Dispatches

This blog has moved

2010-04-09T18:50:00.001-07:00

This blog is now located at http://chuck-thompson.blogspot.com/.
You will be automatically redirected in 30 seconds, or you may click here.

For feed subscribers, please update your feed subscriptions to
http://chuck-thompson.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default.

Tracking HBO’s "The Pacific"

2010-03-23T11:54:00.000-07:00

Eight years ago, doing research for a book called The 25 Best World War II Sites: Pacific Theater, I relied on the works of a pair of U.S. Marine veterans named Robert Leckie and E.B. Sledge to guide me through some of the most horrific battlefields of the war—Guadalcanal, Peleliu, Okinawa.

It’s been particularly fascinating and slightly surreal to watch as the HBO series The Pacific has tracked the same men along the same historic path. I admit to following the series with more interest than most, anxious to see if the quotes, anecdotes, and locations that I drew from Leckie and Sledge to illuminate the war will show up in the HBO series.

Some already have, such as episode one’s climactic battle sequence at Alligator Creek on Guadalcanal.

Others are too good not to be repeated.

From his renowned memoir, With the Old Breed, here’s a bit of classic Sledge imagery describing the fighting between American and Japanese troops on Peleliu Island: “The opposing forces were like two scorpions in a bottle. One was annihilated, the other nearly so.”

In his single-volume account of the entire war, Delivered From Evil, Leckie described Peleliu—focal point of The Pacific episodes five, six, and seven—as “the fiercest, bloodiest battle in the Japanese war.”

On Peleliu, landings at White Beach One were led by legendary Marine officer Lewis “Chesty” Puller, portrayed in the series by actor William Sadler.

I visited White Beach One and wrote about it and Puller in my book. The beach today is overgrown with jungle. There’s little left from wartime to see. About 150 yards inland, however, is an interesting memorial erected after the war—a plaque attached to a rock honoring Marine Captain George P. Hunt, who later served as managing editor of Life magazine in the 1960s. Not the sort of thing you normally expect to find on far-flung rocks in the Pacific.

Finding WWII Sites in the Pacific

The idea behind my book was to introduce readers to the Pacific War by cataloging thousands of extant traces of the conflict that can still be found in the region, from those countless postwar plaques to forgotten invasion beaches to rusting Corsair fighter planes in the middle of the Palauan jungle to sunken Japanese transports in Truk Lagoon to the massive museums and memorials constructed in places like Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima, and Nanjing.

Because the British are the world’s great historians, the WWII trail in Europe has long been carefully preserved. Beginning with a 1987 hike in Guam, when my brother and I tried in vain to locate a Japanese tank “graveyard” in the central mountains of Yona, I discovered that this hasn’t been the case in the Pacific. Remote island locations and postwar neglect left many of the Pacific’s most important battlefields virtually untouched. And undocumented.

Living in Japan in the 1980s and ’90s, and spending significant time in the Philippines and around region, I worked over fifteen years compiling my Pacific War book with the idea of helping like-minded history geeks locate these historic sites. I did so because no guide covering Pacific War sites existed at the time.

After watching The Pacific, if you want to get to Alligator Creek, Henderson Field, Bloody Nose Ridge, or any of the other locations covered in the series, The 25 Best World War II Sites: Pacific Theater remains a unique resource. My “Smile” and “Hellholes” book shave sold better, but I often think my two World War II books will have more lasting value.

The Pacific book also includes a bit on Shuri Castle, a critical Japanese defensive position on Okinawa. After a protracted battle, victorious U.S. First Marines raised a Confederate flag above the ruined castle in honor of campaign commander Simon Bolivar Buckner Jr., whose father had been a Confederate general. I’ll be interested to see if Hanks and company include that nugget of Southern military heritage in their series.

It was a long war and it’s a relatively short series, but I’m still sorry that many major areas won’t be covered in The Pacific. The Marianas. The Philippines. The China-Burma-India theater or “CBI” as it was known, which produced George McDonald Fraser’s astonishing memoir Quartered Safe Out Here.

Fraser went on to fame as the author of the magnificent Flashman series of historical novels. As a smooth-faced Brit foot soldier in one of the most unforgiving environments of the war, however, he found material to fill what military historian John Keegan says ranks “among the classics of military autobiography.” Also one of my favorites.

Okinawa vs. Normandy D-Days

So, what do we have to look forward to in The Pacific? Blood, horror, atrocity, sickness, exhaustion—and plenty of it.

No jungle fighting in the Pacific was as savage as it was in New Guinea (episode four). The fetid, steaming jungles there were home to a variety of poisonous plants and tropical diseases. Logistical nightmares, equipment failures, and, above all, rain and mud, bedeviled both sides. The campaign generated one of the highest disease-related casualty rates in American military history.

With Saving Private Ryan and Band of Brothers, Hanks and Spielberg have taught an entire generation about D-Day in Normandy, but with The Pacific I hope the vastly underappreciated amphibious assault on Okinawa finally gets the big-stage respect it deserves. This might happen because Leckie was there and reported on the unparalleled achievement: “Never before had there been an invasion armada the equal of the 1,600 seagoing ships carrying 545,000 American GIs and Marines that steamed across the Pacific. In firepower, troops, and tonnage it eclipsed even the more famous D day in Normandy.”

In Normandy, the Allies moved 155,000 men and equipment across about 100 miles of English Channel. The American force in Okinawa that Leckie called the “monster of consumption” had to be supplied 7,500 miles from the home country’s western shore. No amphibious operation in military history comes close to matching it on a scale of distance and enormity.

The producers of The Pacific say they haven’t glossed over the trauma and deep racist conviction that imbued the war from start to finish. It’s evident, however, that other than dropping a few carefully placed “J” bombs and hurried scenes of torture and dismemberment, American audiences, browbeaten by decades of politically correct training, won’t be given credit for having the stomach to deal with honest depictions of the living nightmares and racial evil that came to fruition on those distant islands.

Then again, how could that terror be recreated? After the unearthly horrors of Peleliu, in which both sides declined to take prisoners and both sides defiled corpses, Sledge wrote, “Something in me died.”

Even today, it’s impossible to walk the Pacific’s battlefields and not come away with an awful, visceral understanding of the devastation and waste of the war. No TV show can communicate that.

Still, it’s strange how from that all of that death, so many stories continue to take life. Leckie and Sledge’s. My own. Hanks and Spielberg’s. And soon enough, those of a new generation, itself already waist-deep in America’s inevitable arena.

To Hellholes and Back Playlist

2010-02-20T11:52:00.000-08:00

I recently put together a TO HELLHOLES AND BACK playlist for Largeheartedboy.com, a great site that, among other things, asks writers to set their books to music. The following playlist is suitable for any occasion, but particularly applicable for a book about confronting traveler paranoia and places with crappy reputations.

Introduction: The Four Horsemen of My Apocalypse

“Are You Man Enough” — The Four Tops

I never tire of this song — I still have the seven-incher I stole from a store in Palm Springs, California in 1973 during my short-lived juvie shoplifting period. Originally a blaxspolitation-era ode to ghetto grit, in the context of “To Hellholes and Back” it functions as a summation of the worry and note of challenge I tried to strike in the intro.

Chapter 1: The Funniest Joke in Africa

“Ndozvamaida” — Thomas Mapfumo

My favorite African pop track of all time. The lyrics are indecipherable to me — tradebit.com says the narrative takes the side of a woman unjustly wronged by her husband — but the propulsive beat and cheerful melody reflect my decision to search for the lighter parts of the Congo, rather than embark on the timeworn quest for the “Heart of Darkness.” This song never fails to put me in a good mood — I hope the woman in it got her revenge.

Chapter 2: In This Way Children Are Fed and Girlfriends Kept Happy

“Picture Me Rollin’” — Tupac Shakur

“Liar’s Bar” — The Beautiful South

My encounter with a 2Pac doppelgänger in Botswana actually occurs in chapter three, but this piece of machismo urban bravado — “Picture Me Rollin’” goes in and out of the top spot in my list of Pac favorites — reflects the attitude one quickly acquires in the Congo as a means for coping with the never-ending series of bribes and confrontations with soldiers and cops.

This is also the chapter in which my slippery Euro fixer Henri really hits his stride, so I also mention “Liar’s Bar,” from the outrageously undervalued catalog of The Beautiful South, whose defiantly British founders Paul Heaton and Dave Rotheray are the best pop songwriters of the last 25 years.

Chapter 3: The Most Beautiful City in the Congo

“Kupanda” — Madilu System

This is from a CD I bought just after a couple of teenagers tried to rob me in the streets of Matadi. In an effort to re-establish some good vibes and keep Matadi off my shit list, I found a CD seller on a nearby street and began chatting him up about local music. Madilu System — a heavyset Congolese dude — was among his recommendations.

I buy a lot of local music wherever I go and this one turned out to be my favorite from Africa. It’s from a CD called “La Bonne Humeur.” Madilu System is associated with “soukous,” the genial dance music of Congolese origin sometimes called “African rumba.”

Chapter 4: We Have a Winner

“A Change is Gonna Come” — Sam Cooke

History comes into clear and unsettling focus when you come face to face with people whose ancestors we know primarily as terrible statistics from history texts and cinematic recreations of the slave trade. All across the continent, I was consistently moved by the unexpected familiarity of the African people and the instant “American” kinship we shared. In a weird way, this often made me feel at home in a very foreign place.

“Talk to Me” — the Don Cheadle biopic about Washington, D.C. deejay Petey Greene — showed on my Delta flight home from Johannesburg. This Sam Cooke song was used to great effect during scenes of the DC riots after MLK’s assasination — it was also used in the movies “Malcolm X” and “Ali” — and provided a surprisingly emotional airplane moment for me on the flight home. The whole difficult trip kind of came flooding back at me during this scene. Outstanding movie, by the way.

Chapter 5: Heretics in the Temple

“Milan” — Karsh Kale

India intimidates in a lot of ways — terrorism, rampant GI viruses, fried curd balls — but guys like Karsh Kale keep alive the wanderer’s dream of hypnotic Indian wonder. This swirling, orchestral instrumental runs 8 minutes and 54 seconds, yet every time I hear it I think it ends too soon.

Chapter 6: The Unyielding Indian Workforce

“In the Wild” — Hoodoo Gurus

Crossing the Thar Desert in the dead of summer with the windows of your Tata hatchback rolled down is pretty much like sitting in a rolling pizza oven while someone blasts your face with a hair dryer. The only thing worse than making this journey with a Hindu fatalist behind the wheel cranking the Best of Bollywood Duets for seventeen straight hours is making this journey with a Hindu fatalist behind the wheel cranking the Best of Bollywood Duets for seventeen straight hours while your wife is in the backseat starting her period.

And, yes, I know, the brilliance of Bollywood, but spend all day in a car where the only CD is the above-mentioned collection of screechy “classics” and I promise the tune you’ll be singing when it’s over won’t be “When the Mango Harvest Comes and the British Twats Are Dead, I’ll Ululate For Thee.” The Aussie guitar blitzkrieg on this Hoodoo’s road-trip narrative comes as close as I can find to a sonic tribute to the Thar Desert epic recounted in chapter six.

Chapter 7: Sex, Rain and 100 Percent Cotton

“Bhangra Fever” — MIDIval PunditZ

I thought about Robbie Williams’ “Monsoon” here because I think he’s unfairly maligned in the states. And everywhere else, for that matter. But, great as “Monsoon” is, it really has nothing to do with the swampy downpour I endured alongside the trusty Baiju, one of the coolest guys I met in India.

Almost as cool is this classical-Indian-raga-meets-electronica track from New Delhi-based MIDIval PunditZ. I was sent a review copy of this CD in 2002 and it’s never fallen completely out of my rotation. I wasn’t ever able to interest any publication in a review of the disk, but I’ve since included this song on a dozen or so mixed CDs I’ve made for friends. No complaints yet.

Chapter 8: Red Fighters, White Tequila and Cruz Azul

“A Matter of Time” — Los Lobos

“Nogales” — Climax Blues Band

About the plight of Mexicans crossing the border to look for work in the United States, “A Matter of Time” offers gut-wrenching Mexican underclass perspective on the immigration debate. It’s one of the most heartbreaking songs I know. Included here to reflect the outrage surrounding America’s border policies that fuel a lot of the fear and paranoia many Americans harbor about Mexico.

Honorable mention to “Nogales” by the Climax Blues Band. Not by any stretch CBB’s best work, but a funny song about gringos getting tossed in a Mexican prison, another classic fear for traveling yanquis.

Chapter 9: The Electric Shanghai Bob Margarita Acid Test

“Gringo Honeymoon” — Robert Earl Keen

From my all-time favorite Texas songwriter (maybe tied with Willie), “Gringo Honeymoon” works because chapter nine is dominated by the dauntless Shanghai Bob — Blackguard of the Orient, Man of Indiscreet Solutions — who, in addition to sharing my enthusiasm for Keen, appeared at least momentarily headed for his own gringo honeymoon.

At Plaza Garibaldi, while mariachi bands blared and dollar beers popped, an exceptionally good-looking, twenty’ish Mexican woman in low-cut, pube-teaser jeans and tight green top leaped into Shanghai Bob’s arms with a feral take-me-now shriek. He spent a couple hours squiring her around the plaza before revealing an unappreciated side of himself — returning her with courtly decency to her nervous parents’ arms.

Chapter 10: To Sneer or Not to Sneer

“Dreams I’ll Never See” — Molly Hatchet

A lyrically dark, Floridian three-guitar rumble to stand as counterpoint to the “Make Your Dreams Come True” sloganeering invoked like a Profession of Faith so ceaselessly across Disney’s Sunshine State dominion that its recipients no longer seem able to distinguish between crude salesmanship and old-fashioned greed. If “following your dream” or “reaching for the stars” involves a payoff, financial or otherwise, that’s called ambition, not cockeyed optimism. The desire to become a rock star or a millionaire is not a dream. It’s an economic aspiration.

Epilogue

“Still Wishing To Course” — Camper Van Beethoven

A quasi-psychedelic number as tricky to describe as the places in this book. If I’d have thought of it when I was writing, I might have cribbed some of the lyrics:

Wishing in the nightmare, thought’s a possibility
Realizing action, courting all the difficulty

What a band. Off the top of my head, my mini-Camper Van mix would go something like: “Good Guys and Bad Guys,” “She Divines Water,” “Sweethearts,” “We Saw Jerry’s Daughter,” “Change Your Mind,” “Still Wishing To Course,” “One of These Days,” “Where the Hell is Bill?” “The History of Utah,” “Take the Skinheads Bowling,” “Life is Grand” and a couple Cracker tracks like “Teen Angst” and “Get Off This.” Hmmm, next time maybe a whole soundtrack employing only CVB songs?

To Hellholes and Back: the funniest joke in Africa

2009-12-27T12:10:00.001-08:00

The first chapter of “To Hellholes and Back” introduces a running theme of the book’s Africa section — my month-long effort there to uncover the funniest joke in Africa.

Reader Chuck Hafter has submitted a better Congo joke than I was able to uncover.

Told to him in the 1980s by a friend from Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo), Hafter’s joke nevertheless remains painfully accurate, as I discovered in a town called Matadi in an episode covered in chapter 3.

Hafter’s joke:

Reagan, Brezhnev and Mobutu are taking the same plane together. They fly into a very thick cloudbank.

