Alfredo, Caesar, and God

Two years ago, when he was 10, #2 son looked up from his banana bread one morning during a discussion of chapel attendance at his Episcopal private school and said, with a directness no one else in the family seems able to muster, "This god stuff is just stupid, there is no god." I didn't argue, since that's my opinion too, but neither did I rush out to buy him a Richard Dawkins book. If he joined his older brother in the kind of atheism that just wants to sleep in on Sunday morning, that was fine with me.

But then his older brother brought up Alfredo and Caesar.

He wanted to know why we didn't have Alfredo sauce in jars so that at a moment's notice he could have Alfredo chicken just the way they serve it in the school cafeteria. He wanted to know why we didn't have Caesar dressing in bottles so that at the drop of a hat he could have a chicken caesar just like the ones he eats in the school cafeteria.

"Because there is no such thing as Alfredo sauce," I said. "There's a famous dish called Fettuccine Alfredo, which is cream and butter and parmesan with a hint of freshly ground nutmeg tossed with fresh pasta. There's no such thing as Caesar dressing either. The famous dish called caesar salad is made with salt, garlic, Tabasco, dry mustard, oil, vinegar, a one-minute egg, anchovies, pepper, and parmesan tossed with romaine."

"If they don't exist, how come everyone else gets to have them?" he asked.

Buying a hat

Fedex has it now. It's on a truck somewhere north of Houston. There's no turning back. I've gone and bought a hat.

Not like my beloved Peruvian wool knit hat from the Linden Hills Coop that's incredibly warm and silly looking. Or like the real French beret made in the Pyrenees (not some hideous Australian knockoff) that I bought for my wife at Saks. She never wears it so she gave it to me, and I never wear it because I look exactly right in it, which makes me feel as if I've stepped out of central casting and I'm waiting for my baguette and bicycle from the prop girl.

Not even a New York Times logo baseball cap, bought at The New York Times itself, bought twice even so each son would get one and then inherited twice when neither wore it more than once.

No, I'm talking about the kind of hat that friends and strangers alike will see, and think, "another silly fart trying to look like Don Draper." Hah, a lot they know.

The hat adventure is an inevitable consequence of the winter coat adventure. I have a terrible electric blue down coat good for walking the dog in fifty below but I didn't have anything else. Brooks Brothers sells a double-breasted camel hair I wanted for $1300. They sell a wonderful cashmere chesterfield for $1200. (Last year their super-fancy label had a dark blue double-breasted number that was right out of a Gilbert and Sullivan production for twice those prices. I wanted it desperately, it became the beautiful girl I couldn't talk to, I gave up.)

So I went to eBay and bought a dark, dark grey, double-breasted, way-below-the-knee overcoat from Hart Schaffner & Marx, that famous Chicago brand. It was $106 plus shipping, it's in perfect condition, and even if the lapels say it's from the 1970s, I look great in it. What's more, Barack wears Hart Schaffner & Marx. But if winter in Minnesota isn't enough reason, the coat cries out for a hat.

A real hat, a fedora, the kind my father put on his head before he walked out the door with The New York Times tucked under his arm, smelling of coffee and Yardley's lavender, heading for the A train that took him to Wall Street. Fedoras are in right now, they're sprinkled liberally all over the web. You can buy one with silly little brims that makes you look like a 1950s hoodlum for $50; you can buy one with felt made of beaver fur that makes you look like a 1950s capitalist for $500.

I was paralyzed. I spent days not working, poring over the alternatives, learning the different shapes and creases and brims. I agonized over linings, sweat bands, silly little feathers, price, and, when I'd decided everything else, brand. Then I made myself buy a hat so I could return to living.

Anyway, Fedex has it, and they should be bringing it to me in a day or two. It's a real Borsalino, and if you laugh at it, I'm going to have Guido beat the crap out of you.

Stone dust

The workmen began the new patio for the house next door about a month ago. The first day or two they used the machine that makes the ground perfectly flat and very hard. It's the kind of machine you'd want to have if you were a little kid, a thumper, and so, even though it's noisy, it's hard to get mad at it. And it doesn't make a mess.

Then the men began sawing stone. No little kid would want the stone-sawing machine. It's like having a dozen giant, evil dentists drilling in your front yard, minus the screams of pain from the dozen victims. It also produces a cloud of white stone dust that floats merrily in whatever direction the wind wants. Most of the time, that's toward our house. The men did take a break for a day or two to saw brick, and that changed the dust cloud to a dried blood pinkish red. They've long since gone back to stone, but I know that, if they ever finish, there are 25 or 30 steps up from the street still to be covered in brick.

