Mitch Wagner's Blog

Berries

Reading "Chronic City," by Jonathan Lethem

I just finished reading Chronic City, by Jonathan Lethem, a novel about life in present-day New York, which starts out at least somewhat ordinary and becomes weirder and more wonderful with every page.

The main character and storyteller is Chase Insteadman. The Amazon review correctly describes Insteadman as a "genial nonentity." He's a former child star -- and oh, what a great freight of dysfunction and weirdness those three words convey! He was the lead in the wildly popular 80s sitcom Martyr and Pesty, and earns an income from residuals from that show, enough to live comfortably if not lavishly in Manhattan. People still recognize him as his character when he meets them. He's avoided the criminal record and violent eccentricity of some former child stars. He's just this dull guy who lives in Manhattan and who used to be interesting.

He's handsome and somewhat charming, which means he gets invited to a lot of dinner parties and cocktail parties thrown by Manhattan's very, very rich. At one point, we see him enter a brownstone house that's actually inside an apartment building; the house came first and the building was built around it. The condos cost tens of millions of dollars each, and the occupants are, therefore, filthy rich. But the occupants of the brownstone are even more wealthy than that.

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And yet Chase's insanely wealthy friends never seem to do anything. They're the very picture of the idle rich, they do not run companies or exert power, they just exist, fed and groomed by armies of servants.

Chronic City is Chase's story of his friendship with the bohemian eccentric Perkus Tooth. Tooth is a pop-culture critic, specializing in long, angry rants about movies and music. Like Chase, Perkus Tooth's best-known years are far behind him. Perkus formerly posted his rants on handmade posters that he stealthily pasted on Manhattan's Lower East Side. He calls the posters his "broadsides." The posters made Perkus famous in the small Bohemian culture of downtown Manhattan a long time ago. Later, he wrote for Rolling Stone. Tooth, a wall-eyed ectomorph, favors shabby three-piece suits.

Chase's other major relationship at the opening of the novel is with Janice Trumbull, his heroic astronaut-fiance who is stranded on the International Space Station by a barrier of orbiting Chinese land mines.

Chronic City is a pothead novel. Chase, Perkus Tooth and Richard Abneg smoke massive amounts of pot, and a major part of the novel deals with the misperceptions and compelling conversations that occur when frequently stoned. Chase goes to Perkus Tooth's apartment, they listen to music and argue and drink coffee and go around the corner to the Jackson Hole diner for hamburgers and chocolate shakes. Perkus Tooth's apartment reminds me a lot of some of the rooms in my college dorms, shabby places decorated by conversations and music and a constant, familial flow of people stopping by to get high. There's a lovely, warm friendliness to that kind of life, even if nobody ever gets anything done.

Chase, Perkus Tooth, and another character, Richard Abneg are people whose best years, in some respects, seem to be behind them: Chase's acting career, Perkus Tooth's broadsides. Even Richard Abneg, now a powerful fixer for the Mayor of the City of New York, is uncomfortable in that worldly success; he still sees himself as at the outsider, the wild-haired revolutionary he was as a young man.

The novel is populated by mentions of real-life celebrities, as well as celebrities with made-up names who are clearly based on real famous people. The mayor of New York, Arnheim, is a media billionaire. Emil Jumrow is a science writer who seems to be an amalgam of Isaac Asimov and Richard Feynman. In the novel, Jumrow gets credit for the "simulation argument," developed in real life by Nick Bostrom, a philosopher at Oxford University.

The simulation argument, which becomes central to the second half of the novel, argues that we're not living in the real world--we're almost certainly living in a computer simulation of reality.

Reality is a major theme of "Chronic City"--the old, epistemological question, how do we know what we know? The characters of the novel seem to be based on real people: Chase is an amalgam of every former celebrity we've ever seen on TV. Perkus Tooth reminds me very much of one of my real-life friends (although, while Perkus is too crazy to live in the world, my friend is actually successful). I suspect you might well know someone like Perkus too. Likewise, I feel I know know someone like Richard Abneg, another character--a few people, as a matter of fact. The world of Chronic City doesn't have the Muppets in it, but it does have the Gnuppets.

