I am a suit.

I will sit at a conference table or at an elegant luncheon, in my suit, quietly radiating calm, authority and steely reserve. Leaning back in my chair at the appropriate angle, my fingers curled under my chin, I will take in everything said around me, nodding or simply fixing the speaker with a respectful and attentive gaze. At meetings, I will take notes on a legal pad tucked into a rich leather portfolio, using a Waterman pen with my initials engraved on the barrel. My handwriting is bold and angular, stylish while still preserving legibility, and you will notice how decisively I underline my major headings.

At no point will I pull out a Blackberry and begin typing on it — I do not own one, and my Louis Vuitton briefcase contains no laptop. (I am available with an optional laptop-bearing assistant; please speak to me for details.) Instead you will find a region-appropriate copy of Crain’s; my Kindle; several neat file folders containing documents of obscure but impressive purpose; a pair of Prada men’s sunglasses in a black leather case; a Netflix envelope, sealed and ready for mailing (Ratatouille, I explain with a smile; my daughter loves anything Pixar, and we ought to just buy the movie for all the times she’s seen it but we don’t like to use the TV as a babysitter); and my portfolio and pen, should I not be working with them.

I may, in a lighter moment that illustrates my humanity and approachability, show you a photo of my wife and aforementioned young daughter on my iPhone. Their names are Marisol and Kendall, respectively. I will humbly thank you when you tell me how beautiful they both are and then make a self-deprecating remark about my daughter inheriting her looks from her mother. We will both know I am lying; I am a gorgeous man, with captivating hazel eyes, unblemished skin and a jaw like the prow of a yacht.

I will politely deflect all other inquiries into my background and history. As far as you are concerned, I am a man from nowhere, a blank slate, an abstraction made flesh. (I am available with a full background, including university associations and professional organizations, for a modest upgrade charge.)

My suit itself? Contemporary and elegant, with a cool slate-grey hue, stylish lines that accentuate my physique (I work out rigorously and have a resting pulse rate of 45) and a subtle texture to the weave that you may well find yourself admiring during our many conferences, in moments when I happen not to be speaking. My silk tie is custom-made and tied in a flawless, bullet-hard Shelby knot; other knot styles up to and including a full Windsor can be accommodated on request.

As far as my handshake is concerned, I have a grip like a tiger shark’s jaws and can split walnuts between my fingers — did I not assure you that I work out? In addition to my full regimen of cardio, weights and resistance training, I also study Jeet Kune Do, the fighting system devised by the late Bruce Lee. This training allows me to precisely attenuate my handshake to communicate fellowship, encouragement or menace as appropriate to the situation. Without even speaking I can assure the lowliest hourly employee that I am firmly on his or her side; let a supplier know that he is in for toughest negotiation of his life; or so frighten an opposing counsel that his balls shrivel between his sweating thighs like a puppy cowering before a rolled newspaper.

As we work more closely together over the days and weeks, you come to appreciate the awesome intellectual resources I can command, along with my willingness to put them completely at your disposal. Soon I will begin finishing your sentences for you, and then speaking your thoughts before you have a chance to utter them. Days rush by in a blur as achievements you had previously dismissed as impossible suddenly appear tantalizingly close. You notice I never appear nervous and rarely blink. Dimly, you begin to understand that I am capable of doing, and actually may have done, terrible things. You will be grateful I am on your side.

My fingernails are immaculate, my hair perfectly in place. My wristwatch is rated to a depth of 400 fathoms as well as the vacuum of space. My shoes glisten like the hood of a black Ferrari. And I can be yours for a surprisingly modest fee. After all, what price is too high to surpass your ambitions, redraw the competitive landscape and leave your opponents broken in the dust? Contact me today for a quote.

(References available upon request.)

Then one day you put on a pair of sunglasses and see things you never saw before, and your world goes to shit.

John Carpenter’s They Live looked unflinchingly at the underside of Ronald Reagan’s Morning in America. While Gordon Gekko was rhapsodizing about the goodness of greed, migrant worker George Nada trawled through a stunted shadow economy that grew like a fungus on America’s underbelly. They Live presents an America that seems decent enough to justify George’s faith: the squatters’ camp where he finds shelter runs on compassion and good old American hard work, a true expression of the generosity we hold as one of our core values. The problem, as it turns out, is the ultimate viper in the garden: the elite feeding on America’s underclass are actually aliens in human form, hopscotching rapaciously across the galaxy like a cross between Gordon Gekko and Galactus. Even more heartbreaking is when George discovers why he was able to maintain his faith in the American dream while it fell apart around him. The aliens have submerged the culture in subliminal messages, with every surface blaring a mute clarion of stasis and conformity. Thanks to a pair of sunglasses invented by the revolutionaries fighting the aliens, George walks through L.A. and finally sees, in literal black and white, the new guiding principles of America. SLEEP 8 HOURS A DAY. MARRY AND REPRODUCE. WATCH T.V. STAY ASLEEP. CONFORM. OBEY.

What makes They Live resonate so much for me, a decade after I first saw it and well after it was first released, is what it reveals about paranoia and the comforts of conspiracy. While the film bears the trappings of a sci-fi-based horror movie, its central conceit — that American society is being undermined by alien invaders — is actually more comforting than frightening, because it supports the premise that people are too fundamentally decent to create the kind of society depicted in They Live. Suddenly, we didn’t do it — it was done to us. This preserves our ideas of our own goodness while offering a tantalizing promise of redemption. An alien menace is a menace that can be fought and destroyed; what came from outside can be sent back outside. Sure, defeating a technologically advanced alien race is not going to be a walk in the park. But if there’s one thing we know how to do as humans, it’s kill those who are different from us. Whether the solution proved to be sunglasses, computer viruses or red anti-alien virus powder, we’d find a way. If, however, the problem turns out to be us — if we, not alien invaders, made the world around us, with all its greed and its waste and its callousness — then we’re probably screwed.

Being the object of a conspiracy, with untold numbers of nefarious actors working tirelessly to keep us in the dark and helpless, confirms our importance — it reassures us that we are dangerous and worth going to great efforts to deceive and subjugate. Furthermore, a world beset by conspiracy is a world that is at least governed by some kind of order and meaning, even if that order is largely bent against us and we are helpless to do anything about it. The world of They Live is a perversely tempting one, because then at least things would make sense — there would be a reason why everything was so fucked up and wrong.

As I get older, I find that in addition to constantly beginning statements by saying, “as I get older,” I increasingly subscribe to what I call the Belzer Dichotomy of Human Cognition. That is an affected way of saying that I agree with comedian Richard Belzer when he said:

You are either a conspiracy nut or a coincidence nut.

Conspiracies of course are Belzer’s schtick, and he’s carved out a secure niche for himself as the thinking paranoid’s comic of choice. To a conspiracy buff, “coincidence” is a slightly dirty word, a mark of intellectual pansyhood, a confession that one lacks the imagination or the courage to see life as it really is. But I think Belzer was actually on to something quite universal and profound when he said that. We could rephrase the line like this:

You either believe that everything, no matter how trivial, happens for a reason, or you believe that even seemingly important things can happen for no reason at all.

This is about as basic a distinction between human consciousnesses as you can make, and it doesn’t take a great deal of observation to perceive that conspiracy nuts vastly outnumber coincidence nuts. We are biologically hardwired to notice patterns and to ascribe significance to them. In a nutshell, it is why religion exists. Religions vary greatly over times and places, but the one thing they virtually all have in common is the reassurance that the world around you was created, and is advancing, with some kind of purpose. That sense of purpose is why people profess to believe things that are, by any waking, rational standard, absurd. What follows is not an original observation by any means, but even so: if you could have somehow reached adulthood without any religious indoctrination or awareness, and then been approached by a Christian or a Hindu or a Muslim aiming to make a convert out of you, would you take his or her claims at all seriously? Would it seem reasonable to believe that Jesus was born of a virgin and rose from the dead, or that illiterate Mohammed was given the power to read by an angel, whatever that is?

I think the honest answer has to be no, but I understand now that the question is beside the point. I think a great many people who consider themselves religious either don’t actually believe the tenets of their doctrine or else are so indifferent to them that it makes no difference. It is the consolation and comfort that are important; the precepts and dogma are just tools, arbitrary elements to give the conscious, waking part of the brain something to do, like playing solitaire on a computer.

There was a story recently published on Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish (I couldn’t find it again to link it) about a devout Christian who lost his child in an accident. He was overwhelmed with grief, as anyone would be. Where he perhaps took it a step further was when he asserted that the accident was God’s punishment for his sins — that the “accident” was, in effect, his fault. His family and friends tried to insist that he was wrong, that God did not work that way and that sometimes bad things just happened to those who apparently did not deserve them. He would not be persuaded, and eventually explained that he preferred to believe God had murdered his child to expiate his own sins (I’m paraphrasing slightly), because to contemplate the alternative — that his child had died, and his world been destroyed, for no reason at all — was actually more horrifying.

The point of all this is to illustrate that people will go to tremendous intellectual lengths to see the world as being guided by some kind of purpose, and that if they have to choose between an evil purpose and no purpose, they will mostly choose the former. You can see this all too clearly today. There has always been a paranoid strain in American politics, and I’m not going to claim that it’s worse today than it has ever been in the past. But the advent of the Internet and the coarsening of network news (which exists almost entirely to frighten people into watching) has expanded the scope of our fears to a degree that seems without precedent. We believe that the president is a foreign-born socialist mole aimed at instituting either a secular Communist paradise or sharia law, we can’t quite decide which; we believe that the Bush administration knew of the September 11 attacks and allowed them to occur. We believe scientists are making up global warming and hiding the evidence that vaccines cause autism. We believe in a “gay agenda” to convert straight people into homosexuals, as if the gay community were organized like the Mormon church. We believe that the media is hiding the truth about both Obama’s birth certificate and high-fructose corn syrup. Whatever we believe, there’s always a “them” to blame it on. If only we could take care of them, fix them or teach them or avoid them or just plain get rid of them, things would go back to the way they’re supposed to be. How appropriate that Carpenter named his film with that anonymous, ominous pronoun. They do live, and They are everywhere.

"It figures it would be something like this."

Me, I admit it: I’m a coincidence nut. Sometimes — most of the time — shit just happens. I’m not saying that there aren’t instances where evil or self-serving people collude in secret for their own ends. And I’m certainly not saying the government and the media are to be trusted. I’m just saying that the global, sweeping, everyone-else-is-in-on-it kind of conspiracy is a figment of our collective imagination — an understandable but irrational belief stemming from our need to occupy a purposeful universe. There simply aren’t enough people in the world smart enough, wicked enough or determined enough to fake global warming or hide Barack Obama’s true identity or whatever. Someone always screws up, and someone always talks. It’s human nature. There are very few conspiracy theories that can’t be explained by a mix of incompetence, happenstance and ordinary self-interest.

We are small beings on a big world in an incomprehensibly vast universe. Even the best and brightest of us are terribly limited in our perceptions. Our brains take cognitive shortcuts that make us feel smarter than we are, and because we spend our entire lives stuck in our own heads, immersed in our subjectivity alone, we naturally interpret everything around us in terms of how it affects us personally. It takes a certain leap of imagination to jump out of this view, and it takes something perhaps more difficult: a willingness to see yourself as one tiny, tiny part of an immense whole, a whole that is largely indifferent to what you do or even to whether you’re there at all. There is no plan. There are just atoms in their peculiar orbits, joining and separating, colliding or drifting for a time into emptiness.

I get why people find this scary. True freedom always is. It scares me sometimes. I have no one to blame if I am unhappy or end up frittering my life away. And if I live in a world in which people seem to be greedy, short-sighted or just out for themselves, I have only to think of the too-frequent times when I have been one or more of those things, and to reflect on the multitudes of people in the world who have those qualities to an even greater degree than I do. It doesn’t take special sunglasses to see why a world made by people as flawed as us would turn out to be so flawed.

You have no fucking idea what it’s like to be me.
— Steve Jobs

While I have deliberately avoided reading most of the critical reaction to Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs, the broad consensus seems to be that Isaacson had the biographer’s opportunity of a lifetime, and blew it. Despite having unprecedented access to one of the most relentlessly private of public figures, Isaacson’s is a book without insight: his Steve Jobs is the same collection of contradictory impulses he has always been, a self-centered, unlikeable man who somehow created products that people adored, changing whole industries in his wake. In a world full of assholes, critics complain, what set Jobs apart? What made it possible for him to do the extraordinary things he did?

Let me say first that I agree in principle with the critics: Steve Jobs is a lousy book. I believe I arrived at the conclusion via a different route from a lot of other people, and I’ll get into that soon. First, let’s consider the argument, articulated well by Thomas Q. Brady, quoted on Daring Fireball:

I know lots of people that could be described [as “self-absorbed, immature, emotionally unstable control-freaks”], and none of them started a company in their garage that became one of the most valued corporations in the world. What made Jobs different? This isn’t really answered.

Actually it is, at least to a point. There is the asshole half of the Jobs equation, and then there is the other half, which Isaacson documents and which everyone already knows about: his fanatical obsession with spare, minimalist design; his belief that he was destined for greatness and his determination to achieve it; his tremendous persuasiveness; and his knack for infusing technology products with an underlying human friendliness. Unlike Jobs’s more unsavory characteristics, these are not common traits. Combine them with the ones above, and the story of Steve Jobs begins to seem, if not inevitable, then at least somewhat plausible.

Our civilization has spent centuries debating the origins of genius — even the definition of genius — and yet with each new transformational figure that comes along, we start the debate all over again. The truth is that genius has no formula. It cannot be predicted, reconstructed, feigned (for very long) or dissected, at least not in any way that is remotely edifying. You can quantify the factors that make it possible for people to be successful; for instance, Jobs acknowledged how lucky he was to grow up in Silicon Valley, surrounded by people who could nurture his talents and fire his ambitions. Had his parents opted to raise him in the suburbs of Wisconsin, we’d likely never have heard of Steve Jobs. But creativity — or inventiveness if you prefer, since we don’t tend to associate creativity with non-artistic pursuits — is a process that ultimately operates beneath the threshold of awareness. Indeed, it can operate in no other way; inspiration is not an algorithm.