“I wonder where we are,” says Reagan.

“I will tell you,” says Brezhnev. He opens a window and sticks his hand out. “We are flying over Moscow.”

“How can you tell?” asks Reagan.

“I felt the top of St. Basil’s Cathedral,” says Brezhnev.

Later, they fly into another cloudbank.

“I wonder where we are,” says Brezhnev.

“I will tell you,” says Reagan and he opens a window and sticks his hand out. “We are over Washington D.C.”

“How can you tell?" asks Brezhnev.

“I felt the top of the Washington Monument,” says Reagan.

Later, the biggest cloudbank of all.

“I wonder where we are,” say Reagan and Brezhnev.

“I will tell you,” says Mobutu and he opens a window and sticks his hand out. “We are over Kinshasa.”

“How can you tell?” ask Reagan and Brezhnev.

“Somebody stole my watch,” replies Mobutu.

Thanks to Hafter also for emailing me a nice note despite his strong disapproval of my predictably pissy take on soccer in the Mexico City chapter. Per Hafter’s request, I did indeed check out a few Lionel Messi highlights on YouTube. Impressive, but I’m not yet willing to concede the larger points of my “down with nimble-footed nimrods” position. Still, when next in Spain, I’ll have a look at La Liga.

Thanks to all who write.

Smile character updates

2009-09-11T20:12:00.000-07:00

In response to occasional queries regarding the whereabouts and well-being of several of the more notable figures who traipse through the pages of Smile When You’re Lying — and to confirm to at least two e-mailers that, yes, these people do in fact exist — the last days of this Smile-flavored website feel like the time to offer a quick update. (In a month or two this site should undergo a makeover to more effectively coerce you into buying copies of To Hellholes and Back: Bribes, Lies and the Art of Extreme Tourism, on sale December 8, with an excerpt running in Penthouse in January 2010.)

Robert Glasser

I spent most of this past July and August in Hong Kong and during this period in the East was able to convince Robert Glasser to undertake his first trip outside of Japan in six years. The co-star of chapter four obligingly flew over from his sprawling Kyushu estate for a weekend to show me Old Hong Kong in the grand Glasser manner.

We kicked off at Hutong restaurant in Kowloon. On the 28^th floor of a skyscraper overlooking Victoria Harbour, Hutong is famed for what my friend Brian Brink would not hesitate to call its panty-dropper view of the Hong Kong skyline at night. As this was our first meeting since the publication of Smile When You’re Lying, I graciously picked up the tab by way of thanking Glasser for allowing me to ransack his reputation and former anonymity in the service my own greater literary glory.

Few things in this world go together better than overpriced Chinese food, lots of very cold white wine and the free-form musings of Glasser. His rambling memory of the purchase of a pair of cashmere socks in Hong Kong circa 1987 formed the basis of a running theme in the evening’s conversation. (Hard-earned wisdom: cashmere socks, high-maintenance women and electric dryers are a recipe for disaster.) I flinched, but not too badly, when the $350 check arrived.

This would have made for a fine once-a-year splurge had I not allowed Glasser to choose the venue for the following day’s happy hour.

“Martinis at the Mandarin?” he suggested in the way you or I might float the idea of the Taco Bell drive-thru.

A-hundred-and-twenty dollars later we departed the Mandarin-Oriental’s august lobby drinking chamber. And so it went. I wasn’t necessarily glad to see Glasser return to Japan — but I was able to finance pens and porridge for the rest of the month. Just.

Shanghai Bob

Despite torrid negotiations, chapter-four co-star Shanghai Bob and I were unable to reconcile conflicting schedules and so missed seeing each other in Southeast Asia. Bob is recently back in Thailand after a sabbatical in the Indian Ocean — I’m not allowed to say exactly where, for Shanghai Bob reasons best left shrouded in mystery. We have, however, vowed to get together when I’m back in Hong Kong for seven weeks this fall. For those disappointed by the lack of fresh Bob news, I can reveal that the illustrious Bobster makes a notable appearance in To Hellholes and Back, in Mexico City, of all places.

Randy

Buddy Randy, from chapter two, continues to live the man’s man existence in Alaska. Returning stateside from the densely packed cubicle realm of Hong Kong I headed with Randy directly to the nearly people-free realm of the unorganized territories of the Yukon.

I’m not being disrespectful, that’s what they call the area where we put in for a 192-mile, six-day canoe paddle down the Teslin and Yukon Rivers. (And by the way, how kickass is a territory with a Malamute standing atop its coat of arms? Love the Yukon.) On the trip we encountered moose, bear, fox, elk, Germans, even a gray wolf from close range, a rare sight in the wild, assuming you aren’t sitting next to Sarah Palin in a helicopter with .270 Remington on your lap.

4 subversive opinions on eve of 2009 NBA Finals

2009-06-01T09:50:00.001-07:00

Steroids
Strange that no one talks about steroids in the NBA. Personally, I don’t see how you can’t speculate. Compare players with those of ten or fifteen years ago. Forget Dwight Howard’s twin pythons. Even today’s bench scrubs look ready to strap on for the Lorry Pull or haul the Atlas Stones at a WSM comp.

It’s not just the bodies. The hyper-aggressive play, barely controlled wrestling matches that pass for post positioning, and utter inability to control emotions suggests something more than natural jock passion heightened by bruising competition. According to msn.foxsports.com, 115 technical fouls have already been called in this year’s playoffs. Kobe Bryant and Dwight Howard each have six playoff techs heading into the Finals. One more for either results in a game suspension. Simply for being an un-tethered rage-a-holic. Normal? I don’t recall Magic and Larry Legend leading their teams this way.

For the moment, no one seems to be paying attention to the possibility of artificially enhanced performance — the same way everyone pretended not to during that ridiculous 1998 home run chase between Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa.

Don’t blame LeBron. But why not?
One week ago, the Cleveland Cavaliers were the most dominant team in basketball. With the consensus best player in the league in MVP LeBron James, they were expected to cruise into the NBA Finals where they would dispatch the Los Angeles Lakers with their putative second-best player in the league, Kobe Bryant. Few pundits publicly doubted this outcome and the reasoning made a sort of sense. The Cavaliers had the best record in the league this season (66-16) and were nearly unbeatable at home (39-2), where they’d be playing most of their games in the playoffs. While the Cavs barely broke a sweat in the first two rounds of the playoffs (8-0 against Detroit and Atlanta), the “soft” and “unfocused” Lakers struggled a little against Utah (4-1 series win), a lot against Houston (4-3 series win), and almost as much against Denver (4-2 series win). The numbers supported the idea that Cleveland was primed to win its first NBA title, but the real fuel powering the Cav hype was LeBron James, the “international brand” the league and its fans long-ago anointed “the King.” Now, it appeared inevitable: the King would finally be fitted for his crown.

Interesting how quickly the narrative has changed now that LeBron and the Cavs have been run out of the playoffs by the Orlando Magic. The popular explanation for this unexpected turn of events? NOT LEBRON’S FAULT! He simply hasn’t got a quality supporting cast. The team can’t match up to the rest of the league. Cleveland’s management has failed to surround LeBron with good players. Forget the 66 wins, the home court dominance, and the two playoff sweeps. This team sucks! Except, of course, for The Bron, whose MVP reputation and endorsement-friendly status shall be maintained at all costs, even while the clearly superior Kobe Bryant and Dwight Howard prepare to duke it out in the Finals.

“Good for the League”
The knee-jerk instinct to protect LeBron’s image is related to a strange fascination that has come to consume fans across the spectrum of sports, wherein discussion of games, events, and peripheral developments are cast within a framework that asks them to consider whether or not something is “good for the game” or “good for the league.” A LeBron-Kobe Finals, for example, would obviously have been “good for the league,” whereas an Orlando-Nuggets Finals obviously would not have been. Stanley Cup games involving any of the NHL’s “Original Six” teams are widely considered good for hockey. The stateside arrival of David Beckham a couple years ago was supposed to be good for the terminally pathetic performance of U.S. soccer. The drama surrounding jockey Calvin Borel’s bid to win this year’s Triple Crown aboard different horses is being trumpeted as “good for horse racing.” The wondrous ascendance of Manny Pacquiao is an absolute godsend for boxing. Etc., ad nauseum.

Amazing that sports fans have been trained to give a shit about the financial well being of millionaire businessmen and their partner media networks. Me, I couldn’t care less about whether ratings for the Lakers-Orlando series will be lower than they would have been for a Kobe-Lebron showdown, just as I don’t care what the handle at the track will be for this week’s Belmont Stakes. I’m a fan. I watch games. I care about results on the field, not at the box office or with Nielsen wonks. Media naturally care about the popularity (i.e., financial health) of the leagues and events they cover and sponsor. This doesn’t mean the rest of us need to treat this self-interest as a genuine story. Are we really that fascinated by accounting ledgers?

Twenty-second Timeouts
Click a stopwatch the next time someone calls a “twenty-second timeout” in an NBA game. It’ll run between two and three minutes before play resumes. Sometimes longer. Can the NBA stop with the “twenty-second timeout” charade? If the Association can’t even be honest about something as measurable and inviolable as time, how can we trust that it’s telling the truth about any of the topics discussed above?

2009-05-20T22:59:00.000-07:00

To Hellholes and Back

2009-03-31T10:40:00.001-07:00

A quick note to confirm that the recent sluggish pace of postings here does not indicate an inactive site. Mostly the lack of scintillating new copy is a matter of being consumed with finishing up work on a new book. To Hellholes and Back: Bribes, Lies and the Art of Extreme Tourism will be published by Henry Holt in December 2009. Inspired by the latest media drumbeats of Mexi-paranoia, the book will include such observations as, “Telling people not to go to places like Cabo, Cancun, and Mexico City just because drug dealers are shooting each other in Juarez is like telling people that due to gang violence in the Bronx they shouldn’t visit the Grand Canyon.”

Mexico City is now in the running with London as my favorite city in the world.

Updates to follow, though not particularly soon. In the meantime, the site is being maintained and I am answering emails.

Last Hours of George Bush

2009-01-20T07:32:00.000-08:00

I’ve been looking for an appropriate opportunity to post an email I received over a year ago and today seems like it. In a few hours Barack Obama will be sworn in as president; George Bush becomes history. Surely to be remembered for a multitude of sins and failures, it seems plain that the Iraq War will remain at the center of Bush’s legacy.

The following email, which deals only peripherally with Iraq but squarely with the military, was sent to me by a Juneau friend who left Alaska to fly U.S. Air Force planes and works today as a pilot for a major U.S. airline. Who knows, maybe he will be in the cockpit of the next flight you board. But if not him, very likely someone who has shared the experiences detailed here. The whole thing comes around to Iraq in the last poignant and arresting paragraphs.

The email came to me as part of an ongoing discussion about all things military and took me a bit by surprise. It’s an intense and eye-opening view into the world of military training and patriotism and brainwashing. It gave me a window into a part of Dave’s life that I previously knew nothing about.

It’s long, but I’m posting it here (with Dave’s permission) exactly as I received it, typos and all. The only change is the name of the man called “Bill,” simply because I felt it would be best to protect his privacy. I’ve read this email several times over the past year and it never ceases to fascinate me. I love this kind of writing—direct, honest, and fearless. Qualities we haven’t seen much of out of Washington D.C. for the past eight years, and ones I believe we’re all hoping to see more of starting today.

Chuck,

Oh yeah, boot camp would be a challenge!

I really didn't like OTS too well (Officer Training School at Lackland AFB Texas whereafter I was commissioned as a 2nd Lieutenant in the USAF) but I can tell you that we all felt pretty damn good about getting through it! But a regular enlisted guy boot camp... Yow! Less mental stuff, but the physical and psychological...! Yeah, tough.

Survival school, no... you don't find many people that liked that at all so I'm sort of an exception there, but man, it was all good...

Essentially, it was a three week deal. Week one was classroom with me and my new found pals heading downtown to party every night in our rent-a-dent Maverick. Week two was in the woods …

The first couple days in the woods were just in a benign sort of regular outdoors survival situation with a squad of 8 guys or so. We had a mix of talents and comfort levels with the outdoors. We had this one guy who was a flight engineer of a C-141 who was from NYC and had never been off the sidewalk in Central Park. I remember practically carrying the deadbeat up some steep pitches.

On the other hand, we had this Australian Special Forces Commando guy... ultra tough, he and I are cooking up a little food for the crew (we had a live rabbit I killed with a stick and a couple potatoes) and as we are getting things ready by flash light, we notice that there are like millions of these huge daddy-long-legs' spiders crawling on us! So we look at each other and start cracking up simultaneously as we conspiratorially start grabbing the spiders and stuffing dozens of them into the canteen cups we are making our rabbit and potato stew in! Only a few people stayed up to eat that night and we had a great time between us knowing we had stuffed a zillion of these big fucking spiders into the chow!

The rest of the week was escape and evasion and cross country navigation. Basically you break into teams of two, and you have a topo map and a destination to make for a rendezvous. There are no trails, it's all map reading and orienteering, and on some days you covered nearly 8 miles. My partner was “Bill Jackson,” who was a C-130 guy from Abilene. Bill was a pretty savvy outdoors type guy from Texas, and of course me being a Juneau kid I'm no stranger to the forest land. I'll never forget our first afternoon evading... Bill and I were on this ridge and we hear this chopper coming over so we ditch off into a little hide area... Hmmm, we think -- so this is how the game is going to go... Then... we looked across this little valley we wanted to cross to get to our rendezvous with the "partisan" motherfuckers, and son-of-a-bitch if there weren't these 2-1/2 ton trucks coming up this road loaded with troops to search for us!!! We became like sinister forest animals at that point... I mean, in a sense... It was like a giant game of hide-and-go-seek, and yet of course, this was our job!

Of course, the biggest thing in any training we had back then is that if you really fucked it up, you would have to repeat it; and of course -- it was pretty hard to start with so you really didn't want that to happen, and along with that -- look like a loser for having failed! And cleverly enough, you really never knew where the limits were, so even if you wanted to slack it off, you had no idea of how much you could ease it off. For me, I'm pretty much on full blower all the time anyway on that sort of thing so it was no problem, but there were a lot of guys who had a pretty hard time of it. And of course, this "fear of failure" was the huge motivator for the last week of training... the POW Camp.

So a week of classroom, a week in the woods, and then the last week... the camp.

It actually started with another day of class, but that evening, instead of heading out to party, we had to report to some sort of muster right after dinner... We were loaded onto these busses just as the sun set, but, our busses didn't go too far in the dark when we stopped and were boarded by some bad-ass looking dudes with guns... a couple of flash grenades went off... and the next thing we know we are herded off the bus and we are on our knees with hoods being choked over our heads... Next, roughly barked instructions in a Russian accent as I'm roughly pulled to my feet... "Criminal…put your left paw on the criminal in front of you's shoulder."

Around me, I can hear people being pushed around and roughed up. Eventually we assemble into some sort of line held together with our paws on the shoulder of the criminal in front... More orders are barked: "On you left hoof, Harch!" And off we go into the unknown but dreaded and mythical 'Camp'.

People often talk of "suspended disbelief" when discussing movie experiences, or even a nice escape into a book. I can tell you that the POW camp experience provided something like that... but to a level of which I would never have thought possible... and to this day I simply marvel at. It was an experience of a lifetime, and the design of which was pure genius. All the while, we knew were in a school, and yet at the same time we knew that we weren't...