And as time goes on, Chase and Perkus Tooth begin to wonder whether they, and the world around them, are real. They can't even come to an agreement on whether Marlon Brando is dead or alive--they go to Wikipedia, and at first it says he's dead. But when they visit later it says his death was just a hoax, and t he page is decorated with one of those big, Wikipedia disclaimers that says the factuality of the page is in dispute.

Because I am a Second Life enthusiast, I was pleasantly surprised to find that Second Life plays a big role in the second half of novel. It's called Yet Another Life in the novel, and it serves as an example of the whole epistemological theme--could we be avatars in a massive simulation of the world, without knowing it? Lethem gets the details of Second Life right, except for those which appear to have been consciously changed by the author for purposes of the story.

Lethem draws the readers into the whole epistemological game; because Chronic City is filled with in-jokes and mentions of real places and celebrities, it's inevitable that the reader will wonder how much of it is based in reality and how much of it is pure fiction. It's unclear how much the novel is even set in our universe--details like a different mayor of New York, fictional astronauts, and even a tiger running loose in downtown Manhattan are the kind of thing we expect in mainstream fiction. On the other hand, there's a reference to the World Trade Center still standing, and think of how much the world would be different if those two buildings were still up! Alternately: I could only find one reference to the WTC still standing, and the person who references them is by then shown to be unreliable, so maybe this is our universe after all.

The reality games in Chronic City had me hitting Google hard while reading. The characters spend a lot of time trying to acquire a type of ceramic pot called a "chaldron," Lethem describes it so vividly that I was surprised, when Googling, to find that there is no such thing. In real life, a "chaldron" is "a British imperial capacity measure (liquid or dry) equal to 36 bushels."

Jackson Hole, the burger joint where Chase Insteadman and Perkus Tooth spend a lot of time, is a real place--or places, it's a New York chain of burger joints. One of them is located near where my parents' condo was, in Flushing, Queens, and I ate there a few times. The burgers are, as advertised in the book, big and tasty. Jackson Hole has a restaurant where the one in the novel is: 2nd Avenue in New York, around the corner from Perkus Tooth's East 84th Street Apartment. It's appropriate for Jackson Hole to figure so prominently in a novel about reality not being what it seems; it's a place in New York named for a place in Wyoming, and it seems like a local diner, but it isn't--it's part of a chain.

Is Perkus Tooth real? He's on Facebook. I flipped through his friends list to see if I know anyone, and came across a name I recognized: Emily Gould. I was sure for a second that I knew her, but then I realized I don't; she wrote in a confessional style on the blog Gawker.com, and then wrote a confessional article in the New York Times Magazine about the liabilities of publishing confessionals. Although I don't know Emily, I blogged about her. So it feels like I know Emily, even though I don't. This reality thing is kind of tricky.

"Chronic," in the title, is a real-life nickname for marijuana, and Chronic City is one of the names of the brands of pot that Perkus Tooth and Chase Insteadman are partial too. "Chronic" also describes long-lasting or recurring medical conditions; that meaning becomes important at the very end of the novel.

I liked Chronic City a lot. It's a little slow and meandery in the middle, but it's paced fast enough to keep me going, and I gulped down the second half of the book in a single day.

A message to spammers about my penis

Dear spammers:

My penis is not particularly large, but I'm quite happy with it and have no desire to make changes.

I should think after all these years of my ignoring your e-mails, you would have figured that out by now and stopped nagging me.

(signed) Me

Rent a pizza

I spotted this sign on El Cajon Boulevard on my daily constitutional. I think of pizza as a purchase, rather than a rental transaction.

Things I've learned about losing weight

I'm down about 30 pounds from when I started losing weight in March. I still have about 70 pounds go go. I'm not an expert. I'll be an expert when I've lost all the weight, and kept it off for five years. But I've learned some things.

