Manhattan Transfer

The Perfection of Man: I was sitting on the dock of Farmer’s Island in the Damariscotta River in Maine, looking into the water at those little slim silver fish and a starfish the color of a slice of lime that had soaked overnight in a half-finished gin-and-tonic. The minnows were practicing maneuvers for dodging mackerel and the starfish was doing nothing at all unless he was watching with whatever sense a starfish uses to watch. My father walked down the gangplank to the floating dock and said, “Look at the birds.”

A pair of Osprey who nested in the tall pines on the other side of the river had taken flight. They circled in a tightening gyre above the river, slightly downstream from us. “Get the gear ready,” my father said, and I could see he looked happier than ever, his blue eyes shining from beneath his dark and heavy brow. “The fish are coming up river,” he said. The birds were heralds or prophets, and when we fished where they told us to fish, our lines were seldom slack.

Our tackle box was a rusted tin arc. Within the silvery steel lures shined with the reflected orange light of setting sun. I attached a two-and-a-half inch dimpled silver lure to my father’s rod, and a one-inch trapezoidal blue-and-silver lure to my own. When I looked back at my father in the dusk of that Maine summer I felt absolutely sad, watching him pour scalding coffee onto his tongue. The cup steamed and he grimaced, and although I wasn’t more than ten-years old I knew he did this before we went fishing so he could forget about the effects of that day’s alcohol for a few hours.

We walked together back up the gangplank, and onto the pine-needle covered ground of the island. We went a few feet up the path, my father letting me take the lead, and then stepped through the trees and down onto the rocky shore. When we were parallel with the gyre of the Osprey, we stopped and stepped into the river. Even in August, the brackish water was bracingly cool, numbing first your toes and then your ankles. We stood about calf-deep in the river, our eyes moving between the birds and the river-bed, trying to watch the heralds and out footing.



We didn’t speak much when we fished. My father liked silence, and although I was usually very talkative, I kept quiet while we fished, in part because I was pretty sure this following of birds and fishing was part of our religion. In my Catholic school I’d seen a reproduction of a painting in which the Holy Spirit took the form of a bird during the accomplishment of the virginal conception of Christ, and the nuns had told a story in which Christ instructs the Apostles to fish in a certain place. And, of course, John the Baptist baptized Christ while they stood in a river, although I suspected the rivers of Israel were not as cold as the rivers of Maine.

My father was the best fisherman I knew, which is to say that at that time he was superior to all other men in my eyes. His cast looped and arched and floated on the wind, and seemed to be as much a part of nature as the circle of the Osprey or the synchronized movement of a school of minnow. Later, years later, when I had read enough of the great books to fairly count myself as part of western civilization, I realized that I had looked upon my father’s fishing like Homer’s Greeks looked upon the fleet-footed fighting of Achilles. Before the invention of charisma, men saw greatness as something that you could behold with your eyes, character manifested in physicality. This is how it was with me when I was very young—I knew nothing of the virtues or of the soul apart from excellence revealed in the flesh.

I caught the first fish that day. It began with a slight tug on the line, and then when the fish realized it had been hooked it made a dash for deeper water. The line spun out from the reel, and the drag clicked away. I let the fish run, and then yanked my rod up to secure the hook. As I let it down, I reeled in the slack. This is how we brought in the fish: yanking the rod up, letting it down slow while reeling in the slack on the line. I had caught a beautiful green-striped and silver-bellied Atlantic mackerel, about eleven inches in length. The birds had led us to the right place.

Between us we caught a dozen mackerel that evening, fishing together until it got dark. My father helped me climb back onto the shore, and then walked up the path towards the cabins with our catch. I was left to return to the dock to retrieve the tackle box and his coffee cup and to unset the hooks from the rods. The sky where the Osprey had flown was starting to come alive with a meteor storm, bright darts that moved only when you didn’t look for them. The wind on the river and the river on the rocks were the only sounds in the darkness. I finished my work quickly, eager to get back to the kitchen cabin, where my mother would be frying mackerel in butter, garlic and lemon.

