A Friend Indeed

In my quest to read thirty-six thousand books this summer, I've recently begun on Malcom Gladwell's The Tipping Point. The book is about what Gladwell calls "the tipping point" (duh), which describes how certain phenomenal events (or combinations of a few) make the status quo change very quickly. The running example in the book is about how Hush Puppies, after being ridiculously lame for many years, suddenly made a gigantic comeback. It must have started somewhere--and he places the credit (or blame?) with three types of people--connectors, mavens, and salesmen.

You probably know someone of each type, if you think about it hard enough. Salesmen have a natural charisma that allows them to convince you to do something you may not want to do, without you knowing they even changed your mind. The example he gives is that during the '88 presidential race, for some reason or another Peter Jennings always smiled when he talked about Ronald Reagan (even though independent observers said that ABC's news coverage was anti-Reagan if anything). In turn, it was found that viewers of ABC were remarkably more likely to vote for Reagan in '88.

The second type of person, a maven, is the one I found hard to place. I have maven-ish qualities, but mavens are completely un-snobby, according to Gladwell--so obviously, I'm not a maven. A maven is an information gather and supplier. Mavens notice stuff like where to find the cheapest deals everywhere, and they tell you--sometimes even without you asking. I found that it's hard for me to find a maven among my friends because I generally either ignore mavens' advice or don't converse with them because they annoy me. They're not snobby, and 9 out of 10 times I didn't know the information they were telling me, but I don't like being told things like I didn't already know them. Anyway, mavens do this because they want to help people.

When I read about connectors, there was one person on my mind the whole time...who I'll reveal later. A connector is a person who knows people. Lots of people. They make friends easily, and this helps them make more friends. They're the Kevin Bacon in our Six Degrees of Separation.

Now, maybe it's because I've known him for almost my entire life, but I owe pretty much everything to Jake Kurz. He's my connector. He might not fit all the qualities of the ideal connector perfectly, but I've never met a more lovable, friendly guy, and those are the two most important qualities.

Jake told me the other day that DJ's going to start calling him Jack. I told him he's going to have to start driving a Corvette and smoking Marlboros, which he was fine with. I can't see Jake being that kind of cool. Jake's not prototypically cool, mostly because he's not an asshole. I've never known any cool kids to take time out of their lives to do stuff like Best Buddies, much less wanting to make a career out of it. He's always looking out for his friends.

I remember one night I couldn't hang out with Jake, and I was disappointed. There was a party at one of his friend's houses, but it was a small thing, and I respected that. About a half hour later, I found out my sister had been invited to the party at the last minute, and I went from disappointed to pissed. Jake proceeded to rip the responsible party a new asshole.

Jake's got class and loyalty. He's honest and clever. Every time someone I know meets him for the first time, they tell me how hilarious he is afterwards. I have so many memories that would have left my mind a long time ago if Jake wasn't there to make them worth remembering.

I think I'm going to start trying to call him Jack, too, maybe for selfish interests. I've never had a friend named Jack and I've always wanted to. I can't guarantee it'll catch on, though. For me, the name "Jake" is defined by all the things I admire about him. I couldn't imagine him having another name.

This is Kevin Doran, signing off.

The Passion of the Zeitgeist

I just finished reading another book. That makes three in the past month, which I think is a personal record last achieved when I was pwning bedwetting 4-year-olds in pre-school. Man, even then being a nerd seemed to repel the ladies.

Anyway, the book is called How Soon Is Never? The title is a play on the Smiths' hit "How Soon Is Now," which pretty much everyone ages 18-45 has heard. They probably don't know it, though, which is why most people ages 18-45 have no idea who the Smiths are. The book is about the utterly depressing life of Joe Green, a JAP-turned-punk-turned-New Waver-turned-rock journalist. Basically, it's about me if I were Jewish and born in 1969. As it is, I'll probably end up writing the same exact book in 12 years, except it'll be entitled Say It Ain't Not So.

Essentially, Joe Green's mission for most of the book is trying to get the Smiths (who broke up in 1987) back together. In the process, he's also trying to get the woman (who has a boyfriend) he's in love with to love him back. It's got something for everyone. By the end of the book, his mission is an unsuccessful one. Sorry to ruin the ending, but as of now the Smiths have yet to reunite anyway, so it shouldn't be a surprise. He realizes at the end that getting the Smiths back together wouldn't make him happy, since he can't be with the woman he loves.

But the whole book is so passionate. There are a couple gaping plot holes, but it doesn't really matter if you've ever loved some band (or any collective group of strangers) the way Joe loves the Smiths. It's books like this that make me wonder why I ever wane on my dreams of being a rock journalist. Just when I think I'm out, they pull me back in.