Photo by Yukari

Keep a food journal. It's the most effective thing you can do. Write down everything you eat and drink. Once you do that, you will become conscious of your food habits, and start making changes for weight loss. It's almost automatic. Just keep a food journal, everything else will follow. A study by Kaiser Permanente showed that keeping a food journal doubles your weight loss.

I use the Lose It! app for the iPhone to track my calories, weight, and exercise. It doesn't really matter what you use. You can use pen and paper.

Your food journal is a mystic, magic weapon that sets you on the path to weight loss. It focuses your mind on what you're eating and when, and you'll start naturally figuring out how to lose weight from there. Just start keeping a food journal, the rest will follow.

Follow a sensible diet. Avoid fads. Weight Watchers is good. I've been counting calories, a technique that's more than a hundred years old. It works. Losing weight is simple physics: If your calories consumed is less than the amount you spend exercising, you'll lose weight. Lose It includes an automated tool for figuring your target calories. About.com has one on the Web. You can find out the calories in food by reading packages and, for fresh produce and meals out, you can Google the calorie counts. Just Google "(name of food) calories." For example, apples calories.

When you tell people you're looking to lose weight, everyone will tell you how they did it, which is the One True Way. This possibly includes me, in this blog post, although I'm trying to avoid it. Some people will swear by the Zone, some people swear by Atkins, some people lay off processed food or refined flours or white sugar or corn syrup. One person even swore to me that the way to lose weight was to avoid eating white foods. The right way is the way that works for you.

The right way should involve eating a balanced diet, and you shouldn't really ever be hungry.

If you're not eating a balanced diet, and you're fighting hunger, you might (1) Make yourself sick or (1)(b) dead. And I guarantee you won't keep off whatever weight you lose. I guarantee it.

Exercise is supremely important to your health. But exercise alone won't make you lose weight. I exercised regularly for a year before I started counting calories, and I actually gained a few pounds during that time.

On the other hand, exercise helps you keep weight off, and it has other health benefits. It's like a magic anti-aging pill.

Don't say you're "on a diet." Saying, "I'm on a diet," implies it will be a temporary thing, that you'll go off the diet when you've lost the weight. Then you do that, and gain all your weight back.

Weight loss requires a fundamental lifestyle change. It's forever. I figure I'll be counting calories, weighing myself weekly, and keeping a food diary until the day I die. I have a disability--my autonomic nervous system doesn't tell me when I've had enough to eat. As with any other disability, I need to compensate for it.

Lose weight slowly. About 1-2 pounds a week or so is healthy. My doctor says 0.5-2 pounds.

Give yourself a break every once in a while. Every couple of months, my wife or our friend Barbara cooks a really nice meal, or we go to a favorite restaurant, and I just put away the food journal and I eat and drink whatever the heck I want.

If you think you're never going to eat a big bowl of ice cream, or a plate of french fries doused in ketchup, you're going to make yourself miserable. Knowing you can have those foods every once in a while makes it easier for you to not have them most of the time.

A week or two ago, I had a breakfast meeting at a local delicatessen, DZ Akins. I planned ahead of time what I would have for breakfast: Two eggs over easy, wheat toast, coffee. That's all.

When I got to the restaurant, I walked past diners eating big, heavy plates of fancy omelets and hash browns and pancakes and French toast loaded with syrup. If I thought I could never have those things again, I would have made myself miserable and probably had a big plate of them anyway and felt guilty about it. Instead, I just said to myself, "Those look awfully good. I'll have to come back again sometime and have a big plate of that." And then I sat down at my table and ordered the light breakfast I'd planned.

Copper Robot interview with Douglas Rushkoff, author of "Life, Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back" (podcast, video)

Listen to my interview with Douglas Rushkoff, author of Life, Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back. We talked about the central themes of his book: How we've allowed big companies and consumerism to take over all facets of our lives, and what we can do to take back our personal connections and communities.