I mean, we had all heard these stories from our mates that had come back to the squadron after the school, and so in a sense, you have a pretty good idea of what might happen, but being there, and doing it any foreknowledge anyone had some didn't seem to matter...

I can't tell you everything that happened, but I remember being in an isolation cell for a long time, with these weird "musics" on the loudspeakers, and we could only stand, and I could hear guys getting the shit beat out of the around me, and then somehow a firehose was spraying on me and the mean guards ( I had a hood on still so I couldn't see them) are making me stand up again...

Interrogations too of course...

I can't really describe this well, but the feeling I had when I was there, was that... inside, I knew I was at survival school, and that a certain series of events was likely to play out... but, somehow -- and even more intensely -- at the same time -- I KNEW that something had gone wrong with our training, and that: A) We were going to be in this camp situation for a long time; much longer than had originally been foreseen; B) I had no idea ever of what time it was or what day it was. C) It was really, really tough. D) there really was NO HOPE of getting out of there anytime soon...

So at some point on some day, I was raking up these rocks outside a bunker and it was dark, and I ran into my buddy Bill! We were both pretty low... Dude... how are you?... Hang in there... we're fucked, this whole deal is just fucked... I go back to raking up these rocks before some guards can start fucking with us and I'm completely emotionally and physically exhausted; Billy is too.

A mortar attack comes in and we all scurry underground into the bunkers as explosions thunder overhead. The raid is over and I'm back with a hoe in my hand.

And then, over the loudspeaker system... We'd knew the drill by now... the Giant Voice raved... "Criminals; Put down your tools in a safe fashion; turn and face the loudspeaker for an important announcement from the camp commandant." This time we had to muster in front to the commandant's rostrum where we were normally denounced and browbeaten, and our senior officers were humiliated...

It's night, I'm exhausted, emotionally drained, I have no idea what time it is or what day it is... and I KNOW -- and no shit, I mean this, I KNOW and Believe -- we are in some deep shit and we are in for a long haul in the joint... I mean I know this and it's hard and it hurts...

The commandant commands us to turn around, away from the stage... but the tone of the tirade changes... and then it's like -- and I just CAN'T remember the exact words, but it's like, somehow it's something like.... "You are soldiers for the greatest nation on the earth..." and we are commanded "ABOUT...FACE" and we wheel around and there...

There are these spotlights...

And the spotlights are shining a zillion watts up into the sky, up to the top of a flagpole....

And flying high on the top of this silver pole... There is this GIANT FUCKING STARS AND STRIPES FLAG... and it's over.

I wish I could remember exactly what the commandant said that night, but let me tell you -- that turning around... and seeing that flag was one of the most intense experiences I've ever had.. I cried then, and I'm crying now!

Yeah... Survival... That was a time....

And listen Chuck, it's just that sort of shit that bonds the military guys together so tightly. I mean if I meet some USAF guys, we are automatically pals.... So... you didn't want to be in the military, and really neither did I! I just wanted to learn to fly and become an airline guy, but along the way, man, it was a great experience. So you would have had a great time in the service!

Oh also, the flip side of Aircrew Survival and the Camp at Fairchild was "Ejection Seat Water Survival" at Homestead AFB Florida! This school was totally cool! For our 'final exam' we 'parachute' into the Atlantic Ocean via being towed by parasail at about '800 feet, then, the boat holds up the 'Release' flag and we knock away the pelican hook on the towline and it's "Canopy; (helmet) Visor; (disconnect oxygen) Mask; (release) Seat Pack; (inflate) LPU (your life vest); 4-line Jettison (to allow steering your 'chute); Steer into the wind." and SPLASH! into the Ocean you plunge... Pretty good training eh' I can still remember the litany of the "after the chute opens" procedure!

After splashdown the chute was sort of towing me backwards but I quickly released him and the chase boat rolled up to retrieve it; After that, I'm on my own in the ocean.... Unbelievably, Both of the C02 cart's in my vest actually worked, but no way on the raft! You would not believe how fast you can blow up a one-man raft with pure lung-power when you know that barracudas and sharks are looking at your feet like a fucking menu item! So you float around for a day or so and then a big heli comes and picks you up! Man that is something! It's like a hurricane underneath a HH-53 and you have to flood your raft and than swim to the pickup hook! Totally good school!

Anyway man, I ramble on, but suffice to say, these modern times and middle age are pretty fucking lame. And really this is the dilemma a lot of military people face; Look at some kid in Iraq... he kick's down a door and some sort of dune-coon motherfucker shoots him three times in the chest with an AK-47… his body armor keeps him alive as his squad fires up the shooter... later that day, he talks to his dad about it, and his dad tells me the story when we're flying down to LAX...

So here is this kid when he comes back to the normal world after the service... How do you find a normal job that offers even ten percent of the rush of what you just got done doing? How do you go back into the normal world of stupid people driving around talking on their cellphones gossiping about how lame their job is, and where 99% of people have no idea of how intense life can sometimes be...

Anyway, enough rambling, sometime I'll tell you about getting intercepted by Russian fighters off the Sakhalin Islands.

Dave

Drag

2008-12-27T23:19:00.000-08:00

With the smoking ban in Oregon set to take effect in less than a week, I figure I might as well post one last shot across the bow of the USS Pussification. The following essay appeared in extremely shortened form in Esquire last summer, and in a length closer to this one in last November’s issue of Portland Monthly magazine.

DRAG

I don’t smoke. Never have. Never will. In addition to the frightening array of public-service messages—Remember those scared-straight pictures from elementary school, a pink lung and piece of charcoal side by side on lab trays?—I was traumatized as a child watching a three-pack-a-day uncle die of emphysema. I pretty much believe everything I’ve ever heard about the dangers of cigarettes. None of which has anything to do—or should have anything to do—with someone else’s right to light up in places where drinking, gambling, and other adult activities are sanctioned events.

For many righteous Portlanders, January 1, 2009, the day the statewide smoking ban in bars goes into effect, will mark the beginning of a long-awaited era when Oregonians will be free to punish their livers in healthy, smoke-free environments. For others the day will represent merely another installment in the gradual erosion of individual liberties, and the further pacification of a town that once cared more about personal freedoms than cowering groupthink and the kind of hyper-cautious paranoia once found only in crowds of insurance adjustors and kindergarten teachers.

Smoking bans across the world, of course, have been cannily positioned by crusaders as a public health issue. In reality, smoking bans in bars have as much to do with public health as the Clear Skies initiative has to do with clean air and credible environmental oversight. By legislating away a custom that’s been legal since the day the American Revolution was planned between swigs and puffs in musty places like Boston’s Green Dragon Tavern, the smoking ban is foremost an individual rights issue. Worse, it’s yet another way to dispatch the notion of personal responsibility by imposing the morality of an intolerant majority upon a presumably subversive minority.

As startling as the public’s acquiescence to government mollycoddling, is the fact that social conservatives have made smoking bans an issue at all. Isn’t this exactly the sort of thing our vaunted “free market” is supposed to sort out? If enough patrons want non-smoking bars, won’t savvy business owners start opening non-smoking bars? Oh, wait, they already do. According to barflymag.com, font of local boozehound info, 218 bars in Portland are already smoke-free. And not just in anticipation of the pending ban. Reacting to its customer base, Kells Irish Restaurant & Pub went non-smoking in 2000, four years before Ireland disgraced itself with a ban.

“The smartest decision I ever made,” says Jack Stanley, owner of Cactus Jack’s Tex-Mex Cafe, about going smoke-free earlier this year. “In a small place, one person smoking can affect everyone’s experience.”

I like Cactus Jack’s and I’ve got no problem with bar owners who want to ban smoking in their own places. I don’t go to vegan restaurants because I think the food tastes like topsoil, but I’m glad I live in a free society with a reactive economy where my vegan sisters can get their fixes in peace.

The larger issue here is what smoking bans will lead to. Laugh at the hysterics, but don’t think that the elimination of personal choice stops with the right to do your Keith Richards impression in public. The puritan scolds who’ve managed to crush out tobacco in bars pulled the same trick with alcohol in the 1920s—now they’re pushing for smoking bans in cars. That’s the intent, anyway, of Washington representative Shay Schual-Berke, who earlier this year sponsored a bill that would make it illegal for drivers or passengers to light up with anyone under eighteen in the car. Schual-Berke’s justification for the law, quoted in The Oregonian, was telling of those who feign concern for humanity by way of masking the fact that the way other people conduct their lives just drives them crazy: “I cannot stand when I drive around and I see people smoking and I watch their children in the back seat choking,” said Schaul-Berke.

If likeminded Little Napoleons are so concerned with the social cost of what others are doing in cars and bars, why not just ban alcohol? That’d eliminate drunk-driving fatalities a lot faster than it would those from secondhand smoke. Hell, it’d cut down on the alcohol-related diseases and crimes that cost society hundreds of millions each year. While we’re at it, why not ban cars? But, of course, following their own “public good” logic would mean our adult hall monitors would have to give up all their completely safe and environmentally friendly cars. Easier to force someone else to give up smoking.

The other Trojan horse in which anti-smoking zealots have marched through the gates of government is the laughable justification of “worker’s health.” As Dana Kaye of the American Lung Association of Oregon told the Associated Press last summer: “This policy change protects the health of people who right now have to work around cigarette smoke.”

Anti-cigarette nags work the “employee health” mantra the same way brain-dead Bushies chant “The surge is working!”; as though simply repeating the phrase often enough will make it true. But here’s the thing about working in a bar—despite Kaye’s disingenuousness, no one has to do it.

I grew up in Southeast Alaska and like a lot of kids ended up crewing on small fishing boats. For parts of two summers I hauled nets, cleared longlines, gutted fish, and made a buttload of cash. However, as commercial fishing was the hardest and most dangerous work I’d ever done—a street in my hometown is named after a Little League teammate who fell off the back of a fishing boat in junior high and was never seen again—I decided after two seasons that I never wanted to do it again. I began applying for less lucrative though vastly less hazardous work.

Ask around for the real reason so many Oregonians are looking forward to the smoking ban and you’ll get some iteration of the simpler truth. As Stanley says, “One hundred percent, this is because people don’t like smelling like an ashtray when they get home.”

I can relate. I don’t like it, either. The difference is when I don’t want to reek up my church jeans, my solution isn’t to infringe upon someone else’s rights. I do what rational people used to do in this country. I avoid places where cigarettes are smoked. As Fran Lebowitz pointed out in her essay, “When Smoke Gets in Your Eyes … Shut Them,” dealing with “the unpleasant personal habits of others … is what ‘public’ means. … Being offended is the natural consequence of leaving one’s home.” If you don’t like rubbing shoulders with the hoi polloi, drink in your living room. Or go one of the 200 or so smoke-free bars in town.

Besides, I’m going to miss the old, grimy atmosphere. I’ll miss our history together. This country was founded on the tobacco trade. Bogey wouldn’t have been Bogey without the coffin nails. And bars just won’t be as fun when half the working-class regulars—the real target of this anti-smoking jihad—have to bail out mid-argument to huddle in the rain just to get in a relaxing huff. By kowtowing to yet another milepost on the road to American pussification we might be saving our lungs, but we’re killing our hearts.

Tucson, Dead Dogs, and a Sport I Once Loved

2008-11-20T11:34:00.000-08:00

Here’s how you know your gambling operation is in its heyday—even dead guys want to be part of the action.

“To give you an example of how dedicated fans were in the 1980s, we had a patron at Tucson Greyhound Park who passed away and his widow asked if she could spread his ashes at the finish line of the track,” Ron Sultemeier, then general manager of the Tucson park, tells me. “It’s where he’d spent all his time, where all his buddies always were, so she said he would have liked that.”

Such was the euphoria surrounding greyhound racing in the United States near its 1994 zenith when 28.6 million people turned the stiles at fifty-eight tracks to bet $2.2 billion on stick-thin dogs chasing a stuffed bone around a 550-yard oval for approximately thirty seconds. Since then attendance has swan dived and wagers are off more than fifty percent (a 71 percent decline alone in the 1990s in Florida, center of the dog racing universe), with track closures from Iowa to Texas and Wisconsin to Connecticut providing an ugly auger of a dying sport.

It’s easy to see why the American Greyhound Track Operators Association nowadays prefers to avoid the embarrassment of calculating national attendance or handle (total track wagers). Most of the thirty-four tracks that still run live racing exude all the ambience of an intensive care unit—hulking grandstands sit empty, betting windows are dark, and dogs sometimes run around silent tracks with literally no one on the rail watching. (OTB keeps many operations afloat.) What gamblers remain bet the way the French smoke—without joy or hope. Where once echoed cries of “Get up, seven!” or “Don’t you fade on me, you piece of shit!” now is heard only the disconcerting hum of open mics over neglected P.A. systems.

Like Russia and Bear Stearns, great empires collapse all at once and with little warning. Humanitarian protests have made small inroads, but the explosion of legal gambling has been the chief force behind greyhound racing’s lagging performance. State lotteries, Internet poker and sports gambling, and Native American casinos have shifted interest away from racetracks. Once among the highest-earning tracks in the country, the massive edifice of the Multnomah Kennel Club just outside Portland, Oregon—where I paraded like a Viking warrior after my first quiniela win in the 1980s—stands like a hoary relic from an irrelevant civilization, awaiting likely takeover by a proposed casino. In historical terms, dropping a casino into the middle of your dog track is like having the Vatican set up shop in the heart of the old Roman Empire.

“Forty-five- to sixty-five-year-old is our demographic,” says Sultemeier, who now runs Delaware North Companies Gaming and Entertainment, which operates greyhound tracks in four states. “You’re finding fewer and fewer of those twenty-one- to forty-five-year-olds you would have seen ten or twenty years ago.” Big surprise that kids tend to avoid places haunted by senior citizens rolling their portable oxygen respirators up to the wagering windows, like the guy I recently hung out with at the Tucson track. Actually, this isn’t precisely true. The old wheezer remained seated while barking abusive orders at his aged Mexican wife (she of the brilliantly dyed red hair, the blanket color denoting all #1 dogs), after which she smiled, addressed him in polite Spanish, and rose between races with grand Latin dignity to place bets for him.

Upstairs, the clubhouse was an even bigger buzzkill. Rows of deserted tables lined the restaurant—What’s more awkward than a party no one shows up for?—and massive gallery windows with cracked molding and chipped paint offered epic views of a dirt infield overrun by weeds and scrub.

“Ten or fifteen years ago you not only needed a reservation to get in here, you had to wear a jacket,” says Ben, a 65-year-old holdout who’s been betting here for twenty-five years. He’s one of seven guys I count in the clubhouse built to accommodate several hundred. “Look down there,” he says, indicating the rows of empty seats along the rail outside. “You could rape someone out there and no one would know it.”

Even in the clubhouse boxes there’s always been a sort of déclassé charm to the dogs—you hear Tracy Morgan’s voice saying “dog track,” not Henry Higgins’—but for the inveterate dogger this is an ignominy beyond demeaning. I’ve torn up tickets and sworn death oaths to crooked kennels and hapless mutts at tracks from Guam to Idaho; but I never expected to roam the empty grounds of a nationally known track on a warm desert night, find a tote board with a total win pool of $118 for the feature race, and be able to count every head in attendance—twenty-eight. Sultemeier claims the GM at Arizona’s Apache Junction track—now reduced to OTB only—knows ninety percent of the regulars by name.

