darwin documentary Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. It was just the two of us in the theater, and having observed the affirmative nature of Mr. Moore’s reactions — his gasps, guffaws, fist-shakings, and signs-of-the-cross — I introduced myself. Mr. Moore (somewhat unexpectedly) is a columnist for Gilbert Magazine, the official publication of the American Chesterton Society, so we talk about that roly-poly old Catholic apologist G.K. Chesterton. We talk about the Tridentine Mass, and punk rock, and Mr. Moore quotes approvingly from the Dead Kennedys’ “A Child and His Lawnmower”: “You know some people don’t take no shit/Maybe if they did, they’d have half a brain left!” And we talk about Ben Stein.

The T and the Tube

JAMES PARKER — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 20:36:22 GMT

London’s Underground is seething with danger. Boston’s T has cuckoo juice
From time to time, upon discovering that I moved here from my native London, a well-meaning Bostonian will make the conciliatory observation that our two cities are not, after all, so very different.

Smells like T spirit!
Boston’s mass-transit system dates back to 1631, when sailboats ferried passengers from Chelsea to Charlestown. In the subsequent 377 years, service has become a teeny bit faster — but at a price that has put the MBTA in debt to a tune of more than $8 billion. With transportation issues getting renewed scrutiny under the Patrick administration, Phoenix staffers fanned out to kick the T’s tires.

• The trolley Svengali: Why Dan Grabauskas might actually fix the T — if he can keep his job. By Adam Reilly.
• Trouble 'round the bend? MBTA workers have been without a contract for two years. Arbitration will settle the matter soon, but could stir an angry hornets’ nest for 2010. By David S. Bernstein
• Seven habits of highly effective T-riders: Keep your hands on the pole and not on your neighbor’s ass, bucko. By Sharon Steel.
• Underground art: Reviewing the MBTA’s subterranean aesthetic. By Mike Miliard.
• A sinking feeling: Leaky MBTA tunnels have been seeping Boston’s groundwater for years. Can a new plan prevent potential catastrophe? By David S. Bernstein
• State of hock: If the MBTA wasn't in debt, these items would be at the top of its new wish list. By Jason Notte.
• The Phoenix editorial: Is the MBTA on track?

From time to time, upon discovering that I moved here from my native London, a well-meaning Bostonian will make the conciliatory observation that our two cities are not, after all, so very different. Murky winters, pinched faces, an atmosphere of spurious cultural distinction. His feeling seems to be that if Boston is not completely like London, it is at least the most London-like place in America.

How to re-educate this amiable person in as short a time as possible? How to disabuse him, at top speed, of this vague notion of Boston/London fraternity? Here’s how: by sorcery or teleport, insert him into the London Underground. Send him hurtling through space until he arrives at the station called Tottenham Court Road, and set him down on the platform, by the machine that dispenses “crisps” (chips) and bars of Cadbury’s chocolate, and the busker who is performing a gnarled version of Hawkwind’s “Hurry On Sundown.” Within three seconds, as the parched, cindery odors of the Tube fill his nostrils and the Londoners around him shuffle and swear and spill their cans of Special Brew, he will know that he has entered not just another country, but another universe.