I Have Been One Acquainted With The Blog: It was half-past eleven on Sunday and the red light indicating voicemail blinked challengingly from my phone. I had already had five meetings. It was the four days before the close of the sale of the consumer products division of a well-known public company. The division that makes things that prevents scents from arising where nature thinks scents should arise and hairs from growing where nature thinks hair should grow.

Only Monika Koslowski, my secretary, was permitted to disturb me with double espressos and gentle encouragement. “Do not forget the three o’clock conference call regarding European takeover regulations,” she had reminded me. I had authored a piece for the Wall Street Journal about the Future of the Failure of European Takeover Law, which argued that Public Choice theory and Austrian Economics showed that not only was a unified E.U. takeover regime unwise it was also unlikely. This had brought me respect from practitioners of international financial law and vexed the proponents of E.U. harmonization.

It had been an hour since my last espresso. I felt my soul melting into my Aeron chair. I needed Monika but she wasn’t answering the intercom. I wandered into the hallway, to Monika’s desk. She was looking at something on the interweb, and oddly enough it wasn’t her rankings in Tetris. Only two weeks ago she had stormed into my office cursing about someone called “Flora Fanatucci” who had displaced her in the top ten of North American online Tetris players.

“What is that?” I asked her.

“It’s a blog,” she said proudly, her heavily made-up eyes sparkling in the fluorescent lights.

In the hours that followed I found my strength returning as I studied the blogs and lived, in their digital sphere, the decadent lives of the bloggers in their ever moving drama of trivia, gossip, lust, self-and-substance abuse. If found a respite from the heady world of high-finance, of movers-and-shakers, of Men-In-Full. I escaped into a world of self-abasement, where every accident of fortune and misfortune was chronicled in detail that would have stunned the, uhm, otherwise, err, unstunable. It was a beautiful feeling. I know now that my life was by contrast a dull thing, with its promise of a successful career, its blousy young blonde women who dreamed of leaving their jobs in advertising and returning triumphantly to Darien with husbands and children, its one-hour brunches followed by tennis and memberships in reputable social clubs. I am aware of a life all around me of dark enrichment, in which every moment is a tiny, vicious little spike of evil humor and in which every love affair has the decency to turn out badly.

Sitting in these belligerent pinstripes, I dream of the blog life, the blog world; dream of being a part of it. I dream of eating brunch with Elizabeth, Maccers and Eurotrash. It is often brunch in blogosphere. I have on Diesel Jeans and a t-shirt with the word ‘Homewrecker’ inscribed over the face of a well-known actress. The bearded Scottish waiter is brining us another round of watermelon mojitos. Or perhaps my thoughts wander over to Café Felix: D-Nasty is leading the patrons in a Hey Ya! inspired conga-line that snakes through the tables attracting glances through the large windows from those who are not fortunate or European enough to be having brunch with us at Felix. Or perhaps I am not at Felix, either. I am lazily picking at an exquisite omelet that I will not eat because I am skinnied up on diet pills at the Four Seasons where the Week is holding a conference on the subject of lying to our lovers.

It is brunch. I am in Provence, not the one in France but the one on MacDougal Street. We are planning elaborate theme parties that will never happen. We have lifted our Bloody Mary’s toward the sky. “To decadence!” I say. Maccers glass is raised the highest because of the extraordinary shoes she is wearing.

Ah, blog dreams! How dear to me now are the Ritalin Readings. I have studied each one, such that I feel I was there. They are perfect little ink-stains. No. Not ink-stains. They are the pen-drawings the girls used to do on their jeans and on their converse. The Hipster Blogger Lindsay Robertson stands before a crowd, her shortened blonde locks casting a halo around her animating face. She is prepping the audience for a very short reading by an even shorter young woman. Anonymous Outsider lurks in the shadows, anonymously outside. Lockhart Steele and Blubox are entertaining a group of young women who can only be described a bevy of, uhm, young women.

I live the lives of other people in my fancy: I have a huge dog and a smaller dog and I live in Kentucky. All I know of her is that her dogs eat her dates and that she often wakes up surrounded by porn and whiskey. It is all I know and yet it is enough; for lying on her carpet near her unmanageable pets she embodies perfection; and I know about it, and it is mine.