It got me thinking about my goals. What happens when you reach a goal? You can't be satisfied for long, because there are other goals to achieve. Life's a real bitch that way. But everyone has one or two things that they want more than anything else in their lives. For me, that involves having kids I love with a woman I love. It may or may not also involve career goals. But I'll get to that later.

My high school physics teacher, Mr. Cipolla, gave our class some very wise words before the end of the school year. Most of the class were seniors (I was a junior) so it was fitting. He told us that we should always have a goal in mind, and that we should make sure everything we do in life is directed towards reaching that goal.

Now, how does one concentrate on finding a woman to marry? I mean, the starting point of every relationship, romantic or otherwise, is, as the immortal band Deep Blue Something once said, "common ground to start from." So basically, I have to find a woman who wants to get married and have kids with me somewhere around 5-10 years from now and who is a snobby bitch about her taste in pop music. No problem.

Unfortunately, we live in a very real world, a world where you can't survive without money. That means I have to concentrate on college until I graduate and get a job I can survive on. So in between maintaining a positive outward appearance and a social life, I have to be a student, too. And in the short-term, I may or may not have to work for a very paltry salary.

Before I come off as too bitchy, trust me--I have no grounds on which I can bitch. This is a normal lifestyle, if not just a little bit unfocused. At least my dad would think it's unfocused. But my point is that, wise words that they were, my beloved Mr. Cipolla's advice was not meant to be taken as literally as he made it seem. I guess that's where common sense comes into play. Obviously, this was a misjudgment of character on his part, since nobody has any business giving me advice that involves adjusting for common sense. Unless they want to put themselves and everyone they know in grave danger.

Obviously, in life, you can't focus all your energy on just one or two things. If you do, you're going to miss out on a lot. I think that's something that I share in common with Joe Green. When he focuses on his two missions, he invests a lot of time and energy in them--and neither of them work out. I'm not saying people should worry about missing their goals, but you gotta have something else in your life to keep you afloat.

Personally, if I have a problem with my goals in any way, it's the opposite. I think I stretch myself too thin. I want to listen to music, but I also want to play music. I want to write for the humor magazine, but I also want to be a rock writer. I want to run my own music site, but I also want to graduate college. I want to have a social life, but I also want to have money. It's a life of Catch-22s.

There are so many damned distractions in this life that it's hard to maintain the passion for the most important things. It's the reason relationships don't last, in a lot of cases. There's no passion left because the two people are busy trying to maintain a lifestyle and fulfill their other goals. It's the reason bands like the Smiths don't stay together. Maybe there's still passion for music, but if that passion isn't all channelled towards the same thing, there are creative differences.

The real trouble comes along when you're an individual, and you're having creative differences with yourself. I hope it's easier to reunite two (or more) sides of myself than it is to get Morrissey and Johnny Marr back together.

No Offense

Ann Coulter is a big fucking bitch.

(Stop the presses!)

Actually, I bet if you knew her well enough, she wouldn't be so bad. But that public personality of hers...god dammit, I just want to punch her in the ovaries.

What most people probably don't realize about Ann Coulter is that her public political views are probably not what she really thinks. Like every famous person in the political sphere, she does whatever she can to make an extra buck. What's scary about that, though, is that she's making lots of bucks off that exaggerated right-wing personality of hers. That means she's got a market.

Like the KKK, or the Black Panthers, or Neo-Nazis, or al-Qaeda, Ann Coulter's flock are a bunch of extremists. They have their right to free speech like everyone else in America. Like my high school political science teacher always said, opinions are like assholes--everybody's got one. So for every pot-smoking vegan Green party hippie, there's a militant right-winger who thought Pat Buchanan's call for a public, government-sponsored assassination was a good call. I'm sure of it.

With every right in America, however, comes a responsibility. Thursday on Glenn Beck's CNN show, the bespectacled talking head had a discussion with an ACLU attorney about the rights vs. the responsibilities of the first amendment. Both agreed that freedom of speech should be damn near unconditional. They also agreed that people who take their freedom of expression to the extremes are irresponsible and dangerous. The ACLU attorney said that, though he may not agree with group of people who may have experimented with electrical outlets at an early age, on principle he feels obligated to defend them. And under U.S. constitutional law, he's right to do that (to a degree).

[One of the prominent modern interpretations of the first amendment guarantees the right to freedom of speech, expression, assembly, etc. as long as the exercising of that right does not breach the "clear and present danger" clause. This is why, though the KKK is still at large, you rarely see the white supremacists rallying on, say, Capitol Hill. Besides the fact that no one would take them seriously, there's the issue of causing a riot--a very likely scenario on that stage. See, originalists? Sometimes it's okay to have a loose interpretation of the Constitution.]

So besides raging cunts like Ann Coulter, you have a shitload of people with these crackpot opinions coming out of left, right, and center field. And you know what? Maybe that's okay. Maybe we need a reality check once in a while. Not everything is red and blue. Sometimes it's green. Or turquoise. Or black as Dick Cheney's heart.