Many people seem to have expected Isaacson’s book to provide the missing piece of the puzzle — the key that would finally unlock the secret of his genius and forever solve the enigma of Steve Jobs. They were never going to get what they wanted, because it didn’t exist. There was no “one more thing.” The enigma is its own solution.

I don’t want to give the impression that any inquiry into the inner workings of a genius is futile, or that Isaacson should be let off the hook for writing a superficial book about a man who was anything but. I merely suspect that no one could have written an entirely satisfying book on Steve Jobs, because the things people want to understand about him aren’t really explicable. What made Jobs different? How did he look at a Rio MP3 player and conceive what would become the iPod, where everyone else just saw a clunky, half-assed music player? You can posit various intermediary reasons — because he was driven to achieve perfection, because poor design caused in him something akin to physical pain — but what do those explain? What are the reasons for the reasons? The truth is that Steve Jobs did what he did because his unique blend of innate qualities, combined with the people and places that helped to shape his worldview, allowed him to. His career was the result of a confluence of circumstances so unlikely as to appear impossible. “What made Steve Jobs different?” is more a rhetorical question than an actual one. It is a way for our mathematically hampered brains to acknowledge the  baffling unlikelihood of his achievement — the incredible fact that in this world, a man like him could exist at all.

So having put that issue in perspective, what is my primary objection to the book? I will put it in straightforwardly Jobsian terms:

The writing sucks.

This is a dull book, and I don’t mean that in a small way — I mean that in a big way. Isaacson’s prose is as flat and limp as a boned fish. Writing about the most fascinating inventor and visionary of our time brought out no poetry in him, no spark, no consciousness that a man of Jobs’s caliber merited an uncompromising effort. Steve Jobs is a Bill Gates kind of biography: unflavored, drily factual (which is not to say it is accurate), pedantic and, despite the occasional adverbial interjections the author makes to demonstrate he hasn’t been completely taken in by his subject’s point of view, cringingly deferential.

The purpose of a biography — of any kind of writing — is to make its subject come alive for the reader. Empathy and imagination are two of the writer’s most powerful gifts, and to the biographer they are essential tools to bridge the gap between the subject’s consciousness and the reader’s. On my bookshelf near my desk is a copy of Schulz and Peanuts by David Michaelis (the dust jacket of which features a laudatory blurb by Walter Isaacson). I opened it, flipped around for a few moments and came upon this passage, describing the young Charles M. Schulz making his first drawings:

Having dutifully put away the table arrangements, he would bend over the paper, tense, almost sick with excitement, as his pen followed the arched back of the panther threatening Tim Tyler last Sunday. Sometimes he drifted just far enough outside the forms of the cartoonist he was imitating to find himself watching in surprise as his pen point twisted a mouth or curved an eyebrow in a way that seemed somehow distinctively his. But design, proportions, pacing still belonged to the masters, and his drawings still lacked the professionalism that he was ever more aware of pursuing.

Michaelis gives himself license to depict Schulz’s artistic process from the artist’s own point of view; reading this passage, you feel one with Schulz, sharing his struggle and triumph as he experiences them. Note the forceful, dramatic verbs: “his pen point twisted a mouth or curved an eyebrow.” Even the picture Schulz draws adds drama and tension to the scene. The arched back of the threatening panther reinforces how much is at stake here: for Charles Schulz, getting this right is everything, and his best efforts still land him short of where he knows he needs to be. A driven, almost monomaniacal artist is born virtually before our eyes.

There is nothing in Steve Jobs that comes within a hundred miles of this. Despite (or even because of) the 40 interviews Isaacson conducted with his subject, which are reproduced on the page in great undigested gobs, we never feel close to Jobs or get swept up into his story. This I think is the real reason so many have found the book unsatisfying. It’s not because Isaacson didn’t tell us “what made Steve Jobs different” — he explained that as much as it probably can be. It’s because we never get a sense of what it was like to be Steve Jobs, and thus never understand how truly different he was, or wasn’t, from everyone else.

Is this merely a matter of Isaacson not knowing what questions to ask, as some critics have said? No, because interviews are only one of the biographer’s tools, and not necessarily even the primary one. Better interviews would have resulted in a better book than we have now, but I doubt even then that it would have made a great biography. If anything, his easy access to Jobs actually undermined the finished work. Isaacson seems to have believed that simply quoting his subject at length would, ipso facto, provide the definitive word, with a contrasting recollection by a former associate thrown in for balance. This is the stuff of magazine profiles, not biographies. A great biography of Jobs would have required an author willing to get inside his subject’s head by whatever means necessary, a writer with the determination to make his subject his own and the writing chops to convincingly show us the world as he saw it.

Maybe someone someday could still write that book using Isaacson’s materials, should he be generous enough to make them available. In the meantime, we’re stuck with the longest commemorative issue of Time magazine ever written.

Yah wah
Torment
Eee chop yah wah
Today brings torment
Toe meet toe pee chee keene
We lick the blood from our paws
G’noop dock fling oh ah
And taste our victory

Coat ee chah tu yub nub
All the world is slaughter
Coat ee chah tu yah wah
All the world is torment
Coat ee chah tu glo wah
All the world is ruin
Allay loo ta nuv
Until we end in fire

Glo wah
Ruin
Eee chop glo wah
Today brings ruin
Ya glo wah pee chu nee foam
Let ruin fall from the trees
Ah toot dee awe goon goon daa
And rain down on our foes

Coat ee cha tu goo (Yub nub!)
All the world is war (Slaughter!)
Coat ee cha tu doo (Yah wah!)
All the world is blood (Torment!)
Coat ee cha tu too (Ya chaa!)
All the world is tears (Glory!)
Allay loo tu nuv
Until we end in fire
Allay loo tu nuv
Until we end in fire
Allay loo tu nuv
Until we end in fire

Glo wah
Ruin
Eee chop glo wah
Today brings ruin
Ya glo wah pee chu nee foam
Let ruin fall from the trees
Ah toot dee awe goon goon daa
And rain down on our foes
Allay loo tu nuv
Until we end in fire

Arrived at office. Changed shoes, stopped at coffee machine and chatted with copywriter about her sons, one of whom is returning to live with her.

9:07

Entered office of Ran Bao-tu, Senior Creative Director and kung-fu master of unmatched skill, nobility and judgment, for morning conference only to find room in shambles and Master Ran lying sprawled on floor, severely beaten and on the brink of death. Cradled master’s head on my knees, imploring: “Who did this?”. Marshaling last ounce of strength, master weakly named Bai Tiao-man, leader of rival kung fu school Cobra Whisper, as his assailant. Master then croaked final breath, dying.

9:08

Swore revenge in the name of my ancestors on Cobra Whisper and its contemptible, craven master, Bai Tiao-man.

9:09

Began catching up on email.

9:19

Sent Outlook meeting request challenging Bai Tiao-man to combat to the death at 5:00 pm. Request was promptly accepted.

9:30

Met with members of Media, Production and PR teams to coordinate efforts on new brand rollout scheduled for next month. Received numerous condolences and expressions of sympathy on death of Master Ran.

10:18

On way to water fountain, chanced upon my counterpart in Marketing at Cobra Whisper, who disgraced Master Ran’s good name with vile falsehoods and insults. Confrontation quickly escalated into combat. Fight ranged throughout Accounting and Human Resources, ending in front of vice president’s office, where I finally bested my opponent with rapid combination of Crane Plucks Eggs from Nest and Swift Tiger Pounce.

10:22

Stood out in lobby alone, silently mourning Master Ran, a single stoic tear streaming down cheek.

10:30

Met with Associate Vice President to discuss upcoming product launches. Before adjourning meeting, AVP warned me that my skills were not sufficient to defeat rival kung fu master in battle. Referred me to Chief Creative Officer, rumored keeper of Sword of Hands, the deadliest of all kung fu styles.

11:10

Sent Outlook meeting request for appointment with CCO at only time available: 4:45. No reply forthcoming; received an email from secretary saying that CCO was in meetings all day and 4:45 appointment could not be guaranteed.

11:30

Impromptu memorial service for Master Ran in break room. Bai Tiao-man, accompanied by several direct reports, brazenly attended service, laughing derisively and promising to swiftly bring death to me and to our school. Melee promptly broke out. In rash fit of anger, rushed Bai Tiao-man intending to strike him down. Rival master quickly parried my enraged and wild kicks and blows. Though a fiend with neither honor nor courage, he nevertheless easily knocked me to the ground, laughed and confirmed our meeting for 5:00 p.m.

12:15

Lunch with members of Public Relations and Media Development. Discussed strategies for facing Bai Tiao-man and split large platter of nachos.

1:20

Met with members of Marketing, IT and Web to discuss ongoing rollout of new CMS. General agreement that initial schedule was too aggressive and so several milestone deadlines were revised.

1:45

Worked at desk on drafts for several upcoming marketing pieces. Thoughts invariably went back to earlier years, when I chose to pledge my loyalty to Ran Bao-tu over mother’s objections. Remembered leaving home for last time, watching through window of bus as mother wept to see me go, father standing behind her, gruff and implacable, his emotion visible only in the sorrowful cast of his jaw.

3:20

Googled “Sword of Hands.” Found links to several demonstration videos on YouTube but was blocked from viewing them by company firewall. Also surreptitiously followed several BuzzFeed links and checked fantasy baseball team standings.

3:39

Spoke by telephone to CCO’s secretary. Was assured I was “pencilled in” for 4:45 conference.

3:41

Delegation of several direct reports visited me in office to ask me not to fight Bai Tiao-man. Though a worthy pupil of Ran Bao-tu and a winner of several regional awards for excellence in advertising copywriting, I was assured my kung fu was no match for that of Bai Tiao-man, and that I could not hope to master the Sword of Hands in time to defeat him. Calmly assured my colleagues that if my only remaining service to Ran Bao-tu was to die in the defense of his honor, I would consider such a death eminently worthwhile.

3:56

Team designer and student of kung fu Ma Xia-hui came to office to flatly inform me she could not allow me to face Bai Tiao-man and bring even greater ruin and disgrace to our school. To my astonishment, she presented the Crane at Eventide stance, a clear invitation to combat. At first I offered no defense, refusing to raise a hand in anger at a fellow pupil and colleague of several years’ standing. It became clear that though Ma Xia-hui fought reluctantly, she was nevertheless in deadly earnest, striking swiftly and with great power. After twice enduring blows strong enough to knock me to the ground, as well as the destruction of a new iMac and several items of office furniture, I rose and counterattacked with a combination of Drunken Beggar and Tiger’s Shadow on the Leaves. With the fight with Bai Tiao-man heavy in my thoughts, I resolved to bring the duel to a swift conclusion and felled Xia-hui with Executioner’s Hood, tempered to leave her unconscious but alive.

4:15

Called into impromptu meeting to discuss revisions to a campaign slated to start several weeks hence. Even with client’s repeated objections that our approach was “too sophisticated — we’re not selling BMWs here,” my thoughts strayed to my imminent confrontation with Bai Tiao-man. Though I knew I would bring honor to the duel, I could find no way in which I might prevail against Bai or restore our school’s shattered reputation. Teammates appeared reluctant to look me in the eye, and client admitted she hadn’t read most of the draft copy I had supplied her, saying it simply hadn’t “felt right.”

4:26

Received request for meeting tomorrow regarding upcoming healthcare campaign. Responded with “Accept Tentatively.”

4:31

Returned to cubicle and began preparing status report for all ongoing projects, to assist my colleagues following my inevitable death at the hands of Bai Tiao-man. Ma Xia-hui, recovered from our battle, appeared and promptly fell to her knees, begging my forgiveness. I assured her she was not at fault and hoped that, as the leader of our school following my demise, she would continue to uphold the integrity and values of Master Ran. Choking back tears, she hoarsely thanked me for the honor of fighting and creating award-winning direct-mail and point-of-sale advertising at my side. My own emotions nearly overwhelming me, I replied that the honor had been mine, and turned back to my screen, lest my tears betray me.

4:45

Entered team shrine for solitary meditation prior to fighting Bai Tiao-man. Lit incense cones in tribute to my ancestors and to Ran Bao-tu, asking all those who watched over me for the strength to fight with honor and courage. A shadow darkened the altar; it was the team secretary, informing me that the Chief Creative Officer, Wu Xuan-ke, would see me. I looked at my iPhone and saw that it was 4:53.

4:54

With no time to spare and fear getting the best of me, I pleaded with Venerable Master Wu to teach me anything he could of the Sword of Hands, surely my only hope of escaping death at the hands of Bai Tiao-man. He smiled. “Master Bai’s weakness is not in his arm or his fist, but in his thoughts. Your late master, the honorable Ran Bao-tu, has already given you all the skills you need to defeat Bai Tiao-man and the blackguard arts of Cobra Whisper.” When I related my earlier disgrace at his hands, he raised a finger. I fell silent. “He who cannot recall the lesson when it is needed most is a poor student. And according to your annual performance reviews, you are an excellent student indeed.” A soft chime emanated from his MacBook Pro on the desk in front of him. He folded his arms and looked kindly upon me. “And now I believe you have a meeting to attend.”

5:00

Arrived at the Executive Board Room to find Bai Tiao-man waiting for me. He was alone. He expressed frank surprise that I would have the courage to face him in the end. Like all of Bai’s utterances, it only further revealed him as a man to whom honor and respect were alien. The time for words had passed and I did not dignify his craven taunt. I assumed Crane at Eventide. He laughed and took a further opportunity to slander our school’s good name and to promise that it would die with me this afternoon. He went so far as to take no defensive stance at all, simply waiting for the first blow which, as the challenger, it was my duty to strike.

Enraged at the panoply of insults I had endured at his hands, I lashed out with Crane Catching Pebbles, and was easily turned aside; I responded with Spider at Compass Points, and he struck me a blow that sent me sprawling across the hard oak conference table. He laughed, still having assumed no posture of defense. I rose and we circled, a sneer playing across his thin lips. There was no hesitancy in his movements, no telltale wavering of concentration; he was like a solid wall, impervious to my arts. Determined to break his mocking demeanor, I struck with Firefly Dagger and landed a stinging blow to his sternum. His anger flared and he howled and came at me with arms like pistons, brushing aside my defenses and striking me hard in the chest. Again, I lost my footing, and my head struck the floor and rang with the blow.

