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Gone to Ground: Industrial America as reflected in East St. Louis

By On April 5, 2014 · Leave a Comment · In Uncategorized

You’ve heard the phrase “ghost town.” A town that was there and isn’t today. What about a “ghost city?” When a once-vibrant urban area goes to ground, you can hope for rebirth or say bye bye.

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First, I wish this essay to be a testament to how a random occurrence can lead to greater […]

You’ve heard the phrase “ghost town.” A town that was there and isn’t today. What about a “ghost city?” When a once-vibrant urban area goes to ground, you can hope for rebirth or say bye bye.

…………………….

First, I wish this essay to be a testament to how a random occurrence can lead to greater insight, inspiration, and ideas for the future.

In the process of cleaning house a few weeks ago, a rather large house filled mostly with books, I came across East St. Louis – Made in USA: The Rise and Fall of an Industrial River Town. This was surprising because there aren’t many books in this house I am not familiar with, even if I have not read them.

I’ve spent the better part of my career writing about industrial America from the inside out. As a youth, I worked a summer job once in Chattanooga, TN, loading and unloading tires from boxcars and rail cars into and out of temporary warehouses created from abandoned industrial structures. On my lunch breaks or waiting to be picked up, I’d rummage around the old machinery, occasionally the files and paperwork left behind, and the neighborhoods these manufacturing facilities inhabited. Before that, I remember being “volunteered” by my mother to work one of the first Earth Days in 1970 in, to be euphemistic, one of the less fortunate city neighborhoods, far far away, frankly, from the comfortable suburb my family lived in. We worked abandoned light industrial areas and inhabited residential areas.

Industrial America fascinates me.

If Americans know anything about East St. Louis, they know (1) the flat tire scene in the first Vacation movie, starring Chevy Chase and (2) that it is one of those cities adjacent to one of those much better off cities. I moved my family from Bucks County, PA, to St. Louis in 1997. East St. Louis, directly across the Mississippi River, was known for three things – crime, strip clubs, and decaying industrial sites. I was familiar with these kinds of cities. There are edge cities, prosperous suburban metropolitan cities adjacent to or near the cities everyone knows. Then there are fall off the edge of the cliff cities, decaying cities adjacent to the cities we know, usually (but not always) in the next state over.

When I lived in New York City, I got pretty familiar with Newark. I worked in a refinery in Elizabeth, NJ, adjacent to Newark. Back then (1970s and 1980s), lots of cities in NJ served in the role of fall off the edge of the cliff – Newark, Bayonne, Elizabeth, Jersey City, and others. To the north were the prosperous edge cities like Stamford, CT, and those in Westchester County, NY. When I lived in Bucks County, PA, commuting distance to both New York and Philadelphia, I got familiar with Camden. In my frequent travels to Chicago and environs, I became somewhat familiar with Gary, IN. Later I spent a lot of time in San Francisco and got to know Oakland.

East St. Louis: The Rise and Fall of an Industrial River Town, by Dr. Andrew J. Theising, a professor at Southern Illinois University – Edwardsville, IL, explained to me why East St. Louis is the way it is. It exemplifies the power, in this case destructive, of initial conditions: The city was conceived to cater exclusively to its industrial interests and once those industrial interests decayed to nothingness, the city’s purpose, it’s reason for being, went with it. It has, for all intents and purposes, gone to ground. There is very little left. What institutions and “businesses” remain, or have emerged in recent years, are, according to Theising, public and non-profit and therefore not paying taxes.

Theising’s treatise, eminently readable, is based on scholarly research. The photographic history alone is worth the read. Even in 1918, the city was determined by census statistics to be the second-poorest in the country. Mind you, this was a mere fourteen years after St. Louis, across the river, hosted the World’s Fair when it was America’s fourth largest city. Although simplifications are dangerous, you could say that St. Louis’ money went west (Clayton, MO, is the prosperous edge city for the metro area) and St. Louis’ industrial dumping grounds went east. The government of East St. Louis catered to those industrial interests, at the great expense of its residents.

I was so captivated by Theising’s book that I told him so in an email and he graciously offered to give me a tour (he runs a place called the Institute for Urban Research). I had driven around the city before but it had been about ten years. Yes, I had even visited the strip clubs every so often with an out of town business client on generous expense account.

But I wasn’t prepared for what Dr. Theising showed me.

Fact is, the city has, indeed, gone to ground. So little of it is left. There is a main drag and I was surprised to learn that, while the storefronts were boarded up and there was little activity early on a Friday afternoon, on weekend evenings, you’d be hard pressed to find parking. As portrayed in Vacation, the city is something like 97% African American. In this day and age, that in itself is kind of mind-blowing.

Here are just a few anecdotes illustrating what happens when a city has gone to ground. We toured a new neighborhood. The homes were less than ten years old. In the parlance of the urban planners, it is an “infill” neighborhood. I can’t recall whether it was described as a law or a neighborhood ordinance, but the residents are not allowed to congregate in the front of their homes. Can you imagine? Okay, most outdoor grilling takes place in the back yard, but a law that prevents you from hanging with your family in front, waving to the neighbors walking by? That’s because so many killings take place in these areas from people shooting from cars as they drive by. Yet over ten years, this neighborhood has apparently sustained itself as a quality place to live.

East St. Louis has six police officers. Dr. Theising told me the number of 911 calls the city gets per day and I forget the number but I do remember doing the math in my head and it came out to approximately one every five minutes. The city only has about 27,000 residents. When I asked the obvious question, how do six officers respond to a situation every five minutes, Dr. Theising’s expression answered the question simply: They don’t. They can’t. I think the suburban town I grew up in had 200o residents and at least six police officers.

We drove through an intersection well to the east of downtown and Theising pointed out the two grocery stores across the street from each other. Of course, the irony is that the rest of the city is a food desert. You could probably guess that the two stores are competing to see which one goes belly-up first. But here’s the kicker: One of the stores actually pays for a car service to pick up and return customers. Now, I do know that most grocery stores operate on the thinnest of margins. It’s impossible to imagine how a store remains solvent adding car service fare to its expenses.

If you wanted to develop some constructive ventures in East St. Louis, apparently you’d be hard-pressed to even figure out who owns the land. Many residents have had the land passed to them from relatives but never had the records officially revised at City Hall.

Towns surrounding East St. Louis are often incorporated as separate cities essentially owned by the companies who operate the industrial facilities, or once did. Thus, there is no hope of annexing or incorporating adjacent areas.

Truckers which just charged residents of St. Louis like me so much per ton to transport our bulk waste to a landfill or a recycling center routinely dump their cargo in some abandoned lot across the river. You know an urban dystopia has emerged when it is a good thing you see tires sticking up from the ground or a sidewalk. Why, you ask? Because that means someone had the decency to mark where a sewer lid had been stolen so no hapless soul descends to their doom into a sewer line from which the likelihood that someone would hear you scream is next to zero.