But along with the reality check, there's also the side effect of psychological numbing, a widespread cynicism across America. Then, to counter the cynicism is a widespread sensitivity which causes things like Janet Jackson's nipple to force freedom of speech out the window. There's no such thing as a free lunch. Or a free tit, if you will.

The widespread sensitivity is a more obvious sign to us. You have people lashing out against the Patriot Act and all its sequels, even though the resolution was essentially a rallying cry after 9/11 that redundantly passed laws which were already in place. You have Howard Stern making a big fucking deal about getting out of terrestrial radio and onto his own channel on Sirius. You get the picture.

***

While sensitivity is the obvious issue, cynicism is arguably a more dangerous one. It's the silent killer in this case. There are no more lines to be crossed. The internet has destroyed them all through stuff like child porn, sensationalized violence, and the aforementioned psycho extremism.

Nothing is offensive anymore. And because nothing is offensive, no one knows where the line is. Are racist jokes okay when a person of the minority in question holds no grudge against them? Who knows anymore?

One of the most startling trends I've noticed, as the poor, powerless white middle-class young male, is that in television commercials, it's perfectly okay to portray men as stupid. The only time you might see a woman shown as dumb is if she's an airheaded teenage girl. But men of all ages are picked on. Dads don't know how to use cleaning supplies or new pieces of technology, or how to buy gifts for their wives. Twenty-something ex-fratboys pay attention to nothing but food, chicks, and beer. It's not okay for women to be stereotyped anymore, which is fine. But it's perfectly okay to stereotype men as blithering idiots?

That's just one example. Have you ever seen a gay man on TV who isn't flamboyant? Sure, there are tendencies all the time in real life, but there are a fair share of perfectly normal guys who happen to be gay. I guess convention doesn't sell products, though. Why don't we just wheel out ol' Mammy and Sambo and Liberace while we're at it?

This kind of stuff just slides right under our noses most of the time, and thereby becomes imbedded in our subconscious. Our worldviews become skewed towards these stereotypes. Sure, it's the natural thing to do, and it's our right to have any opinion we want, justified or not. But is it responsible? Fuck no.

Humans are naturally ethnocentric. It's the reason 9/11 happened. There were a bunch of misguided glue-sniffers who took an idea with a foundation and perverted it until it turned into a full-scale terrorist attack. They're still out there.

It's also the reason the U.S. is in Iraq right now. The people running our government have their misguided (but not unfounded) opinions of what Iraq should be like, and Iraqis have their misguided (but not unfounded) opinions of what the U.S. is trying to do to them. Every opinion is based on some fact, somewhere down the line. When the opinion strays too far down that line, however, you get conflicts. When both sides are as far apart as the U.S. and al-Qaeda are right now, well, you get a lot of people who are very pissed off.

The major problem in all of this is that people who agree with Ann Coulter are holding the Middle East wholly responsible for all the bad stuff that is happening. What the fuck, people? Haven't you seen Spider-Man? Do not tell me you didn't, because it made, like, 3 trillion dollars. "With great power comes great responsibility." What power does the Middle East have, compared to the United States? We're the richest country in the world. We're the most highly populated liberated state in the world. We have all the responsibility here. And instead of holding ourselves accountable for all this shit, we're pushing it on Iraq and Afghanistan and Iran and North Korea and al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden and anyone else who so much as gives us a second thought.

I'm not sympathizing with the people who mean us harm. I'm asking for some accountability on both sides. And since we have 99% of the power in this case, we have 99% of the responsibility. It's not fuzzy math. It's an opinion based in fact, something the extremists lost a long time ago.

***

"You'll meet them all again on their long journey to the middle," Philip Seymour Hoffman's Lester Bangs says to William Miller in Almost Famous. I'd like to hope that this holds true for extremism--that they'll all meet up in the middle. The middle's where the compromise is, the idea of consensus without which we wouldn't have a concept of modern democracy. It might not be right all the time, but it's rational and responsible most of the time. It's where even accountability brings us. It's safe.

But hey, maybe "safe" isn't what people want. I guess that's why we have extremism. Without it, we'd have no rock and roll, or jazz, or monotheism, or atheism, or democracy, or communism. With every middle, there's a circle of extremes. The mission, should we humans choose to accept it, is to tighten up that circle. Extremes are like most women: good to have around at the right times, but mostly just really obnoxious.

(I'm sorry, was that offensive?)

Great Expectations

In the Flaming Lips' song "What Is the Light? (An Untested Hypothesis Suggesting That the Chemical [In Our Brains] By Which We Are Able To Experience the Sensation Of Being In Love Is the Same Chemical That Caused the 'Big Bang' That Was the Birth Of the Accelerating Universe)," Wayne Coyne croons, "'Cause if it's natural / Something glowing from inside / Shining all around you / Its potential has arrived."