The last race of the night features the irresistibly named Fabulous Event who also happens to be the “Best Play Of The Day” on the tip sheet of the local handicapper supreme, a guy named “Weasel.” (I’m not a skilled enough inventor of symbolic irony to be making any of this up.) How fitting would it be for this noble beast to lift the spirits of these entire proceedings—particularly mine, given that I’m down $65—by charging to a final, emblematic victory befitting his moniker? Naturally, I bet the house; in this case, $20 to win.

Alone on the rail next to the finish line, I listen to the dogs yelp as they’re loaded into the starting box and ponder the dirt where that long-gone handicapper had his ashes scattered. Dolly Parton’s “Here You Come Again” (big on the country charts in 1977) drifts over the loudspeakers. A rusty clank indicates the bone gathering speed on its mechanical arm in the far turn. The gate lifts and Fabulous Event breaks … dead last.

Watching this loser give up ground while the pack flashes past I’m overcome with the nauseating sensation that I’ve seen this race run one too many times. Crumpling the betting ticket in my pocket, I turn my back on the ashes, and head for the parking lot. If no one’s watching this shit anymore, I might as well join the crowd.

A Palin Geography Note

2008-09-25T17:43:00.000-07:00

I believe it's time that someone pointed out that fourteen U.S. states share actual physical borders with foreign countries, and that no one ever before imagined that this fact alone bequeathed any sort of foreign policy expertise upon their elected officials. Also, Boston and four other state capitals are closer to Moscow than Juneau is.

The Inevitable Palin Post

2008-09-13T08:31:00.000-07:00

Over the past couple of weeks a number of people—from friends to readers contacting me through this website—have called or written asking for my thoughts on Sarah Palin. Given that I wrote about politics and growing up in Alaska in Smile When You’re Lying, including a section about my time working as a staffer in the state legislature in Juneau, I suppose the queries are inevitable.

The comments below represent an amalgam of about ten or twenty emails I’ve dashed off in recent days. Since it seems pointless to rehash issues I’m sure most people have already made up their minds about—does Palin’s background make her more or less qualified to step into the presidency, etc.—I’ll try to inject one or two more overlooked items into the discussion.

My first reaction to Palin’s nomination remains my primary explanation for it: oil.

As anyone who has read chapter two of Smile knows, the government of the State of Alaska represents merely a confluence of oil interests (not just oil companies, but oil construction and supply firms, land holders, contractors, lobbying groups, etc.). As anyone who has spoken with me in the past eight years knows, I believe that the Bush administration is THE oil company in this country, that our federal government is essentially at this point run as a massive oil concern. Alaska is far and away the biggest domestic producer of and most important domestic future supplier of oil and natural gas. Thus, for THE oil company, a compliant Alaskan government ally is crucial to long-term strategy.

For those who might disagree with these statements, OK, but at least please spare me the “conspiracy theory” accusation—all of this oil-company profiteering under the guise of government is more of less being conducted in the open (if you don’t believe me, ask Alan Greenspan), which sort of takes the “conspiracy” part out of the equation. They named a state after Washington. They named cities and schools after Jefferson and Lincoln. They named a national park after Teddy Roosevelt. They named an aircraft carrier after FDR. They named a space center after Kennedy. They named a Chevron oil tanker after Condoleezza Rice. They name these things for a reason.

As a state bureaucrat and elected official, Palin is an oil flunky start to finish. (This assessment has nothing to do with her personal life or skills as a mother, issues I know and care absolutely nothing about.) Applied to Palin’s public record, the word “reformer” has as much credibility as “No Child Left Behind,” “Clear Skies Initiative,” “Mission Accomplished,” and “Country First.” Half of America seems to have embraced Orwellian doublespeak, but take even a cursory look and you’ll see it’s been business as usual in Alaska for the past two years. Record oil profits. Record payoffs to Alaskans to go along with the corporate-socialist program. A massive PR and lobbying push more development.

I’m not necessarily complaining about this. To me oil isn’t, or shouldn’t be, a political issue. It’s an economic issue and, perhaps sooner than we’d like, a survival issue for all of us. If given the choice, I’d say let’s not drill in ANWR. I dislike this incredibly stupid “Drill, baby, dill” mantra—the reality in Alaska, and one I think Palin might even embrace, is closer to “Drill, drill, drill, kill, kill, kill.” But at some point, I don’t think we’re going to have a choice about pulling more oil and natural gas out of there. It’s just going to happen. Insofar as elements necessary to sustaining “our way of life” and “our freedom,” oil ranks a very close third behind oxygen and water. I wish it weren’t true, but we need the stuff that much.

To me, these observations are pretty self-evident; which is why it continues to amaze me that I have yet to see any mainstream media put two and two together on the Palin pick. To paraphrase Slick William, “It’s oil, stupid.” Virtually every major issue facing this country can be reduced to oil dependency: Iraq, Iran, terrorism, national security, economy, gas prices, housing market collapse, decline of the auto industry, national debt, China as America’s banker overlord and economic and political threat, climate change ... go down the list, it all comes back to oil. Empires fight over the most valuable and precious commodities of their times: gold, spices, land. Today it’s oil. What’s so hard to understand?

Given this pragmatic view of American politics, the Palin choice makes a certain amount of sense, assuming that you don’t mind having an oil company for a government. Unfortunately, I do mind. I think turning over our federal government to oil concerns has and will for decades have cataclysmic repercussions for Americans.

I no longer live in Juneau, but I’m up there a lot (as recently as two weeks ago, again in November), and still consider myself a Juneauite, if in self-imposed exile. Much is made of Palin’s vaunted popularity in Alaska, but she isn’t at all popular in the state capital, where she seems to have gone out of her way to make herself disliked.

In Smile I wrote, “It’s impossible for me to be civil about Anchorage given the fact that those scheming oil whores have been trying to steal the capital from Juneau ever since I was a kid.” In the roll call of contemporary schemers, Palin ranks first. Although Alaska voters have never approved a capital move (voter approval for capital relocation is required by Alaska law, per a measure called the FRANK Initiative), during her term Palin and her legislative cronies have been brazenly circumventing state law and the will of the people of Alaska by simply ordering the relocation of offices of commissioners and state departments from Juneau to Anchorage. Palin is the first governor to refuse to be inaugurated in Juneau. She is the first to convene a “special session” (to discuss, what else, oil) of the legislature outside of Juneau; a one-day session she then hailed as a precedent-setting success laying the groundwork for a new “legislative hall” she wants constructed outside of Juneau.

The idea is simple—remove the apparatus and employment and money from Juneau, but let the little town with the destroyed economy keep the star on the map as it dies away and is forced to further sell itself out as a theme park for cruise ship lines and plundering ground for timber and mining companies. That’s Palin’s idea of small-town values, but I suppose turning your back on something you supposedly believe in so strongly is a small sacrifice to make in order to make business easier for the oil concerns and lobbyists who own you and who have grown weary of doing business in the real Alaska.

If you need a start for daily newspaper stories about Palin ignoring the will of voters on this issue, start here: http://www.juneauempire.com/stories/021708/opi_247904221.shtml

Oh, and where would the new legislative hall for the state be built? If you guessed in Palin’s hometown of Wasilla (the latest capital move bill was introduced in the Alaska House of Representatives by her Wasilla Republican cohort Rep. Mark Neumann) you’d not only be right, you’d also be my kind of malcontent.

Barnburner that it is up north, the capital-move issue is not one likely to arouse the interest of many voters outside the state. But I bring it up for two reasons. First, to cop to my regional antipathy for Palin. More importantly, though, to provide a preview of what Americans might expect from an administration in which Palin holds the number-two post. Circumventing public will and ignoring the constitution and other laws is standard operating procedure for twenty-first-century Republicans. Nothing new there. Palin will fit right in. As I said, her nomination makes a certain amount of sense from a GOP standpoint. Just please don’t call her a “reformer.”

The other Palin issue is religion. As for all the Bible whomping, I have to admit that although I never much liked Palin, until recently I knew nothing about her strange rapture tendencies and belief that God Himself is laying plans for that natural gas pipeline across the state. But that is the way of these fake Christians who have taken over so many key government positions. Hide your true nature from the infidels (i.e., fellow Americans) who are your enemy, reveal your true self only to fellow “believers” and deceivers.

A day or two after the Palin pick was announced, I wrote an email to a friend saying that oil was the obvious reason she’d been chosen to run with McCain. I ended that email saying, “What confuses me is, why Palin? There are plenty of oil whores in Washington with much more experience and credibility than her. Why wouldn’t they have let a more known quantity supplicate the party to oil concerns?”

The video of Palin addressing her Wasilla church, asking the flock to pray for that natural gas pipeline, standing by while some nut job talks about Wisconsin and Alaska as prophesied “refuge” states for end-of-days crackpots, answered my questions. “Energize the base” is the latest code word for “pander to fake-Christian zealots while we pillage the treasury and retain power.” The strategy appears to be paying off. They’ve even got these people believing that “God” (whatever that means to them) is actually rooting for an unholy alignment of corporations and government and military to bring oil from the Middle East and Arctic to the United States to power our SUVs. Don’t these people even pretend to read The Bible anymore?

But the most mysterious thing about Palin—as incomprehensible to me as the theory of relativity and Tracy Morgan’s enduring popularity—is that a number of intelligent people who I know, respect, and in some cases love, actually intend to vote for her (not the top of the ticket). For years, I’ve worked in offices with unhappy, harpy co-workers (of both sexes) and their nasty harangues and mean little snide comments and lies about co-workers they don’t like and inferiority-complex disregard for education (if you support the American Veep contestant who disdains Harvard and went to five colleges in six years, dial 666 on your cell phone!) and the only thing they’ve ever got me excited to do was rush out the door at 5:30 and start drinking beers so I could forget for a few hours that I had to see them again the next morning.

Like what’s going to happen again in Ohio and Florida and, who knows this time, Michigan and Pennsylvania and wherever else the Democrats are characteristically ignoring, most of the back story surrounding Palin is a fraud. In other words, she fits right in. Now, please stop asking me about this. I can’t take much more of the fourth-grade “coverage” of this ridiculous bunch of people and a media that has somehow come to confuse “objectivity” with giving equal air time to actors who don’t even act well, allowing them to lie, cheat, and steal with zero accountability or retribution. I don’t want any more fights with good people whose point of view on this thing is as foreign to me as German opera. I’ve had a stomach ache since Palin’s “I’m running for student council so vote for me!” speech in Minnesota, and talking about this more isn’t going to change anybody’s mind. Or make the pain go away.

Vanishing America: Euro-Am Neighborhoods

2008-08-28T15:53:00.000-07:00

Unless you’re prowling the Arizona border with the minutemen militia or cashing paychecks from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, you don’t often get the chance to watch ethnic migration playing out in this country in all its Dobbsian glory. Which is why the Podhale Tavern is such a worthwhile side trip if you happen to be in the vicinity of Jackowo—alternately known as Avondale, and occasionally Polonia—the largest Polish-American neighborhood in Chicago, itself the city with the most Poles outside of Warsaw.

Yet here on a Friday night, amid the mounting empties of Zywiec and Okocim beer and mid-Soviet-era, wild-and-crazy-guy bar aesthetic (twinkly Christmas lights, wood-paneling, nude pinups) only half the regulars are of the classic, square-jawed, Polish-speaking variety. The other half, with their baseball caps and unswerving loyalty to Miller Lite and Norteño hits, are shooting games of bola ocho on the pool table. The Podhale’s Pol-Mex diaspora—perhaps the strangest collision of cultures since Cuban-Chinese—is a sociologist’s dream. But Jackowo itself commands attention as arguably the last traditional European-American neighborhood left in the United States.

“The old, identifiable ethnic European neighborhood has pretty much died out across the country,” says Rob Paral, a Chicago demographer I’ve recruited to guide me through America’s waning avenues of Euro influence. “Chicago has most of what’s left and Jackowo is pretty much it.”

There are, of course, plenty of ethnic-pride-minded types who’ll speak up for Little Italys from Baltimore to San Francisco; for Columbus, Ohio’s German Village; Detroit’s Greektown; and dozens of other once-prominent bastions of continental culture. But what European neighborhoods remain in this country are largely vestigial artifices maintained by under-funded museums and a handful of restaurateurs still trying to wring a buck from the historical remnants of our collective mythology. Usually this is accomplished by tricking out of towners into consuming $14 plates of pasta and subsequently drifting into cheap Chianti comas.

One feels an inevitable sense of regret in the face of cultural loss, and if you’re the type who gets choked up at the thought of steam engines, coats and ties at the ballpark, and Irish ghettoes fading into the mists of history you may turn to the likes of PBS The NewsHour senior correspondent Ray Suarez who once wrote a book called The Old Neighborhood, which bemoaned the societal cohesion forfeited in the great migration of Euro spawn away from our packed cities. Dig beneath the sentiment and lousy Little Italy dinners, however, and you begin to wonder what all the whining is about. Old neighborhoods are easy to romanticize, but the fact is that life in ethnic communities is almost always measurably shittier for the ethnics who do the actual living in them.

As immigrant density increases, socioeconomic conditions become lower. Poverty levels increase. High school graduation rates decrease. Communal housing devolves into slums. Not only that, but left in a vacuum cultural enclaves are prone to abscess. Mormon communities that integrated, for example, gave us Mitt Romney. Those that didn’t gave us Warren Jeffs.

Jackowo has remained the exception due to a wave of Polish immigrants who came in the 1990s, an atypical influx facilitated by relaxed restrictions in Europe, changes in U.S. immigration laws, and Chicago’s traditional status as a Polish beacon. Five- to ten-thousand Poles a year are still arriving in Chicago.

Even so, the neighborhood represents a last gasp, not a proud continuation. Given that Latino immigrants to the city outnumber Poles six to one, Chicago Poles couldn’t keep pace with other groups even if they wanted. Which, increasingly, they don’t. Poland’s 2004 entry into the EU coupled with the plummeting dollar makes London and Berlin logistically easier and more lucrative places for outward-bound Poles to earn money. These days the truly ethnic communities in Chicago are Mexican. As Paral says, “There are parts of Chicago that look more like East L.A. than East L.A. does.”

During the Podhale’s “happy hour” (the ruminative nature of the Slavic crowd makes quantifying such offhand descriptions a necessity), the reaction to all of this is mixed. Behind the bar, Lucy—who’s lived in the neighborhood twenty-five years—tells me that if I’m looking for the real Polonia experience I’ve arrived twenty years late.

“Before here every restaurant Polish,” she tells me. “Every person, all houses, business, everything Polish. Now half is Mexican.” Lucy’s expression seems to indicate that the changes she’s seen aren’t necessarily for the better, but just to be sure I put the question to her directly. She angles a shoulder toward the Mexicans at the pool table and offers one of those dour, struggle-of-the-steppe expressions that’s always made the culture feel so impenetrable to me.

Two stools over, Eddie is more fatalistic: “All life, everything change, all the time, it is impossible to stop, why bother to try?”

Eddie came to Chicago from a small Polish town in 1973. He worked construction, then ran a bar, then owned a bar. He looks like a retired left tackle—head chiseled from a block of stone, shoulders like shanks of beef. I imagine a football coach shoving him onto a field shouting, “Kowalski, get in there and knock some sorry sonofabitch on his ass!” and Eddie running out and doing it.