I rose, my feet unsteady beneath me. Bai now stood in the Venom Brood stance, his fingers bent like fangs of oak ready to strike me down. My attack was clumsy and obvious. He struck my side and my throat, then haughtily kicked my weakened legs out from under me and I fell yet again.

Fear overtook me as I lay on the blue and gray carpeting, and I struggled to remember some words of my master, anything that would bestow the clarity I needed to prevail. Bai circled near me, fully alert and ready for me to engage him again. I hauled myself to my hands and knees. I saw blood ooze from my mouth onto the carpet. My wounds throbbed with a pain that rippled throughout my body. In an instant the scene around me dissolved and I was in Master Ran’s office, in precisely this posture, having just failed a combat trial in one of my annual performance reviews. He had knocked me to the ground again and again, and this time ordered me to remain on my knees.

“Do not get up,” he said, “until you know why you get up — until you can engage the opponent with thoughtfulness and purpose. Let the enemy come on like the black storm, his heart knowing only rancor and destruction. It is a fool who fights the rain storm. Fight not on the enemy’s terms, but on your own. Face your enemy with honor where he is dishonorable, courage where he is cowardly, mercy where he is cruel. Where he rushes headlong, looking only for the quick path to victory, you must see the blow that is yet to be struck. Look not to the lightning strike, but to the dark clouds that are its portent.”

In an instant the vision had passed and I was back in the conference room, bleeding and stiff with pain. I had not fully understood the lesson that day. But now, facing my own black storm of an enemy, I knew what I must do.

I rose to my feet but assumed no stance. I looked at Bai Tiao-man and for the first time I pitied him — pitied his shrunken heart and his coldness, his pleasure in the weakness and failure of others. I saw how his own lost honor haunted him and drove him to destroy the good and noble wherever he met them. Bai unleashed another taunt, but his words had lost their force. I raised one hand in a parrying stance, a posture one would adopt in facing a novice. In fury he lunged and I stepped beyond his reach. Again he lunged, and again, each time coming within a hair’s breadth. He saw cowardice, for that was what he looked for; and I saw the simple crudity of his attacks, their single-minded dullness. He struck out with great power at that which most easily presented itself. I knew then I could defeat him, and my pity for him grew.

I stepped within his reach and parried his attacks with the Bending Reed form — a form useless for counterattack, but my enemy’s frustration mounted, as I had known it would. His blows grew wilder, and I could now read them in his face before he threw them: now was the subtle flicker of eye and mouth that betrayed the opponent at war with himself. I struck with Fist of Hummingbird and he staggered. There was fear in his eyes now as the specter of defeat entered his mind for the first time, fed on itself and grew larger. Now would he be at his most dangerous — and his most vulnerable. I closed on him with the Hundred Eels Fists, giving him no room to counter, and his will broke. He gave ground and I advanced, diverting his desperate blows and choosing my attacks for maximum effect on my opponent’s mind and body. He cursed me helplessly, unable to see how he himself had given me the key to his defeat. He was now mine to finish. I struck with Hungry Oak and sent him to the floor.

“Why continue?” I asked, with what I sincerely hoped was a note of kindness in my voice. “Has there not been enough death today?”

I watched the struggle of emotions play across his face, his fear and rage and pride combating for dominance. I had little doubt which would be the victor, but honor demanded I offer him a final choice.

“No,” he spat at me between heaving breaths. “There is not quite yet enough death today, little pupil.” He lurched to his feet and came at me one last time.

He was still fast, still powerful, but his will had already surrendered. I was ready with Executioner’s Hood, and I felled him.

5:18

Returned to my desk to find Ma Xia-hui waiting for me. Her demeanor was dignified but I read the joy in her eyes. We embraced without embarrassment. She asked if Bai Tiao-man still lived.

I laughed. “Our school still lives. Our honor still lives. Whether Bai Tiao-man still lives is for him to decide.”

5:19

Changed response to tomorrow’s meeting to “Accepted.” Shut down computer and left for the day.

He is young, almost child-like, with round cheeks and curly close-cropped hair. Dressed in jeans and a coarse denim shirt, clutching a guitar with unclipped strings winding off the tuning pegs like whiskers, he might be mistaken for a roadside ragamuffin, but the grin gives him away, even more than those babyish cheeks do: a grin of knowing impetuousness, a charmer’s grin, a grin that knows luck is on its side, or fate or destiny or whatever you choose to call it. Yet how to account for the contrast between the puckish demeanor and the voice? How does someone barely distinguishable from the average small-town twenty-year-old — for it is apparent to the keen observer that the hardscrabble mannerisms are an affectation, given away with a subliminal wink — sing so forlornly, so emphatically and so unaffectedly of things he could never have experienced? The words he sings are infused with the morality and vision of an Old Testament prophet, strained through the vocabulary of an itinerant brakeman. He chides and insinuates and accuses and finally takes it all back onto himself: Ah, but I was so much older then. Always his voice prowls among the words like a hunter nosing for prey in the rocks, investigating dark corners, overturning and exposing hidden things, ignoring what lies in plain sight. It remakes old sayings and never utters the same word in the same way. Not a conventionally attractive instrument, but one that seems to say, Would I be saying these things, in this way, if they weren’t true?

This performer soon gives way to a new face — and the transformation is shocking. In place of the fresh-faced, Jimmie Rodgers-like troubadour now stands a dandified Mod in a tight-fitting striped suit, a wild nimbus of hair radiating from his head like sunbeams, his sallow face guarded by a pair of dark glasses. But the most noticeable transformation — before he starts to sing, that is — is the Fender Telecaster guitar slung high on his chest. He begins to pick at it tentatively, his long-nailed fingers not quite used to the guitar’s weight and action. From the shadows, he is joined by four other musicians, and this ensemble explodes into a roaring barroom blues, tough and loose and fearless, that batters the walls of the club. The gangly singer steps to the microphone and cuts loose in a voice like a police siren amplified through a Marshall stack; he howls, wails, croons, giggles, moans, an unfathomable conviction undergirding everything and holding it together. The words are as arresting as the voice — in fact, the words don’t seem as though they could be delivered any other way. There are torrents of imagery, as though a hundred years of newspaper headlines, shared memory and tall tales were compressed into some cultural singularity before bursting out again, coalescing into a fractalized landscape where Beethoven, Jack the Ripper and Ezra Pound rub elbows with gamblers, old widows, strutting commanders-in-chief and the unnamed lost and lonely. There is jarring silliness, surprising pathos and mystifying juxtapositions of time and place. And most piercing and memorable is a question, thrown out to the audience like an unanswerable taunt: How does it feel?

The audience who are witness to this onslaught — the club is now packed — are left breathless as the performer rushes off stage, irrepressibly energetic to the last. Now nursing a pale drink, the old man near the stage nods, though the gesture is at least as much in wonder as in approval or sympathy. His attention seems to waver a small degree as the next performer comes up. Less sallow-looking, more contented than his predecessor, this singer leads a lean country ensemble through a series of weird, off-kilter parables that give way to more conventional, even mawkish ballads. The audience is intrigued but not quite with him; a few spectators begin to trickle out. The next performer galvanizes the crowd with searing, heartfelt songs of breakup and loss: If you see her, say hello. After him, as the evening lengthens into deep night, a succession of new singers ascends the stage, each one a bit older than the previous, a bit more undirected and less compelling. There is the Christian singer, at first accommodating and then increasingly strident and condemning; the hopeful ’80s pop star, sounding lost amid reams of dated arrangements; an aging folk-rocker delivering almost willfully inconsequential songs; and, in a strange echo of the day’s first performer, an older man with just an acoustic guitar, scratching out folk songs and ballads with a voice from which nearly all the contours have been shaven away. These are performances without irony, taking each song’s outlandish truths and fanciful occurrences as read. I rode all day and I’ll ride all night and I’ll overtake my lady. Whatever he is channeling, it fails to reach very far — the club has grown mostly empty now, and many of the people still present are lost in conversation, reliving and debating what they have already heard earlier in the evening.

The stage light dims, the last performer shuffles off to scattered applause, and for a long time it seems as though there will be no more music here.

Then the old man rises from his table. He adjusts his hat, fiddles with it some more until it’s nested back in the same spot before he started fussing with it. And then he climbs onto the stage.

He sits at an electric piano. From behind him a lonely electric guitar picks a frail chord on every beat. He leans into the microphone.

I’m walking … through streets that are dead.

The audience, distant at first — they have heard much tonight that either disappointed or baffled them — gradually allow themselves to be taken in, surrendering to the words, and to this music that sounds piped in from some juke-joint of the subconscious, every dive bar anyone ever imagined rolled into a single place. The sound as it unfolds picks up and reconciles most of what was great from everyone who came before on this stage: the snatches of quasi-remembered standards, the competing stories telescoped into one fractured narrative, the unabashed humor, the taint of Biblical judgment and overhanging doom. Your days are numbered and so are mine. The loss within these songs is overwhelming, every turn of a corner revealing another ghost, yet despair never overtakes them — or the singer. The man plays on, crouched behind his keyboard, barreling through one song after another, untwisting each one in new and unexpected directions. The playing has taken on a new meaning, here in the waning minutes of night: the act of performing itself, the perseverance to faithfully deliver these words and these melodies is an ennobling one. The perseverance and devotion are the antidotes to despair. As the set at last winds down — I feel a change comin’ on, and the last part of the day is already gone — the man finally brings his gaze from some indeterminate point in space to rest on the faces turned to him. “Thank you.” And out of nowhere a grin, wicked and impish. And then he’s gone, the final chord still ringing in the air.

The sun has returned to the solitary window overlooking the floor, revealing seats that are nearly full again, with both new listeners and those who have sat here stubbornly for what must feel like ages, accepting the mediocre and the execrable as the occasional, and inevitable, price of the sublime. The stage light once again dims. All that remains is the audience, restive yet still miraculously willing to keep their place as they watch the empty stage for whatever is going to happen next.

I have a soft spot for Scott (whom I occasionally call by his first name). Raymond Chandler felt that Fitzgerald just missed being a great writer, and I can see his point: an awful lot of Fitzgerald’s work is either not quite formed (his first two novels, which honestly I have been so far unable to finish) or commercial and vaguely hacky (much of his short fiction, although many of his stories are beautiful and completely honest). Someone once said Fitzgerald is a writer best discovered when young, and as a no-longer-quite-young person, I think that’s true. He has a young person’s longing to be swept up and away, a young person’s ideals, a young person’s eagerness to admire — even to worship — and to mold himself in a beautiful and noble image.

Yet while I am no longer able to look at life quite as breathlessly as his characters do, I sympathize with, and even admire, their determination to live in a kind of refined and rarefied grace. I am nearly Fitzgerald’s age when he died, and I marvel at how strong his idealist streak remained through years that tried him severely. I can’t remember where I read it, but I recall he once described Tender Is the Night as a “testament of faith.” Partly it was simply faith in himself, in his ability to persevere while living with a mad wife, deepening debts and dwindling inspiration. And partly it was faith that the beautiful illusion was still worth cherishing, worth nurturing, worth bringing, however improbably, toward reality. Beauty is truth, as Keats said and Fitzgerald believed, and it’s no coincidence that a Keats verse inspired the novel’s title.

The beauty of Tender lies in its characterizations, both those of the human characters and the settings they inhabit. Fitzgerald shows us a French Riviera that is sun-baked, aloof and rather incomplete without the cosmopolitan visitors who give it life. He draws us into the action, as he did in The Great Gatsby, through an observer, the young film star Rosemary Hoyt. Like many Fitzgerald heroines, she inspires and expects admiration, but her vanity is excused by her youth, and we admire her seriousness, her sense of duty, and her devotion to her mother, even if it sometimes borders on idolatry. Through her we meet an array of colorful, briskly drawn characters: dissolute Abe North, the crass, volatile McKiscos, and Tommy Barban, a hotheaded brawler with a surprising gift for biding his time. At the heart of the novel lies the golden couple Dick and Nicole Diver, who appear to the naive Rosemary to have everything: looks, money, poise, discernment, and a knack for making everything around them seem charged with exclusivity and promise. The talented psychiatrist Dick, in particular, has a preternatural gift for social life. To be included in his company is to feel an elevated sense of privilege, to perceive oneself as an irreplaceable component of a fragile, evanescent moment in time. Dick Diver seems to have successfully elevated living itself to the realm of art, and it makes him irresistible.

The Divers, as every American lit student knows, are based on Gerald and Sara Murphy, a pair of expatriate socialites who counted among their circle of friends pretty much everyone you would have wanted to know if you were at all interested in the post-war arts scene: Hemingway, Picasso, Cole Porter, Jean Cocteau, Dorothy Parker, and, to their eventual consternation, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. Like the Divers, the Murphys were wealthy but not gauche, trendsetters rather than followers, and had a gift for la dolce vita (or whatever that would be in French) that made them seem even more brilliant than they undoubtedly were. Virtually everyone who came into the Murphys’ orbit rhapsodized about them, as the rootless expats in Tender rhapsodize about the Divers. But Fitzgerald had bigger things in mind than a fictionalized biography of two of his friends, and that ambition elevates the novel to near-greatness — and provides its fatal flaw.

The problem is that Dick and Nicole aren’t just based on Gerald and Sara Murphy; they’re based just as much on Scott and Zelda, and for all his ecstatic prose and pulpy plot twists (including a duel with pistols and a corpse found in Rosemary’s bedroom), Scott can’t fully hide the seams. As Rosemary moves deeper into the Divers’ world, she falls in love with Dick and also discovers the couple’s dark secret: Nicole is schizoid, and Dick fell in love with her when she was his patient. Their marriage uneasily combines romance and therapy, devotion and obligation, and as Dick comes to reciprocate Rosemary’s affections and Nicole grows increasingly restive in her role as patient and wife, it unravels and eventually falls apart.