Anyway, that last line got me thinking: does anything arrive at its potential? In the human mind, I don't think it does. People always have expectations for other people or other things, whether they're fair or not. When you see a movie trailer and think, "Hey, that looks good; I'm going to see it," you're disappointed when it turns out the movie sucks complete ass like most Hollywood movies. Back when Forrest Gump came out, my friend Sean hated it. This movie won the Academy Award for Best Picture, and my friend Sean hated it. He might be the only person I know who feels that way. But he had (somewhat) good reason--the commercials marketed the movie as something of a comedy, or at least a film with a humorous edge to it. The catch phrase for the movie was popularized in trailers before it even hit screens: "Life is like a box of chocolates...you never know what you're gonna get." The combination of Tom Hanks' comical attempt at an Alabama accent and his mouth full of chocolate made light of a cautionary statement.

When Sean saw the movie, being a 9-year-old boy, he didn't find it funny. Therefore, he was ultimately disappointed by the expectations he had for the movie and grew to dislike it. It's the same thing that happened with me and Wedding Crashers. It got great reviews from critics and my peers alike, but when I saw it I found it underwhelming. I thought that--outside a stunning cameo from the amazing Will Ferrell--after the crashers decide to stay with the Cleary family for a weekend, the jokes become predictable and forced. I like the movie, but I don't love it like everyone else seems to.

But expectations can go the other way, too. Somehow, despite all the hype surrounding it, Sufjan Stevens's 2004 release Illinois absolutely blew me away. I discover something new to fall in love with every time I listen to it. But ask me what I think of Sufjan's next album when it comes out, and at first listen I'll probably be disappointed. The only way I can be genuinely overwhelmed by an artist's greatness is if I've never been to exposed to them. Once I fall in love with a past work, nothing can live up to my (or anyone else's, I think) expectations.

So what happens when people reach or outdo their expectations? They're rewarded by getting higher and harder expectations heaped onto them. Believe me--as a life-long Philly sports fan, I know. It's been said that Julius Erving is the only Philadelphia athlete never to get booed, thanks to his MVP, high-flying performances and bringing an NBA title to the city. On the other hand, Hall of Fame third baseman Mike Schmidt is famously quoted as saying "Philadelphia is the only city where you can experience the thrill of victory and the agony of reading about it the next day." Schmidty was the best third baseman in baseball history, a three-time National League MVP, and the 1980 World Series MVP--but his memory of Philadelphia is tainted because he was not protected from to the boo-birds. Another former Phillie, Del Ennis, was said to be booed more than any Phillie ever, perhaps because he was born and raised in Philadelphia. Ennis wasn't the same caliber of a ballplayer as Schmidt by any means, but it just goes to show you that Philadelphians hold nothing back when it comes to players who fall short of expectations. Aaron Rowand has already made a name for himself by running into the centerfield fence just to catch a ball--but if he swoons this summer, watch how fast Phils fans turn on their new favorite player.

In Cameron Crowe's classic Say Anything, Lloyd Dobler (played by John Cusack) is an underachieving high school graduate who isn't expected by anyone around him to amount to anything. His passion is kickboxing, which is enough information to confirm that public sentiment. His sister (played by real-life sister Joan Cusack) doesn't think much of him, even though he's pretty much the coolest uncle in the world to her son. His girlfriend's father (John Mahoney) certainly doesn't think much of him, since Diane Court (Ione Skye) is too good for him in pretty much every way. She's beautiful, she's the valedictorian, and her father would do anything in the world for her. It's a fitting juxtaposition that Lloyd's parents are never mentioned or seen in the movie.

Not even Lloyd's friends have much faith in him, evidenced by their response when they find out he's got a thing for Diane. His friend Corey (Lili Taylor) tells him that "Brains stick with brains." In other words, "Lloyd, don't even think about it." But most importantly of all, Lloyd decides that he has no expectations even for himself. By the end of the movie, his only passion outside of kickboxing is loving Diane. He has no goals other than to be the best boyfriend he can be, which obviously doesn't go over well with Mr. Court. But the telling line of the movie is not one from Lloyd to Diane, but one philosophical line that Lloyd learns from Corey: "If you start out depressed everything's kind of a pleasant surprise."

So is that the secret? Can you really only be satisfied if you have zero expectations for something? If you have expectations, and they're not reached, that's a letdown. But if you have low expectations and they're exceeded, man, that's great. But boy, is it depressing.

I'm at a crossroads in my life, or at least I will be this fall. I guess the old cliche is "three strikes and you're out." I have a full count. I think it's partly (or mostly) because of expectations that have been made for me. Don't get me wrong; I'm not making excuses for myself. But it's kind of tough being Del Ennis and living in a house with 40,000 frustrated Phillies fans.