It is brunch. I am with hereitype and Overserved in Schillers Liquor Bar. It is brunch. I am with Ash, who is being mistaken by the waiter for Johnny Knoxville. We are eating sushi for brunch. Or I am with Maud Newton and Terry Teachout. Terry and I are disputing which year of the American Mercury was the periodical’s apex. Or I am with SAC, eating brunch in his car, and we are planning to Crush the Bots.

All over the blogosphere it is brunch! It is brunch at the Applestore. Nick Denton is perched upon a stool; he is telling us that no-one will get rich from blogging. Jason Calcanis tells us that only he and Nick Denton will get rich from other people blogging. Jeff Jarvis, who is the moderator, tells a joke that the audience finds very funny, especially the girl to my left with a stylized New York City skyline imprinted across her ample bosom. It is brunch in the many-roomed mansion of Uncle Grambo in Detroit. I have walked out to the pool with Peabs to smoke Meth, which is what bloggers do in the Midwest. And now I am swimming in the pool for we have smoked all of our meth. I am not wearing any clothes at all. It is brunch in Los Angeles. I am on the lot of Universal Studios. I feel ashamed that I am taking up so much of Lindsay Lohan’s attention. It is that mysterious time which is neither breakfast nor lunch. I am in the Lower East Side apartment of trust fund baby Andrew Krucoff. There is a bridge which connects his apartment on the east side of Suffolk street to his apartment on the west side of Suffolk street. The eastern apartment is uncluttered and spare, as if torn from the pages of Wallpaper. The western decorated with ironic clutter, as if lifted from Welcome to the Johnson’s. It is brunch at Soho house, where a woman in a leopard print shirt is exposing her breasts to me. It is brunch in the blogosphere. I am lapping burgundy off the small of the back of a young woman who has a blog about handbags. It really is brunch in my office. I am transfixed in front of my laptop, considering whether to eat all or just half of the grapefruit I have brought into the office. I am wearing my belligerent pin-stripes. I cannot help wondering why Elizabeth Spiers has been so hard on someone called Graydon Carter? For it is brunch. I said, Brunch. Monika! Bring me an espresso!


[No apologies to E.B. White]

Legends of the Fall: “The most important thing to remember is that The Humans don’t matter,” Simon said.

As far as I could work out ‘The Humans’ was Simon’s phrase for the people who didn’t matter, so this was entirely circular. More specifically, The Humans were the Normals—people with jobs and families and who didn’t get drunk. Simon tried not to see them at all.

I learned most of what is worth knowing about the world from Simon, even if a good deal of it was wrong. And he was wrong about this. The Humans mattered. In fact, they were necessary. They were the canvas against which we used the jet engines drugs and booze to splatter our lives. They were the Athenians voting to kill Socrates. And we were, well, if not quite Socratic, perfectly willing to drink Hemlock or anything else you could pour into a glass with ice.

People who don’t know much about drinking think good drinkers are one of two types. Either someone who drinks a lot, or someone who drinks a lot of the time. In Simon’s opinion this confuses volume with velocity. Simon could swallow half a fifth of scotch in the time it took you to smoke two cigarettes, back before we knew it was too dangerous to allow people to smoke in a room where someone is drinking a half a fifth of scotch. He drank gin between scotches, if only to give the bartender time to refill his glass. Pints of beer evaporated under his gaze. Still, Simon was wrong about what makes a good drinker.

A good drinker drinks fast but he does it with implosive energy, the blackhole kind of reverse-polarity, anti-matter energy that sucks in everyone around him. At the end of a night he is not notable as the drunkest person in the bar because he is surrounded by the drunkest people in the bar. They are a mess, they have drank too much, and tomorrow they will feel an odd shamefulness about it. The good drinker is the same way except that he lacks one thing that they have: a cause for drinking. He has provided them a cause but he is his own cause, the prime mover of dipsomania.

Sexy English Girl: I think you should not romanticize drinking so much. Talk about something else please.

Everything else I know seems inappropriate.

Sexy English Girl: Nothing is inappropriate, honey.

Well, you asked for it. I am going to tell you the story about what happened when Thomas Jefferson cut down a cherry tree.