LISTEN TO THE PODCAST:

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I started the interview by asking Douglas about the incident that opens the book: "I was taking out the garbage in front of an apartment we really couldn't afford the rent on and I got mugged--at gunpoint, the whole thing," Rushkoff said.

The apartment was in the affluent Park Slope section of Brooklyn.

"I went back and posted what happened to what was supposed to be a nice, lefty parents list, the Park Slope parents list. I posted what had happened and where it had happened. It was on Christmas Eve, even.

"The first two e-mails I got back were off-list, from people who were angry that I had posted the location of where I had gotten mugged, because they thought this could negatively affect their property values. And I was really struck that these people cared more about suppressing any conversation about crime in their neighborhood, and the effect it might have on the brand value of their real estate, rather than having an honest conversation about what we need to do to make our neighborhood safer.

"It made me realize that people had internalized the values of corporations. It wasn't just that corporations -- Wal-Mart and Starbucks -- were opening up too many places where we lived, but that we as people were starting to behave as corporations ourselves, caring more about the short-term asset value of our property rather than the places we lived as experiential homes for human beings.

"I wanted to look at the process by which we had assumed corporate values as individuals."

How did we get here? Rushkoff says it goes back centuries, to the end of the Middle Ages, when the new merchant classes started creating wealth through trade, creating a period of affluence unrivaled for many centuries. People had so much wealth that they used the excess to build vast cathedrals.

But the aristocracy was losing out in the new order, and so they cooked up a plan to hang onto their power. They granted trade monopolies to some of their merchant friends, centralizing currency and economic power. This corporate system is the one we still have today. Big companies take wealth from the edges and keep it for themselves, Rushkoff said. They sell us junk food and home entertainment systems that make us fat and sedentary, and then sell us healthcare to solve the problems created by our unhealthy lifestyles. They lobby government against public transportation, and sell us cars to get around. They manipulate government regulation to keep small businesses from competing.

How do we unravel that situation? One way is for people start small, work locally, and create value with their neighbors. "It's very easy to join a movement," Rushkoff said. "I think it's a lot simpler and more effective to just start doing the things you want to do. You are going to come up against laws and things that get in your way very fast."

For example, Rushkoff said he joined a community agriculture group where he lives in New York. He found they couldn't grow enough chard--they were not allowed to use one of their fields for chard, because they had to use it for corn or else pay a penalty. They went to lawmakers to get the law changed.

Similarly, a group in Ohio wants to put solar panels on houses, but found the power monopoly had enacted a law preventing people from supplying their own power. The Ohioans had to go to the state legislature to get it changed. Other neighborhoods are working to get bike lanes created on public roads.

"I think the way to take it back is not to try to operate on a corporate level. They're at a disadvantage on the local level, they're at the giant, abstract, central government, media and lobbyist level. Let them have that. We can take back the real world, and slowly but surely drain them of their revenue by doing things for ourselves.

"I get letters from people in places like Lansing, Mich. They ask me things like 'How can we get a corporation to come here and give us jobs? How can we get a bank to come here and reinvest in our community?' And what I keep telling them--and it sounds idealistic but it's actually just very realistic--if you've got skills, and you've got people with needs then you've got the basis of a real economy. That's all an economy is."

We also discussed the value of the Internet in creating wealth, the limitations of open source, the scariness world of being someone who's trying to make a living making books or music or any content that can easily be digitized, the need for a new social contract that allows digital content creators to get paid, and Rushkoff's ideas for his next book.

WATCH THE VIDEO HERE:

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From Copper Robot. iTunes

"Mutiny in the Time Machine:" A childhood favorite book for me

I loved this book when I was a kid. It's the story of a small group of Boy Scouts who find a saucer-shaped time machine, and have adventures traveling in time. Along the way, they pick up a boy from ancient Sparta, and another one from the domed city of Troy in the year 3000 AD. The first-person narrator is the team's leader, he tells the story in a wisecracking style that I was much enchanted with when I was a boy. The book came out in 1963, the Mad Men era, based on stories initially serialized in Boy's Life magazine.

