The Erinyes

My first experience with Wax Trax Records happened in the mid-80s. I happened upon the store late. The founders had moved on to Chicago to start a record label by the same name. They maintained ownership of the original store in the seedy Capital Hill area of Denver, just south of Colfax Avenue behind the state capital. The store served as a pilgrimage site for me every time I would head up to Denver for any reason. If my friends and I were headed up to see a concert, we always allowed several hours to go to Wax Trax. It was part of the ritual. Today, when I talk to my friends about record stores—bemoaning their deaths with quiet, romantic sympathy—it is often Wax Trax that I am talking about. I can recall asking the clerks about the association between the Denver store and the Chicago label on my second or third visit. By that time the focus had shifted from the Denver punk scene to Chicago industrial. The store combined elements of both major musical movements in a way unique to the entire state of Colorado.

The Wax Trax store helped introduce me to a huge number of bands I would never have discovered otherwise: Front 242, Hüsker Dü, KMFDM, New Order, Sisters of Mercy, Joy Division, My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult, Depeche Mode, Nine Inch Nails, Sinead O’Connor, Ministry, Bauhaus and the Revolting Cocks.

So when I began talking to my friend and co-worker, Bruce, about our various hobbies a few months back, he began describing his interest in music. I talked about my reintroduction to photography. He would show me the various specialized tubes he had purchased for his music equipment. I would talk to him about lenses and darkrooms. Bruce is a quiet, introverted, highly skilled engineer. I respect him a great deal. He has a passion for elegant technical solutions to difficult problems and the experience and track record to back up his quiet confidence. He also moonlights as a sound engineer and plays guitar in his own band. Some time ago we began exchanging books as well. I have lent him On the Road by Jack Kerouac and Rock On by Dan Kennedy. He just lent me the recently-published Chris Connelly autobiography: Concrete, Bulletproof, Invisible and Fried: My Life as a Revolting Cock. I have just started reading it.

The book promises to open up the lives of the people who were in the middle of the music scene I only orbited second-hand in Denver. The back cover reads:

Connelly’s superbly written, funny, irreverent, and sometimes downright scary memoir is one of the finest portrayals of a man trapped in the eye of a post-punk industrial storm this side of Armageddon.

In it Connelly attempts to paints a fair, but disturbing picture of a drug-addicted, out-of-control tyrant in Al Jourgensen, the founder of Ministry. He describes both the personalities and places with wit, originality and humility. The book includes a litany of hallowed Chicago nightlife institutions from the 80s and 90s: places like Smart Bar, ChicagoTrax, and Cabaret Metro. Places I missed by four or five years as I moved to Chicago too late to experience most of these at their prime. My visits to those places came after Wax Trax Records filed for bankruptcy in 1992. Seattle grunge was on the rise, not Chicago industrial.

I wonder if there is a connection there to draw upon with my relationship to my child bride. Whirl arrived in Chicago out of the grunge scene of the Pacific Northwest where I came to Chicago through this musical path. I will have to think about that as I turn the pages and get back to you.

I perused a couple of the local bookstores a few days ago. I was looking for a copy of The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler. I found it. I bought it. I have completed reading it. At the time I was looking for it, however, I stumbled upon Rock On by Dan Kennedy. I picked it up, read the back cover and thought of my friend Smokes. Some of you may remember that Smokes was one of the champions of the Best Rock Song Evar! discussion from a couple years back. Smokes is also a consummate fan of all the Harmonix/Neversoft music video games: Guitar Hero, Guitar Hero II, Guitar Hero III, and the most recent addition, Rock Band. Where some kids play Madden NFL because they dream of being a football star, John plays Guitar Hero because the little boy inside of him still dreams of being a rock idol.

So when I find a book where the back cover reads …

When Dan Kennedy is hired by a major record label in 2002, he thinks he’s chanced upon a dream job in the world of full-blown gonzo rock-and-roll excess that has pockmarked his dreams ever since he was a suburban teen. The sobering reality: he’s basically walked into a nine-to-five world that’s equal parts This Is Spinal Tap and The Office.