Sexy English Girl: I thought that was George Washington.

Indeed. Apparently there was a lot of it going around. Look, one day Tom Jefferson was a little English colonial doing colonial things like drinking tea and not getting lost in the woods when he saw a magnificent cherry tree. There was a serpent in the tree, and it said to him: “Eat one of these here apples.”

“What apples? Those are cherries,” Tom said.

“Same difference. They didn’t exactly have apples in the Garden of Eden either. It was pomegranates or something, I forget. Apple is merely a convenience. Just eat one.”

The serpents reference the Garden of Eden reminds you of something or another, you’re not sure what. But you don’t think eating fruit offered up by vague serpents is a good idea. “No, thanks. Got any tobacco?” you say.

Sexy English Girl: How have I suddenly become involved in this?

Oh, sorry. When you’ve written too much in the second person present it gets hard to write any other way. You just know that when Jay McInnery wrote that profile of Mr. Big the first draft began, “You walk into a restaurant with Mr. Big, who is talking about his ferarri and his supermodel girlfriend.” Can I keep on?

Sexy English Girl: How long have you been drinking?

The whole time. Any, what happens next is that Tom takes out an axe, and chops the tree down.

Sexy English Girl: Is that it?

I’m afraid so. I told you it might not be appropriate.

Sexy English Girl: You are an odd boy.

Fair enough. We live in an odd world. My father used to say, “Life is unfair.” I always imagined that this meant that life was the opposite of a fair, and the World’s Fair in particular. Instead of miraculous displays of the future of the world we were stuck with pedestrian reality of an all too local present. My father also used to say, “Up and at ‘em” every morning and I thought he was saying, “Up and Adam”—which I took to be a reference to Garden of Eden and the Fall. It’s all tied together, you see.

Back before KGB pills dulled hangovers and diet pills sped us through the day following a binge, drinking was something that could only be handled by the elite. And when I say handled, I mean taken to its devastating conclusions. It was a challenge to wreck your prospects through drinking because it hurt too much. You woke up in gutters, with your head split open. It was disgusting and beautiful, like a rotted peach in an old pair of addidas shell-top sneakers. Which reminds me of a woman who I met at Hi-Fi last night.

Sexy English Girl: Yes. Talk about women. I like when you go on about women. Like the proof of God on a spring day.

I like it when you speak to me in hypertext, but I’d rather not. I’m not very good with them, and they are always angry when I write about them. If I write about a woman I know, she thinks I ought not to have done it. If I write about another woman, she wants to know why I am writing about other women.

Sexy English Girl: That’s too bad. You’re a bit dull on everything else.

Where Predator Becomes Prey: The first time I saw my father fishing was on Nobadeer beach in Nantucket. Nobadeer is a difficult to reach spot south of the airport, at the end of a long, unpaved sandy road. It was about twelve miles from the cottage my family rented just outside of the village of Siasconset. We formed a sort of camp with the families who spent the summer in neighboring cottages. On fishing nights the entire camp would drive out to Nobadeer for a bonfire. We’d cook, roast marshmallows, the adults would drink, the younger children would play on the dunes as the sun went down and gather around the fire when the long grasses became to seem menancing in the dark, and the older children would flirt with each other in the darkness. But most importantly, the men would fish.

To my mind, there was no greater fisherman in Nantucket than my father. With bright blue eyes and dark, wavy hair, my father was an athletic man who played football in college and had become a runner, golfer and tennis-player later. He fished calf-deep in the surf with a long, thick rod armed with a heavy silvery lure. His cast was a big, powerful thing. He held the rod with both hands, one near the base for leverage, the other just about the reel. He’d throw the rod behind him and then loop it forward. On a good cast—and most of his casts were good casts—the lure would hit the Atlantic just beyond the wave break, where the bluefish lurked for food. It looked to me like one swift motion but I know now it was really a series—the bail flipped, the thumb on the line to hold it in place during the backstroke, the pull of the rod backwards, the pause as the line reached its full extension behind him, and then the pull forward with the lower-hand and the release of the line. Finally, as the lure struck the sea, a turn of the crank to flip back the lure and lock the line.