But here is the Disney Matterhorn of the tour. Dr. Theising took us to an overlook sandwiched between a functioning agricultural industrial facility and an expansive abandoned property along the river banks. It’s an urban park (Malcolm W. Martin Memorial Park) with an amphitheater cut into the ground and a lookout point so handicap friendly that the poor bastard who pushes the wheelchair up the five inclined stair-stepped walkways probably needs an iron lung when he/she reaches the top. One of those bronze sculptures of a famous person (I guess it’s Malcolm Martin), so real you’re happy it isn’t dark out, greets you. You gaze across the river. Damned if you aren’t equidistant from the ends of the Gateway to the West, the St. Louis Arch. I mean, this lookout point bisects the arch perfectly. It’s almost as if the designers were poking their figurative thumb in the eye of the “prosperous” city across the way. The experience was even richer knowing that, at the top of the Arch, visitors were looking down at us.

I’m looking at you…looking at me. You’re looking at a ghost city. I’m looking at your majestic skyline, unobstructed views, a photographer’s paradise, free parking!

I brought a friend with me for the tour whose knowledge of the arcane of St. Louis (he’s the kind of guy who stops and makes you read historical highway markers) is second to none. I at least consider myself an educated and informed citizen of the region I live in. Neither of us had even heard of this “park” though it was completed in 2009. Yet a family who drove up with Ohio plates somehow knew about it (and evidently were not familiar with the scene from Vacation).

Yet, for all the desolation, the gone to ground appearance, I couldn’t shirk the feeling of hope. East St. Louis was a clean slate, on the surface anyway. I began to envision a 50-year development plan that learned from  the lessons of the original “initial conditions.” I remember a movie, an awful movie, and I think Chevy Chase was in this one, too, with John Candy, where one of them looks out across the wilderness from the deck of some country home, and says, “I see condos…I see shopping malls.” Well, I saw a completely different energy infrastructure, one based on renewable and clean distributed small scale electric power and microgrids, a bicycling community, urban farms, a small scale farm to market where residents walked to the “farmer’s market.” I saw an urban area that rid itself of its “initial conditions.” Converting the rails to trails. Deploying the Internet as the “highway system.” I saw a place where someone like my daughter, soon to graduate with a degree in environmental studies (urban planning, social justice and lots of other things thrown in), and others like her, could start from scratch and begin to build a model community for the twenty second century.

But that was after I stopped reflecting on the geometry, the irony, accompanied by my friend and an expert on East St. Louis, and the silent perennial sentinel, the bronze statue, , all four of us standing (well, for accuracy’s sake, the statue guy is sitting) virtually under the majestic Arch, in homage to the city which no longer ranks in the top fifty by population in the United States.

If America ever had the guts to embrace central planning again, East St. Louis would be a pretty fine place to start. Maybe the city across the way learns a thing or two as well, because maybe it’s on the same path (not that anyone would want to admit that ). Because the alternative, corporate and industrial control, resulted in this ghost of a city.

Thank you, Dr. Theising.

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Excerpt from The Moment Before – A Novel

By On March 2, 2014 · Leave a Comment · In Uncategorized

Note: This excerpt is the first five pages of the first chapter, which is a split scene with the last chapter. Together, they constitute the “end” of the story/novel. I would value knowing your initial impressions, and send me a note if you would like to read an uncorrected proof reader copy.

The Moment […]

Note: This excerpt is the first five pages of the first chapter, which is a split scene with the last chapter. Together, they constitute the “end” of the story/novel. I would value knowing your initial impressions, and send me a note if you would like to read an uncorrected proof reader copy.

The Moment Before

by Jason Makansi

 

PART I

The end

(November 2012)

The first thing he notices is the frigid, sanitized air chilling his skin. He pinches the bridge of his nose, fighting a sneeze. He’s always been allergic to these cheap motels, never properly cleaned, dust accumulated over the decades in old air conditioners with suspect thermostats that rattle and whir like a turbo prop at close range. He pulls the blankets up. The dream he wanted to remember fades with the blur he rubs from his eyes. It’s time, but he hesitates, burrows his head in the pillows.

Three minutes of mind time, twenty minutes of clock time later, his first clear thought crystallizes: Banal discussions of people in the aggregate eventually boil down to one person whose life is forever fucked by decisions made by others. He commits this to memory.

For Stuart, the judgment begins now. What comes after, he doesn’t know. Today he faces Elias, one person who embodies the vengeance of a nation, a man for whom words have not been invented to convey his suffering, whose life, history has not yet judged.

He throws the blankets forward, then, out of habit, immediately tries to fold the top layer to neatly match the bottom.

In two steps, he draws the blinds, shields his eyes with his arm. Today, the man, the abstraction, becomes real. Resolve descends upon him like faith surely does moments before death. He is ready to see the man’s face. Elias Haddad.

 

Later, as the bus ambles towards the prison Stuart feels his throat constrict, chaotic flutters in his gut, decades of professional confidence in his duties leaking into a pool of doubt. He feels the burden of his own people, the centuries of persecution, the weight of his family’s past in Europe. It straightens his back as he steps down into a blustery Midwest autumn breeze whipping around the bulky front of the bus. Behind him is his crowning bureaucratic achievement, the Saluki Federal Repatriation, Rehabilitation, and Detention Facility.

“Banal discussions of people in the aggregate…someone forever fucked by others…” He shows his government identification and security clearance to the burly guard armed with a pistol at his side and an automatic rifle slung across his chest. The man wears a bullet-proof vest, a helmet, and a visor over his face. Where the man’s gear ends and his body begins is hard to tell.

For ten years, Stuart has been an enlisted bureaucrat in the domestic army responsible for the safety and protection of three hundred and fifteen million Americans. Enthusiastically, he’d transferred out of the Department of Energy into the newly created Department of Homeland Security. His family and friends, even his wife, were not happy with his move. Stuart had shrugged it off. He wanted to make a difference. He wanted to keep the American people safe.

Now, the question, Are we safer now than we were ten years ago?, torments him, occupies a growing volume in  Stuart’s mind, as if he’s cowering in the corner of a room filling with poison gas. This is the central question, the existential question, of his department, his livelihood. Until Elias, he would have confidently answered yes. There have been no major attacks on the homeland.

We are safer. But at what cost?

The accounting hasn’t begun.

Perhaps it begins today.

The misery inflicted on this man hasn’t found its way into the national ledger. Forty years it took for the country to apologize for the internment of Japanese citizens after Pearl Harbor! A century and a half later, an apology came for the systematic destruction of Native American lands. When will atonement for Elias Haddad begin?