The Time Machine books and the Danny Dunn books have a lot to do with who I am today. Both series told stories of kids who had adventures and solved problems using teamwork, self-reliance, brains, and decency, which are good values to teach. More important to me: They made a science fiction fan out of me, and that shapes your thinking. Reading a lot of science fiction, and following it up with history, made me acutely aware that the present is not a permanent state. The future isn't going to be like today but with funny clothes and smaller cell phones, it will be fundamentally different, because the past is fundamentally different from today.

I found a used copy of the Time Machine book on Bookfinder (Julie recommended I look there) and ordered it yesterday, it should be here soon.

The book's author, Donald Keith, is a pseudonym for a two-brother writing team: Donald and Keith Monroe. They wrote several stories. Donald lived 1888-1972, and Keith lived 1917-1973 and authored several stories and articles on his own, apparently for both children and adults. I love the titles of some of them: "How Crazy Is This Brush Factory," Argosy, March 1957; "The Time Machine Kidnaps a Parade," Boys’ Life July 1976; "The Time Machine Saves a Patriot," Boy's Life, April 1975. Guessing from the dates that Boy's Life republished the stories in the mid-70s, after the authors' death, which is how I rediscovered them. I loved that magazine, even though I never really stuck with Scouts.

Alas, the Scouts of today seem to have become fanatical, prohibiting atheists, agnostics and "known or avowed" homosexuals from joining. So it goes.

Duke's Liquor

Fun Web video series: The Guild

The Guild is kind of like Seinfeld for nerds. It's the story of six dysfunctional people who play an unnamed World of Warrcraft-like game together. Their lives revolves around scoring in-game points, leveling up, and attempting to relate to the real world through the lens of the virtual world.

The Guid stars and is written and produced Felicia Day, who's had a modest success as a character actor on TV: She had a supporting role in Joss Whedon's TV show Buffy the Vampire Slayer. She had a supporting role as a paralyzed dancer in the HBO biopic Warm Springs, which starred Kenneth Branagh as FDR; she did a memorable song-and-dance number leading a troupe of dancers in wheelchairs.

Day also appeared as a depressed math teacher on House. She had the top of her head sawed off so they could poke at her brain. They didn't really saw off Felicia Day's head, though -- they used a prop and special effects. Hmph. Paraphrasing Alan Rickman in Galaxy Quest: Actors today have no commitment to the craft.

Felicia's career has taken off as a cult star of Internet video, starring in Joss Whedon's Dr. Horrible's Sing-a-long Blog and creating and starring in The Guild.

Other stand-out characters and actors: Zaboo, a priapic, manic Indian-Jewish-American, played by Sandeep Parikh.

Vork, the productivity-obsessed guild leader, who stands out as antisocial even in that crowd, played by Jeff Lewis. I really couldn't stand Vork in the first season, but his earnestness grew on me.

Felicia, Sandeep and Jeff appeared on Copper Robot in April. Listen to the interview here:

Download it here.

The Guild is three seasons so far. Each episode is about seven minutes long, so each season is actually about 45 minutes. Good lunch-at-your-desk watching.

Overthinking the season finale of "Mad Men"

Interesting set-up for next year. Sterling Cooper was always a bubble of the past in a changing world. It was an oasis where middle-aged white men still ruled, where they could go out for two-hour lunches saturated with beef, alcohol, and tobacco, and then come back to the office and chase their secretaries around the desk for the rest of the afternoon. In the rest of the world, women and non-whites were gaining power and the world was moving on. Now, Don Draper, Roger Sterling, and Bert Cooper are thrust into that new world. What will they make of it?