I tell Eddie I’m looking for the best Polish food in the neighborhood and on his advice my buddy Donovan and I end up at the Staropolska restaurant. Brightly lit. Vinyl booths. Disinterested wait staff. Friday night, eight o’ clock, and quiet as John Paul II’s tomb. The kind of place you know you should leave the second you walk in, but before you can pull your thoughts together you’ve got a booth, menus, a couple beers, and a commitment.

The bottom-feeder of the dumpling world, the pierogies are at least decent (not counting the ones filled with beets), but even while eating the pork goulash I can feel the intestinal blockage setting in. I’m not kidding. I’m going to live with this meal for the next three days. After Lucy’s vague petulance, Eddie mumbling about his 82-year-old mother wanting to return to the home country to die, and the Eastern Front gaiety of the Staropolska, the evening is in danger of falling apart.

Dono and I settle up and finally leave Jackowo behind for a bar in Andersonville called Hopleaf. Two dozen beers on tap. A menu with Montreal-style brisket, a duck Reuben, and mac-and-Stilton-cheese. The place is filled with good-looking, young people. Very good-looking. Especially after Lucy.

After a weekend of earnest sociological contemplation, heady discussion with demographers, and boozy chats with locals, it’s the Hopleaf that winds up offering the most articulate explanation of the demise of Euro-America. Surrounded by exotic food, drink, and well-dressed crowd, I hear an imaginary son of Eddie saying, This is what it’s all about. This is what my ancestors, who had no time for nostalgia and no love of long faces, would have wanted for themselves. What possible reason could there be to not leave the old neighborhood behind for good?

Bill Simmons Will Not Die in Peace

2008-07-29T11:29:00.001-07:00

A couple of months ago, a men’s magazine asked me to write a profile of the sportswriter Bill Simmons. The story idea was prompted by the public feud Simmons and his employer (ESPN) had gotten into earlier this year, but the piece was also meant to include classic elements of career-retrospective profile. Set up who Simmons is, why he’s important, find out where his head is now, etc.

Because I’ve been a fan of Simmons for a number of years and because I think his book, NOW I CAN DIE IN PEACE, is one of the funniest sports books ever written, I was pretty excited about the assignment. After putting in calls to Simmons’ agent and a PR rep from ESPN to set up an interview, I began doing a bunch of research and writing notes and little disjointed chunks of copy. This is my basic SOP when doing profiles. Do a ton of research. Come up with two or three angles that might or might not end up being the approach to the finished piece. Write up a ton of questions, pose them to the person in the interview, go back and decide which of my assumptions were right, which were wrong, and write the piece using a bunch of interview quotes to help support or refute my original points.

Alas, six weeks into this process, Simmons (after some back and forth with ESPN) declined to be interviewed (for reasons discussed below). Not having access to the person being written about puts writers and publications in tricky territory and in this case the magazine decided that without Simmons’ participation, the parts about his testy relationship with ESPN would be especially tough to pull off. The whole piece was killed before it ever really got off the ground.

Despite understanding the magazine’s decision, I was nevertheless disappointed, not the least because I had about 8,000 words of a half-written profile I’d spent a lot of time putting together. I hate wasting time and effort, and I also felt that during the process (including re-reading his book) I’d come to appreciate Simmons in a way I previously hadn’t. And then I remembered I hadn’t posted anything on this site for a while (been in India this summer; more on that later), so rather than let a lot of time and energy and perhaps a modest amount of insight go to waste, I wrote up the Simmons’ story, sans its star. My original hope was to get Simmons to annotate the story with quotes, sort of the gimmick he uses in NOW I CAN DIE IN PEACE, but for now here’s the “killed” story on the best American sportswriter of the decade. CT

HED: Bill Simmons Will Not Die in Peace

DEK: Ripped in the press. Censored by his bosses. Betrayed by supporters. How long until the most famous sports fan in America throws in the towel?

Find a guy who grew up fixated on something specific—music, cars, hammers and nails—then saddle up in a bar next to the backup guitarist, the shop mechanic, the CAD-zombie architect. You’ll hear it before the first beer’s gone—nothing sucks the fun out of something you love like repetition and obligation. Like many before him though, Bill Simmons, the most important sportswriter of the new century, figured he could play by his own rules. Thought he’d hit on a way to turn his obsession into his profession and not get burned by the switch. Thought he could game the system.

Simmons’ love was sports and his idea was to live the dream for all of us. If he couldn’t be a professional athlete, he’d be the next best thing—a professional fan. With an innovative writing style, and helpful kick from an emerging communications behemoth, he’d skip right over the conventional model of objective “sportswriter” by taking his hometown Boston Red Sox, the NBA, and the plainly obvious connections between game three of 1987 Stanley Cup Finals, the surprising lack of decent bars outside Yankee Stadium, and Beverly Hills, 90210, and spin it all into a career that essentially amounted to publicly rooting for his favorite teams.

Simmons’ ticket out of the suburban white guy, nine-to-five ghetto was a prodigious writing talent. To co-opt the vernacular of his style, the kid hit the keys like Clubber Lang coming out like a house on fire in the first fight against a bloated, unprepared champ. With its searing humor and unapologetic Sawx cheerleading, The Boston Sports Guy, the one-man website he started in 1997, drew the 28-year-old a growing number of devotees. One of them, Jimmy Kimmel, brought him out to L.A. in 2002 to write jokes for his TV show. By 2003, Simmons had moved on to become the full-time Sports Guy, ESPN.com’s most popular columnist, a platform from which he quickly seized the mantle of America’s Biggest Sports Fan from Chris Berman.

Simmons became sports’ first Internet star. Before The Sports Guy, professional athletics were written about in a vacuum, as though nothing else existed outside the arena. Simmons’ instant-classic columns, like his dead-on dissection of Hoosiers, placed sports within a broader social context, inserting them seamlessly (why had this not been done before?) into the entire mainstream milieu in a way that millions of young guys instantly identified with. His murderously funny recap of the 2006 NBA All Star Game in Houston—aka “the black Super Bowl”—concluded with Michael Jordan’s wife breaking up a raucous hotel-bar card game: “She sneaks in and sits down next to him. And poor MJ looks like somebody who took a no-hitter into the ninth, then gave up a triple off the left-field wall.” Columns like these spoke to fans with such universal empathy that they stand beside anything Grantland Rice or George Plimpton ever wrote.

I personally know a writer is great when he can get me to read and laugh at all 374 pages on a subject I hate—in this case, the Red Sox and the miracle run of Boston sports dominance the rest of the nation has been enduring alongside the worst presidential administration in history. (I’m not saying there’s a connection, but I’m not saying there isn’t, especially given Curt Schilling’s repulsive and needlessly divisive public endorsement of Herr Bush immediately after the 2004 World Series.) In addition to being ridiculously funny, Simmons’ account of the Sox’ curse-killing Series triumph, Now I Can Die in Peace, is one of the three best sports books of the modern era, alongside Jim Bouton’s Ball Four and Joe Queenan’s True Believers.

**

If you’re a sports fan, or if you’ve been paying any kind of attention to the career arc of media darlings, you know what happens next. Get famous enough and pretty soon people will start hating you simply for being a celebrity. For Simmons, the backlash began in earnest during March Madness 2006, when a Sports Illustrated feature on Internet sports websites portrayed him as the field general for a style of sub-literate, frat-boy, turd journalism with less credibility than a North Korean presidential election. Web postings dedicated to Simmons antipathy blossomed, typified by the Anti-Bill Simmons blog, which continues to rip Simmons despite aping his signature style. On the eve of last season’s Celtics-Lakers NBA Finals, when all of Boston was wrapped in a euphoric group hug of disbelief (“The Pats? The Sox? The Celts? What’s next, Scarlett Johansson comes over to give us all blowjobs?”), longtime sportswriter Bob Ryan (who Simmons thanked in the acknowledgments of his book) devoted an entire Boston Globe column to annihilating Simmons. The piece began with the sentence, “Beware of False Prophets.”

Outside criticism is one thing, but from the day he signed with ESPN, Simmons has also famously struggled with pleasing corporate masters who frown upon such Simmons specialties as toxic excoriation of the network’s most inept announcers. All of this professional strain exploded into public spectacle this past spring when the beleaguered Simmons announced that he’d be cutting back on the number of columns he writes for ESPN.com by way of protesting the Disney-owned company’s censorship of his work. Simmons had recently signed a major contract extension with ESPN through 2010, but now he claimed the company was reneging on its deal and editing his best jokes, telling Deadspin.com: “I still love writing my column and only re-signed last year because I really did believe that we had hashed out all the behind the scenes bullshit and come to some sort of agreement on creative lines, media criticism rules, the promotion of the column and everything else on ESPN.com. Within a few months, all of those things changed and certain promises were not kept.”
If you’re curious about the kind of material the worldwide leader considers inappropriate for you and other impressionable children, Simmons provides an example in Now I Can Die in Peace as part of a discussion on the creative use of profanity at Fenway Park. “My favorite shirt that I wasn’t allowed to mention at ESPN.com: The one that says ‘Yankees suck’ on the front and ‘Jeter swallows’ on the back. Now THAT’S comedy.”
For a guy in the smart-aleck business, depriving readers of laughs is never wise, but the highly publicized dustup with ESPN may have hurt Simmons’ image more than the company’s. The smattering of onetime fans turning on their former hero has lately begun to feel like a sea change, with readers beginning to wonder if sandbagging his column doesn’t put Simmons in the company of diva athletes who cheat the fans by loafing after fly balls or refusing to take their allotted twenty-five jumpers a game just to prove a few pissy points to management. The gathering mood was summed up by one ex-fan in a web posting succinctly titled, “Bill Simmons is a Twat.”
**
Another of those ex-fans is my buddy Shanghai Bob, a man who follows American sports with the obsessive fervor characteristic of homesick expats yearning for familiar touchstones amid the chaos of Southeast Asia. Shanghai Bob’s far-flung residence makes him precisely the type of reader Internet columnists are built to reach and for a number of years he and I giddily forwarded each other links to stories with subject lines like “Simmons does it again!” Shanghai Bob stopped with the Sports Guy emails a couple years ago and lately has taken to referring to Simmons as “that little punk from Boston.” A few weeks ago, I emailed Bob to find out why exactly he’d soured on the guy.

“I vividly recall a three-page sponge bath and neck rub of Curt Schilling published long after the 2004 Series when it might at least have been understandable,” he replied. “Without doubt the most nauseating piece of jock-sniffing ever composed.”

Kidlike adoration of athletes is part of Simmons’ shtick, but his relentless Beantown boosterism was bound to get old with a national audience. It hasn’t helped that with their teams’ ascendancy Boston fans have morphed into the most obnoxious lot this side of an Arsenal football riot, remarkable for being the sole entity on the planet capable of making a sympathetic figure out of Hank Steinbrenner. Most of this is due to the city’s insufferable run of sports success, but Simmons shares the blame for playing a not insignificant role in rallying the quaint, mythical notion of something called Red Sox Nation into a cohesive conglomeration the rest of the country now despises in a way it had not previously realized was necessary.

After the somewhat predictable “Fuck Boston” rant, Shanghai Bob moved to the other chief criticism of Simmons, that the man often simply doesn’t know what he’s talking about. A prime example (provided by my Simmons-hating friend Rama in New York) is this exchange between Simmons and ESPN NBA “draft guru” Chad Ford following Ford’s critical review of several European players during an online debate.

Simmons: Wait a second, aren’t you the same guy who keeps pushing that superduperstiff Kosta Koufos on us as a potential lottery pick?

Ford: Ummm ... Kosta Koufos was born in the exotic locale of Canton, Ohio. He's played American basketball his entire life. Yes, his parents are Greek ... but does that now count as international?

Simmons: Kosta Koufos is American??? My whole world has been shattered! Can we count him as a foreigner, anyway? Come on, throw me a bone.

While the view that Simmons doesn’t have a clue about certain subjects is occasionally valid—Ryan essentially made the same point, though less effectively given that his tone suggested a man being prepped for a hip replacement—this criticism has never made sense to me. Simmons is without question a blowhard (to my ear, the lovable kind, but I understand dissenting opinions) and like all columnists he plays fast and loose with rhetoric to support his various outrageous arguments. But his rise to fame was facilitated not by a keen grasp of numbers or precedent (though more often than not he has that), but rather by a unique recognition of how sports fit into the fuzzier realm of the prevailing cultural zeitgeist.

On this last point, however, there’s also cause for concern. Throughout his career Simmons has been obsessed with growing old and irrelevant, telling The New York Times in 2005, “I live in fear; fear of being tapped out,” and Sports Illustrated in 2006, “I really feel like I have a year or a good eighteen to twenty months left in me.” By way of keeping fresh, he’s replaced the 90210 jokes with references to The Hills and The O.C., but more and more often he’s been misreading the landscape in more fundamental ways. Previewing Wimbledon in his ESPN magazine column this year, he essentially declared the entire sport of tennis dead. “If I guaranteed you that the 2008 Wimbledon men’s final would be the best match of the past 20 years, would you watch it?” he wrote. “Amazingly, many sports fans would say no.”

Rafael Nadal’s epic finals triumph over Roger Federer, of course, turned out to be perhaps the greatest tennis match ever, one of those transcendent TV events, like the Boise State-Oklahoma Fiesta Bowl, during which energized fans texted and emailed like-minded friends around the country until, even before it was over, the match had passed into the realm of legend. And plenty of people watched it. NBC pulled a twelve-percent share of the total TV audience, a forty-three percent increase from the year before. Two years in the making, Federer’s dethroning was the apex of one of the most ferocious rivalries in contemporary sports yet Nadal hadn’t even been mentioned in Simmons’ column.

**

Actors and musicians have reputations for being difficult interviews, but the fact is that, dating back to the days of Howard Cosell and then Bryant Gumbel, no one in the celebrity universe is as big a prima donna as the sports media celebrity. (Bob Costas being a rare, holy exception.) Employed by a media company that was a major sponsor of his radio show, I once spent six months unsuccessfully trying to track down Jim Rome, cock-blocked at every turn by an army of protective minions reminiscent of David Spade as Dick Clark’s personal assistant on Saturday Night Live. “And you would be? And this would be regarding?” “Uh, the same guy who’s been jumping through your fax-phone-and-email hoops for the past six months trying to arrange an interview with the guy we dropped a quarter of a million bucks on this year.”

Back when he was hosting Around the Horn, I flew to Washington, DC to interview Max Kellerman. The rising ESPN star postponed our first scheduled meeting, then a second, and I spent three days in a hotel room watching the TV show he was filming half a mile away and waiting to be rescheduled. I finally went home without an audience with the media giant. Tom Hanks? A sweetheart. The allegedly temperamental Williams sisters? Graciously allowed me into their Florida home less than forty-eight hours after flying back from losses in the Australian Open. For sports guys, though, you have to grovel.

Simmons took his time ignoring interview requests for this article before eventually declining through an ESPN publicist, and a few days later with a polite, apologetic email. Since the SI story, which Simmons still sees as a hurtful ambush, he’s been wary of interviews, and extremely selective about media he talks to.