Sometimes, the cost measured in human lives, the full accounting, never takes place.

One by one, the prisoners exit, hobbled by leg irons, navigating the steps. Each takes a careful glance towards his new home, away from the crater of suffering, injustice, and denial of constitutional and international human rights. Each one of them is a line on the ledger. They are the externalities of a safer homeland. Stuart once loved this word: externality – the cost or a consequence of a product or a service that is not factored into its price. It seemed to explain so much in his old world of energy. He had loved it when it had to do with pollution, with safety. Carbon dioxide emissions are an externality of energy production.

Human externalities had only recently occurred to him.

“Banal discussions in the aggregate…”

He watches as the men blink in random patterns against the brightening Midwestern sunshine, getting their first look at their new surroundings, men of all ages, dark complexions, heavy beards, days, weeks, or months unshaven. One looks hostile, another perplexed. Stuart excavates their expressions, the subtle lines and angles of their faces, the palate of skin tones, etched and eroded like sandstone on canyon walls, searching for signs of their suffering, for the history behind their arrival here today. Stuart contemplates the cultural biases that make him and his fellow Americans see all these swarthy men as sinister. Would a line-up of British or Scandinavian prisoners invoke the same impression? He shakes his head and bites his tongue, wishing he were not so susceptible to the same prejudices that for centuries confined his own people as second-class citizens in Europe.

A second, equally large security guard follows the last two prisoners off the bus. One of the two is noticeably older, much older. He’s smiling. Somehow his smile is contagious. Stuart can’t help but crack a sliver of a smile back. He sees this man’s smile as an infinite number of points along a curved line oscillating with joy and relief, a thousand points of light beaming upon his new world.

Stuart squints up into the mid-morning sun and waits for his eyes to adjust. He smells the faint hydrocarbon vapors emanating from the freshly poured asphalt. Squiggles of heat rise mirage-like into the cooler air above. He starts to sweat. It’s too warm for the camel-colored overcoat he’s brought with him from D.C. He feels silly wearing it. Is he sweating from the heat or from what others might think of him for dressing inappropriately? He sheds the coat, placing it over the crook of his elbow. Immediately, he is more refreshed, but the crook of his elbow sweats profusely.

Stuart stretches one arm over his head, then the other after transferring his coat, twisting his body to relieve the kinks in his spine from the long, uncomfortable ride. He often forgets that he’s not a young man anymore. Chronic aches and pains are permanent features of his physical landscape. The smiling prisoner is shackled at the ankles, handcuffed, hands bound to his waist by a thick metal belt. Still, he smiles.

The accounting begins now.

The guards in the security detail carry enough weapons to suppress a small insurrection. They unnerve Stuart, though as a Homeland Security operative, he’s loath to admit it. Security personnel in potential target cities are one thing, but here, in the agrarian calm of the Midwest, they feel intrusive, like he’s watching a grainy video from a Cold War satellite nation.

The armed men begin to herd the prisoners toward a wide door into their new home, built on land taken through eminent domain. Sunlight beams off the structure to who knows where. Stuart wishes he could concentrate the rays through a magnifying glass and vaporize his guilt about John Veranda’s property. He’d have to sort that one out later. Heap that onto what he feels about Elias, his “career,” and he might just break down right here, right now.

Sort it out later? Who was he kidding? After this, he’d have to confront Veranda. An evening in Saluki wasn’t in his travel plans but if not now, when? The inevitable cannot be postponed.

Stuart walks by the men once more. Awkward doesn’t come close to describing how he feels, but he forces himself to embrace it. There’s relief here, too. A tension that’s been building for months finally ready to dissipate, a fever on the verge of breaking.

Stuart wants to say something, but he doesn’t know how. What do you say to people who have been abducted from distant parts of the globe, swept away from their homes and families, detained for years against their will, with no explanation or justification, held captive for reasons no longer understood? What do you say when indefinite detention turns into hundreds of wasted lifetimes, into men grown old in prisons for reasons that have faded with years not even sufficient to qualify as history?

 

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Narratives and how they emerge

By On March 1, 2014 · Leave a Comment · In Uncategorized

Last week, I read most of (skimmed parts) Errol Morris’s A Wilderness of Error: The Trials of Jeffrey McDonald. Books can be far more memorable for how they make you think than for their subject matter. Morris made me obsess with the idea of how we construct our personal narratives, and how they are constructed […]

Last week, I read most of (skimmed parts) Errol Morris’s A Wilderness of Error: The Trials of Jeffrey McDonald. Books can be far more memorable for how they make you think than for their subject matter. Morris made me obsess with the idea of how we construct our personal narratives, and how they are constructed for us.

Errol Morris is a documentary film-maker. I watched Morris’s The Thin Blue Line sometime in the 1980s. It is accompanied by a Phillip Glass score. It was my introduction to documentaries. I may have watched a few before that, perhaps in a high school class or mindlessly on the television at home. Although I didn’t know it at the time, it was also my introduction to how narratives are constructed, or perhaps more frequently or accurately, how they emerge and take on a life of their own, for better or worse.

The documentary essentially is about a guy wrongly convicted of a murder in Texas and the guy who did it. Incidentally, Morris is credited with winning the wrongly convicted guy his freedom and his life. Ironically, he was sued by that very same guy years later.

There are two scenes I remember. The first is when the guy who wasn’t convicted of the murder essentially confesses. The second is when one of the guys (or maybe both) are sitting in a cheap motel watching The Swinging Cheerleaders, a soft-core porn movie. Well, as the definitions were then. I remember watching that movie at a drive-in with a car full of buddies in 1972 or thereabouts. I thought cheap movies to drive adolescent fantasies disappeared as fast as they were released. I won’t lie. Seeing that snippet of that movie in a documentary about person wrongly convicted of murder overwhelmed me with feeling I’m not sure I could describe even to this day. For whatever reason, that tiny common data point in my own personal adolescent narrative haunts me all over again when I see the movie.

The Thin Blue Line reconstructs the narrative of how that guy was convicted and how the other guy got away. It is hard to separate the chill from how terribly wrong the reality of our social institutions can be from the mind-numbing impact of Glass’ minimalist score of repetitive tonal fragments.

A Wilderness of Error does the same thing, reconstructs the narrative of this guy who has been sitting in prison for several decades for the murder of his family. The details are beyond sickening, the errors in evidence, judgment, etc. I’ll just offer the most peculiar. The guy who was convicted, the father, was also stabbed 27 times with an ice pick during the altercation. The trial apparently demonstrated, convincingly, that he did this to cover up his crime.