Like Scott Fitzgerald, Dick Diver started his career with a meteoric publishing success but has latterly found himself treading water, fiddling with a vast follow-up volume he can’t make any progress on. (The theme of squandered potential recurs again and again in Tender, from Abe North, a once-promising composer who hasn’t written in years, to young Rosemary Hoyt, who cannot find a success to match that of her first breakout role, in a film called, with suitable Freudian resonance, Daddy’s Girl. The title is doubly gruesome, referring not only to Rosemary’s child-like worship of Dick but to Nicole’s sexual abuse at the hands of her father which drove her to madness.) Like Scott, Dick’s mentally ill wife drains him of his creativity and ambitions. And like Scott, Dick drowns his frustration in drink, and drink makes him an asshole and eventually a pariah. In real life, the temperate Murphys cast the sodden Fitzgerald out of their circle after Scott lobbed a garbage can over their garden wall; in the novel, Dick has to carry both the worst of Scott Fitzgerald and the best of Gerald Murphy in his own person, and the combination never fully convinces. For all of Tender’s focus on psychology, Fitzgerald was not a psychological writer in the way someone like Henry James was. What inspired him was personality: that “unbroken series of successful gestures” (as Nick Carraway calls it in The Great Gatsby) by which a person makes himself, like a self-creating deity from mythology, into an object of fascination, grace and beauty. This dynamic, simultaneously noble and absurd, helps to make Gatsby (and its title character) so sympathetic and enduring. Gatsby may be an empty suit, but his emptiness has an integrity: it is all of a piece, the honest core of a man who has chosen to be a surface and to treat the rest of the world as if it were just as artificial, and ripe for reinvention, as himself.

The reason why Dick Diver fails to come convincingly to life is that his creator didn’t fully understand the man who inspired him. An admirer of successful surfaces, Fitzgerald could not see beneath the gestures of Gerald Murphy’s life to the traits that motivated them. The result is a character who, for the love of a starlet half his age, throws away everyone and everything he cares about. One feels neither sympathy for a weak man unable to resist his appetites, nor justified indignation at the callow machinations of a cad. Dick’s fall is not tragic but phlegmatic — he does not have Gatsby’s absurd, touching faith in the rightness of his own destiny. Dick’s desire for a younger woman, and for a renewal of the sense of purpose he felt as a young man, are banal, and Fitzgerald doesn’t do banal — banality is the very thing his characters long to escape.

Fitzgerald imagines the Divers’ marriage as something like a donkey elevator, in which one car could not rise without the other, opposing car falling. As Dick starts to lose himself in his love for Rosemary, Nicole grows more capable and confident. By the novel’s end, Nicole is embarking on a new life with Tommy Barban, her troubles seemingly behind her, while Dick, friendless and on the downward slope of his career, fades into obscurity. As psychology, this is absurd: marriages don’t function on Newtonian principles, certainly not one in which one partner is schizophrenic and the other a hopeless alcoholic. Fitzgerald’s marriage to Zelda took its toll on him, but Zelda did no better in the bargain. Nicole and Dick’s doomed marriage feels like something between redemptive fantasy and painful settling of accounts: Scott lays the blame for his stalled career firmly on Zelda while imagining that his sacrifice was at least worthwhile — that Zelda might have taken his strength and been healed by it. But Scott doesn’t seem to know why this would have happened, and Nicole’s redemption (from a disturbed socialite to a woman redeemed by the love of Tommy Barban) is even more opaque and baffling than Dick’s disgrace.

What I found most rewarding in Tender Is the Night was the myriad ways in which Scott explored, analyzed and obsessed over his own dissolution. Dick Diver is just the most obvious of the novel’s Fitzgerald stand-ins. Abe North carries out the same kind of drunken antics for which Fitzgerald himself became notorious; I am convinced that a prank referred to in the early sections, in which Abe was thrown out of a restaurant for attempting to saw a waiter in half (“Wouldn’t you like to know what was inside a waiter?”), came directly from Fitzgerald’s own life. Dick Diver eventually washes his hands of North, exactly as Gerald Murphy finally had had enough of Scott. Albert McKisco doesn’t find success as a writer until he takes to dumbing down others’ ideas for mass consumption, becoming the hack crowd-pleaser Fitzgerald felt he had become. (“They pay the old whore $4,000 a screw now,” he wrote to Hemingway, referring to the then-astronomical fees his short stories earned.) As a chronicler of the Jazz Age, Fitzgerald never shied away from showing what happened after the party ended, and the characters in Tender Is the Night seem trapped in an endless, Dantean hangover. Everyone’s best days are behind them (even, it seems, young Rosemary Hoyt’s), and no one save for Nicole and Tommy seem to have any idea what to make of the days that remain. Perhaps only a writer as enthralled with youth as Fitzgerald could feel the disappointments of middle age so acutely. Gatsby never lived to see his beautiful surface pit and scar with age, while Nicole Diver must ruefully watch the mirror for signs of sagging and stiffening flesh, and Dick ponders a professional legacy that seems to diminish before his eyes. Not a beautiful vision of life — but a true one.

We know all these reasons. But there is another reason why airport security is annoying that I think has been overlooked: the anticlimax. Security screening consists of a wait of anywhere from twenty minutes to two hours or more, during which you are forbidden from relieving the tension by joking about the one subject — terrorism — that is on the mind of literally every single person there, which is rather like being forced to wait in an elephant paddock without mentioning the elephant. This is followed by a mad shuffle to dump purses, jackets and laptops into trays, take off shoes and demonstrate that your shampoo and conditioner can’t be used to blow a hole in the fuselage of the plane. All of these things are really only the preamble to the personal screening, in which you either pass through a metal detector or stand in front of a scatter x-ray machine before being summarily waved through.

That’s it?

The reason that this process seems so onerous is that we get nothing out of it — that our time appears to have been frivolously and blatantly wasted. It is hard to think of any routine activity in which so much waiting delivers such little payoff. Therefore, one idea for making security more tolerable and thus, perhaps, more effective is to give people more for their money, as it were. I have a few ideas on this score.

1) Make the screening longer
Yes, this is an insane idea, but given that our present system is so massively inefficient, making it nominally more so in the interests of passenger satisfaction makes some sense. If passengers felt that TSA personnel were really making a big deal out of them — or, if you like, really taking them seriously as a potential threat — they would probably find the process more fair and more justified. My ideas for expanding the screening process:

• Personal interviews. Every passenger has to submit to a brief, two- to five-minute interview. These would include standard questions about the traveler’s destination and purpose of visit. The screener would then have the option of exchanging small talk with the traveler, perhaps comparing pictures of grandchildren and such, or of engaging them on the subjects of politics, economics and current events. Screeners could draw upon a list of prepared questions that appear designed to elicit potentially dangerous or subversive views but whose answers would, in fact, be completely ignored, their only purpose being to permit the traveler to express him or herself and to let them know they are taken seriously.

• Actors. Airport security suffers from an inherent problem: it’s successes are invisible. Nobody ever sees a terrorist plot foiled or a suspicious passenger with no carry-on baggage summarily hauled away for questioning. Thus, the common perception is that airport security is a fiction, a charade put on solely to deliver the illusion of safety rather than the thing itself. Well, perhaps it is — and if it is, let’s make it a good illusion. Scattered randomly throughout the day at every major airport should be actors whose sole purpose is to pose as passengers, be “unmasked” as potential terrorists and swarmed by security personnel and then arrested, in as showy a manner as possible. There should be variety: while suspicious travelers will nervously eye the Middle Eastern men, a young, pregnant white woman should suddenly rip open her coat to reveal that she is wired head to toe with explosives, screaming that she’ll blow herself, her unborn baby and all the rest of these goddamn people to kingdom come unless someone gets her ex-husband on the phone RIGHT MOTHERFUCKING NOW. There would then occur the most spectacular display of security prowess as a (carefully rehearsed) crack team of agents wrestle the woman to the ground, disarm her and drag her, howling and shrieking like a hyena on fire, to the nearest holding cell. An agent will then return to assure people that everything was under control and that all were safe. You know what would probably happen then? The whole room would spontaneously break into applause.

A lot could be done with this idea. The TSA could stage foot chases, martial arts battles of a dozen or more combatants, and even mock shootings. You would walk through an airport en route to a flight knowing full well that anyone around was capable of doing literally anything. I don’t think this would make people terribly afraid, but it would make them more alert, and enforce the principle that security procedures are there for a reason.

Of course, these ideas only make a flawed system more tolerable, while actually increasing its cost and inefficiency. So, in the interest of a constructive debate, here are actual suggestions for improving airport security.

1) TSA On the Go
Have you ever been to an Apple store and noticed there are no cashier lines? Instead, hipsters in black t-shirts and carrying portable credit card readers roam the floor and conduct transactions on the spot, wherever you happen to be. This is how airport security should work. Rather than a thin, urethra-like line feeding a paltry security station, the screening area should be vast and open, with TSA screeners equipped with the latest metal detector wands and other portable scanning gear. They would proactively find travelers in the crowd, quickly check them over (no one’s taking off their fucking shoes, thank you very much) and issue them a signed and dated stamp indicating that they have cleared security and may enter the terminal. No one could board a plane without that stamp, and anyone failing the brief security sweep would be led to a more thorough station — in fact, the same station to which we foolishly submit every traveler today.

2) Appointments
Taking the Apple store menu even further, why not be able to make an appointment with a TSA screener? I don’t think this would be as efficient as the previous suggestion — waiting rooms always run late — but it couldn’t help but improve the current situation, and people would be in a better mood if they knew that a time and place had been set aside for them. And in fact, there’s nothing to say you couldn’t combine this suggestion with the previous one. Make the security experience more like the Apple store is basically the takeaway here.

You know, on second thought, I’d really rather have the actors.

Perhaps Jobs soft-pedaled this announcement because he knew it wasn’t a surprise at all. The night before the iPad launch, McGraw-Hill CEO Terry McGraw spilled many of Steve Jobs’ beans in an interview with CNBC, breezily confirming that Apple was announcing a tablet computer running the iPhone OS, for which McGraw-Hill was collaborating with Apple to provide educational content. It might not appear entirely out of character for Jobs to lop McGraw-Hill out of his presentation, provided it had ever been included — Jobs famously dropped graphics chip vendor ATI from a keynote when they revealed upcoming Mac models before he could. And it prompts a mordant chuckle to imagine the look on Jobs’ face as he watched McGraw blithely steal his thunder. But I give Jobs the benefit of the doubt. It is likely that Apple’s negotiations with textbook publishers are still in progress, and that Apple will formally tout the iPad as an education tool at a later date. Because this arrangement is a very big deal — one that could potentially have a huge impact on both parties.

A little background. When pundits bewail (or laud) the impending “death of print,” the implied subject is usually newspapers and magazines, whose advertising-based revenues have proved impossible to replicate in the online space. To these publishers, the iPad and the devices that will succeed it offer a renewed hope that digital content can actually be monetized through subscriptions to iPad-native versions of their publications. College textbook publishers, though, are in a very similar predicament. Their revenues have been falling, but for a different reason. While newspapers struggle to compete against the resolutely free (as in beer) ethos of the World Wide Web, textbook publishers compete against a much more insidious foe: their own products.

If you went to college within the last few decades, you probably bought many of your textbooks used. Maybe you found it convenient to own a book where the key passages were already underlined and highlighted, but it’s more likely you simply wanted to save some money: generally about 40% of the cost of a new copy of the same book, if my addled memory serves me. No one can blame a student for wanting to save money, but buying used textbooks turns out to be a classic instance of a decision that benefits the individual at the expense of the collective — and ultimately, the individual herself.

Used books are bought and sold by used book dealers, not the original publisher of the textbook. When a textbook is released in a new edition, the publisher collects revenue for every copy sold of that edition. Then the academic term ends, and the used book dealer appears behind those long folding tables in the campus bookstore, buying back every usable copy of that new edition. Say for the sake of argument that the used book seller buys back 50% of the publishing run. (Note that I have no idea what the actual average is, or if there even is a reliable average.) The next semester, for every new copy the bookstore orders of that title, there is a cheaper used copy sitting next to it on the shelf. Students buy the used books until they run out, then buy the new ones. The publisher’s revenue from the book is half of what it was in the previous term, and the edition is not even a year old. Then that semester ends, the used book people come back, and the cycle repeats.

Run this equation a few times and you see the dilemma the publisher is in: its new product is quickly elbowed out of the market by identical but cheaper product from which it collects no revenue. (Just to be clear about this, because a lot of people don’t understand or believe it: used book companies have no relation to book publishers and pay them no royalties on any of the books they buy and sell.) That’s how it was when I was in school. Today, with the power of the internet, the publisher’s situation is much worse. Students can now visit eBay or Half.com if the campus bookstore is out of used editions. Some enterprising students have even ordered international copies of the same edition — priced considerably lower to compete in less affluent markets — and gone into business selling textbooks to their fellow students at a fraction of the domestic price.

(We’ll get back to the iPad in a minute, I promise.)

Publishers have tried to combat this trend in two ways. The first is to revise textbooks more often, in order to render the used editions obsolete. But few academic subjects warrant such frequent revisions, and students and faculty alike balk at this strategy: students for the obvious financial reasons, and teachers because a new edition forces them to rewrite their tests and lectures. The other approach has been to load new textbooks with goodies that used books don’t have: PowerPoint notes, study guides, practice tests, even multimedia and interactive software. The trouble with this is that not every product appeals to every student, meaning a whole kitchen sink of add-ons has to be thrown in to appeal to as many students as possible, thus raising the cost of the book (further, as publishers have already had to raise prices to make up for the revenue they’ve lost) and forcing even more students into the arms of the used book seller.

How to get out of this impasse?

Textbook publishers need a form of digital textbook that can be registered to a single owner and that expires a set time after being activated. This not only solves the problem of used books, it saves them the massive cost of printing, warehousing and shipping textbooks. It allows them to recruit talented authors with the promise of greater royalties — and perhaps most importantly, offers the real prospect of reduced textbook prices, as efficiencies can be passed on as savings to the student. Everybody wins.

The problem holding back this happy state of affairs is the same one facing newspapers and magazines: reading a digital text on a laptop is simply not as convenient, effective or rewarding as reading and holding a physical textbook. As a piece of technology, the book is actually quite difficult to improve on: it’s compact (reasonably), requires no power to use and can last forever if treated with care. You can write in it, shove notes in it and use it to fight off a CIA assassin. Students need a digital textbook that benefits them, not just the publishers, and no one has yet succeeded in making one.