Like most of us would, Simmons has recoiled from public criticism, but the infamous SI piece wasn’t so much a hatchet job on him as it was an unintentionally comic display of insecurity and fear of the Internet by the brick-and-mortar establishment. Like all shortsighted print media (listen, the Internet is going to replace print the same way TV replaced radio and the movies), SI is scared shitless of the Internet and undoubtedly saw in Simmons’ youthful hand the dagger coming to hack the majestic treacle of its old-school sapmeister Rick Reilly into obsolescence. (Unable to beat ’em, Reilly and his cloying style merely joined Simmons at ESPN.)

The article was also notable for the scolding tone it took with supposedly unscrupulous and ill-informed Internet writers who had been the first to break the news, back in 2006 mind you, of a link between Roger Clemens and a positive steroids test. Tsk, tsk, you Wild West neophytes, finger-wagged the scooped magazine, leaving us all to wait another two years for the established, respectable media to crawl up to the story.

The SI piece was a joke to every reader under fifty, but anyone who’s ever been mauled by a bloodthirsty reporter or backstabbed by fellows in the profession will have sympathy for Simmons’ newfound suspicion of interviews. On the other hand, it’s hard to drum up sympathy for a guy who made his fortune naming names and blasting away at targets and who then signals for a time out once the pot shots come flying back at him. If Simmons didn’t want to be called out in public, maybe he shouldn’t have once described the roster of Red Sox managers in his lifetime as “a staggering collection of drunks, butt-kissers, dimwits, village idiots, senior citizens, hotheads and lunatics.” Nobody likes a guy who dishes it out but can’t take it.

**

I’ve never met Simmons and I could be wrong on this, but I don’t get the sense he’s a prima donna or a bad guy. But either way, I really don’t care. I don’t continue to read his stuff because I think he’s right—I read him because I find it remarkable that after so many years, after so many columns, after so many brilliant and completely justifiable Stephen A. Smith jokes have undoubtedly been cut from his copy by unimaginative corporate weasels, the man is still the funniest, most insightful sportswriter we’ve got (the Wimbledon whiff notwithstanding). I don’t say that facetiously. More than anything it’s his talent as a writer that people underestimate—Simmons is often dismissed as an Internet phenom, but the fact is he excels in books and magazines and probably the screenplay he’s occasionally mentioned writing.

That said it’s hard to account for the strange place his once brilliant career is in and a lot of Simmons’ problems seem to be of his own making. I’m glad I don’t work for a Disney-owned company and I’m sure Simmons’ columns suffer as a result of the fact that he does. But we all make compromises and having worked for ESPN before Simmons presumably signed his new contract with his eyes open. He undoubtedly enjoys the financial security (various estimates put his annual salary between $500,000 and $1 million) and status that comes with being a big wheel at ESPN, but who wouldn’t expect a deal like that to require certain concessions? Keith Olbermann isn’t at MSNBC for no reason.

It’s possible that after more than a decade of helping the public fully appreciate the social value of multi-millionaire kids with godlike fast-twitch muscles and steroid dealers on speed dial, Simmons’ current temper has much to do with the assertion his sometimes blog partner Chuck Klosterman makes in the book Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: “Nobody realizes how much the people who write about sports despise the subject they write about.” Do something long enough, turn your love into a job, and see how fast it takes to become embittered.

Simmons repeatedly insists he’s still as big a fan as ever—making the point often enough that you begin wondering who he’s trying to convince—but all of us fell in love with sports as kids and I have a hunch that Simmons is as much a fan of his childhood as he is a fan of sports. After the table of contents, the first page of Now I Can Die in Peace features a photo of Boy Bill dressed up for Halloween as his childhood hero, Boston centerfielder Fred Lynn. It’s a sweet shot—baggy uniform, eye black smeared like butter, cockeyed Sox cap. You see a lot of love in that kid’s face. And if you look at it long enough, you can almost avoid coming to the conclusion that Simmons hasn’t become what he promised himself and tacitly promised all of us that we never would—sick of the game.

Instant Upgrade: 13 Ways to Improve Travel

2008-05-21T21:39:00.000-07:00

Few things suck more for the traveler than nasty surprises. Yet we keep traveling. Not simply because we like to travel or, in many cases, we must travel, but because as rational beings we accept that the world is an imperfect place and that we shouldn’t expect too much in the way of personal attention from the colossus of modern travel.

In offering the travel industry at large, the following suggestions for improving its product—some revolutionary, some disarmingly simple—I’m not asking for the stars. I seek neither the impractical (first-class leather seats in coach), the implausible (teleportation), nor the unrealistic (airport concourses that demand less walking than a breast cancer fund-raiser). Instead, I’ll simply hand over ideas that, implemented with minimum effort, are conceived to save the industry money as $4-a-gallon approaches, while making the travel experience more pleasant for all. And by “all” I mostly mean “me.” Since none of these brainstorms are protected by patents, licenses, or other legal restrictions, Big Travel can feel free to begin making my life better right away. I’ll start with a few easy ones and work up to the big-ticket items.

1. Fall out of love with your own voice
“On the left side of the aircraft, folks can get a nice view of the Salton Sea.” “The captain has turned on the fasten seat belt sign.” “We’ll be coming through the cabin shortly with a choice of beverages.” “In just a few moments we’ll be starting our descent into the Newark area.” “We know you have a choice in air travel and we thank you for choosing us.”

On a two-hour, fifteen-minute flight from Dallas to Chicago I once kept a running tally of every piece of patter that came over the intercom. No more than nine consecutive minutes ever passed without a superfluous announcement of some type. Almost all of these concerned matters passengers would have figured out anyway, such as, “In just a few minutes we’ll begin our video programming” (more on this shortly) and “You can stow your larger items in the overhead bins.” I get that any job on an airplane is tedious and repetitive, but take away his entire collection of Spiderman videos and Ben 10 figurines and my seven-year-old nephew still demands less attention than pilots and flight attendants. Intercom use should be reserved for three circumstances: departure safety briefing, landing announcement, and emergencies.

2. Don’t make us ask
Nothing spoils a meal like being held hostage to an uppity or lackadaisical waiter’s notion of when you’ll be allowed to leave the restaurant. Checks should be delivered with the final course, at least for businesses lunches.

3. Abolish institutionalized taxi rape
One the enduring mysteries of travel is the overwhelming percentage of municipalities that allow the first impression of their cities to be an extortionate $45 cab ride from the airport to downtown. Does the Mafia run every taxi company in the world? Is it too much to ask that visitors to major cities be spared from getting fleeced as if they’ve concluded a transaction with a twenty-dollar streetwalker as soon as they get to town? Affordable rides into the city would eliminate a significant amount of the stress and hassle endured by visitors coming to a place for the first time. If private enterprise can’t responsibly accommodate tourists, local legislation should be employed to force them into it.

4. Retire the beverage cart
Responsible for more mashed toes, shin splints, and dislocated elbows than the WWE, these two-hundred-pound chariots of doom present passengers in aisle seats with a constant danger, cost airlines money, and keep me from taking a piss at precisely the moment I most need to. To shave expenses, airlines have already done away with most food. The next logical step is ending the tiresome drink service that creates more trouble than it’s worth. For flights of three hours or less, hand out bottles of water and sell beer, wine, and booze in the departure lounge. This will save the airlines money and labor and, for customers, eliminate the risk of being sideswiped every five minutes by the polyestered haunch of an exhausted stew horsing a Sisyphun weight up and down the aisle taking drink requests and barking orders—“Keep your feet and knees in!”—with all the élan of the guy who sits in the booth and weighs me in at the dump.

5. Or at least eliminate the paper trail
Why do I need a tissue-thin napkin every time someone on an airplane hands me four ounces of water in a urine-sample cup? Former American Airlines chairman Robert Crandall once famously saved his company $40,000 a year by eliminating the olive from salads the airline once served onboard. A small redwood forest could be recycled from the napkins airlines plow through each year.

6. Update hotel check-in times
In 1946, the Tote’m convenience-store chain extended its hours from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m., announcing its groundbreaking move by changing its name to 7-Eleven. In 1974, the company now known as ACCEL/Exchange booted up the world’s first twenty-four-hour ATM network. In 2005, England and Wales ushered in the era of never-ending public drunkenness by granting licenses allowing pubs to serve liquor round-the-clock.

Yet as nonstop commerce has created a sleepless planet, hotels remain mired in conventions of the 1800s, when the stagecoach or steam train rolled in and out of town once each afternoon and again the following morning. With airlines cleaving away from the hub-and-spoke system (which once rigidly controlled arrival and departure times) in favor of more or less continuous schedules and red-eye flights, the hotel industry needs to restructure its own arrival and departure policies to reflect modern traffic flow. Few miseries compare to landing in a city at 6 a.m. only to while away the morning in traveler’s purgatory awaiting an “early” one o’ clock check-in that you had to grovel to get. The major hotel chain that figures out a way to implement anytime check-in will become the new Hilton. Unless, of course, Hilton gets to it first.

7. Address us like adults
One of the best things about leaving the United States is being spoken to like an adult. Once overseas, the quick temper, simpleton instructions, nursery-school tenor, and scripted happy talk that exemplify the American travel industry’s idea of “service”—the chirpy banter from flight attendants on Southwest Airlines being the pinnacle of infantilism—are replaced by straightforward, competent voices delivering information in a crisp, capable manner. I love England because it’s like a grown-up America, a fact I’m reminded of as soon as I get on a British Airways flight or hop into a London cab. We’ve come to expect politicians and media to speak to us like we’re children—people who fly our airplanes, drive our busses, steer our ships, and run our hotels shouldn’t talk to us as though we just learned to finger paint.

8. Stop the parade
For safety and security purposes, the FAA requires flight attendants to perform a visual check of an aircraft cabin every fifteen minutes. Airlines make use of these mandated rounds by coupling them with a spate of busy work that’s become the bane of passengers who just want to read, work, watch videos, or sleep without interruptions from flight attendants who march up and down the aisles like North Korean border guards. Passengers can’t “sit back, relax, and enjoy the flight” (While we’re at it, how about killing off that overused nugget of twaddle?) if the entire cabin crew is acting like Mom at Thanksgiving, running around so much that the rest of us can’t just relax without someone haranguing us every twenty seconds with more food, drink, or whatever. All we want is to be left alone.

9. Blow us (or at least our wives and girlfriends)
The hotel industry could instantly delight half the population by making blow dryers mandatory in every hotel room in the world. In addition to creating much-coveted luggage space, this simple addition would all but do away with the “God, my hair looks like shit in this picture” regret that vexes females for decades after otherwise pleasant vacations.

10. Decommission wide-bodies
If airlines are going to insist on aisles that are fewer than seventeen inches wide, they should also insist on employees who are fewer than seventeen inches wide.

11. No more enforced TV viewing
As anyone stranded for more than ten minutes in a departure lounge knows, the CNN Airport Network and its eight-minute programming loop is the most excruciating torment devised since CNN International, the channel dubiously famed for its passionate coverage of Lithuanian soccer league injury reports and Formula One qualifying heats from Macau. It may be too much to ask airports to stop assaulting innocent bystanders with piped in CNN weather updates from Guillermo Arduino. But once onboard, when I turn off the tiny monitor embedded in the seat nine inches from my face, it’d be nice if the damn thing stayed off instead of constantly reawakening itself to taunt me into becoming acquainted with the thrilling shopping opportunities in my arrival city, watching bad movies edited to protect the sensibilities of ten-year-old Mormon boys, or staring numbly at the monotonous progress of a little icon representing my boredom traveling across the Great Plains or Atlantic Ocean.

12. Open the damn door
Some propositions that seem fifty-fifty really aren’t. Like dropping a piece of buttered toast. We all know the minute it goes down that it’s not coming off the floor without a collection of lint, dirt, and hairs stuck to the golden half. Same principle applies to double doors, one side of which hotels, restaurants, and other businesses are obsessed with keeping locked, so that patrons inevitably clank up against the locked side. Unless you’re managing a prison, there’s no reason to infuriate the luggage-hauling masses unfamiliar with the particulars of local door management.

13. Let babies be babies
With a few exceptions, this list of suggestions doesn’t seem all that onerous, but I do acknowledge that travel is a two-sided arrangement and that if travelers are going to make demands of the industry we should be willing to give something in return. Yes, we’re the ones paying the bills, but most of us need travel more than travel needs us. By way of finding a negotiating point, perhaps we as travelers could begin by correcting some of the behavior that aggravates an industry already worn to the nub by the non-stop demands of a complaint-minded public who loves nothing more than pointing a litigious finger of blame every time a fly winds up in an ice cube or a drunk is refused a drink. I’ll get the ball rolling by identifying an area of passenger comportment in critical need of improvement.

Although babies who belong to people I don’t know are often a pain in the ass, I accept that they are necessary to the propagation of the species, that spending my tax dollars on their future schools indirectly benefits me by helping to maintain a working and literate society, and that apparently they must all now fly like Saudi royalty everywhere they go. (I personally didn’t see the inside of an aircraft until my parents were confident that I knew how to feed myself and shut up the instant I was instructed to do so, but they were of a lost generation to whom things like social manners and public dignity actually mattered.) I also accept that babies, particularly when exposed to the dry and pressurized stress of an airborne environment, have a tendency to cry and are deserving of my sympathy.

What I find intolerable, however, is a solution that’s worse than the problem. By this I refer to the incessant shushing and cooing of parents who, primarily for the benefit of annoyed fellow passengers, put on a showy though inevitably vain effort to quiet the uncontrollable, twenty-two-pound monster forced to sit in their laps for the entire journey from Skowhegan, Maine to Kauai because they were too cheap to buy it a separate ticket. No amount of baby talk or off-key lullaby’ing has ever stopped a single baby on an airplane from doing everything it could, for as long as it could, to sound like Christina Aguilera sticking a butter knife in a light socket. A baby will stop crying when it’s fed or when it’s good and ready to stop crying. Screaming infants I can take. This—“Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh! Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh! I don’t know what’s gotten into him, he’s never this fussy! Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh! Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!”—I cannot. Nor should the flight attendant who just ruptured my knee with the beverage cart have to.

Random Music-related Conversation Starters

2008-04-29T20:31:00.000-07:00

The latest issue of Esquire printed a short thing I did called “A Few Music-related Discussion Questions.” I’d originally written a longer piece; below is the full list, including all of the entries that appeared in the magazine as well as those that didn’t make the cut.

A Few Music-related Discussion Questions

There was once a time when we stayed up all night chain smoking and discussing the social application of music, not caring in the least about peripheral issues such as copyright infringement or the industry’s collapsing business model. In a humble effort to redirect our foundering appreciation of music’s cultural relevance, we herewith present this short list of burning topics. Discuss.

Is it possible to issue a call to arms to Generation Apathy and, if so, can a manifesto be any more dickless than John Mayer’s “Waiting on the World to Change”?

In light of such innovations as Facebook and Thomas Friedman, is “World Music” any longer a valid designation?

Is Remi Nicole’s “I prefer Rock N Roll” this decade’s “I Love Rock and Roll”? Or just this year’s “Hey Ya”? [Postscript: I suppose it’s time to admit I was wrong about the explosion in popularity I expected for this single, but it’s still a great song worth youtubing.]

Has hip-hop become that unbearable or have we just grown old and predictable together? Follow-up: Is it possible to be obnoxious and boring at the same time?

How come the best song about Iraq—Andrew Bird’s “How You Gonna Keep ‘Em Down on the Farm?”—was actually written during World War I?