The processional through life causes all of us to construct, refine, tweak, embellish, interpret and (many other verbs you could insert here) articulate our own personal narratives. Others, those close to us, those we work with, attend service with, neighbors, have their own narratives about us. Imagine reading one paragraph of a description about yourself from family, friends, neighbors, and co-workers.

In certain situations, usually under duress, narratives change and emerge. When something unacceptable is revealed, when gossip is passed around, when something is said that is out of character with our narrative, a new narrative can emerge. Often, it is out of your control. When the crap hits the fan – in the worst case in the examples above, but consider suddenly losing a job and not being able to pay the bills, or if a family member is accused of a crime – the narrative begins to be reconstructed by institutions. Churches, banks, companies, clubs, and on and on.

Every documentary, movie, every article, every research paper, thesis, book, biography, autobiography, account of history, is a narrative, a connecting of dots, whether fact or fiction, proof or speculation, and every combination imaginable of all of these. In research and analysis, we might plot points on a graph and try to “capture” a broader story by drawing a line to represent what we observed. That line becomes an equation that explains a theory which emerged from the data points. We do this every minute of every day without thinking. Often for our livelihoods, we capture the narrative, freeze it in time, and “publish” it.

We construct our narratives in real time too, of course. My 25-year old daughter, a history major in college and a strong writer, has spent the past year, collaborating with her sister and mom in writing and publishing a dystopian genre novel. She also blogs about writing. She has followers from around the world. The novel is selling better than probably 95% of all self-published works. She is using every tool being thrown out there as a result of the breakdown of the traditional publishing world to construct a professional narrative.

I worked for 35 years as a writer of technology, science, and business, and in the last fifteen years fiction. Initially I quietly resented how she essentially entered the world of fiction writing in a year. Then I realized she was doing what I had done when I graduated from college. I got my degree in engineering, but with an eye toward writing about engineering. I remembered telling my advisor/professor I was an excellent writer. He probably had never heard this from the mouth of an engineering student. He asked me to help him with an article he was preparing for Scientific American. In my first engineering jobs, I told everyone I was an engineer who knew how to write. And loved to write to boot. Soon, everyone brought their proposals, their papers, their reports, their memos for me to review. I had no real idea how well I could write. I just convinced everyone I could writer better than they could (not that difficult with engineers, I accept). My professional narrative became reality. A virtuous feedback loop ensued. The more people brought me their work, the more skilled I became. Just like my daughter is doing.

In many ways, the very meaning of life is constructing and reconstructing narratives, comparing narratives, challenging narratives (e.g., peer reviewed research), originating narratives, that involve other persons and phenomena, and your self. It’s done with facts, assumptions, speculation, words, with numbers, consciously, unconsciously, loudly, quietly, with ambition, with confidence. But we all know we construct that narrative within an envelope bounded by ethics, morals, and the ability to perform as we say. When the narrative emerges from others, especially institutions, we have to be more cautious by several orders of magnitude.

You either define your own narrative, or have it defined for you. Within reason. Within boundaries.

Sometimes, especially when the shit hits the fan, you don’t have a choice. You are a victim.

Errol Morris’s work convinces me there are precious few facts in this world. Arriving at some version of the truth, however well accepted or not, to fill in the yawning gaps (and in some cases, canyons) between the “facts” or data, requires a great deal of influence, superiority, rank, institutional behavior, guessing, assumptions, ambition, speculation, preconceived notions, agreement among specialists, and ideology.

I have a favorite saying: Nothing is so satisfying as creating your own mythology, nor as dangerous as believing it. I often wonder if megalomaniacs think about this once their heads hit the pillow.

As for what the future might hold for narrative construction, imagine every thing you write, everything you’ve written, every video you appear in recorded by a surveillance camera, captured in a computer server somewhere, regardless of whether you’ve deleted it from public view. It is still captured digitally somewhere. Every feeling, every mood you decided to record for posterity, most of your movements. Imagine an Errol Morris, good intentions or malicious, in ten years gaining access to all of those records and constructing or reconstructing your narrative. Worse, and probably more appropriate, imagine an algorithm, a bot, putting the pieces together, and detecting patterns, and making conclusions from them.

A narrative can be a thing of splendor, or a thing of terror. Sometimes they are constructed and sometimes they emerge. Perhaps always they are a combination. When each piece of data, each piece of evidence is examined, under a microscope in Morris’s cases, it can be horrifying to understand how the story can change, and change the victims.

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The Tapestry from Chamber Project St. louis

By On February 1, 2014 · Leave a Comment · In Uncategorized

Once again, Chamber Project St. Louis delivered unique creative expression and performance in unusual settings. This one was called Weave. It was part of the On Tap Series which means the venue is a downtown brew pub, Schlafly Tap Room. Which means you can drink craft beer during the performance!

[…]

Once again, Chamber Project St. Louis delivered unique creative expression and performance in unusual settings. This one was called Weave. It was part of the On Tap Series which means the venue is a downtown brew pub, Schlafly Tap Room. Which means you can drink craft beer during the performance!

The resulting tapestry included a vibraphone, Marimba, cymbal, looped (recorded) parts, trumpet, dancer, and spoken word, in addition to the Chamber Project’s backbone of clarinet, violin, cello, and flute (no viola this time). Compositions spanned 1924-2009, featured composers Brett Abigana, Ingolf Dahl, Steve Reich, Jacques Ibert. I had only heard of one of these composers prior to this performance.

As much as I love traditional chamber music, these performances offer a different kind of excitement. At least for me, and probably most aficionados of “classical” music, these ladies and their musical compatriots seem to open up the entire process. Of course, it’s not the raucousness of a rock concert, but it isn’t the staid, hushed atmosphere of traditional classical either. They’ve definitely taken the stuffiness out. Snob appeal ain’t present. The patrons who go because they’ve always gone (believe me, I am guilty of this), who go more for the visibility at intermission than the music, they don’t seem to be present. Nor are you bombarded yet again by the same big local and regional corporate names. The members of Chamber Project do it all, too. They take the tickets, handle the money, plead for the funding. True entrepreneurial talent, which is, if you read one of my recent posts here, essential in today’s world.

The Abigana Little Match Girl “wove” a dancer, a vibraphone, spoken word, and a flute. The percussionist managed to hit his cymbal with his elbow, something else I had never witnessed. From my vantage point, the dancer was clearly the solo part.  I am no judge of dance, but she captivated me. The Dahl Concerto a Tre was probably the most traditional of the four pieces, cello, violin, and clarinet. The playful vignettes, soulful at times but never seeming to get too serious, reminded me of Richard Strauss’ tone poem Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks. Even though the underlying subject matter may be serious, the music isn’t, or at least not for long.