He fished for blues on the Nobadeer. In July these ranged from two to seven pounds, but as the summer went on, the fish gained weight and power, some weighing up to twenty pounds. When a blue took the line, his reel would let out a spray of whirls and clicks as the fish pulled against the drag. The sound was unmistakable and would bring everything else at the bonfire to a halt while he began his contest with the fish. Beaching a bluefish in late summer involved not just skill-—keeping the line tense enough so that the fish couldn’t shake loose but not so tense that it risked breaking in the crashing surf—-but power. The reels and cranks were sturdy mechanicals but didn’t offer that much in leverage for bringing in a blue. The technique involved pulling the rod backwards, literally yanking the unwilling fish shoreward, then releasing the rod forward and reeling in the slack of the line. The bluefish were predators and did not willing submit to this conversion into prey.



As he reeled in the fish, my father would back up onto the beach. The bluefish were known to attack their captors as they were brought in, so he didn’t want to be standing in the surf when his fish was brought close. Dragged out of the water, the fish would performs fantastic flips and bends, its blue-green and silver scales flashing moonlight in what I sometimes imagine to be a protest against this early demise. Other times I thought it was a tribute to my father's fishing.

A Chorus of Complexes: It was the morning after one of the nights from which you get awoken by your own self-loathing. I was passed-out in my living room, experimenting with the adhesive properties of vomit on hardwood flooring, when my self-loathing found me. Only it wasn’t really vomit since the only thing I ate the day before was an entire bottle of scotch and about forty ice-cubes. Two per glass you see.

Self-loathing kicked me in the head to wake me up, and then shoved a dead cat in my mouth to make me remember what it tastes like when you have no soul. Everything I was wearing was going to have to be burnt.

What happened next was surprising. Self-loathing looked down upon my increasingly mortal coil and took pity. She began to sing to me. The tune was that one you remember from when you were a little child. I’m talking, of course, about the ice-cream truck song.

It turns out that there are words to that song, and Self-loathing knows the words. It is a song about the wine-dark sea, the unforgetting mountains, the rosy-fingered dawn and, mostly, about how I have more issues than Maccers has shoes. More issues than D-Nasty has Latina lovers. More issues than Eurotrash has, well, issues.

Each verse named a different psychological complex that was ruining my life. Some were familiar, others were not so familiar.

My Oedipal Complex. Not really interested in fucking my mother, thank you. Let's talk about my father. Those nights he’d stumble home an hour before dawn and then my mother shouting and crying and wondering how her life had come to this. Oh, Helen, there are no Argives coming to your rescue! And those nights he would rouse me from bed to sing Kevin Barry. Or end up in a screaming match with my mother. Or, if the bottle had been deep enough, tell me again about the night he went out on a boat with his brother Dennis and a cousin into the Long Island Sound, and how they were swimming and how Dennis never surfaced, and how they never found him. Those are pearls that were his eyes, and telling your eight year old son that story in a scotch soaked slur is just about like exposing the little lad in hopes that with his death you will avert the prophecy that he will one day destroy you. This first verse of the ice-cream song reminded me that I am waiting at the cross-roads and my father rides with the caravan that is approaching.

My Ajax Complex. No. Sorry. Not out to kill my cleaning lady. This one is all about the clouds about the fallen sun--watching others rise to glory while sinking into inner darkness. Congratulations on becoming a Managing Director. What wonderful children you have. I love your new column in the New York Times. That piece you did for the New Yorker was hilarious. In a fit of madness, Ajax the warrior destroys his final enemy. It’s either himself or me. I forget.




My Odysseus Complex. You know this one, right? I’m not coming home on time, the ice-cream song chants. I’ll be out all night with Circe. She’s a doll, and she has her own island. We sail there four sheets to the wind, and I’m the captain aboard the SS Blackout. She’s smells of scotch because, actually, she is scotch. With two ice cubes in a tall glass because our hand trembles. Just like it did with you, Dad. Is this the underworld? Is that Dennis I see there? After awhile, Dennis, we had to stop looking. It was dark out by then. I had to row the boat ashore, to go into the house and tell everyone I’d lost you. So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. And beneath this gashed and puckered mirror a dark body was slowly borne by one of the backward currents.