A month into the work, every window and every windowsill is coated with stone dust. We've long ago given up any thought of having a drink or eating on our front deck. The dog and cat leave stone dust footprints as they walk through the house. And when we close a screen door, the bang produces a little mushroom cloud of stone dust.

The most alarming part is that we've gotten used to it. We're like the people who live in the one-industry town who know that the exuviae from the giant factory is poisonous and ugly but who also know that complaining about it is futile. Would our lovely, polite, friendly neighbors understand if we told them how we feel? And would that stop the work? No and no.

I'm just glad I can't see our lungs.

Forget it, Jake

Jeez, will everyone stop talking to me if I defend Roman Polanski? Not that he needs defending by an obscure Minneapolis copywriter, what with legal talent I couldn't afford five minutes of, and a bunch of famous directors speaking up for him. And no, I don't have daughters, nor am I a victim of sexual abuse, so I can't possibly understand.

But really. Do those people in the L.A. District Attorney's office have any criminals more dangerous to chase? If they've got some spare time, they might go to the movies. Or is this one of those vote-getting adventures that's class-related, where the D.A. is picking up a lot of prole votes for prosecuting the small foreign pervert who makes films where things don't blow up.

And the Swiss. Since they have little interest in culture, but lots of interest in money, and they've done nothing about it for 30 years, someone must have paid them. Why now?

I don't think it's ok to have sex with 13 year olds, even if the Roman Catholic church does condone it. Nor am I saying Polanski should escape punishment because he's one of the greatest artists who worked in the 20th century's most important medium. I don't have a good answer, but I do know that the 13 year old in question, now in her forties, has asked that Polanski be left alone. Maybe she's seen Chinatown.

You lie and the Big Lie

Sometimes I think I'm the last old commie who really believes in free speech. So I was relieved, even excited, to see that Dennis Kucinich had voted "no" and Barney Frank "present" on the vote to censure Joe Wilson. Wilson's yelling "you lie" was inappropriate and rude. It was also part of a calculated Republican Party disinformation campaign, a campaign of lies itself, meant to derail healthcare reform, bought and paid for by the insurance industry.

And that's all irrelevant.

What is relevant is that we live in a country, and profess a political ideology, that believes in free speech. Not polite free speech or appropriate free speech, but just plain free speech, even for people like Joe Wilson who would take it away in a second from people whose politics he didn't like.

Never forget that we've just been through eight years of Orwellian rule based on the Big Lie. We all have the right to ask why every congressperson and senator who sat and listened to George Bush lie to joint sessions of Congress didn't stand up and call him on it. We all have the right to ask why every news organization that reported Dick Cheney's lies didn't follow with a sidebar reporting the truth.

Maybe the representatives who voted to censure Joe Wilson should instead have spent their energies documenting the money trail behind the real lies about death panels. Muzzling one sad stooge hurts freedom. And does nothing to pass legislation that millions of people desperately need.

What I saw at the fair

It's not as if anything changes from year to year at the Minnesota State Fair. It's just that, inevitably, I'm at different places at different times, and therefore see new things. This year I saw five.

Young women wearing evening gowns and lots of jewelry driving low-to-the-ground, two-wheeled carts pulled by ponies. Uh-oh, I have to admit I'm not sure they really were ponies. I was too amazed by the drivers to pay much attention to the animals. But they don't race goats, do they?

The sow, from the annual sow-and-new-piglets display in the swine barn, urinating so copiously that I wondered if they'd bred her with an extra bladder. I know they're not beyond that kind of thing.

My niece carrying a blue balloon with a GOP elephant logo on it. I don't know which adult of the four present allowed it, but I know who it wasn't.

An 89.3 baseball cap that I coveted, but did not buy.

A huge stuffed Stewie lying on a roof underneath the gondola ride where some adult, ashamed of himself for carrying a doll, had dropped it. No child would ever carry a Stewie.

Three oinks for the fair

The Minnesota State Fair is almost here, and what's more, it's as late as it can mathematically be, which means there's the least possible time between the fair and Christmas, the two most fun events on the planet, and well-deserving of a run-on sentence. I don't need to defend Christmas, but really, the Minnesota State Fair? You bet.

It's filled with fat people eating unashamedly, the only place in the wild this happens.

It's the only place in Minnesota, which lacks real public transportation, where all social classes and ethnicities and geographies mix freely.