The Reich piece, as Reich is want to do, really got my blood flowing. It’s hard to sit still. And the great thing about these performances, is you don’t have to. For one thing, you’re not crammed in between eight others and their heavy winter coats, purses, etc. You can weave, bob, tap, and even get up and go to the back of the room and elaborate. The marimba live is played over a looped marimba in a technique called “phasing.” It was, in three words, too much fun. Mesmerizing too. If you weren’t in an altered state from a few brewskis, or glasses of wine, the music would surely put you in one.

Ibert’s Le Jardinier De Samos, featured everyone but the dancer. Although it came off to me as a bit of a hodgepodge – the phrase “managed chaos” came to mind – the duet between the violin and the cello in the third movement was exquisite. Even so, I admire the group for selecting such pieces. If I heard it again, I might think otherwise.

Who knows – maybe I’m the one that’s had his head in the sand about performances like this. Maybe they’ve been going on for decades and I’ve been one of those patrons stuck in my music-listening ruts for too long. But I think there’s something really special going on here. My horizons are expanded with each of their performances.

 

Apartment hunting

By On January 6, 2014 · Leave a Comment · In Uncategorized

Need something to do while snowed in, in bed with the flu, sore from shoveling, or just damn tired of people nostalgically recalling the winters of their youth? Read The Apartment, a short novel (perhaps a novella) by Greg Baxter.

I’ve read lots of “big books” this year. Just finished Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge. Was tackled […]

Need something to do while snowed in, in bed with the flu, sore from shoveling, or just damn tired of people nostalgically recalling the winters of their youth? Read The Apartment, a short novel (perhaps a novella) by Greg Baxter.

I’ve read lots of “big books” this year. Just finished Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge. Was tackled by William Gass’ Middle C. Spent late autumn with Murakami’s The Painted Bird Chronicles. Have Elizabeth Gilbert’s The Signature of All Things teed up on my nightstand. After starting the new year reading The Apartment, I plead temporary sanity after torturing myself all year.

Not really. I love reading big books. I admire the author’s effort to put his/her Brontosaurus footprint smack in the middle of the literary circle, even if I don’t care for the work, or in some cases even understand the work, how the hell it got published in the first place, other than legacy academic fawning over established and known quantities and guaranteed level of sales.

But a small, quiet book hidden like an improvised explosive device, packing as much potential energy, but mercifully, does not need to detonate to pack its punch – that’s refreshing. Here’s an author with no need to create multi-dimensional fiction that can only be analyzed with tensors of mathematical matrices, no sentence acrobatics worthy of Blue Man Group, and no complex aromas masking the meat and potatoes of genre.

Over a time line of less than 24 hours, a 40-something Iraq War Veteran American citizen looking for an apartment in an unnamed European city with a female companion on a blustery snowy day delivers a subtle, poignant incision into America’s place in the contemporary European world. That’s it. But it’ll take the legs right out from under you.

Context is everything. I read one of the funniest books ever on divorce (A M Homes’ Music for Torching) when some good friends were going through their, often from my vantage point, comical separation. I still cherish A Catcher in the Rye because I sat on the benches of a boys private preparatory academy and longed for the balls to sneak out and do something, anything, like what Holden Caulfield did.

I read The Apartment during an all-day snowstorm. I’ve spent time in European cities like Baxter’s setting. I often find myself in a frame of mind similar to the narrator of The Apartment. Give it up. Blend into the background of a place you stand out in simply because of your nationality. Cut your ties. Drink in bars where no one knows your name – or speaks your language. Float through each day. I don’t deny that it was a book in synch with my psyche at time of reading.

Following Pynchon’s 500 page Bleeding Edge of post 9/11, post dot com bust, deep Internet sewers of conspiracies, corporate malfeasance, and shadowy tech exec yanking on the marionettes, wrapped in a detective genre (modernized for contemporary readers with a Jewish female New Yorker accounting sleuth for a private dick), well, all I can say is, Thank God for the randomness of finding Baxter on the “What’s New” shelves of my local library. An author who plays a human being, not a god who won’t even pose for a photograph.

Apartment hunting probably will never be this riveting in my lifetime.

Dare I say it? I hope Baxter takes his shot at the Brontosaurus circle.

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Free Agent Generation

By On December 15, 2013 · Leave a Comment · In Uncategorized

I’ve been thinking a great deal these days about how individuals, small businesses, and creative types (authors and writers, artists, dancers, musicians and composers, etc) market themselves, grow professionally, and otherwise make a living, keep food on the table, thrive, not just survive.

My sense is that every professional, regardless of career choice, has to […]

I’ve been thinking a great deal these days about how individuals, small businesses, and creative types (authors and writers, artists, dancers, musicians and composers, etc) market themselves, grow professionally, and otherwise make a living, keep food on the table, thrive, not just survive.

My sense is that every professional, regardless of career choice, has to learn how to, as we all used to call it, pound the pavement. This isn’t taught in college. You don’t get this through on-the-job training. It doesn’t matter whether you work for a company, an institution, a non-profit, a university or college, or what size it is. If you don’t consider yourself a “free agent” throughout your career, inside or outside your place of employment, you are going to suffer.

There are fewer full-time, tenured professorships at colleges and universities, and more adjunct professors. I think we all are pretty aware of how tenuous corporate employment is in this globalized world. Early retirement programs occur frequently. Massive layoffs are common. Unions have little power anymore. Government relies on outsourced contractors precisely to avoid more permanently employed workers. Inside an organization, the tyranny of the pyramid-like hierarchy and hollowed out organizations speak for themselves: Fewer positions are available as you climb the corporate ladder.

I read Daniel Pink’s book, Free Agent Nation, more than ten years ago when it was issued. Having been “telecommuting” for years, and encouraged to work away from the office (this inside a Fortune 500 company) several days a month as early as 1982, I found most of Pink’s content quaint, obvious, and useless. Yet he propagated the important lesson that we all need to think like free agents. By 2001, when it first came out, I had been chief editor of several engineering trade publications based in New York City but lived 70 miles away, came into the office one or two days a week, and then in 1997 moved to St. Louis, and ran the content operations “remotely.” In 2000, I jumped into the dot com pool, and quickly stepped out less than a year later, dried myself off, and started my own consulting company.

In short, I’ve operated as an independent inside and outside companies since the 1980s. I’ve had to come up with new ideas, nurture them, get people to buy into them, execute them, market them, sell them, and close, close, close the deal. As if that’s not enough, it doesn’t end there. Then you have to chase the money in the door (what, you think just because you have a contract, someone automatically pays you?). You have to ask for the money on the front end, and not rest easy until the check has cleared the other bank at the other end.