Great to see Don and Roger as drinking buddies again. Roger continues to be a mensch -- who'd a thought it? Also, Peter and Trudy seem to have the most healthy relationship of any couple of the show. They discuss matters like adults, they hear each other out respectfully, they share defeats and victories. Who'd a thought it?

Peter is the unlikely man of the future. He's the spoiled scion of a wealthy family, and yet he's the one with ambition and drive, and the vision to see the future clearly when others around him are blind to it. Don rattled off a list of ways that Peter is a visionary: Missile and air companies, the African-American consumer market, and more. I expect come the late 1970s Peter will be recommending that Sterling, Cooper, Price & Campbell throw its weight behind a little startup called "Microsoft."

And speaking of the late 70s: At the end of the episode, the network showed a "coming in 2010" string of promos. I saw Superman flying and I thought, briefly, "Holy crap, they're going to jump Mad Men to 1977! That's brilliant!" But then I realized it was just a promo for Superman Returns. Shucks.

Joan's back, hooray! In the new firm, maybe she'll be more of a senior management role, and not just the head girl. Too much to ask for 1964?

I'm a little surprised that Pryce's weaselly Brit assistant didn't come along to the new agency.

I wonder which of the Sterling Cooper characters not in the hotel room will be coming back to next year? Kinsey, Cosgrove, Sal? Kinsey is potentially an interesting character, with his stupid beard and stupid beatnik affectations. He thinks he's a genius, but he now knows he's not--he now knows that Don and Betty are the true geniuses. So many potentially interesting ways to take that character.

I suspect Sal will be part of the new firm. I suspect there just wasn't time in the episode for a Sal storyline, and he'll be back next year. Don might have to come to Sal, as he did with Betty, and admit to being in the wrong and ask him humbly to come back. But I think it's more likely, given Sal's character and the nature of the world in 1964, that Don or one of the other partners will simply invite Sal to come back, and Sal will simply choose to not mention the circumstances under which he left. Sal thinks if he keeps pretending everything is OK, everything will be OK.

Season finale of Mad Men = Kramer vs. Kramer + Ocean's 11.

"Peggy, get me a cup of coffee." "No." I had to make Julie rewind that so I could see it again, it was so great. One of the main things I love about Mad Men is how small moments like that become so enormous. Peggy had another one: "Thank you for stopping by." And Trudy: "Peter, could I talk to you in here for a moment?"

Betty says she doesn't love Don, and almost certainly a lot has to do with the fact that she's caught him in yet another betrayal. Yet I think part of it is because she's appalled to find he's just trash, not the aristocrat she thought he was at all. I thought that before last night, and I think it even more based on their fight in the bedroom. Also: What's with the marriage to the new guy? When is she going to stop looking for men to take care of her? And, as Julie points out, she hardly knows him and he hardly knows her.

What do you think of the flashbacks? I like 'em, but not everybody does:

[W]e had to sit through a few flashbacks that, like nearly all MM flashbacks this season, looked and sounded like drafts of an unproduced Eugene O’Neill play. Young Don’s life was portrayed as a hillbilly caricature complete with a corked jug o’ moonshine. (Weiner seems to have gleaned his knowledge of lower-class rural life from old collections of Li’l Abner comic strips; it’s too bad he never lets Don’s subconscious stray enough to portray Betty as Daisy Mae… ) When the horse reared in the stable and knocked Dad unconscious, Weiner has by now programmed me to select the appropriate time-period song lyric. In this case, I heard Dean Martin singing, “Ain’t that a kick in the head… "

Don Draper has an opportunity to re-invent himself with integrity now. He can either be openly single and tomcat around without shame or deceit, or find someone new and settle down and be monogamous and honest. Who thinks that'll actually happen?

It must be awful to have to tell your kids that Mommy and Daddy are getting a divorce--but even more awful in 1964. At least parents today have a script they can follow, so many people have done it, but in the world of Mad Men, divorced people are still freaks (as we saw in the first season).

As usual, James Poniewozik has great observations. He calls Bert Cooper in this episode a "lion in winter."