I think of Smokes. I tell him about the book. The next day he runs out to scour stores. He finds the last copy at the third store he visited. He runs home and starts reading. Ten pages in and he’s falling out of his chair laughing. So, now that I’ve finished with Phillip Marlowe, I’m going to join him in this strange, strange land. I may not be– or even want to be– a golden god, but I sure enjoy laughing with one.

Twice a year– once in the spring and once in the fall– the Chicago Public Library selects a book for the entire city to read. This spring, “One Book, One Chicago” enters its seventh year as a program to promote reading and discussion among all city residents. The selection is the 1953 Raymond Chandler crime novel, The Long Goodbye. The choice of The Long Goodbye marks the first time that the committee has selected a mystery novel. I do not usually read mysteries or crime novels. Those tend more often to be Whirl’s preferences rather than mine. Occasionally she will recommend one for me to read, most notably novels by James Ellroy. I am also somewhat amused that the 1974 Robert Altman film adaptation by the same name arrived in the mail yesterday. I do not remember which of us added that to the movie queue, but the accidental timing was perfect. And I should probably also note that another Chandler adaptation sits on my short list of favorite films: The Big Sleep starring Humphrey Bogart. Suffice it to say I am excited to read this book.

The Long Goodbye is the last book Chandler wrote. It features his iconic detective, Phillip Marlowe. From the back cover:

Marlowe befriends a down-on-his-luck war veteran with the scars to prove it. Then he finds out that Terry Lennox has a very wealthy nymphomaniac wife, who he’s divorced and remarried and who ends up dead. And now Lennox is on the lam and the cops and a crazy gangster are after Marlowe.

I better go find out what happens!

Whirl has worked at the Field Museum for ten years. She’s worked for a number of departments and divisions in that time doing a wide array of different jobs. We have joked that she seems to be collecting various divisions as a twelve year-old boy might collect baseball cards and have gone so far with the joke as to tell it to several of her current and former supervisors. But one thing she has not done in all of those years work at the Field Museum is to attend Members Night.

Members Nights are the museum’s annual Open House. Individuals who have agreed to become members of the museum get an opportunity to enter the collections and research areas typically off-limits to day-to-day visitors. What I quickly learned after Whirl began working at the museum is that only a small percentage of what The Field Museum is involved in is visible to the typical visitor on the floor. The Field Museum is a working research institution, not just a collection of dusty artifacts from long ago civilizations and exotic lands. Hundreds of scientists associated with the museum perform primary research in Anthropology, Botany, Geology, and Zoology. Members Nights are the museum’s way of inviting interested people behind the scenes to explore that vital aspect of the institution.

This year, Whirl’s boss invited her to represent the Insects Division for the Zoology department. She had never done this before and so she attended for a short while on Wednesday night to get an idea of what to expect. On Thursday I went with her to explore on my own and to take a few photographs of her department and the other departments presenting exhibits at the museum.

Some highlights of this year included the preparation of a cheetah for display, newly received artifacts from the Marquesas islands, and hissing cockroach races. I also learned that fluorite is the state mineral for Illinois.

It is often that when Whirl and I talk about our work it seems like we are speaking entirely different languages to one another. The chance to see the museum in the same light that she does– if only for a few hours– was a treat.

It is uncommon for a film to have a dramatic impact upon me. While I like film as a general rule and I enjoy discussing them with my friends and family, I generally reserve my highest praise with more than a little caution. To confess in public to a film having significant impact upon me is quite rare. In the case of a film based on a book, it is more likely for me to read the book first, and then see the film than the other way around. For whatever reason, Into the Wild happened in reverse. Of the films I have watched in the last year, Into the Wild is my favorite. Sean Penn adapted the film’s screenplay from the 1996 Jon Krakauer book of the same name.