These days, in the creative world, self-marketing has been blown out of proportion, almost, with all the tools at one’s disposal, to “talk” to the world through your “network.” The fact is, the creative world is the world of “rock stars.” If people complain about the 99% vs the 1% in the regular economy, in the creative economy, it’s probably more like 99.999% to 0.0001%. That is, a tiny sliver achieves notoriety either in dollars or acclaim, and the rest either starve, beg for grants, moonlight, work from an academic platform, or live off of someone else.

The bottom line is, if you think you are going to build it and they will come (much as I LOVE “Field of Dreams”), you are depending on dumb luck to bail you out. Ever so rarely does the cream rise to the top. Rather, the squeaky wheel gets the grease. Those with the most admired credentials get the leg up, and the rest of the body. Real free agents, those from the sports world (where I suppose the phrase was coined), frankly, have actual agent representatives that do all the heavy lifting. They don’t get paid their commission until their client’s check clears the bank. They don’t eat until the the transaction is complete.

You eat what you kill. Yes, that’s brutal. But it’s true, if you translate not-so-ancient survival skills to modern-day ones.

Were you taught how to survive in the Darwinian world of business in college or high school? I know I wasn’t. And that was four decades ago. 95% of what I learned had nothing to do with the real world, and everything to do with continuing on to graduate school, which I had no intention of doing at the time. The one thing I learned in engineering school was the brutality of discipline. The same goes for my eighteen years in a Fortune 500 corporation. I was forced to take professional development courses in management and sensitivity training, not for my benefit, but mostly intended to protect the company from lawsuits and manage personnel risk.

We might have honed leadership skills in sports, Scouts, clubs, fraternities, class, places of worship, and other outlets. But hunting and gathering, moving money from one person’s pocket to yours (hate to be crass, but whether you are trying to convince someone to put their coins in the Sunday offering plate, selling your self-published book, employed by a corporation, displaying your wares at a crafts fair, or managing a store on main street, that’s what business is), involves so many skills (which can be learned) which aren’t even deemed necessary in academic or corporate circles.

How do you present yourself as a confident creative with high quality content for others, without coming across as an arrogant, self-absorbed prick? Can you become a self-made professional without making everyone around you cringe when you show up?

I often tell my clients, after laboring to get an article in a publication, a report completed, or a presentation ready for an industry meeting, that now the hard part begins. Leveraging that effort so that it gets in front of more eyeballs, contributes more to the marketing effort, generates interest in the company or product or technology, etc., is where the rubber meets the road. Academics just have to list the paper in their c.v. People in the real world have to sell something and then collect the money.

Isn’t it strange that a student’s entire future depends on benchmarks no one gives a crap about after the first hire? I’m talking about grades and standardized test scores.

Have you ever been at a trade show, an arts and crafts fair, an employment fair, or something else where a thousand people are lined up in identical tents or booths promoting something? I can’t tell you how many times I’ve witnessed the booth person sitting, waiting in the back for a prospective buyer to approach them. What? You feast on the transaction you close, the deal you negotiate, the sale you make.

Sitting back and waiting is not a strategy. Hope is not a strategy!

Sadly, in a world where it’s every professional for him or herself, where every resume has to stand out in the pile on the HR officer’s desk, where every artist is out begging for funds and grants, you better know how to value your story, how to tell your story, and how to get paid for your story. Sometimes you have to do this immediately in an email. Sometimes you have to do this inside a multi-year strategy for getting past the usual gatekeepers.

You better know how to identify your competitive advantage, ask for the money, communicate effectively (and I don’t mean how to do power point presentations, or write a letter, but persuade powerfully without turning off the recipient), sell and market, run a meeting, write contracts, establish trust, promote yourself, paint with numbers, work a crowd, read people, understand the hierarchy and pecking order, cultivate an organization’s corporate culture, and work the government.

If you don’t have these skills, your professional advancement will slow or cease.

My conclusion now, and this after shepherding my two daughters through college and high school and running an independent consulting business, is that young adults, as well seasoned veterans and professionals, require a boot camp of sorts, a boot camp during which “they get their minds right” (to quote a favorite line of mine from the prison movie, “Cool Hand Luke”) about developing the skills you need as an independent.

Today, the hard work begins after you graduate from college, after you take early retirement from the company, after you believe someone who says, “you are so good at this, you should make it a business,” and even after you are hired by some firm.

School does not fully prepare anyone for the real world of work, nor does a corporate career. Thirty years working for one firm means you have a terrific understanding of how to operate in one organization, which may not say much about every other organization you’ll have to deal with as an independent.

Boot camp may sound harsh. But the military does this for good reason. You have to get your mind right about how to survive without becoming someone else’s road kill.

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Portland biking dispatch #2: Apparitions in the Fog

By On November 17, 2013 · Leave a Comment · In Uncategorized

So, it’s my second day in Portland, Oregon with a bike. I scan the bicycling maps left at the place I am renting. It appears the St. Johns Bridge, about four miles north, is a cool destination. In fact, on the map, it looks like it might be a bike/pedestrian bridge. Well, they keep saying […]

So, it’s my second day in Portland, Oregon with a bike. I scan the bicycling maps left at the place I am renting. It appears the St. Johns Bridge, about four miles north, is a cool destination. In fact, on the map, it looks like it might be a bike/pedestrian bridge. Well, they keep saying it’s a bicycle friendly city.

I am, of course delusional.

The road there winds around these cliffs below which are industrial areas, the Willamette River, and forested areas beyond the river. Beautiful. Busy road, but lovely. I get close to the bridge and quickly realize it’s a major thoroughfare. But the blue line on the map meant it at least had a protected bike lane. It’s been foggy this mid-Saturday morning, but not too bad. I meander around a little before I find the entrance to the bridge. There’s a sidewalk along both sides of the bridge but no barrier. The right lane of the roadway has lettering that spells, “Bicycles on Roadway.” I suppose this is where bikes are supposed to be.

Only after I’ve made my choice on the roadway do a few other things dawn on me. First, the fog is much thicker on the bridge than it was earlier. Like, much thicker. Second, I am wearing clothing that blends in with the fog, no caution lights. When the first double-length semi carrying a quarry’s worth of gravel passes me on the left, I realized I was going to die on this bridge. I can see about ten feet in front of me. I can’t even look at the ten feet behind me to understand just how close the cars and trucks are getting to me before they dart into the next lane over. My idyllic morning ride across a “pedestrian” bridge has turned into crossing the George Washington Bridge from New Jersey to Manhattan at rush hour. Come to think of it, that would have been safe. Traffic would be grinding forward at about 1 mph.