There are lots of pigs and goats. There are also lots of cows and horses and sheep, but I find those dumb, and two of them are so big they're scary. Pigs and goats, however, are smart and you can tell they have a sense of humor, so it's nice to mingle with them.

If you want to see it, you have to walk.

It's the only mass event left that isn't openly orchestrated and exploitative. Baseball games used to be like that, back around the time the Dodgers left Brooklyn.

It allows everyone to be a low-life, to wallow unashamedly in tastelessness and ugliness, and then to find joy in the wallowing.

It's way too hot and there's no way to air-condition it, so that for a few hours we have to give up our insane desire to master the planet.

New York, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, Boston, and all the other hip places don't have anything like it, which provides a rare opportunity to count your blessings.

Everyone can eat like a fat person and do so unashamedly.

Tactical rudeness

LaGuardia, roughly ten o'clock on a not particularly hot, but definitely muggy, Friday night. The cab line is 300 people long but it's moving; it will take only about a half hour to get to the front. There are young and old and middle-aged, men and women, professional and working class, Indian-, Pakistani-, Chinese-, Japanese-, Korean-, African-, Dominican-, Jamaican-, and Puerto Rican-Americans, and quite a few white folks of the originally-European variety.

As I move closer and closer to the head of the line, where it folds into an S before feeding people into cabs, I notice two men, jaw to jaw, arguing angrily. One is a movie-star handsome mid-30s Hispanic businessman in a beautiful suit; the other is a burly, hugely tall, late middle-aged white guy. I can't hear what they're saying, but they're pretty damned interesting if only because they're the only two out of 300 who are doing something other than looking at their smartphones for salvation from cosmic boredom.

They argue, and they argue, and they argue, and suddenly, up from the line jumps a short, fat, young woman in hip-hop clothes who screams to all 300 of us, "hey everybody, this fat white motherfucker jumped in the line what are we going to do about it are we going to let this cocksucker just do it c'mon everybody speak up let's do something you're not going to just allow this prick to break into the line . . . " And before she can put it on a loop, the burly, hugely tall, late middle-aged white guy shrugs, walks away, goes to the back of the line.

Everybody cheers.

Which makes me wonder how my children, growing up in Minneapolis, will learn the essential skill of tactical rudeness.

Denny Hecker and Goldman Sachs

I'm grieving for Denny Hecker. No fooling, I really am. In a world of weasels, he wasn't.

If you've been reading the Strib, you know a lot about Denny. They've made him out to be a knave or a fool, depending on how much schadenfreude you're inclined to enjoy with your morning pop-tart. But that's not the most important story the Strib could be telling, and you reading, about good and evil in the business world.

Try the recent Rolling Stone article on Goldman Sachs and the financial gangster takeover of world capitalism. Go ahead, click the link. It's a long article, but you'll be rewarded with an analysis of the plundering of the world economy that might even make you angry.

So are news organizations like the Strib that aren't telling the Goldman Sachs story, that are instead diverting people with fluff about a local car dealer, guilty of collusion in the looting of the republic? Yeah, probably.

As for Denny, I'm not his friend, and barely his acquaintance, but I knew him one step closer than his omnipresent face on the sides and backs of buses. He's a fellow parent at Breck and has a son in the same grade as my oldest. He gave money to the school. He helped raise more by offering great lease deals on Escalades at the annual auction. And every year he threw the best Halloween party on the planet, filling his enormous house with every child and every parent in the same grades as his kids, with fabulous decorations everywhere, and lots of delicious food. It was joyfully excessive, the children loved it, and even parents like me who hate parties had a great time.

I doubt there'll be a Halloween party at the Hecker house this year. But I bet there'll be some great ones out in the Hamptons when those record Goldman Sachs bonuses get paid. As for you, sucker, you won't be invited.

Brand, price, and theft

Late last week one of us (nobody's stepping up to take responsibility here; certainly I'm not) left the garage door unlocked. Not the big door that the cars use, the little door that the humans use. When we woke up in the morning, here's what was gone.

The quarters that we use for parking meters. The thieves were thorough. But not the ridiculously expensive tennis rackets. The thieves were from a different culture.

The iPhone of #2 son, which, no matter how many times we'd asked him not to, he left in the car. At least it was a two-year old, first generation model. He'd inherited it from his brother, and he'd had it for a week.

Two bicycles, one good but old, one not-so-good but old, both necessary.

Enter the Minneapolis police department bicycle auction.

If you've ever wondered what's east of Bachman's in that wasteland that looks kind of like the less pretty parts of New Jersey, some of it is a huge shed where the police keep bicycles they recover but that no one claims. About once a month they auction them off.