Jon Krakauer has done this to me before. A little less than a year ago I read Krakauer’s chronicle about the fatal 1996 catastrophe atop Mt. Everest, Into Thin Air. I was so engrossed by the book that I read it almost straight through. I paused in reading it for only a few equally compelling diversions: to go to work at a new job; to enjoy Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman’s video travelogue of their motorcycle trip around the world, Long Way Round; and to walk the entire length of Clark Street with my friends on a beautiful late summer Saturday.

Into the Wild attempts to tell the end story of Christopher McCandless. In the spring of 1990 McCandless graduated a top student at Emory University in Atlanta. After graduation he abandoned plans to continue to law school, broke off communication with his family, gave away his savings and began traveling the continent. For two years he made his way through the American Southwest, the Dakotas and the Pacific Northwest. He alternated between settled periods where he would work a job and make friends and time spent living alone without money or human contact. His eventual goal was the wilds of Alaska where he died in August 1992.

Upon viewing the film, Whirl noted to me that the story of McCandless’ disappearance, death and discovery were front page news where she lived in Oregon. The story became national news as well after the 1991 Gulf War fell off of the daily news cycle. I was living in Germany at the time and unaware of McCandless’ impact. Krakauer’s book made McCandless a heroic figure to many. The abandoned bus on the Stampede Trail where McCandless camped in Alaska has become a tourist destination and a campground. Others are more critical. Alaskan Park Ranger Peter Christian wrote: “I am exposed continually to what I will call the ‘McCandless Phenomenon.’ People, nearly always young men, come to Alaska to challenge themselves against an unforgiving wilderness landscape where convenience of access and possibility of rescue are practically nonexistent […] When you consider McCandless from my perspective, you quickly see that what he did wasn’t even particularly daring, just stupid, tragic, and inconsiderate.” I grew up the west and am not unsympathetic to that idea. The wild is unforgiving. The wild makes no special provisions for hope or transcendent experience.

There are several themes I find compelling in McCandless’ story without trespassing into hero-worship. McCandless and I would be close in age. We both traveled, often alone, into unknown territory around the same time. We both struggled with finding a purpose to our lives once unshackled from the expectations of family, school, friends and society. I never took the step of inventing a new life for myself– I could not, and cannot, loosen myself from the social bonds required by such a re-imagining. The romantic in me, the sentimentalist in me, the adventurer in me– still these are drawn by the possibility.

Krakauer’s wrote of the fatal mistakes on Everest with clarity and sympathy. I have great respect for him as a writer. I am very hopeful that his treatment of Christopher McCandless is written with the same voice. I could use that.

Three years ago, in January 2005, I suffered a serious traumatic brain injury. The injury placed me in a coma for ten days and the hospital for weeks more. The injury changed my life. Since that time I have looked for voices and means of expression of what I went through and continue to carry with me.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is the English translation of the French memoir Le scaphandre et le papillon written by journalist Jean-Dominique Bauby. Bauby served as editor-in-chief of the French fashion magazine ELLE. In December 1995 at the age of 43 his life changed. He suffered a massive stroke. The results of the stroke included complete and permanent paralysis of almost all his voluntary muscles while retaining nearly full awareness of his senses. Vision, hearing, tactile sensation remained absent any ability to act upon the information those senses provided. This rare condition is known as “locked-in syndrome”. For Bauby, his sole means of communication to the outside world was the ability to blink his left eye.

Using that one remaining ability, Bauby wrote and edited this book– painstakingly, tediously, letter-by-letter, two minutes per word, he wrote the book over the course of a year. The book gives voice to his thoughts and feelings about his life and the situation in which he found himself. The title serves as a clear description: the diving bell refers to the empty shell he considered his body, the butterfly refers to his spirit. The book was published in 1997. Two days after publication, Bauby suffered a heart attack and died. His astonishing book continues to give cheer to those who face life’s ultimately impossible odds and the confrontation of the sudden, merciless, fickle nature of life. The book serves as an inspirational reminder of mortality: the plain fact that swift and sudden changes can sweep away anything we might have taken for granted.