I pedal as fast as I can. I recall the last time I pedaled this fast I was trying to get from Fort Hamilton Parkway area of Brooklyn back to the Brooklyn Bridge too late in the evening and the only direct route I knew at the time was to just barrel down 4th Avenue (for the most part, the kind of neighborhood in 1981 you didn’t want to be fixing a flat tire). Anyway, I keep climbing the gradual incline to mid-span. When I get there, a kaleidoscope of colors appears from the fog. Turns out a class or group is (1) performing fog worship, (2) practicing their Tai Chi, (3) suffering the effects of too much Chai Tea, or (4) all of the above. They are on both sides of the bridge, to boot. The break in my concentration, I think, may cause me to waver and wreck. Still, poetry in motion, or burial under a few tons of gravel? Focus, focus, focus.

The map indicated many biking paths in the green space on the other side of the bridge. Of course, I didn’t actually bring the map with me. I couldn’t find any of them. Traffic was heavy, intersections difficult. So I pedal back to the bridge. This time, I take the sidewalk. Strangely, I do not pass or even see the colorful movement artists. Only ten minutes or so had passed. Did they quit soon after I saw them and run? Had they rappelled under the bridge? Could they disappear off of a bridge this long that fast? Or was it just the over-active imagination of an all-too eager cyclist, that dream-like moment as my life passes by ahead of my thoughts of certain death?

Only the Portland fog knows.

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Portland, Oregon: Bicycle Friendly!

By On November 1, 2013 · Leave a Comment · In Uncategorized

Below is my attempt to capture a short scene from my recent two-week sojourn in Portland, Oregon. Portland declares itself the most bicycle friendly city in America. One of the goals for my stay was to live without a car, and bike as much as possible. I’ve been bicycling in cities most of my adult […]

Below is my attempt to capture a short scene from my recent two-week sojourn in Portland, Oregon. Portland declares itself the most bicycle friendly city in America. One of the goals for my stay was to live without a car, and bike as much as possible. I’ve been bicycling in cities most of my adult life, in Manhattan from 1980-1987, St. Louis from 1997 to the present.

Earlier, I had read a lengthy article on-line about how Portlanders might be a little too polite to each other.

I am peddling around a curve on the Broadway Bridge into the Pearl District of downtown Portland. A bicyclist (bicyclist 1), an older guy (which means he looks older than me) in front of me stops. He is pulling some kind of cart contraption that is much longer than his bike. He smiles, says something to me as I pass, but I don’t understand what he is saying.

I slow down and look behind me, concerned.

Bicyclist 1: (yells something)

I stop about twenty feet in front.

Me: “I’m sorry, what did you say?”

Bicyclist 1: “Hello! I just said hello.”

Me: “Oh, okay, I thought something was wrong.”

Bicyclist 1: No, I’m okay. How are you?”

He bends over and starts fiddling with something on his bike.

Me: “Uh, okay, I’m new to the city. You need any help?”

At this moment, another bicyclist (bicyclist 2) swerves around the bicyclist stopped behind me. This next guy wrecks, literally slides with his bike about ten feet until he is across from me. He gets up quickly, like this happens all the time, before I can even say something. He looks behind him.

Bicyclist 2: “That’s not really a good place to be stopping.”

Bicyclist 1, totally non-plussed: “It’s not like I had a choice.”

Bicyclist 2: “Wait, I’m not blaming you at all. I’m just suggesting that’s not a safe place to stop.”

Bicyclist 1: “No, I know, sorry, man, it’s just, something wrong with my bike.”

Me, to bicyclist 2: “Wow! Are you hurt?”

Bicyclist 2, feels a few spots in his mid-section, smiles, a really big smile: “No, I’m good. Might be a bruise here in the morning.” Pats his left thigh.

Me: “Are you sure? That was pretty gruesome looking.”

Bicyclist 2 moves towards me a few feet. As he bends down to inspect his bike, the Metro train clangs by and I realize the guy was wrecked right on top of the tracks. We are two arms lengths from touching that train.

Me: “Holy shit!” I look from the train to Bicyclist 2. “Sorry, I’m new to Portland biking.”

Bicyclist 2: “Really? This is a great city for biking.” He pedals slowly, checking his bike out, then speeds up. “Enjoy!”

I look at him pedaling away in front of me, then back at the guy behind me, head still buried in his bike.

Two things immediately come to mind. First, bicycle-friendly in Portland means equal accent on both words. Second, what would this exchange have been like in Manhattan circa early 1980s?

 

Performance art – or performing for art?

By On August 31, 2013 · Leave a Comment · In Uncategorized

William Gass is one of these literary fiction authors who apparently appeals to only the highest echelon of the literary fiction community, whoever they are. These writers intrigue me. I’ve noticed over the years that writers and readers tend to have their favorite “big books” from these literary lions but despise most of them. I […]

William Gass is one of these literary fiction authors who apparently appeals to only the highest echelon of the literary fiction community, whoever they are. These writers intrigue me. I’ve noticed over the years that writers and readers tend to have their favorite “big books” from these literary lions but despise most of them. I love Don DeLillo’s Underworld. My patience for David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest became finite at page 60.

Last Saturday I checked out Gass’ latest novel, Middle C, from the library. Coincidentally, that evening I was browsing events around town and Gass was listed as participating in a performance at the Meta Gallery, 3151 Cherokee Street, one of the currently hip neighborhoods in St. Louis (Gass lives in St. Louis, as do I). Well,  of course I had to go.

I love these kinds of events. Random. Vague. Cool. Fashionable. Dubious. Curious. Galleries are a display case for the art, the artist(s), and especially those in attendance. Often, I sense that everyone who shows up thinks: (1) Is everyone else as ignorant about the meaning, value, worth of this stuff as I am? (2) Can I convince everyone here that I’m the only one with the true insight into the displayed works? (3) Is standing in front of one work too long the same thing as dropping a fragile object in a store – you drop it, you bought it kind of thing? (4) It is de rigueur  now that the wine has to suck at these things. (5) Is the outfit she’s wearing like the prize at the bottom of the Cracker Jack box – a bonus for showing up? (6) I am now defined by the company I keep – I hope no one I work with shows up.

In short, everyone is performing. It’s unlike any other type of cultural excursion.

I find ignorance helpful when viewing art. I bring no pre-conceived notions. I am open to possibility. I also find going solo a blessing. I am absolved of conversing – thinking up something intelligent, something creative, something worthy of what I am viewing, words superior to the displayed works in their artistic flourish! Ignorance and solitude, yes. As long as you can stomach all the people staring at you, or using every muscle not to, wondering why you have no partner and no friends.