Enter the iPad. From the demo given of an interactive iPad edition of the New York Times, it is easy to see the device’s potential for digital textbooks. All the multimedia, online access and bookmarking features a student could ask for, along with the portability of a slate of plastic and glass that weighs a pound and a half. One could argue that few people actually need to carry their entire reading libraries around with them all the time, but the few who do are college students. In addition, students could carry their notes and their term papers in progress, as well as have constant access to their professor’s online course management site, all from the same slim device.

The Kindle cannot do this. For one thing, its screen, however good it may be for reading, is not equipped to reproduce the pedagogy of a modern textbook, which increasingly has come to resemble the USA Today weather map (imagine that on an iPad) in its colors and 3-D effects. For another, the Kindle is too specialized. You can bookmark your texts, annotate them and look up words, but you can’t instant message your classmate, navigate a complex website or type notes during a lecture. Textbooks are only the beginning of the classroom experience, and Kindle is unequipped to recognize that reality. (I will also say that, in the little time I’ve handled it, I have found the Kindle quite underwhelming: slow, lacking in customizability and embodying a distinctly last-century aesthetic. One further benefit to adopting the iPad on campus: students will want to own them.)

The benefits for textbook publishers then become obvious: here is a device that might finally usher in the digital textbook as a viable product. The benefits for Apple are less crucial, but still not to be taken lightly. For one thing, it will deal a crippling nut-shot to Amazon’s foray into the hardware business and position Apple as the top-selling e-book manufacturer — within, I would guess, a very short time, say 12 months after release. (Amazon still refuses to say how many Kindles they’ve sold. Bet that Apple will not be so reticent.) For another, universities represent a very nice market for hardware sales — especially hardware that’s mandated by the school’s curriculum. Whether students end up bringing the devices to campus themselves or leasing them from the university, Apple could end up putting a lot of iPads into a lot of hands. And beyond that is the prestige: Apple is proud of its heritage as a favorite of educators, and building the first great digital learning device of the 21st century is not something Steve Jobs takes lightly. (Note his strained and slightly bizarre affirmation that Apple’s goal is to combine technology and liberal arts, the latter a term you rarely hear outside of a college curriculum.)

So while Jobs’ launch of the iPad was comprehensive, it ignored one of the device’s biggest potential uses. I expect this will be corrected. At some point this year — I have no inside information, and am simply surmising — Apple will formally launch the iPad as a digital textbook reader, announcing its partnerships with loudmouth Terry McGraw and other educational publishers, demoing all the incredible things that an iPad textbook will be able to do, and most likely touting an agreement with one or more major universities to conduct pilot studies of iPads on campus. One lucky class at Stanford or Berkley or somewhere will be issued a new iPad along with their student ID. And what may turn out to be the iPad’s most significant role will truly begin. Small wonder Terry McGraw couldn’t wait to talk about it.

A peaty, smoky, slightly caramel nose gives way to discordant tones of apple, clove, cedar, and introspection. While some of the members present were delighted by its lightness and busy frivolity, your Secretary found it a disquieting dram, apt to give one thoughts of licking an exposed chair in a bus station, or happening upon a nude self-portrait one had no memory of ever taking.

Redpinnock 15 Year Diabolic Reserve

This notorious Speyside malt rarely makes its way overseas, and the Society was truly privileged to be able to sample it this summer. Does this whisky — distilled in casks lined with human skulls, tended to perfection by a master distiller who is rumored to be over 200 years old and completely mad — live up to its reputation? And how! A nose of peat, gravel, rainwater and bone scarcely prepares you for an explosive palette of oak, cherry, blood and iron, leveling off with a strong note of human fear. I don’t mind revealing that this whisky had an extraordinary effect on those in attendance: Mr. Rossini found himself reliving a harrowing childhood incident involving his Boy Scout troop, while Ms. Kreisler began to spontaneously recite what the members eventually identified as the Anglo-Saxon poem “The Dream of the Rood,” a work she claims to have neither read nor heard of before.

Drumnadrochit Single-Cask 12 Year-Old

Despite some tantalizing rumors from our brother chapter across the pond, this is not a whisky at all, but an expression of untempered seawater larded with plant detritus and industrial refuse and allowed to mature, if that is the word, in a “cask” formerly used in the recycling of diesel oil. Further examination determined that the label was printed on an ordinary desktop printer, and that the signature it bore gave a clue to its true provenance. We salute the members of our Edinburgh chapter for another hearty jest at our expense. Such members, being devoid of ordinary human feeling, will no doubt delight to hear that Mr. Evans became violently ill after sampling this libation and was later found to have ingested a nearly invisible plastic filament that became entangled in his lower intestine. We wish Mr. Evans a speedy recovery and hope he is discharged from the hospital in time for next season’s tasting. We wish our Edinburgh brothers and sisters slow, lingering deaths.

Weesleekit Cask Strength (No age statement)

This unassumingly named, and now exceedingly rare, Eastern Highland malt packs quite a “wallop” — as the whisky world learned to its horror last spring, when a stray spark in the bottling plant set off an explosion that demolished more than half of the distillery and claimed dozens of lives. It will be the better part of a decade before the distillery is rebuilt and once again bottling; until that day, savor every drop of this pale, bold, exceedingly powerful dram. A nose of smoke, butane and lots of alcohol sets the stage for a taste that makes up for its complete lack of subtlety with a memorable attack across the palate. As this whisky numbs the tongue within seconds and renders all but the hardiest connoisseurs insensate with drunkenness, it made an ideal conclusion for the evening, which soon gave way to an exuberant revelry rarely to be found at our gatherings. Those photos of the event suitable for public viewing may be found posted to the Society’s website.

Hannoch 18 year-old; Glen Skye Masters Choice 14-year Reserve; Bogmannon Sherry Oak 10 year-old; Windex cleaning solvent (no age statement); Diet Rite Cola (canned September 2009); Dasani bottled water (expires February 2012)

Empty bottles of the above libations were discovered in the morning following the members’ enjoyment of the Weesleekit Cask Strength; however, as no member can recall consuming them, a report on their merits will have to wait for a future tasting.

(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction
By Bob Dylan

Driving my broke-down ambulance down Highway 9
Johnny with a bullet wound strapped in behind
The preacher on the radio asked me for the time
And directions to your carnival attraction

The newspaper reporter came down from Bootblack Hill
Said “How’m I supposed to tell any of these Jacks from Jill?”
Then passed me an empty jug and said “Buddy, drink your fill;
Before I have to go and file this retraction”

Oh, I can’t get no satisfaction
No I can’t get no satisfaction
‘Cause I try and I try to get you to sign up for any kind of reaction
Oh I just can’t get no satisfaction

When you poured the wine and said “Let me get this right
And tell me how that shirt you’re wearin’ could be so white”
And I told you every shirt’s the same color at night
And you turned so fast I couldn’t see your reaction

Nancy on the shore bidding her sailor goodbye
Came back home to find no one had ever told her why
A sailor would just as soon kick dirt in your eye
As he ever would confess his attraction

I can’t get no satisfaction
I just can’t get no satisfaction
‘Cause I try and I try to get you to sign up for any kind of reaction
Oh I just can’t get no satisfaction

The regimental chief on his way back to the ball
Talked me into giving up my peg and my awl
Gave me a card that said “For a good time, call”
Then ran off to join the rest of his faction

We were throwing dice with a nine-toed freak
Who explained he’d need to see me later that week
“You see, Bob,” he said, “I’m on a losing streak
And the judge, he sent me down for another infraction”

Yes, I can’t get no satisfaction
I can’t get no satisfaction
Because I try and I try to get you to sign up for any kind of reaction
Oh I just can’t get no satisfaction

I woke up in the parlor of Widow Casey Jones
Who gave me a blanket for my back and whiskey for my bones
Took my biscuit roller and traded it for a bag of precious stones
Then went to visit the minister, all laid up in traction

I went to the Union Hall to redeem my ball and chain
And sign the papers to keep you out of the rain
I hung my coat above a portrait of Calamity Jane
And headed out to join the chain reaction

Oh, I can’t get no satisfaction
No I can’t get no satisfaction
‘Cause I try and I try to to get you to sign on the dotted line
For any kind of reaction
Oh I just can’t get no satisfaction

***

Mr. Tambourine Man
By Mick Jagger and Keith Richards

Let the chips fall where they may, my dear
Because I can go all night
The reason is a friend of mine
Standing there beneath the light

He’s a gentleman of grace and class
And blood beneath his nails
He reads the secrets scratched upon
Your scabby needle trail

Hey, Mr. Tambourine Man
Shake that wheel for me
I’m not sleeping, and there ain’t no place I’m going to
Hey, Mr. Tambourine Man
Cop a feel with me
In the haze of a drum-skin morning
I’ll keep it tight with you

You strolled in here, a bitch in heat
With Leather Jackie on your arm
And you ditched him in thirty seconds flat
Before he kept you safe from harm

You came aboard the swirling ship
A tar eager to please
Your hands too numb to grasp the rope
That kept you on your knees

Hey, Mr. Tambourine Man
Shake that wheel for me
I’m not sleeping, and there ain’t no place I’m going to
Hey, Mr. Tambourine Man
Dance this reel with me
In the haze of a drum-skin morning
I’ll keep it tight with you

You’re ready to go anywhere
You’re willing to be lead
They way you lead those ragged clowns
By their tiny little heads

So stand up tall, my wilted rose
For a gentleman with flair
He’ll blow the leaves right off your bed
And leave a smoke ring in the air

He’ll take the diamonds from your sky
And set them on your dainty wrist
Your weariness becomes his mill
Your love will be the grist

Hey, Mr. Tambourine Man
Shake that wheel for me
I’m not sleeping, and there ain’t no place I’m going to
Hey, Mr. Tambourine Man
Crack a seal with me
In the haze of a drum-skin morning
I’ll make it right with you

It would be inaccurate, I think, to say that Harris stood in favor of torture as such. However, he did argue powerfully that our revulsion to torture is essentially hypocritical, extending as it does from a sort of moral blind spot. Harris’ argument is too lengthy to quote directly, so I will summarize it as fairly as I can.

1. We are resigned to what we call in warfare “collateral damage,” meaning the unintended destruction of non-military targets and the injury and death of civilians.
2. The toll in pain and death exacted by collateral damage is as gruesome as that of any other wartime horror: men, women and children are blinded, crippled, mutilated or killed, or suffer thirst, starvation and sickness in the wake of attacks that destroy local infrastructure and services.
3. The pain and suffering of the collaterally damaged is, in fact, qualitatively of little to no difference to that suffered under torture.
4. The preceding premises being true, one cannot morally object to one but not the other; anyone willing to accept collateral damage in wartime has no basis from which to declaim torture as immoral.

Harris made this argument to illustrate the limitations and biases inherent in our moral reasoning, particularly the human tendency to respond to individual suffering while remaining relatively unmoved by the suffering of a great many people. There is a component of torture — perhaps the way in which it is reducible in our imaginations to a dichotomy of victim and tormentor, the latter holding the former utterly in his power — that seems immediate and visceral. Yet Harris, while admitting even he found his own conclusions unsettling, was not simply arguing as the devil’s advocate. Those who have read The End of Faith will know that Harris has a very large axe to grind against Islamic fundamentalism; unlike most thinkers of essentially leftist bent, Harris has no compunction about denouncing Islam as a religion of ignorance, hatred and cruelty, nor does he balk at describing its war on the West in essentially neoconservative terms: that is, as a clash of civilizations, a zero-sum game in which compromise or rapprochement is out of the question.

As a person repulsed by the torture that has been carried out by my government ostensibly on my behalf, I was brought up short by Harris’ arguments. Had I been too quick to give in to my instinctive reaction of horror and outrage? How can one argue with any conviction that slamming a man’s head repeatedly into a wall is worse than, say, burning a little girl with napalm while denuding the forests surrounding her village? Is one of these things really worse than the other?

Upon reflection, I came to the conclusion that yes, one of these really is worse than the other. The reason lies in an argument that Harris used earlier in his book but forgot, or omitted, to apply to the torture debate. That reason is intention.

The End of Faith spends considerable time discussing of Noam Chomsky, who has argued that the United States routinely commits atrocities of the magnitude of September 11 and that we are, at best, no worse than the terrorists who struck back at us; in fact, our arrogance and self-righteousness actually make us worse. Harris has no time for this facile moral equivalency. Citing Chomsky’s example of the U.S. bombing of the Al-Shifa pharmaceutical laboratory in 1998 (which Chomsky claims doomed hundreds of thousands to die of otherwise treatable illnesses), Harris points out an obvious, and significant, distinction. The U.S. attack came as part of an effort to destroy sources of biological and chemical weapons. It was not the United States’ intention — nor was it even in its strategic interest — to destroy a vital source of medicine for the civilian population. The September 11 hijackers chose precisely the opposite tactic, one designed to cause the maximum possible civilian destruction, and concomitantly, the maximum amount of horror, grief and revulsion.

It may be — and is — cold comfort for thousands of bereaved Sudanese to be told, essentially, “We didn’t mean it when we consigned your children to die of malaria and dysentery.” But as Harris points out, intention forms the very foundation of ethics. And ethics, I might add, forms the very foundation of justice. The modern justice system is based on the understanding that motivation is the key to understanding crime and properly administering punishment or redress. Two people might be brutally run over by cars on the same night; one may be the victim of an enraged ex-husband, the other of a sudden and fatal impulse to run into the street after a dropped $20 bill. Although the result in these two situations is the same, as is the sense of loss experienced by the bereaved families, they are not the same crime, and there is no ethical argument for treating them as such.

This is the difference between a girl blinded in a bombing and a man driven irreparably mad by physical and psychological torture. We go out of our way to ensure that the bomb will not injure the girl, continually improving the accuracy and precision of our weapons to ensure only strategically significant targets are destroyed. The purpose of any attack in war is to limit or destroy the enemy’s capacity to fight back, not to murder and terrorize civilians; indeed, the latter effect might well work against the former. Exceptions can, of course, be cited throughout the history of our country and our world, from repugnant aberrations such as My Lai to deliberate wholesale destruction, such as Sherman’s March. But as a general principle of warfare, the axiom is sound: attacking military targets and avoiding civilian ones is the most effective way to wage war.