You can show up two hours early, at 4 pm, and look at each of the roughly 150 bicycles seven or eight times, trying to decide which ones are worth bidding on, and for how much. Here's how to do it when you're not a bicycle mechanic.

Like all marketing victims, choose by brand. Trek, Cannondale, Specialized, Giant, and Gary Fisher are acceptable. Schwinn, Murray, Huffy, and anything you haven't heard of are not. Like all peasants, pay no more than the fair price. The French still regulate the price of a baguette because there's a fair price for bread that has nothing to do with the market. It's why your grandfather, when you tell him you paid $200 for that Hermes tie, says, "I never paid more than $9 for a tie in my life." The fair price for a ten year old bike that may have spent a Minnesota winter outside is a hundred dollars because it's the symbolic, magical limit for a pig in a poke.

Once you're that smart, everything falls into place. We bought one bike for $90, which allowed us to spend $110 on the second one. They're both a brand called Next that I've never heard of and that I doubt still exists, but they look cool and the kids like them. So nuts to brand.

The next step is to send #2 son out on his new used Next to stand on random street corners and see if anyone wants to trade a bicycle for an iPhone.

The difference between tragic and stupid

A few weeks ago a Minneapolis woman driving westbound on Lake Street after midnight hit and killed a man standing at a bus stop.

Sad yet boring.

The few of us who relish those kinds of small events assumed that public death after midnight meant lowlife, and moved on to the next item of accident and mayhem in the online Strib.

But then it turned out to be interesting.

The man was 48, jobless, and lived alone with his widowed mother in the lower middle-class neighborhood where he died. He'd gone out on foot to buy a pack of cigarettes; he didn't drive because of previous drunk-driving problems.

The woman was 49, and lived with her husband and children in fashionable and wealthy East Isles. She'd been returning home from St. Paul where she'd gone to a party to celebrate her daughter's graduation from St. Paul Academy. The car was an Audi. She was so drunk she'd fallen asleep at the wheel. She'd been in treatment before for substance abuse.

And everyone either knew her, or knew someone who did.

By everyone I mean the social class that sends its kids to St Paul Academy, or Blake, or, as I do, Breck. I'm not rich, but most of the parents I know are, and they were abuzz about poor Kirsten Driscoll, what a tragedy it was for her, how she'd ruined her life.

I have to admit that, even though I didn't know Kirsten Driscoll, those were my thoughts also. It took a few hours before people realized their reaction was inappropriate. Uh-oh, a man is dead, and maybe that's worse than doing something pathetically stupid that will be embarrassing at parties for the rest of time.

And then, maybe because the Strib writes about the bad behavior of new money but not old money, the story disappeared. I've been waiting for weeks now for the "Parallel Lives" feature to appear, the one where we track the 48-year old victim and his 49-year old killer in order to dramatize the ironies of their different paths through life, culminating in their fateful final meeting.

I'd like that because it would give me a good chuckle, and release me from that scared feeling I now have every time I get behind the wheel of my BMW. Am I about to ruin my life?

Rock the Garden

After spending seven and a half hours at Rock the Garden two days ago, I have some unsurprising observations.

1. I owe my 14-year old son, William, a huge debt for diving headfirst into alternative rock, thus staving off for maybe a few years my inevitable descent into old-fartitude.

2. Rock is a whole lot more comfortable lying down on a grassy hill in the sun than it is standing in an auditorium or a basketball arena.

3. Tattoos are like other consumer goods. Almost all of them are ugly, cheap, tritely conceived, badly designed, and ill made.

4. Even the best rock is less interesting than Bach or Mozart, and you don't leave the concert feeling you've had an intellectual workout. Am I missing something here?

5. Calexico is way cooler than the audience thought it was.

But mostly, where are the old people? It's not as if the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra is selling every available seat.

Jumbo shrimp

The other day my wife asked me, “have you ever read an intelligent tweet?” I didn’t answer. So the next day I tweeted, “my wife asked me last night, had I ever read an intelligent tweet?” Nobody answered, although not a lot of people follow me. And nobody reads this blog either, so again, nobody will answer.

That’s just fine. On matters of life and death like Twitter, it’s best to remain anonymous. After all, 100% of the people who tweet had “The Emperor’s New Clothes” read to them when they were little, and here they all are, me included, terrified to speak out. Who can blame us? The Emperor could turn out to be wearing a magnificent suit, and then we’d have to spend eternity with all the Academy members who didn’t give best picture to North by Northwest or The Wild Bunch.