From the book’s back cover:

In a voice that is by turns wistful and mischievous, angry and sardonic, Bauby gives us a celebration of the liberating power of consciousness: what it is like to spend a day with his children, to imagine lying in bed beside his wife, to conjure up the flavor of delectable meals even as he is fed through a tube. Most of all, this triumphant book lets us witness an indomitable spirit and share in the pure joy of its own survival.

I knew the Oscar-nominated film There Will Be Blood was inspired by the novel Oil!. What somehow slipped through my awareness was that Upton Sinclair was the novel’s author. This would be the same Upton Sinclair who wrote The Jungle, the seminal novel about the Chicago stockyards in the 19th Century. I ran across the recent printing of the novel browsing the bookstore last week. I picked it up.

Contemporary society’s need for oil continues to dominate the social, economic and political landscape. I believe it is to this end that this edition’s back cover reads:

As he did so masterfully in The Jungle, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Upton Sinclair interweaves social criticism with human tragedy in this glorious 1927 novel to create an unforgettable portrait of Southern California’s early oil industry. Enraged by the oil scandals of the Harding administration in the 1920s, Sinclair tells a gripping tale of avarice, corruption and class warfare, feature a cavalcade of characters, including senators, oil magnates, Hollywood film starlets, and a crusading evangelist. Sinclair’s epic drama endures as one of our most powerful American novels of social injustice.

Today’s oil fields may no longer be in America’s back yards of Texas and California but I do not think that makes them any less important or relevant. On the contrary, I believe that makes them all the more relevant, their impact all the stronger. While I do not live in The Jungle back of the yards, that particular Chicago that novel portrays continues to haunt me. Also, while I do not own an automobile– and thus avoid a more visceral connection to oil through the ritual of the gas pump– I suspect Oil! will likely have a similar effect.

The wars in Iraq have figured as prominent cultural events in my adult life. I arrived in Berlin two weeks before the 1991 invasion and experienced firsthand the anti-American sentiment that decision fostered. When I returned to the States, I noticed how differently my experiences were from those of my friends and family. Germany’s perspective on war is different from that of many other nations, the US included. The last seven years have been characterized by various iterations of the terror war. I believe, in time, America’s involvement in Iraq will become the defining characteristic of my generation– more culturally significant than the Internet, the cellular phone, or Seattle grunge rock.

It is with this admission that I am surprised at how little I actually know about US involvement in Iraq. My condition is not due to lack of exposure. I know Iraq has not wanted for lack of copy or airplay. I know the wars in Iraq have dominated news, business and politics for at least the last eighteen years. Still I am left wondering: why? What is it we are doing there? So I intend to correct that oversight. Generation Kill is an award-winning book by the Rolling Stone journalist, Evan Wright. For two months in 2003 Wright experienced the most recent invasion of Iraq as an embedded reporter with the First Reconnaissance Battalion in the United States Marine Corps. The New York Times described Wright’s work.

Mr. Wright’s portrait is nuanced and grounded in details often overlooked in daily journalistic accounts, like the desperate search for places to relieve oneself during battle. Or the constant use of racial epithets toward fellow soldiers and Iraqis. … [This is a] complex portrait of able young men raised on video games and trained as killers. There’s 19-year-old Cpl. Harold James Trombley, whom Mr. Wright describes as curled over his machine gun, firing gleefully, and whom he quotes, as saying: ‘I was just thinking one thing when we drove into that ambush. “Grand Theft Auto: Vice City,”’ he says, referring to a video game. ‘I felt like I was living it.’

Like most things in life, I do not expect to find simple, elegant answers– as much as I might wish to do so. I am diving into this unknown with that apprehension and understanding firmly in mind. What I do hope to find is some bits of understanding– however small they might ultimately be.