This is sound military strategy, but it is also a sound moral position, one held by generals as much as by civilians on the home front. We maintain a distinction between civilian and military targets because it is a crucial way of maintaining our humanity in the midst of the harrowing pressures of war. War may be hell, but it is a hell we have tempered through mutually agreed-upon rules for civilized conflict: capturing instead of slaughtering troops who surrender; refraining from the use of chemical or biological weapons; honoring neutrality; and affording all those within a war zone a measure of basic human dignity. Civilized nations do not sell prisoners into slavery, prostitute them or hold them for ransom. And civilized nations do not torture.

Torture deprives human beings of their humanity in a way that mere imprisonment, even in harsh conditions, does not. It is not the randomness of flying shrapnel or the error of shelling the hospital instead of the munitions factory. It is an act of calculated cruelty, a deliberate stripping away of the mental and psychological resources that are the bequest of civilization itself. There is a very good reason why torture strikes such a deep chord of horror and unease within us, why most of the Americans who insist on the benefits of this practice still can’t bring themselves to drop the mealy-mouthed euphemism “enhanced interrogation techniques.” Only a sociopath — or one who has completely excluded the enemy from their moral universe through racism, nativism or simple abject fear — can remain unmoved by the spectacle of one human being reducing another to a state of infantile helplessness through the application of pain. It is simply not who we are.

This is not, as Harris maintains, the result of some facile moral blindness. The capacity to treat even our enemies with a modicum of respect is the quality that, to be blunt, makes us better than them; it is a component of our cultural identity far more valuable than any transient strategic advantage that torture might confer. (That there is little evidence that torture confers any such advantage is beside the point.) We as Americans may not be — may never have been — as exceptional as we claimed. But we entered this conflict with a clear moral advantage, one which I, at least, clung to over the last turbulent eight years. I believed that the ideals which my country maintained even in war were worthy ideals, and that we could never truly be defeated as long as we held fast to them.

Now my country is afraid — so afraid that it couldn’t shed those ideals fast enough, as long as their loss granted a feeling of safety and control; exercising our power and our cruelty gave us the heady rush of charging into battle full-bore, all guns ablaze, redeeming ourselves for the torpor that allowed the attacks to succeed in the first place. Too few people stopped to ask if this crack-cocaine rush of bogus courage was worth the price; and while many people still insist ours is the greatest nation on earth, they are at greater and greater pains to explain why.

I’ve been following this story — what very little there has been of it to follow — for about three years now, ever since the Apple Computer/Apple Corps trial, when the secretive Neil Aspinall was forced to admit in court proceedings that he was, in fact, supervising a total revamping of the group’s catalog. Questions that had been fruitlessly batted back and forth are now finally answered. Yes, the mono Sgt. Pepper will come out; in fact, all of the albums will be available in mono (except for Abbey Road, which was never released that way). Yes, the music has been cleaned up in a way that, we are assured, adds the punch expected of contemporary rock while still being true to the original mixes’ ambience. Yes, even the original, oddball stereo mixes of Help! and Rubber Soul will come out, which most people will likely not bother to listen to more than once. And while no details of packaging have been released, we know we can get all these goodies in two fell swoops: all of the stereo albums and all the mono albums will be available in two separate box sets.

It was that last detail that really brought it home to me, that illuminated what should have been a patently obvious fact: they are going to sell a shitload of discs.

I think the reason I never bothered to think of it is that parallel to the tantalizing prospect of remastered Beatles tracks has run the story of another, long-delayed, Beatles milestone, the availability of the tracks for online purchase and download. Every imminent Macworld Expo or iPod announcement brought a fresh crop of rumors that this, finally, would be the one where Jobs could make the announcement that, so we all believe, he has been so eager to make: that the world’s greatest band was coming to the world’s biggest music retailer.

Except, honestly, I never gave much of a shit whether or when the Beatles went digital. Five years ago, before iTunes had cemented its grip on the digital music market, the Fabs’ presence might have made a difference; had one of the upstart services like MTV managed to lure them with a sweetheart deal, it would have given iTunes a serious black eye and, possibly, some worthy competition. As it is, despite some grumbling in the Beatles’ camp about not seeing eye-to-eye with Apple on prices, there is no viable third-party alternative for the Beatles in going online. Amazon, despite running a very nice digital download service, barely has double-digit market share, and going with an also-ran service would cheapen the Beatles’ image enough to not be worth whatever concessions the band could get. If the Beatles don’t go with iTunes, they’ll open their own storefront; right now I’d say it’s even money either way.

But whether the Beatles sell their music through iTunes or from their own servers doesn’t really matter, anymore than whether you buy your CDs at Borders or Best Buy. What really counts — all that really counts — is the music. People are going to want it. Just as the Anthology albums did ten years ago, it will give people an excuse to fall in love with the Beatles again — and it’s going to be a pretty damn good excuse. The albums will be impeccably packaged, with liner notes, photos (the inserts on the current CDs are comically paltry) and even QuickTime documentaries on the making of each album. They are also, from everything I’ve heard so far, going to sound great. Everyone is going to want these.

The L.A. Times quoted a Beatles expert named Martin Lewis:

“There will be cynics who will point quite accurately to the vanishing CD marketplace,” Lewis said. “There’s no doubt it will not do as spectacularly well as had they reissued them in 2001 in the wake of the ’1′ [hits compilation] album, which has sold 31 million copies worldwide and 8 million in the U.S. But any cynics who say the Beatles have missed the boat will be wrong. This will sell exceedingly well and will be a huge boost to the recorded music industry.

“And if the CD is going to die,” he said, “the Beatles are going to give it a superb wake.”

I think Lewis is wrong and right. I don’t think releasing the albums in the wake of 1 would have helped them sell better. Part of the reason 1 was such a hit was that it was the first high-profile Beatles release people had had a chance to buy in a long time. Releasing the albums after that would likely have led many to think that, actually, 1 was enough for the time being.

But in his second point, Lewis is dead on. EMI and Capitol are going to have a very nice Christmas this year thanks to the Beatles. And I think his point about the death of the CD is a good one — perhaps better than he is aware.

The reissue of the Beatles catalog is, in a way, the ultimate shoe-drop, the event that the music buying public has been unconsciously awaiting since shortly after the CDs first came out (and earned criticism for their mono mixes and overall un-dynamic sound). The first Beatles CDs were issued 23 years ago, and except for some low-key reissues here and there (the White Album anniversary release, Let It Be … Naked), the CDs on store shelves today are the exact same ones that were on the shelves at Sam Goodies or Tower or Virgin back in the late 80s.

I remember how, once the Beatles were out, CDs seemed to have arrived, beginning in earnest their irrevocable shift from yuppie status symbol to a true format for the masses. (I’m old enough to remember when people used to be ridiculed for buying and listening to CDs. Well, at least for buying and listening to Brothers in Arms.) Now we’re witnessing the tail end of that cycle. People are growing more accustomed to the realization that music is information; audiophiles still have the option to buy their black shiny discs, but the fetishization of the music delivery vehicle, whether the vinyl LP, the cassette tape or the CD, is ending. When every CD you buy goes straight onto your iPod anyway, it’s only natural to wonder why you’re bothering with the shiny disc in the first place.

But the Beatles, I predict, will be a special case. The remastered Beatles CDs will be the last music that people will actually want to own on CD. (A friend of mine, in fact, told me they were “probably the last CDs I will ever buy.”) They may not realize it consciously, but buying the Beatles on CD one last time will serve as a tacit farewell to an entire era, when we helped change the economics of the music industry by happily buying our favorite music again and again, each time with a promise of improved fidelity, of more sumptuous packaging — of somehow being closer to the music we cared about. Cynics have always derided this, seeing the industry’s treadmill of reissues as nothing more than a ruse for parting nostalgic music lovers from more of their money. But there was always more to it than that, wasn’t there? Re-buying an album in a better edition was a small act of devotion, a conscious renewing of ties with a work of art that gave your life a little extra meaning. Loading up your player with the stereo mix of Pet Sounds or the 5.1 version of Dark Side of the Moon was both thrilling and familiar, a batch of impending surprises you knew you were going to love. All that for, what, 12 bucks? A bargain.

So it will be with the Beatles. People will once again savor the experience of viewing the new packaging and photos, reading the new liner notes, hearing the opening notes of “I Saw Her Standing There” or “Help!” or “Back in the U.S.S.R.” as though for the first time. What ensuing CD purchase, what classic album reissue, can live up to that? Once the definitive Beatles CDs are safely on the shelf, why bother with music on shiny discs again?

And also, truth be told, because I have an unfailing sympathy for the uncool. And McCartney, no matter how cool his various achievements, will always, personally, be uncool. As many a sardonic wag has remarked, The Beatles are dying in order of coolness. Ringo’s next.

Reading my essay over now, there are a few things I would change: I’d tone down the Yoko bashing, for one thing. (The creepy, unhealthy psychodrama of the Lennon/Ono marriage rests more with the groom than the bride.) For another, I actually think I could’ve made my case stronger. Forget for a moment the fact that, in 1966, McCartney was among the handsomest, most interesting and most sought-after (read: cool) figure in arguably the most culturally significant city in the world at that moment. He went where he wanted, slept with whom he wanted, did whatever the fuck he pleased; no one would turn down a chance to trade places with Paul McCartney. But forget all that and just stick to what you can quantify. McCartney was the first of the Beatles to write his own songs, the first member of the fledgling Quarrymen who actually knew how to play. (Lennon played the guitar with banjo chords until “Paul taught [him] to play properly.”) Unlike Lennon, who before meeting Ono deeply mistrusted anything avante garde, McCartney eagerly absorbed the musique concrete of Stockhausen or Glass, and was the first of the Beatles to rip the eraserhead out of his tape recorder and begin making tape loops in his home studio. Without McCartney, “Tomorrow Never Knows” would have consisted of John Lennon banging out C on his acoustic guitar, and the world might have been spared “Revolution #9″ altogether. It was McCartney who pushed the Abbey Road engineers to overdrive the trebly guitars of “Nowhere Man” and who had the idea of recording his bass through another amplifier instead of a conventional microphone. Critical opinion has swung between either Sgt. Pepper or Revolver as the Beatles’ masterpiece — and both are dominated by Paul, from behind the desk if not always behind the mike. This is something beyond cool; there are maybe a dozen people in 20th century popular music who can claim achievements of this rank.

And yet.

I will defend McCartney’s creativity and experimentalism to the end. Yet my heart-of-hearts favorite Beatle?

John.

John Lennon was a deeply wounded man, a man for whom braggadoccio and cruelty served as a mask for an insecure boy who never stopped resenting all the grownups who thought he was worthless — and who he must have at least occasionally suspected were right. Lennon’s earliest efforts at “honest” songwriting were exercises in formulaic self-pity, no more or less fundamentally honest than the likes of “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” But somewhere around 1965, Lennon figured out how to tap his inner conflicts without resorting to sad-clown poses. He presented the tangle of his psyche with all its contradictions intact, grounding his songs in uncertainty, hesitancy, confusion. Lennon’s finest songs — “She Said She Said,” “Strawberry Fields Forever,” “I Am the Walrus” — are snapshots of a tumbling psyche in mid-churn.

The usual critical line is that McCartney, by contrast, was shallow, preferring to pander with a smiling face and a thumb perenially turned upward. That’s an oversimplification. McCartney aired his share of emotional dirty laundry, most famously in “We Can Work It Out,” positively Lennonian even before his partner added its rather impatient middle eight. But McCartney, ever the forward-thinking optimist, tended to present his emotional dilemmas post-facto, their tensions already resolved. If Lennon’s songs were the work of a skeptic, McCartney’s were the product of a believer. Think of “Let It Be” and its famous opening lines:

When I find myself in times of trouble
Mother Mary comes to me

No sooner is the crisis introduced than the solution arrives. Lennon could have handily written an entire song about finding himself in times of trouble — indeed I seem to recall a song called “Help” written in 1965 or so — but for McCartney, it is merely the precursor for the dramatic uplift, the consolation that is the song’s true message. “Hey Jude” of course is an anthem of consolation, a plea for optimism that is both cannily calculated and wholly heartfelt. Both “Hey Jude” and “Let It Be” are gorgeous songs, and the former is among the Beatles’ very finest, but unlike Lennon’s finest, they begin after the crisis has taken place, not in the middle of it.

So I will always admire Paul’s amazing abilities, his drive, and his belief that the ordinary and the positive are worth celebrating. But it’s John who, briefly and wonderfully, speaks to me.

Somehow it tells you so much about Paul McCartney: the need to present a sunny, all’s-well face to the world; the juvenile streak that manifests so often in his music (even John knew to stay away from dangerous machinery when he was stoned); and most importantly, the essential mystery that has been hiding in the public’s plain sight ever since the Beatles first came to the consciousness of a generation. McCartney was the smiling, puppy-eyed charmer, and he adopted that characterization so expertly that few people to this day have bothered to look past it. They see a shallow media persona and assume it hides a shallow man, and they’re wrong.

It was not always so. Anyone involved in London’s artistic and cultural ferment of the mid-sixties (which John Lennon largely wasn’t, preferring to shuttle his friends out to Weybridge rather than mix it up at nightclubs) knew McCartney as a key figure, popular among the cognoscenti for his intelligence, curiosity, and openness to new ideas. Naturally his cultural pursuits weren’t allowed to infringe on his favored pastimes of getting high and sleeping with women, yet he still found time to help launch London’s first countercultural newspaper and bookstore, talk movies with Michaelangelo Antonioni, collect the work of surrealist painter Rene Magritte years before anyone else thought it worthwhile, be seen with one of London’s most beautiful and talented actresses, and — oh yeah. And write all those songs.