It’s probably best to ask questions instead of supplying answers. Here are some that may or may not be good. 

• If you set millions of people to writing Emily Dickinson couplets, how would they do?
• What percentage of people who tweet know who Jenny Holzer is?
• And what percentage of those people are embarrassed that they’re not as good?
• If Twitter turns out to be no different from the Sunday coupon inserts, will you mourn?
• What could you be doing instead?
• If your writing is stupid, does that mean your thinking is stupid?

Or, back off a little, and consider that many things that aren’t any good turn out, 100 years later, to be important artifacts of cultural history. That’s a pretty good weasel.

Bad math

I lost it in the 9th grade. No, not what you're thinking, those were simpler times. I mean my ability to do math. I've always blamed my teacher, whose name I've forgotten so thoroughly that I couldn't pick it out on a multiple choice test. But I do remember that she was old, with haunted-house grey hair and huge folds and wrinkles. She was fat, and wore what I would later learn was a muumuu, with body parts flopping loosely around inside. She had warts, a lot of them. And she was crazy, yelling "I'm going right on" when any of us dared to raise a hand and ask a question.

This wasn't some hillbilly backwater. It was a class that did grades 7, 8, and 9 in two years, in one of the finest junior high schools in the New York City public school system, back when that meant the best education on the planet without paying for a New England prep school.

Yes, I've always blamed my teacher, that is, until this spring, when my older son, in the second half of 8th grade, lost it. He's not doing 7, 8, and 9 in two years, so it's exactly the same time as I lost it. And his teacher is notorious for being a bad teacher, even though the school is as close as Minneapolis comes to a New England prep school. The mothers, who pay more attention to this kind of thing than the fathers do, are up in arms. But I'm not so sure, and I'm not planning to join their lynching party. Instead, I'm spending my time thinking about the power of DNA molecules to direct our lives. And while I'm not discovering any hidden affection for my nameless math teacher, who's certainly been dead for 30 years, I'm ready to accept at least some of the responsibility.

Dueling bromides

So is it God who's in the details, or is it the devil? 

For Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who, if he didn't say "God is in the details" first, said it famously enough to get the credit, perfection lies in the unity of the overall design with the smallest aspects of how that design is executed. The IIT campus is beautiful, whether in plan or on foot. Crown Hall, its jewel, is beautiful to look at and to be in. And when you get right up close to it, and examine the choice of glass, the choice of steel, and how the two materials meet each other, those things are beautiful also. 

Watch a graphic designer spend hours kerning type, or a film editor cutting in take after take, or a writer polishing a fifth draft. They're looking for perfection because they know God is in the details.

So where did the devil come from? I suspect he came in, as he often does, in the bags of money. The devil is in the details for business people, who know that even small things mean the difference between profit and loss, success and failure, job or the unemployment line. It's not about the quest for beauty, it's about the avoidance of mistakes. 

No moral, just a reminder that the rhetoric you choose has consequences. As you struggle with details on your next project, are you searching for beauty, or trying to avoid screwing up? 

History, memory, meaning

Watch out, this is going to be one of those sententious "put Christ back in Christmas" rants, only it's about Memorial Day. 

Once upon a time, before its meaning was homogenized, Memorial Day was Decoration Day, when people decorated the graves of the Union dead from the Civil War. It was a holiday that honored people who had given their lives to end slavery. (The South, recognizing the anti-slavery connection, usually celebrated on days different from the the North.)

Eventually there were too many wars to remember the meaning of each one, let alone give working people a day off for each. But by forgetting where this holiday comes from we forget that all wars are not equal. We forget that slavery, the fight to end it, and the subsequent battle for racial equality, are the central narrative of the past two centuries in this country. 

OK, back to slow-cooking those ribs. We'll talk about this again on November 11th.

It's just a stupid pun

But it seems to have taken on a life of its own. Once you're socialistmedia for your tweets, why should you be something different for your blog? The moral of the story is that cute, in all its tooth-aching sweetness, conquers meaning. 

So no, this isn't a blog about socialist media, socialism, or even the media. I won't mind if some old Trotskyist, sitting on a park bench somewhere in New York, doodling away on his iPhone, tattered Gristede's shopping bag full of ancient and irrelevant literature at his feet, stumbles across it. I'll be pleased. But he'll be disappointed. 

I will try to offer ideas that don't confirm what you already know. After all, if you could think of it yourself, or write it yourself, why would you waste your time reading it from me?