Three years ago I almost died. Do not worry. The story does not have a bad ending. I would not be sitting here writing it if it did. Besides, I have already told the story a number of times, so repeating it once more would not be particularly interesting for anyone. Including me. So I’ll sum up quickly: three years ago I was involved in an accident that put me in a coma. I suffered a serious brain injury, almost died and spent months in recovery afterward. I got better. The end.

That is the end of the bad part of this entry. The good part of this entry is that every year my friends and I celebrate this date by going to Las Vegas. Today marks the third year we have done so.

It was a really fun trip. The day before we were scheduled to leave two of our group wrote to let us know they would not be coming so there were thirteen of us instead of the originally-planned fifteen. We stayed at the Imperial Place, which is a dive-y sort of hotel-casino on the Strip across from Mirage and Caesars Palace and next door to Harrah’s and the Flamingo. This was the first time for most of us staying there. In previous years we stayed at the Tropicana on the south end of the Strip. This year we talked about getting a different view of things and Steamboat Wille and Hurricane scouted the Imperial Palace for us when they went to Las Vegas with Hurricane’s parents in May.

Imperial Palace is not fancy. It’s a little tired. A little run-down. It has some charm and some unique characteristics, but it’s not the brightest gem on the strip, by any stretch. I particularly enjoyed the Dealertainers.

In 2003, the Imperial Palace spun off part of their long-running tribute show, “Legends in Concert” as blackjack dealers. Now the likes of Britney Spears, Jake and Elwood Blues, Gloria Estefan, Dolly Parton and of course Elvis deal you cards. Every once in a while, they step back from the table, climb up onto a small stage, sing and dance. It works as a quirky, kitschy dive-y diversion and is a lot of fun– a good match for the Imperial Palace.

Before I go on, I should talk about the fire. This interesting event unfolded just as we landed in Las Vegas. The roof of the Monte Carlo casino caught fire. To the best of my knowledge there is no causal relationship between these two events. Correlation does not imply causation, as my scientist child bride is wont to remind me.

We were driving north up the Strip and saw smoke rising in the sky. It was difficult to determine if Mandalay Bay, New York New York, or Excalibur were on fire. We were diverted off the Strip before we were able to see the Monte Carlo and caught the rest of the story when we got to Imperial Palace and were able to watch the news. This was a big story for Las Vegas, a major casino on fire on the Strip. I could not help but wonder why it was such a big story, though. It looked fairly obvious to me that it was a small section of the exterior facade that was burning rather than anything of real substance. And sure enough, the fire was extinguished fairly quickly, despite the smoke, falling flaming debris and gaggle of gawkers down below.

I have seen big fires in Chicago before– most notably the LaSalle Bank Fire and the Dexter Building Fire. Those were events: several hundred firefighters and serious property losses as a result. This was not. Now it may be a tribute to the Clark County Fire Department that it never got out of control, but the skeptic in me wants to assign the blame for the magnitude of the story to the media. Contrary to popular sloganism, what happens in Vegas rarely stays in Vegas. Flaming 40-story casinos make for dramatic copy.

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Richard Matheson wrote the apocalyptic novel, I Am Legend, in 1954. It is the story of the last man alive in a world overrun by a changed, bestial version of humanity. It is partly a vampire story. It is partly a zombie story. It is one of the definitive end of the world stories. I cannot help but hear Michael Stipe’s rapid-fire mumble in the background as I read it. The novel has been adapted into film three times: Vincent Price starred in The Last Man on Earth in 1964. Charlton Heston starred in The Omega Man in 1971. Will Smith stars in the recently released film by the same name, I Am Legend. While I have only ever seen The Omega Man, I understand each of these film adaptations differ from the original novel in varying ways. I like a good vampire story; I like good zombie stories too. And you just can’t go wrong with positing the end of the world in gruesome ways.

So while the wintertime temperature plummets in Chicago, I think I’m going to curl up with a good book, maybe light a fire and see how Robert Neville gets through the original version of this story. If he does.