The greatness of McCartney’s songwriting is so self-evident as to be beyond dispute. It need only be pointed out that his work is far less simplistic than is often claimed. “When I’m Sixty-Four” may be a light-hearted toe-tapper, but the fear of aging lying beneath its charming façade can ambush an unwary listener (“indicate precisely what you mean to say/Your’s sincerely, ‘Wasting Away’”). “You Never Give Me Your Money” is a heartbreaking confession of the Beatles’ decaying carmaraderie, simultaneously recriminatory and celebratory; I’ll take its stunningly versatile four minutes over Lennon’s chest-thumpingly obvious “God” any day, thank you. And “Penny Lane,” arguably his finest single achievement, is a joyful, smutty, kaleidoscopic remembrance of childhood every bit as mind-blowing as its more lauded companion piece, Lennon’s “Strawberry Fields.” (Spend a half-hour sometime pondering the nurse who “feels as if she’s in a play” but “is anyway.” Your head may explode.)

So how, despite his undeniable achievements, has McCartney acquired his reputation as a lightweight, middlebrow balladeer, cuddly and unthreatening? Truth be told, the fault is mostly his, and goes beyond the admittedly depressing decline in the quality of his work around the mid- to late seventies. The birth of Safe Paul McCartney can be traced to the summer of 1967, when Rebellious, Intellectual Paul McCartney admitted to a BBC reporter that he had not only taken LSD (the first pop star to make such an admission), but found the experience beneficial, even a little fun. The establishment came down swiftly and mercilessly, deriding him as an “irresponsible idiot” and generally making life difficult for every drug-taking pop star from then on. While John Lennon never lost his taste for outrageous remarks, McCartney has made nary an offensive peep since, and by the mid-eighties was confessing in interviews that his own family was “a lot like” that depicted on The Cosby Show. Thus the perception of Paul McCartney as an ordinary family man, a perception that has preserved his privacy while chopping away at his artistic reputation.

Happily, there are signs that McCartney is finally coming out of the woods and achieving parity with his martyred ex-partner. A pair of studio albums reminded the public of both his songwriting prowess (Flaming Pie) and his rock n’ roll pedigree (Run Devil Run); a new biography called Many Years From Now finally gave him due credit for his role in advancing the Beatles’ art; and the tragic death of his wife Linda, as sincere and humble a celebrity’s wife as any you’d hope to meet, reminded the media that a life of simple decency was nothing to sneer at. Of course there will always be naysayers; Yoko Ono, appalled at what she regarded as a slur on her late husband’s memory, shriekingly attacked Many Years From Now as a compendium of lies, claiming McCartney was merely “Saglieri to John’s Mozart” and that McCartney made little contribution to the Beatles other than insuring they all turned up on time. Her remarks, in their utter falsity and paranoia, make her pitiable. Lennon at his angriest never claimed to be the sole genius behind the Beatles. And when, years later in America, he would weep listening to “My Love” or gently croon “Here There and Everywhere” to Yoko from their white grand piano, he demonstrated something that his widow is still too blinded by jealousy to appreciate: that a song that insinuates itself into your heart is never simple, and never easy. The seeming effortlessness comes from genius, know-how, hard work, and an emotional generosity that’s impossible to feign. May we all live to see them receive the respect they deserve.

Originally published on Pop-Culture-Corn around ’99 or so.

John Doe: What drew me to the project was working with [director] Ulu Grosbard and Jennifer Jason Leigh and Mare Winningham, and it being a great script. But I think it is accurate, to a bar band. Luckily, that’s the only time I’ve played “Hava Nagila.” Guaranteed. And I hope it’s the only time that I play it; not that it’s a bad song, it’s …

[Laughing throughout] It’s of a situation you’re not often in …

Yes. It sort of has a certain … je nais se quoi. [Laughs] But … the only thing that I don’t think a movie has ever captured in the music world is the speak that musicians have, the way that people are constantly capping on each other, and the banter that goes back and forth at rehearsal and just as they’re hanging around. I think that would be really difficult to script; you’d have to record it and then transcribe it. Even in Spinal Tap, it didn’t have that. I think of that sometimes in rehearsals and stuff.

The sickest part about doing acting is that then you find those same situations coming up in your real life. And then you’re wondering what’s real and what’s not.

Flashing back …

It’s just weird. Right around that same time when we were promoting Georgia, I was doing a tour on my own, and there’s this one place in Cincinnati called Sudsy Malone’s, which is a Laundromat-bar-gig.

One-stop shopping.

And it’s very popular with a certain level of musicians, because then they know that there’s one place they’re going to have clean clothes. And you can put your laundry in between soundcheck and the show and have it pretty much done. I’m sure that someone has probably gotten offstage while they’re playing so they can put it in for the …

[Laughing throughout] Put the fabric sheet in the dryer …

Right. [Laughs] I don’t think they’re worried about fabric softener with their jeans and t-shirts.

Your character had a line in that movie, something like “Look Sadie, things are really happening for us, and I don’t want you to fuck us up.” And to most people, for this band, nothing’s really happening; they’re playing bowling alleys. But for that band, to be able to just make a living playing is probably a pretty big deal.

Right, right.

They don’t have to worry about the day job anymore.

I think a lot of people would be better if they did have a day job. And in a way, acting has provided that for me, to do it for the right reasons; to do it because I love it, and because I need to do it, for creativity and stuff. And you can get—when you have a major label contract, you can get distracted, or you can get too far away from the reason you’re doing it. Because it becomes a job. And I think I was there—I was there with that Geffen contract, and I was there with kind of losing the reasons to write songs, or writing songs just for X, and it kind of came back after doing that Rhino record [Kissingsohard, 1995]. I’d collected a bunch of songs to do that record and then toured that, and then, just through personal life and things that happened, I realized I’d lost a sense of discovery, and a sense of searching for something and trying different things. Doing that Kill Rock Stars record [For the Rest of Us (EP), 1998) was—I tried to be innovative and tried to do different things, and carried it over into this one. It's important.

Do you feel that you're still "paying your dues"? Is there a point in your career where you thought "OK, I'm here; this can now be my job, I don't have to worry about where the next paycheck's coming in"?

Everybody has to worry about where the next paycheck's coming in. Because everyone extends themselves over and above what they actually make. [Laughs] Everybody does.

This being America, after all.

Yes. Not just because it’s America, because you develop a lifestyle. I’m still having character-building experiences, let’s put it this way. [Laughs] You know, once you accept the fact that life is struggle, then you can embrace it a little bit better. My priorities are not security and comfort, although it’s nice to have in moderate amounts.

Well, you do have a family to help keep up—

I do.

—and that’s always a consideration.

It’s a great source of love, it’s a great source of happiness, and also it can take you away from what you really need to be paying attention to, which is a difficult balance. My wife is finishing school, she’s been going to school for five years, and so I’ve been taking the kids to dance classes and Girl Scouts and crap like that, and sometimes I have to turn down auditions, and say “I can’t do that, because I’ve got to be home.” And that can be really frustrating. Because you’re not paying attention to what you’re supposed to be doing. But that’s part of the tradeoff.

I was going to ask how the family has affected your songwriting, because it doesn’t seem like there’s a huge shift in the early X stuff to what you do now; it’s the same kind of themes and a lot of the same subject matter.

[Pauses] My kids have provided me with some great lines, in the way that they would mix up words. [Pauses again] It’s kind of separate. And I would be a better poet if I could write simply about day-to-day things, and the kind of pleasure they might give you. I’d be a better writer if I could do that. But you end up being drawn to similar subjects, and those being when things are not right, when things are upside-down and confused, and then writing sort of makes you feel better or helps you sort it out or something. Those moments of change.

Now about the new record [Freedom Is ...], I was reading that you originally released it on the Internet.

Yeah.

I was wondering what brought you to that decision, and are you happy with the results of it?

I don’t know what kind of downloads they’ve had on that … I think until the technology catches up with it, until everybody has a CD burner in their computer, which is becoming more popular now—you can buy computers that have CD burners—I believe that people will pay for it. I don’t think that everybody needs to steal it, or wants to steal it. They need faster download time, and the ability to take it away from their computer; you may store the file there, but you need to be able to put it in your car. Until you can do that, it’s not going to be substantial, but I think that’s maybe a few years away.

The way it happened was eMusic did a benefit record for the refugees of Kosovo, and through my management they asked me if I’d donate a track to it. And then we were sending some tapes around to record companies and they weren’t, you know, beating down our door, so it was an obvious way to have something released. And then spinArt came through and said “You know what? We really get this, and we’d love to put it out.” And they were the most logical choice.

Are you committed to any label, or is that just for that one record? You’re working through spinArt and the next one will be through someone else?

Yeah. But if things go well with spinArt, then I may do another record with them. If things work, I like to continue doing it, like to try to be loyal. But you know … if there was a bigger independent, I doubt if I would ever sign to a major label; I doubt they’d be interested. At this point, I think major labels really have their heads up their asses. I kind of hope that they crumble under their overhead and their desire to get the next hit. I think they’re blowing it, because they’re not developing catalog; they’re not developing people that are going to have careers in two years, or certainly not ten years. Maybe a few. But I would love to see them …

Yeah, they just got slapped for price-fixing CDs, I don’t know if you read about that.

I heard about it.

Five of the labels got hit for—

Really?

—yeah, artificially keeping the prices inflated.

Wow. That’s great.

‘Cause [prices] haven’t gone down since the mid-80s. There was all this talk saying, “Well, they’ll eventually go down once the medium gets more popular,” but they never did and people just kind of forgot about it.

So what’s the repercussions of that? Do they have to—

Well, the consumer might get a couple of dollars off; I don’t know if they reached a settlement agreement yet.

Well that’s the most frustrating thing about retail stores as well. Because they’re just as guilty of that. When I released that record on Kill Rock Stars, we sold it for like four dollars, so if they double the price it would be eight. We’d walk into a record store and it would be 16! A couple of other friends of mine released EPs, and I would go to get their records and they’d be 16 bucks. For five songs. Well of course they’re not going to sell very many of them!

I think what made the labels so mad was chains like Best Buy selling CDs for nine dollars, as a loss to get people into the stores—

Right. And buy a refrigerator.

—and they took extreme exception to lowballing.

But they can do that.

Yeah. Stores like that certainly can. While we’re talking about downloading music, I assume you know Metallica’s suing Napster, and other artists are suing Napster. What’s your feeling on that?

I don’t care. I’m not at that level. I give away tracks for benefit records, or just do it for small fees, things like that, because at this point I’m still establishing who I am as a solo artist. It sounds crazy, but people still think that I play roots music. Certainly Rhino, Kill Rock Stars and this record is not roots music; I mean, maybe it is because it has a verse and a chorus, it’s not drum n’ bass, but I have more in common with Aimee Mann than I do with Dave Alvin. Just the way the music sounds.

I know in the case of Metallica, a lot of the fans are saying “You let fans trade tapes in the early days to get your name around, and now that you’re famous, you’re cutting everybody off.” Is that valid? Or is stealing stealing, no matter …

Stealing is stealing, but I think Metallica … they’re still going to sell records. You are not gonna … that 300,000 records that supposedly got downloaded, people are still gonna go out and buy a physical record. Maybe not all of those. They should just—I don’t know. They should do what they want. I could care less. I understand the concern. I can empathize with them, but at the same time, they should try to put a better spin on it or something, so they don’t look creepy.

Just a bunch of greedy corporate …

Yeah. But I don’t know; that is a question I can’t answer easily. I don’t think anybody can. But I believe that people will, like I said earlier, that people will buy stuff. And they won’t just steal it.

If you’re devoted to an artist, you won’t begrudge them their fifteen bucks for a CD, or you shouldn’t.

The only thing that’s worrisome about downloading to me is that it encourages just getting one or two songs, and not to say that every record is … as one thing, worth it, but still … there may be one song that you don’t get at first. And then, three or four or five listens into it, then it becomes your favorite song, and then you go back to the one that was originally your favorite, and then it shifts around. There are few records that, as a whole, really hold together. But there’s certain records that I still listen to that are new or old, that, as soon as the second song is finished, I start hearing the third one. And then when you hear them out of order, like if someone makes a mix tape and you hear that second song, and then this other song comes it’s like “No no no no no, that’s not right!” [Laughs] “That’s not supposed to be there!”

Maybe what the future has in store is that the whole idea of the self-contained album might fall by the wayside. People just release a batch of songs.

That’s why I love EPs. Twenty minutes is perfect; it’s a perfect kind of—you know our limited attention span these days. [Laughs]

But it’s hard to release those, isn’t it? Store don’t want to carry them.

Stores don’t want to carry them, record companies don’t want to release them, writers don’t want to really write about them because they don’t consider them valid.

I wanted to ask about X. I don’t quite know the status of X today; I heard you broke up …

No no no, we’ve been playing together with Billy Zoom for, like, two years now. Maybe even longer.

I mainly ask because I was reading a few interviews with you semi-recently, and you were mentioning getting together with Exene [Cervenkova, fellow co-founder and Doe's ex-wife] and talking about where you wanted to take the band, and agreeing that it wasn’t what you were both into heart and soul, so maybe it was best not to revive it as a full entity.

Right, right, as far as a recording band, that kind of thing. But when we play, we play the first four records, and have been going back to those records, the catalog of those, and putting new songs in the set. We played two nights [in Chicago] a few months ago, and did two nights at the House of Blues in L.A. just, like, three weeks ago; played that benefit for Dennis Darnell down in Orange County with Social D and Pennywise and Offspring. Man, Pennywise just tore the place up. They’re like Black Flag squared. It was crazy. But you know, the status of X is that we play for people who never saw it and want to see it again. Those two groups. And it’s loads of fun. There’s not a whole lot of pressure; I mean, there’s pressure to play well and to really do it, and do it right.

You just kind of do it when the four of you feel it would be a good time?

Yeah, when we can get the right place and it makes sense, yeah. For fun and profit.

In that order.

Right.

Playing the old songs, does it feel the same? Singing the songs that you wrote upwards of twenty years ago now. Do they mean the same?

Some of ‘em. Once that engine starts, then you’re in it. You’re in it and you’re not intellectualizing about it. And I think once you are singing a song, or playing a song, it kind of defies time; it just creates its own reality and you’re feeling and hopefully projecting that song right.

I was laughing listening to the guy yesterday [at Doe's Noise Pop performance] yelling for “Johnny Hit and Run Pauline” over and over. [Doe laughs.] I kept waiting for you to tell him, “Look guy, this isn’t really the place.”