Annie Minx was the artist whose works were on display this evening.  No idea who she is. I couldn’t discern her in the crowd. But I liked her work. I guess the best way to describe them, pardon my ignorance and creative flourish, is they were Jackson Pollock in relief map 3-D, or multi-colored (multi here meaning every color from the palette) simulated rock that had bubbled up from a volcano, molten mess quickly fused by flowing water, with no supervision. Some of the them reminded me of mounted wildlife trophies. One began to look like a wild boar every time I returned to the beer in an iced barrel out in the alley. Another resembled tree bark. They were all glossy, plastic or solid waste materials perhaps, with acrylic paints, maybe, and they tended to come together at an apex, triangular pyramidal mostly. The ones mounted on white drywall background stood out much better than the ones against the brick wall. There were no price tags on the works. Mercifully, written descriptions, which usually possess the creative flourish of a rock sinking to the bottom of a pond, were absent.

Minx’ works were only one facet of the evening. There was a musical act as well. It was presaged by the music playing in the background, a group called Swell Maps, a 1970s UK post-punk band, I learned, after asking the guys dressed in black tights and muscle shirts hovering around the equipment. The selected pieces didn’t sound very punk to me, more like ambient electronica a la Kraftwerke only fed through a fuzz master. I failed to make a connection between the music and the art but that’s because I was still thinking too hard after two beers. I avoided the flimsy clear plastic cups of Chardonnay, surely laced with White Oak No. 2 from the industrial flavor chart.

The music performance started with a version of Lou Reed’s “Sweet Jane.” The version of this song from the album Rock n’ Roll Animal is one of the best rock songs ever, you know, the one with the best intro to a rock song ever. I looked around the gallery and thought, I am probably the only one here who actually heard Lou Reed perform this song live (three times!) in New York City during the reign of punk rock. That was pretty easy to conclude as most of the crowd hadn’t even slithered out of the womb when I was living in Manhattan when NYC hit rock bottom (I entered college there 1974, the year the city declared bankruptcy).

Then the young guys in tights began to do a punk rock impersonation, or maybe it was a parody, or irony, or cognitive dissonance. Like I wrote, ignorance is so helpful at times like this. They kept asking for requests from the audience, none of which had anything to do with punk, or with the period. I often go to things like this insisting privately that I will only listen, absorb, and not project. I failed (I always fail at this). I shouted out a few requests. At least they were from the 1970s (“666,” Aphrodite’s Child) and/or the post-punk period (“White Wedding,” Billy Idol), I thought, obscure enough that these two whippersnappers could show their crowd how hip they really are, but songs not so underground that two hipsters purporting to parody the era I came of age in wouldn’t have become familiar with. (Wow, that was a tortured sentence, but yet with an artistic flourish, no?)

Needless to say, they did not “perform” my requests. It wasn’t clear whether they knew of what I requested. Neither of them even offered up a Billy Idol sneer straight out of MTV. I gave them the benefit of the doubt, and figured they were playing along with me, another layer of irony. When I yelled out 666, the only guy there much older than I looked over at me and laughed a knowing chuckle. I thought maybe he was William Gass. Or maybe I just had it wrong from the get go. One of the guys in tights could also have been named William Gass. The William Gass I was looking for never performed, least not before I left.

I am looking forward to reading Middle C.

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The Post Low-T Generation

By On August 12, 2013 · Leave a Comment · In Uncategorized

Dave Eggers tackles a lot of big themes in A Hologram for the King. Perhaps the biggest is that the main character and his plight stand in for America as both enter a low-Testosterone phase.

Alan Clay waits. That’s about all he does. He waits. He waits for a member of the royal family so […]

Dave Eggers tackles a lot of big themes in A Hologram for the King. Perhaps the biggest is that the main character and his plight stand in for America as both enter a low-Testosterone phase.

Alan Clay waits. That’s about all he does. He waits. He waits for a member of the royal family so that he can show him a new technology that allows people to communicate in person through holographic techniques and the royal will, hopefully, invest in Alan’s company. He waits with his team members. He waits for bandwidth to conduct the all-important demo of the technology. He waits in his hotel room before he waits outside of it. He waits in a tent. He even waits in a huge concrete vault of a space that is waiting for the building that is supposed to rise on top of it.

Alan desperately needs the royal investment. His life has kind of capsized. The usual stuff. Divorce, struggle relating to his daughter, looming tuition bills, loss of ambition, difficulties with sex, empty nest, tyrant of a boss, bad relationship with his dad. He’s a victim of the post-2007 collapse of the global economy. America is a victim too. China is eating its lunch. Alan had a good business. He was into bikes. Then he discovered outsourcing and ruined it. His Dad worked in the real economy. Shades of Bud Fox in the movie Wall Street.

Economic recession permeates the novel. We get glimpses of the surreality of Saudi life, where everything is illegal but available. Oddly, we get no glimpse of oil. Just sand. Lots of sand, unfinished buildings, indeed an unfinished city. But no glimpse of what Americans associate with the Kingdom. Petroleum. We see what petrodollars can do. Not the petrol itself.

Thoughts of Godot are inevitable. Alan and his team wait. Absurdity surrounds. Like the sand. Alan has a relationship with a woman who works in a nearby building. She’s almost robotic in her motions, an ex-pat, a western woman, surviving in Saudi culture. Alan is checked out in the hospital (a self-inflicted problem involving a knife and a lump in his neck) by a female Saudi doctor. He hangs out with his driver (his only meaningful relationship) and his family and almost shoots a shepherd boy, clearly an allegory for America’s military ambitions in the Middle East. Alan’s driver is the most interesting character in the novel. Too bad he sort of leaves the stage after the shepherd boy almost bites it.

Alan is in his mid-50s. Thoughts of low-T, like Godot, are also inevitable. He needs a pill. America’s global reign is ending. America needs a pill. Both come off as kind of pathetic.

The ending is difficult. Not sure it works. He “gets” the Saudi doctor but a survivalist tale of Alan as a boy with his dad is told that doesn’t seem to fit. But overall, the novel tightly and successfully weaves difficult to capture economic themes, almost impossible to make interesting. The emptiness of the Saudi desert is the emptying of Alan’s life and achievement. Digital technology is, with China, ascendant. Outsourcing and consulting are villains, even if unintended consequences of the global economy. The ex-pats and the Saudis warily move around each other cloaked in sterile cloth of cultural differences.

Eggers seems to have a recent fascination with Middle Eastern themes. His last book, Zeitoun, a non-fiction work, tells the story of a Syrian American man and his Heinz 57 American wife caught between the Katrina disaster in New Orleans and post-9/11 paranoia about Muslims and Islam. I admire Eggers for pounding this sand. Few American authors display such courage.

A Hologram for the King is a fast read. Like the landscape he describes, Eggers give us lots of empty space and breathing room. Human kindness taken with mutual understanding is the only pill, in the end, that cures what seems to ail Alan. No cure seemed evident for America.

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