Name a guitarist under 30 who is as good or famous as Hendrix, Page, Townsend, and Van Halen were at age twenty. Explain why you are unable to do this.

Given that they are composed and arranged by some of our most brilliant musicians, shouldn’t movie scores be considered the classical music of our age?

When will the “Imagine Alice Cooper slamming mojitos in Martin Denny’s basement while Dr. Dre and that Feist chick make out in a corner to the sounds of Slash and Shooter Jennings tuning up” form of music criticism fucking die already?

Now that Taco Bell is using Joe Jackson’s “One More Time” to move enchiritos, will the punk generation stand by while its most treasured musical touchstones are raped on the altar of commercialism the way Baby Boomers have already grown accustomed to doing?

Which performer bears more responsibility for the death of jazz: Kenny G or Wynton Marsalis?

Is American Idol successful simply because we like to laugh at pathetic losers, or because it’s almost impossible to find real singers on pop radio anymore?

A. Almost all of us own some Johnny Cash, Hank Williams, or Willie Nelson. B. Or at least appreciate the idea of the aforementioned informing our musical landscape. C. Despite what you may have heard, Nashville is filled with incredibly talented songwriters and musicians. D. And many hot female singers. E. Dierks Bentley is a genuinely likable performer. F. Tim McGraw and Faith Hill openly revile George Bush, so they ain’t all lockstepping Limbaugh slurpers. G. So why do many of you still refuse on principle to listen to country music?

Is the popularity of shuffle the inevitable and perhaps comforting byproduct of a society and political system increasingly paralyzed by random, inexplicable events that render its citizens feeling powerless in the face of their own doomed lives? And is anyone else sick of it yet?

Common Questions About Travel "Lies"

2008-03-14T14:20:00.000-07:00

I did an interview with a German newspaper this past week. A number of the questions the reporter asked were similar to those that have come up in the Q&A portion of appearances I’ve been doing to promote Smile When You’re Lying. Given that there seems to be widespread interest in these sorts of issues, I thought I’d post a few of the questions and answers.

Q: Every time I read about travel and resorts in German newspapers, the cheapest hotel costs around 100 Euros, the flight is 1,200 Euros. I ask myself: Who has the money to spend on holiday in these places? Why don’t they write about cheaper possibilities?

A: They don’t write about cheaper possibilities because the businesses that support cheap travel (local restaurants, inexpensive modes of transport, single-owner hotels, etc.) don’t have the money to advertise. Travel publications and travel sections of newspapers exist in significant ways as the megaphone of their advertisers. So, if Four Seasons buys $100,000 worth of advertisements in a certain publication, what hotel do you think the publication is going to write about? A mom-and-pop guesthouse can never afford to advertise in a Western magazine or newspaper. But the Raffles Hotel in Singapore can. That’s why you get “tips” advising you to go to the Raffles in Singapore, and not a one-room hut.

The best travel magazine I ever worked for was called Escape. It was published out of Los Angeles. Escape was trying to be a magazine for the Lonely Planet type of traveler — out-of-the-way destinations, stories about independent travel, maximizing cultural experiences. It was a terrific magazine and had many loyal readers, but it went out of business because it couldn’t sell advertising to the kinds of places it was telling its readers to go to. Readers are important, but ultimately magazines are kept in business by advertising money.

Q: What role does PR play?

A: It’s an extension of advertising. Advertising dollars get a magazine’s attention. PR people are the second wave that come in to “help” the publication push its editorial content in the direction that most pleases the advertiser.

Example: A Caribbean country’s tourist board commits to $250,000 worth of advertising to be spread over a one-year period. A month or two later, a PR representative from that country’s tourist board calls the magazine’s ad director and says, “I’ve got a great idea for a story about a new golf course and four-star resort that are opening three months from now on our island.” The ad director says, “Great idea!” The ad director has a meeting with the editor in chief during which he or she reminds the editor in chief of the $250,000 ad buy.

The editor in chief delegates the story to a staff editor, who in turn assigns the golf-course-four-star-resort story to a writer. The primary contact given to the writer is the PR representative who initiated the story. The writer calls the PR rep. The PR rep arranges the writer’s trip (air fare, hotels, food, booze, round of golf, maybe a golf lesson with the club pro, everything paid for by the PR agency). The writer takes the trip, tours the new facility, and has a genuinely nice time and writes his or her glowing account of the wonderful trip. The magazine gets a nice story and advertising dollars, the Caribbean country gets some nice promotion, the PR agency earns the trust of its client and a feather in its cap to flaunt to prospective new clients about its insider contacts. Everyone is happy. (And by the way, that word “commit” up there is important because it gives the advertiser the opportunity to withdrawal the remainder of its advertising buy for any reason; for example, in the event the publication in question prints something the advertiser doesn’t like.)

Now, did anyone “lie” in this exchange? Not really. But when he or she flips through the pages, the reader usually has no idea of the process, not to mention the $250,000 account, that led to the story about the new hotel and golf course they’re reading.

Q: You mentioned Lonely Planet. When you travel for example in Thailand nearly everyone has a Lonely Planet. Are you sick of this?

A: I wrote critically of Lonely Planet’s self-righteous attitude in my book and I was sort of surprised to get a lot of supportive reaction from people who agreed with me. For whatever reason, I thought my dissatisfaction with Lonely Planet was somewhat rare. But I don’t begrudge LP for its success, which I think it earned in an honest way. But, yeah, it has become sort of a victim of its own success. It’s like the old Yogi Berra line: “That place has gotten so popular that nobody goes there anymore.”

Hey, I Don't Hate ALL Travel Writers

2008-01-13T08:13:00.000-08:00

Five Great Travel Books and One Reasonable Request

While I was editor of Travelocity magazine (2000-01), we published an ambitious piece titled “The 100 Best Travel Books Ever Written.” The list included the expected heavyweights — Twain, Theroux, Chatwin, McPhee, Heat-Moon, Bryson — alongside unexpected picks by writers such as James Fenton, Michael Crichton, and Dr. Suess. I like to remind people of this list because, particularly in the wake of the publication of "Smile When You’re Lying," I’ve occasionally been accused of having it in for travel writers. And while it’s true that there are few things I enjoy complaining about more than bad travel writing, there are few things I enjoy reading more than good travel writing. Since short of combing through the stacks of files in my basement it’s almost impossible to unearth a copy of the long-forgotten January/February 2001 issue of Travelocity magazine, here’s a short selection of travel books I admire, each published since 2000.

The eXile: Sex, Drugs, and Libel in the New Russia
By Mark Ames and Matt Taibbi
More than any book I know, this compendium of The eXile, a biweekly English-language Moscow tabloid founded by the authors (Taibbi now writes even sharper copy as a political columnist for Rolling Stone) sums up the thrilling, tedious, and difficult life of expats, from meeting the “Mongolian Dennis Rodman” to the dead return to “dull, sexless America.”

Trials of the Monkey: An Accidental Memoir
By Matthew Chapman
Like all good travel writing, Chapman uses his destination as mere starting point for a story broad enough to take in a number of topics — in this case, science, religion, education, and his own history. The great-great grandson of Charles Darwin, Englishman Chapman travels to exotic Dayton, Tennessee, site of the Scopes-Monkey Trial, to understand both sides of the argument his ancestor so infamously began.

Queenan Country: A Reluctant Anglophile’s Pilgrimage to the Mother Country
By Joe Queenan
I just opened my copy to find a good line and here’s what was on the first random page I looked at: “The current occupant of the throne, Elizabeth II, has presided with great aplomb and dignity over the gradual but inevitable disintegration of the British Empire. Neither flashy nor communicative, this paragon of bourgeoisie taste and homespun attire seems like a very nice old lady who has had the misfortune to be hemmed in by a self-replicating battalion of ding-dongs.” I love Queenan because you can open to just about any page of his books and find gems like that.

Boeing Versus Airbus: The Inside Story of the Greatest International Competition in Business
By John Newhouse
More of a business book than a travel book, but Newhouse is so good at relating the inside details of the dramatic rivalry between the aviation giants that you learn a lot about modern travel in the process. In discussions of America’s trade deficits and export imbalances, few people realize that Boeing is the United States’ number-one exporter and has been for fifty years. We need to pay attention to this stuff.

Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story
By Chuck Klosterman
At some point in his/her life, every freelancer in America will try to talk an editor into funding a self-indulgent “Road trip across America” story. Klosterman is one of the few writers good enough to land the dream gig and then sharp and funny enough to turn the trip into a book you can read three or four times and still laugh at. Klosterman’s journey to places where famous rockers met their demise (Buddy Holly, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Kurt Cobain, etc.) gets diverted in favor of impromptu side trips to visit ex-girlfriends and sample the gastronomic delights of Cracker Barrel.

Closed on Sunday: And Other Pleasant Surprises For the Small-Town Lutheran
By Garrison Keillor
OK, I made up the title. This book doesn’t exist. But since Garrison Keillor is the modern Mark Twain, and since he’s been around the world many times over, if he’d ever break down and do a travel book, I’m certain it’d instantly appear at the top of lists like this one.

George MacDonald Fraser Memory

2008-01-05T16:31:00.000-08:00

I picked up a voice mail this morning from a distraught Shanghai Bob telling me that George MacDonald Fraser had passed away. In a way, I’m glad I wasn’t there to receive the call—it would have been a tough one to get through and, anyway, not long before I’d received the same news (cancer) in an email from Nicholas Latimer at Knopf.

I wish I had it in me to write the kind of eulogy that Fraser deserves, but I know many others with a stronger connection to the great man will deliver those in the coming weeks. I will look for them online. What I can do, in the meantime, is post an interview I conducted with Fraser in December 1999. The story originally appeared in a 2000 issue of American Way magazine. Following the convention of the magazine, it has a somewhat overlong introduction and regrettably short Q&A section. However, if you aren’t already a Fraser or Flashman fan, perhaps the intro will serve as a decent primer.

As for the Shanghai Bob connection, I can only say that while struggling through a difficult and often socially barren year in Japan alongside Bob and our mutual friend Robert Glasser (both Shanghai Bob and Glasser make several appearances in “Smile When You’re Lying”), Flashman and Fraser’s other books quite literally helped us make it through the dark days. Through his books, I think all of us experienced that most strange and satisfying byproduct of the reader’s life—getting to know and become “friends” (of a sort) with someone they've never met. Fraser’s books had that kind of personal impact on people and his way of facing every situation, no matter how grave, with a sense of humor certainly had an impact on my way of thinking about writing and, indeed, living. That sort of perspective was much needed that year in Japan.

Fraser is beloved around the world, but he has a particularly large fan base among expats. I don’t say this simply because it was as an expat that I discovered Fraser, but because his outsider’s outlook, irreverence, and subversive wit aligns so perfectly with the sensibilities of many Westerners who often find themselves in tricky situations abroad. Meeting Fraser and conducting this interview in the lobby of a London hotel will always be one of the great thrills and privileges of my professional life.

Hed: GMF (TK)

Subhed: After a four-year hiatus, Victorian rake Harry Flashman is back in a new novel by the master of military tales from Balaclava to Burma.

By modern standards, George MacDonald Fraser might be considered a lunatic. It's a description he'd probably approve of. For three decades the British author has used military loonies, unpopular causes, and some of history's most infamous characters as the unlikely basis of his wildly popular Flashman novels. Now, at 75, Fraser is smiling along with legions of Flashman addicts as the series' latest installment—Flashman and the Tiger, the eleventh volume, is the first in four years—is set to be published in the United States.

A collection of three stories, Tiger differs in format from the usual full-length novels, but is filled with the comedic villainy, cowardice, and amoral antics that have earned Sir Harry Flashman a worldwide following. The fictional Victorian-era British officer puts his usual irreverent, eyewitness spin on historical events and figures, fleeing from Zulu warriors, trading insults with Oscar Wilde ("an overfed trout in a toupé"), traveling on 1883's maiden run of the Orient Express, dragooned into service in Africa, and quivering alongside the brave (and crazy) British defenders of Rorke's Drift in an action that would become a Victorian legend.

Comedy may be Fraser's trump suit, but his hole card is keen attention to historical minutiae and scholarly eloquence. Quartered Safe Out Here, Fraser's autobiography of his WW II service in Burma, ranks among the best military writing ever—an excerpt appears in the landmark collection of war writing, The Book of War, in which editor John Keegan, probably the world's most-respected living military historian, calls Fraser's memoir "one of the classic literary achievements of the Second World War, indeed of any war." His three volumes of McAuslan stories are among the most heartbreaking and hilarious depictions of the decaying world of the British Empire. Screen credits include The Three Musketeers and the James Bond film Octopussy.

Born in Carlisle, Scotland, Fraser fought in Burma in 1945, left the military in 1947, and worked as a newspaperman in Canada and the U.K. until one day telling his wife he was "going to write us out" of a stable but predictable future. His first book—Flashman—was published in 1969. Taken for the historical send-up it was in Britain, America didn't get the joke at first. Many reviewers, confused by the legit historical documentation, mistook the fictional Flashman for an authentic figure and reviewed the book as straight history. The mess was soon sorted out by a smiling Fraser, and a growing legion has been smiling ever since.

In person, Fraser is a surprise. Neither irascible nor argumentative like his title characters, he is warm and friendly. Living with his wife on the Isle of Man, Fraser is a barely graying veteran now settled comfortably into extra pounds, easy laughter and stories of dash and daring that credit the tradition of Scottish adventure writers from Sir Walter Scott to Robert Louis Stevenson to Arthur Conan Doyle.

AW: How does the new Flashman stack up against the others?

GMF: I'm never happy with the last one. Never. And I'm just surprised that it's outselling the others [in the U.K.]. I'm told that every new Flashman has outsold the previous one.

AW: Is it fair to call these books male fantasies?

GMF: I suppose so. They're escapist. They're adventure stories.

AW: Flashman collects enemies and girlfriends with equal efficiency. Have you got favorites?

GMF: The best villain I think I've done is John Charity Spring, the Oxford don [Flash for Freedom!, Flashman and the Angel of the Lord]. I may have been a little hard on Otto Bismarck [Royal Flash], though no harder than he probably deserved. As for women, the mad queen of Madagascar [Flashman's Lady] is a very interesting one. She must have been an awful cow. (Laughs) But, I would say that Flashman's favorite is the Rani of Jhansi. [Flashman in the Great Game] There are pictures of her. She was stunningly beautiful and a very interesting woman. No one is sure about her character—whose side she was on in the Indian Mutiny and so on—but she was entirely virtuous as far as I can see. Although Flashman thinks she wasn't. And I had to explain this in a footnote.

AW: The footnotes are really the secret weapon of the series, aren't they?

GMF: They were just sort of an idea in the first couple of books. And then I realized that in fact this was a good way of filling in history. I mean, I could go back now and do 40 footnotes for the first book, but I had probably about 15. It just didn't occur to me to do more. But people like them. And it's a good way of getting the truth across.

AW: Is there any truth to the running speculation that Flashman's Civil War exploits are written and tucked away in a drawer?

GMF: No, that isn't true. It's a long time ago that I wrote his Who's Who entry and had him on both sides of the U.S. Civil War. And I've been stuck with that ever since. I've done a lot of research for it, I just haven't got down to committing it to paper. But I know what roughly is going to happen. That might be the next one.

AW: What would Flashman think of modern England?