I wondered why he wasn’t at the House of Blues two months ago. We played it both nights!

There’s a song on the [new] record I wanted to ask you about, “Too Many Goddamn Bands.”

Yeah.

Which I liked, but I assume that my view of it as a writer who’s trying to keep up with the music and failing, because there’s just so much of it—

Yes.

—must be different from your view of it as a musician—

No!

—is it like competing with all these people, or …?

Well part of it is the competition, but it’s … it’s too much everything. On the back of the Freedom Is … CD, there are little parentheses, like one- or two-word descriptions of the song. And for that one, it’s like “And everything else.” Because we’re just overloaded, completely, so it’s incredibly hard to focus on a film, to focus on a scene, a direction in music, because everything’s happening simultaneously and everybody’s vying for people’s attention and people’s attention span is shorter and shorter, and so you don’t want to do anything.

There’s kind of two songs in that song. One is the experience of being in a band, which is the verse, and then the chorus is more like what we were just talking about, the overload everybody experiences. It’s kind of fucked up the way that you have to buy shelf space in record stores, and if you’re stuck in the bins you can forget about selling anything, really, or getting to the people who might want to. Unless you’re going in and specifically requesting a record.

I go into those used record stores, and there’s always that bin of dollar CDs, with all these bands that made CDs and went nowhere; it’s heartbreaking to look at it all.

I know, I know. Or there’s—how many times have you gone to a movie, and you’ve walked out and … “What’d you think?” “It was OK.” [Laughs] To take two years of someone’s effort and all these people’s hard work: “It was OK.” Just sort of—[snaps fingers; both Doe and PCC laugh] gone! I’m sure that those people, if they could hear that, would go “Well wait a minute! Did you see this thing—”

“Didn’t you see that one shot?”

But that’s the way it is.

I guess it’s incentive to try to rise above the pack, but that can provoke a lot of healthy responses and a lot of not-so-good responses, as people try to get seen and get noticed.

I think all you can do is just to be true to yourself and try to … you know, whatever goals you have in a song or in a record or a movie or something like that is to do that the best you can, and then just forget about it. Not to overthink it, not to overintellectualize it, and to realize that as you’re doing it, that’s the best part of it. All the rest of the stuff—the touring, you have to be in the moment for that, enjoy that for what it is, but if the record or the movie doesn’t do well, then—it didn’t do well! For whatever reason. You can be pissed off for a short period of time, but it’s really dangerous to read reviews and to believe them. Because then if you read something good, you think “Oh, well they got it,” but then you have to read something that’s bad. So I tend not to.

Do you listen to your old stuff ever?

Songs? Sure. I don’t listen to much X. You listen to a record so many times, you’re kind of done with it. And you’re thinking about new stuff.

Originally published on Pop Culture Corn in June 2000.

Write a scene showing a man and a woman arguing over the man’s friendship with a former girlfriend. Do not mention the girlfriend, the man, the woman, or the argument.

2.

Write a short scene set at a lake, with trees and shit. Throw some birds in there, too.

3.

Choose your favorite historical figure and imagine if he/she had been led to greatness by the promptings of an invisible imp living behind his or her right ear. Write a story from the point of view of this creature. Where did it come from? What are its goals? Use research to make your story as accurate as possible.

4.

Write a story that ends with the following sentence: Debra brushed the sand from her blouse, took a last, wistful look at the now putrefying horse, and stepped into the hot-air balloon.

5.

A wasp called the tarantula hawk reproduces by paralyzing tarantulas and laying its eggs into their bodies. When the larvae hatch, they devour the still living spider from the inside out. Isn’t that fucked up? Write a short story about how fucked up that is.

6.

Imagine if your favorite character from 19th-century fiction had been born without thumbs. Then write a short story about them winning the lottery.

7.

Write a story that begins with a man throwing handfuls of $100 bills from a speeding car, and ends with a young girl urinating into a tin bucket.

8.

A husband and wife are meeting in a restaurant to finalize the terms of their impending divorce. Write the scene from the point of view of a busboy snorting cocaine in the restroom.

9.

Think of the most important secret your best friend has ever entrusted you with. Write a story in which you reveal it to everyone. Write it again from the point of view of your friend. Does she want to kill you? How does she imagine doing it? Would she use a gun, or something crueler and more savage, like a baseball bat with nails in it?

10.

Popular music is often a good source of writing inspiration. Rewrite Bob Dylan’s “Visions of Johanna” as a play.

11.

Write a short scene in which one character reduces another to uncontrollable sobs without touching him or speaking.

12.

Your main character finds a box of scorched human hair. Whose is it? How did it get there?

13.

A man has a terrifying dream in which he is being sawn in half. He wakes to find himself in the Indian Ocean, naked and clinging to a door; a hotel keycard is clenched in his teeth. Write what happens next.

Originally published on McSweeneys.net.

Most of you reading this probably don’t need to be reminded how wildly anticipated Batman was, how it seemed to promise the restoration to greatness of a character who had languished for decades in camp-TV hell (more on that later). Superman had been the movie of our childhoods: vast, sweeping, touched with reverence and just enough self-deflating humor, it sought to fill you with wonder, an ambition worthy of the greatest superhero ever. Batman, though, would be the movie of our adolescence. It wasn’t going to delight us-it was going to kick ass.

And for the most part it did. Beginning with the massive stone bat symbol that ended the opening credits, Batman was a movie of Gothic excess. From the shadowy Expressionist spires of Gotham City to Jack Nicholson’s calorie-burning turn as the Joker, everything in Batman is both exaggerated and obscured, vibrant and colorful yet hidden in shadows. Watching it joyfully that summer night, it was hard to think how it could’ve been improved: Michael Keaton was a surprisingly capable Batman (or at least a capable Bruce Wayne; as those OnStar commercials have shown, anyone with a decent chin can play Batman), the script was funny (“This town needs an enema!”), and best of all, the movie was dark-just as we knew Batman ought to be.

Except it really wasn’t.

There’s a curious disconnect between the way enthusiastic Batfans (including me) embraced the movie and what’s actually visible on screen, lo these many years later. Certainly, Batman is hardly the sunny, optimistic adventure that Superman was. Roger Ebert disliked the films partly because he always assumed that it would be fun to be Batman, as if anyone other than a borderline psychopath would look forward to donning a silly costume and placing himself in mortal danger every night. Burton, at least, wasn’t that naive, and the few moments of Batman that really qualify as “dark” are the ones where Keaton is allowed to show the toll that being Batman takes on Bruce Wayne’s psyche. We see him in his Batcave, dressed in sombre black and watching a party in his own house (Wayne Manor is more wired than the Nixon White House) from a bank of security monitors, fearfully eavesdropping on his guests; we see him rocking himself to sleep in a pair of gravity boots after a romp in the sack with Vicky Vale. Bits of disturbing ambiguity flash up here and there: when he tells Vicky that parts of rambling Wayne Manor are “very much me,” is he simply referring to the Batcave and its trove of gadgetry? Or is there still a corner of the mansion where Bruce Wayne remembers the happy childhood that was stolen from him?

Such moments are rare, and the rest of the movie is about as “dark” as a vintage Warner Brothers gangster picture, the ones that relished their anti-heroes’ nefarious exploits for 80 minutes only to gun them down mercilessly at the end (remember kids, crime doesn’t pay). From the boozy Det. Eckhart in his Columbo raincoat to Robert Wuhl’s intrepid newshound to Jack Palance as the aging-but-ineffectual crime boss, Batman calls again and again on the stylistic language of B-movie film noir, but without the deep moral ambiguity that suffused that genre at its best. In short, while it might be closer to pastiche than straight-out camp, Batman is far less dark and serious than its gloomy compositions make it appear. Even Danny Elfman’s score, still often held up as the ideal “serious” superhero movie score, is a tongue-in-cheek genre exercise; I can’t hear it without picturing vintage black and white footage of Packards and Cadillacs swinging around corners, tommy guns blazing from their windows.

There’s nothing wrong with this, of course. But I do think it’s time we all lightened up a bit and realized that if Batman took its title character out of the camp ghetto, it didn’t take him very far. Moreover, I realize as I get older that the original “Batman” TV series is nothing to be ashamed of: it’s superbly designed, funny, intelligent, and far more sophisticated than just about any other comedy on the box today. (It had the worst test scores of any ABC show up to that time, and wouldn’t stand a chance in hell of getting on the air now.) It also saved a comic series that was teetering near cancellation; the Batman films, for all their self-conscious distancing from the TV series, probably wouldn’t exist without it.

And finally, in one of those funny accidents of history, the whole process is primed to start up again. With Joel Schumacher having sunk the series into a new morass of cheesy puns, hyperkinetic editing, leather fetishism and banal homilies, Batman needs rescuing today far more than he did in 1989. Supposedly a film adaptation of Frank Miller’s terrific Year One series is now underway that promises to take Batman once again back to his dark, turbulent essence. When that summer comes I have a feeling I’ll be there again, my popcorn and coke (and ticket stub) in hand, once more eager to witness the rebirth of a legend.

Originally written for Entertainment Geekly in June 2003.

“But monsieur,” Frenchy cried, his dishevelled hair falling in his face, “zees boat, she is not rated for depths-”

“Don’t argue with me!” Bill grabbed Frenchy by the collar and held the stolen disk in front of his face. “We’ve got six renegade Russian submarines who will do anything to get their hands on this. We’ve got depth charges falling all around us. And there’s an underground cave system directly beneath us on the ocean floor, which I’ve explored in another documentary here on A&E, The Unexplained: Mysteries of the Depths.”

“Bill, that klaxon’s really cutting into everything,” said Phil, the sound technician. “We might have to loop this when we get back.”

“If we get back,” muttered Frenchy.

Bill tore Frenchy’s beret from his head and slapped him across the face with it. “Frenchy, are you going to give that order … or am I?”

Frenchy sighed. “Mon dieu.” He turned to face his crew. “Take her down. Stern planesman, fifteen degrees down bubble.”

“Mon capitan,” said a crew member, “she will fly apart!”

“Oui,” said Frenchy dully. “Oui.”

As Frenchy gave further orders the deck began to tilt beneath their feet. Charts and papers slid from the table and poured onto the deck. Bill’s cameraman, Carl, grabbed an overhead rail for support while continuing to shoot with his free hand. Bill turned to the lens, pausing as the makeup girl gave him a quick powder.

“On a submarine,” Bill intoned, his resonant voice cutting through the chaos around him, “there’s no such thing as a ‘routine dive.’ As the boat submerges, the pressure on the hull from the surrounding water increases, and so does the tension in the air. There is an added urgency and care in the way these men go about their jobs. They know that, a quarter-mile below the ocean’s surface, there are no second chances. They know that-”

Suddenly a noise like a pistol shot ripped through the cabin.

“What the hell?” said Bill.

“Sacre bleu!” said Frenchy, shouting to be heard over the eruption of conversation among his crew. “The hull rivets, they are flying loose!”

Two more steel bolts burst from their sockets and ricocheted through the cabin. One hit a monitor and shattered it; the other struck Phil in the forehead, killing him instantly.

“Phil!” Bill hollered, holding Phil’s lifeless corpse in his arms. “Noooooo!!”

Carl retreated under the table and continued filming. Men rushed from station to station, ducking their heads and protecting themselves with their arms while all around them the ship groaned and cracked with the ever-mounting pressure. Frenchy surveyed the ruined monitor.

“Main sonar control,” he said, looking down at Bill cradling the dead crew member. “Until we fix her, we are flying blind.”

“We keep going,” Bill said grimly.

“Monsieur Bill, you do not understand. We cannot keep going without-”

“Damn it, Frenchy!” Bill leapt to his feet and threw a solid left into Frenchy’s jaw. Frenchy dropped to the deck. The crew stopped to watch, aghast; an eerie silence fell over the room, punctuated by the increasing groaning of the hull.

“Diving officer,” Bill said, breathing heavily, his face shining with sweat, “what’s our depth?”

The diving officer spoke no English. Another officer read the guage: “Nine hundred and eighty meters.”

“Get us down to one thousand and fifty. Then level your descent and bring us about on a course of 35 degrees, speed five knots. Follow that for two minutes.”

The officer relayed these instructions to the diving officer, who burst into a tirade in impassioned French.

“He says even if the boat does not crush like paper, there is no help for us down there,” the officer translated. “He will not follow this course.”

Bill glanced down at the body of his dead technician, blood from his head still oozing onto the floor. Damn it. It’s all going to be for nothing.

“Take the boat down,” said Frenchy suddenly, pulling himself to his feet. A red welt was growing on his chin. “We have come zees far. We will trust zees American a little longer, heh?” He smiled at Bill, who nodded. He repeated the orders in French, then added, “Sound collision alert. We must be ready for anything.”

Bill and his team crouched down along the wall as the crew drove the sub ever further down. The grinding of the hull plates grew louder, ever louder, until ordinary conversation was impossible. Warning sirens rang incessantly. The lights began to flicker.

“Carl, let’s roll,” Bill said.

“Bill, it’s bedlam in here!” Carl said. “And our sound guy’s dead!”

“Never mind that. There’s work to do. Meg, powder me and then pick up that mike.”

Meg patted the shine from Bill’s face and gingerly picked up Phil’s boom mike. Bill faced the camera once again.

“The sea is an unforgiving, merciless mistress. Even now she tears at the hull of our ship, searching it for weaknesses. We are now engaged in a race against time-a race we never wanted to run. Can we make it to the bottom before our vessel tears apart? Will we find the protection and assistance we need? These questions-”

A terrific crash sounded deep within the ship. Officers shouted in French.

“Hull breach!” Frenchy said. “How bad?”

“Capitan!” an officer yelled. “We have reached the destination, and …”

“And what?” Frenchy replied. “Zees boat, she will be filled with water in five minutes!”

“I cannot be sure,” the officer stammered. “But I could swear … there is another ship alongside us!”

Frenchy looked at Bill, a look of dumbstruck surprise on his face.

Bill smiled at him. “Shall we see who’s at the door?” Then, turning once more to the camera:

“That’s next … here on A&E.”