GMF: Not much. We have had a succession of real rubbish in parliament. Never more so than now. They've turned the country into an open sewer, frankly. I know I sound like an old reactionary and indeed in many ways I am. The worst thing, of course, is that we have been betrayed into Europe. You know, this European Union thing. It's a personal opinion of mine that our natural alliance is and always has been with the United States. And should remain that way. We have nothing in common with the French, the Germans. And I have got into very nasty trouble by saying that I am very reluctant to see our laws interfered with or dictated by the children of the people who gave us Belsen and Dachau.

AW: The National Review published an essay of yours that included typically controversial views on Lady Diana.

GMF: I was sickened by the public's behavior when Princess Diana died. Let's face it, if she looked like the back of a bus it never would have happened, there never would have been that kind of outpouring. That should have sent the feminists into a great rage. But it didn't. But here's this young woman and she's getting this huge amount of attention and people are beating their breasts and weeping. They didn't do that over Churchill when he died. OK, he'd had a long life. But even Kennedy didn't get this kind of thing. And he was a president.

AW: In your autobiography Quartered Safe Out Here, the man you call Captain Grief seems to have lent some qualities of lunacy and heroism to the British military figures in Flashman books.

GMF: The Second World War was full of guys like that. Mad as bloody hatters, you know. I don't know why. It seems to be a sort of British military type. You get people like [Charles] Wingate and General [Charles] Gordon and so on, and they are nuts!

AW: After the rigors of becoming an officer, why didn't you follow through with a military career?

GMF: Because what's the point of being a soldier in peacetime? For a Scottish highlander—which I am—there are three good reasons for fighting. One is briefly in a good cause. Another is for money. And the third is for fun. And in peacetime you don't have much opportunity for any of them.

AW: Are fans disappointed to find that you're not like Flashman?

GMF: They're disappointed to find that I'm not six feet two inches tall and extremely handsome and distinguished looking. (Laughs) For one thing, I'm not English, I'm Scottish. And I'm writing about this polished, charming English cad and I'm obviously not. To that extent, it is a disappointment. No, I'm not like him. I couldn't stand the pace. Who could?

AW: Does Flashman represent your alter-ego?

GMF: No, I've never had the slightest desire to be like Flashman and I think my military experience killed any particular idea of derring-do. There was a young lady this morning at a book shop who told me about playing a game at a dinner party asking men who they would like to be and three of them said Flashman. Now, I don't know that they'd thought hard about it, but I don't think they'd really like to be Flashman.

AW: Royal Flash was made into a movie with Malcolm McDowell long ago. Has there been any recent interest in a Flashman movie?

GMF: Oh, yes, all the time. But Royal Flash is the only one that doesn't involve great race movements and battles and crowds of extras. They would be murderously expensive to do. I can't say I'm all that keen on the idea. Because the film or the television of the book seldom does justice to the book. Anyway, who's going to play Flashman? Errol Flynn's dead a long time ago, you know? And I don't see anyone of that style around now.

A "Smile" Soundtrack

2007-12-21T23:19:00.000-08:00

David Gutowksi, the impresario behind Largehearted Boy, recently asked me to contribute to his blog. Largehearted Boy is an inventive site that, among other things, has writers provide a “soundtrack” to go along with their books. I’ll paste the first few songs I chose for Smile When You’re Lying and then provide the Largehearted Boy link to the rest of my “soundtrack.”

Since Smile When You’re Lying is basically a memoir masquerading as a travel book, and since numerous songs are referenced throughout, it’s easy to come up with an accompanying “soundtrack” pegging songs to specific chapters. The trick will be keeping it concise. There’s a great moment in Chuck Klosterman’s Killing Yourself to Live in which Klosterman tries to decide what CDs to bring along on a (pre-iPod) road trip—after punishing rounds of cuts, and mindful of limited car space, he finally decides to pack a mere 600 CDs. No promises, but I’ll try to keep my list slightly more manageable.

Intro: You Deserve Better
“Li’l Darling” — Count Basie
A rare chapter that presents no obvious musical cues, so I’ll take the opportunity to list a transcendent ballad written by Neal Hefti, one of those sadly forgotten geniuses of American song (spanning generations, he later wrote the “Batman” theme). I was introduced to Count Basie by a high school band teacher named Stan Sells and have never stopped buying his records (Count Basie’s, not Stan Sells’).

Chapter 1: “Welcome to Thailand, Ulysses S. Grant!”
“Tomorrow People” — Ziggy Marley and the Melody Makers
This chapter deals with a trip to Thailand in 1988. You couldn’t go anywhere in Bangkok that summer without hearing Ziggy Marley or Tracy Chapman. I bought pirated cassettes of both and paid a cabbie to drive me around for an hour while I looked at the dysfunction out the window and listened to “Fast Car” and “Revolution” and “Tomorrow People.” This before all my cash was stolen and I could no longer afford to so brazenly laugh in the face of Peak Oil. (We’re all doomed, by the way.)

Chapter 2: Baked Alaska: How Drugs, Tourism, and Petroleum Tamed the Last Frontier
“Fight or Fall” — Thin Lizzy
“Black Market” — Weather Report
“After the Lovin’” — Engelbert Humeprdink
Thin Lizzy comes as tribute to everyone who ever sparked a doob in the woods outside Floyd Dryden Jr. High. As explained in the book, I wasn’t among the wool-encased hipster trendsetters in halibut jackets (you may have to be from Southeast Alaska to get that reference), but I did love their music.

I spent a large chunk of my early youth as an inveterate jazz snob; insufferable in a 15-year-old, but there you are. Weather Report represents 70s jazz fusion, the most unfairly maligned genre in music history. In high school, I obsessed over bands and musicians like Weather Report, Pat Metheny, Jeff Lorber, Herbie Hancock, Stanley Clarke, etc. Given that this period of pop music was dominated by the likes of Loverboy, Scorpions, AC/DC, and Pink Floyd, it might not surprise you to learn that I didn’t notch a single date in high school. Even so, as the inclusion here demonstrates, I hold no grudge against Joe Zawinul and Jaco Pastorius.

“After the Lovin’” because “adult contemporary” was the only type of music Juneau’s two identical radio stations played back in the day and, I don’t know, it’s either a cool sing or the repetition brainwashed me.

Chapter 3: Canned Hams, Kendo Beatdowns, and the Penis Olympics—The Education of an Accidental Ambassador in Japan
“Headstart for Happiness” — The Style Council
With a certain age group of British men, it’s possible to start a fight simply by walking into a pub and declaring that The Style Council was in fact a better band than The Jam. (True, by the way.) Life in Japan fired my suicidal imagination like no other place and there were dark weekends there when only my discovery of Paul Weller’s new and improved incarnation pulled me through.

To read the rest of this piece, go to: http://www.largeheartedboy.com/blog/archive/2007/12/book_notes_chuc_2.html

A Tupac Sighting in Africa

2007-12-18T14:04:00.000-08:00

As a rule, I’m bored with discussions of race relations in America and related history. This isn’t because I don’t consider the topic to be an important and ultimately defining subject in any review of U.S. society. It’s just that from my point of view the problems always get framed in the most irrelevant terms imaginable — how a talk-show host defamed a certain ethnic group, why an offhand remark made by a politician betrays racial insensitivity. Such obvious red herrings. You want to fix racial inequity in this country, focus 100 percent on education. Overhaul the school system to legitimately give all groups equal access to equally funded schools and stop wasting time griping about racist jokes and the ten percent of prejudiced Neanderthals who will always be with us and you’ll get to the mountaintop a lot faster.

I’m not a bullhead about this. I’m willing to admit, as with most issues, to a lot of gray territory, and to the limitations of my typically reductive logic. I’m also willing to concede points to those more familiar with the tribulations of living in a racially divided world, particularly to any non-white person in this country. Still, after a couple decades of discussion, debate, and spittle-filled shouting matches, this pretty much sums up my core position: It’s all about education; if you want to change racial discrimination, discussion of any other point is a waste of time.

That said, it’s pretty much impossible to tool around Africa and not reflect on all aspects of the history of African-Americans. It sounds naïve, I know, but it’s startling to travel across the continent and see so many American faces. It really brings history into clear and unsettling focus to come face to face with the people whose ancestors we know primarily as terrible statistics from history books and disturbing cinematic recreations of the slave trade. I spent November in South Africa, Zambia, Botswana, Namibia, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and was consistently moved by the familiarity of the people and the instant “American” kinship we shared. In a weird way, this often made me feel at home in a very foreign place.

In Botswana, I came across a guy in a market who bore an absolutely uncanny resemblance to the late rapper Tupac Shakur. (Jay-Z and Kanye are amazing, but for me, hip hop as art form begins with the Sugar Hill Gang and ends with Tupac, so I’m sort of partial to this story). I was so taken with the similarity that I actually followed the guy around for a few minutes, trying to get in position to snap a surreptitious photo or two to show to friends back home. Seriously, you could start an entire “Tupac lives” cottage industry with a couple pictures of this dude. Alas, the guy never emerged from the crowd near the fresh goat section, and I felt too awkward to approach him with my bizarre request for a photo.

All of this felt a little impolitic; it’s strange to wonder if a future rapper’s people had been snatched from the very acre of earth you’re vacationing on. Nevertheless, I mentioned the Tupac doppelganger to Ace, the philosophical, 26-year-old African I was temporarily traveling with. It turned out Ace was also a huge fan of the man he referred to in reverential tones as “the late, great legend.”

“There was also a guy at my school, near here, who looked so much like the late, great legend that we only called him ‘Tupac,’” Ace told me. “His real name was discarded. He became known as Tupac, even to his parents. So maybe those infamous genes can be traced to this place.”

It’s staggering to stand in a barren landscape still dotted with circular mud huts and grass roofs and ponder the fantastic historic and generational calamity that led from an unfortunate bushman or woman taken away from southern Africa, to the likeness of a martyr sanctified on T-shirts around the planet. Not to mention the immortal lyric, “Even as a crack fiend, mama, you always was a black queen, mama.”

My Favorite Souvenir From Africa

2007-12-06T10:07:00.001-08:00

Petty bribes to traffic cops and soldiers are an accepted feature of daily life for visitors as well as citizens in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Usually these are taken care of after a bit of theatrical debate and a payoff of two or three dollars worth of Congolese francs. After you adjust to this near daily occurrence in the Congo’s magnificently dysfunctional cities, the process starts to feel more annoying than outrageous. As you move up the ranks to work out “problems” with government officials, the encounters become more civil—far fewer automatic weapons are involved, for instance—but pricier.

This I discovered a few weeks ago after an immigration official at Kinshasa’s D’Jili International Airport “inadvertently” stamped a September arrival date into my passport. The date conflicted with the November date on the official visa issued to me by the DRC embassy in Washington, DC, not to mention my actual arrival date of November 14. The clerical “error” made it appear as though I’d entered the country illegally, a regrettable “mistake” subsequently taken advantage of by officials throughout the country.

In a mid-sized town, a few hours east of Kinshasa, a run-in with a typically eagle-eyed local officer—who’d spotted my passport issue like he knew it was coming—ended with me coughing up ten bucks, but also, more happily, hauling away a souvenir of a type I’m sure no one else has. After an interminable session of intense but respectful argument about how best to handle the matter of my passport, the official who’d detained me—a congenial, heavy-set bald guy with wire-frame glasses who sweated profusely despite incessantly waving a plastic Japanese fan for the entire hour I sat in his office—pulled a sheet of paper from his desk and began breaking down for my benefit the grim economics that forced a nice guy like him to harass a nice guy like me.

“Do you know what I make in salary each month?” the official asked me.

When I said I hadn’t the foggiest, he shook his head plaintively, scribbled something on the paper and turned it around for me to read: “Par roi 22,000 FRC = $45.”

“That’s not much of a salary,” I said.

“It is a crime that a man in a position as revered as yours is not remunerated more fittingly,” added Henri, my local traveling companion and invaluable assistant during these negotiations.

“I am forty-five years old,” the official continued morosely. “Do you know how many children I have?”

I shook my head. Like a coroner filling out a death certificate, he scratched another line on the page: “Pere de 10 enfant.”

“Ten kids?” I said. “Wow!”

“Oh, monsieur, it is a terrible burden,” added Henri. “Life is truly unfair to the Africans.”

Next, the official jotted down his monthly rent: $120. Then figures covering other expenses. School for the younger children. University for the older ones. Food. Electricity. Gasoline and car maintenance. All told the guy needed about $250 a month just to keep his head above water.

“So,” I asked, the guileless lamb being led into the room where they shoot the pneumatic bolt between your eyes, “how does a man in your position make up the difference between such a tiny salary and such massive monthly expenses?”

“My friend,” the official replied, spreading his arms and smiling in a rueful way that suggested a recent viewing of Braveheart being stretched on the rack.

Ten dollars later, my passport came back across the desk, and Henri and I were out the door. But I’d gotten something for my money. While the official had been looking wistfully out the window, no doubt ruminating over textbooks for his under-funded spawn, I’d discreetly slid his ad hoc budget into my pocket. As soon as I get completely unpacked, go through my photos, and finish my laundry, I’m getting a little frame for that scrap of evidence attesting to the Congo’s endemic corruption. I’m not big on T-shirts or carved knick-knacks—some keepsakes, however, are almost worth trouble you go through to get them. —CT

Greetings Readers and Travelers

2007-10-06T11:20:00.000-07:00

A few years ago, I wrote one of those ubiquitous “list” sidebars for an airline inflight magazine (Southwest Spirit). The list was titled 12 Great Slide Guitar Players or something like that and was essentially meant to divert bored passengers flying between Phoenix and Las Vegas with a fascinating, well-researched overview of noteworthy slide guitarists, both historic and contemporary. Son House, Bob Brozman, Bonnie Raitt, people like that. Like all such lists, it was meant to start conversations, not end them. As these things go, it was a pretty unassuming, innocuous little 200-word piece.

Or so I imagined.

Turns out, there’s a large and fanatical subculture out there who tracks every word or opinion ever written, spoken, broadcast, or silently contemplated about slide-guitar players. My list almost immediately appeared verbatim on someone’s blog, unleashing a torrent of comments. Many of these questioned the competency and dubious lineage of the list’s author (lots of “Who the hell is Chuck Thompson?” postings), others cheerfully spread the gospel of slide guitar by adding their own favorites to the list, and a few, from anonymous ramparts, actually rose to defend my honor against the angry mob fueling the discussion. The furor eventually dissipated and the posts trickled away, but while it lasted it had been a fun process. In addition to learning from several sources that I was in no way qualified to comment on the religion of slide guitar, I learned a few things about slide players and the people who love them.

All of this by way of announcing my intentions for this site. I’ll start with the assumption that, unless you’ve landed here by accident, you have some interest in Smile When You’re Lying. This gives us something in common, inasmuch as I have an interest in it as well. If you have a question, comment, or anything else you care to make known about the book, I invite you to post it here. I travel often and have made a solemn promise to my eyeballs to take regular breaks away from computers, but for as long as possible I’ll keep up with activity on this page and try to respond here and there to questions and comments. Like most people, I prefer smiles to insults, but I have fairly thick skin and always appreciate honesty and thoughtful commentary.

Just don’t ever try telling me that Son House doesn’t belong on a list of 12 all-time great slide guitarists.

Thanks for your interest,
Chuck Thompson