My Paris Complex. Think Trojan War, not dog-shitted streets. She’s not mine but I love her, and I’ve made her love me but I do not deserve her. I won her with tricks and flattery. And because of this I’m afraid that I will bring pain and ruin to everyone I know. You fight, my brother. I want to drink to forget but self-loathing keeps singing along to the tune of the ice-cream song.

My Agamemnon Complex. In the end I will be destroyed by the woman I love. Self-loathing is my Casandra, and I can see the daggers in my love's eyes. They were forged in the fire where I burnt our daughter, little Effie. Which is to say that I will deserve it when I am destroyed. But isn’t there a chance at forgiveness? Perhaps borne of admiration for all I have accomplished? No, no. You wouldn’t forgive him, would you? You had to shout, and scream, and destroy him for his vice. You couldn’t just let him be drunk and tired and pass out. And let us sleep. Your sons, living in the next room of the apartment. Alone, despite the fact that there are four of them in the room, because they are too scared to talk and it is too dark to see. Please, please, Mom, just let us all sleep tonight, the little ones and Dad too. Let him dream that Dennis did not hear the Siren’s call.

Then Self-Loathing ended her song, and told me I was late for work. My insides felt like they’d been dragged through the sewers of NYC. And since I could not remember anything from the night before, I was in no position to argue that they hadn’t. But somewhere, deep in my gut, I knew that I needed a frozen explosion of cherry, lemon and raspberry flavored ice in a rocket shaped pop.

The Logic of Torture In Iraq:

Q: (sighing) Now, what about this picture?
Taibbi: (nostalgic) Oh, that. There we're sodomizing the prisoner with a chemical lighting unit.
Q: Why?
Taibbi: Why? What do you mean, why?
Q: We mean, why?
Taibbi: Look, it's the same thing I told Le Monde. What would you do in that situation? Seven-thousand miles from home, all these guys behind bars?shit, when are you ever going to get a chance again to sodomize a guy with a chemical lighting unit? I mean, I'm 34 years old already. Carpe diem, dude!
Q: What do you mean, it's the same thing you told Le Monde?
Taibbi: Just now. When you guys gave me my phone call.
Q: You called Le Monde?
Taibbi: I was going to call my mother, but then I thought to myself, hell, I can talk to my mother later! Then I thought about calling a lawyer, but I ended up ditching that idea, too. So I called Le Monde.
Q: Jesus! What did you tell them?
Taibbi: Oh, all kinds of stuff. They were like, 'Are those photos for real?' And I was like, shit, that wasn't the half of it! We did stuff that would have broken the camera if you tried to take a picture of it. It was fucking sweet! I told them this one story about a guy, just an ordinary guy, he was actually one of the quieter ones?anyway, we took him and shoved his head completely up a horse's ass. Just to see if it would fit! You'd be amazed, but it did.
Q: Um?
Taibbi: And then they were like, did you do this on your own, or was there clearance from a superior? And I was like, a superior? Hell, we had carte blanche from the president himself! A written presidential order!
Q: Wait? Is that true?

[The Abu Ghraib days were the best of my life--By Matt Taibbi.]

The ultimate irony hat:


[The George W. Bush Online Store--Farm Ranch Team]

Barbie Shaped Women:

"In Western societies, the cultural icon of Barbie as a symbol of female beauty seems to have some biological grounding," concludes the team. "I would be the last person to propagate Barbie," Jasienska notes wryly. "But when you think about the hourglass shape, Barbie is sort of the symbol."

Why does "propagate Barbie" sound so dirty?

[New Scientist--Barbie Shaped Women Are More Fertile]

And sipping martinis out of the same dirty glass:

"We like to refer to it as an empire, which is a complete misnomer, you know, as its kind of a collection of misfits in their underwear at home, you know, under one umbrella."

[Choire Sicha Reveals the Secrets of Blogging to NPR.]

Also, it's bad luck to sit under your umbrella indoors. At least go up to the rooftop, lie on a towel, and pretend you can afford a place on the beach.

Are you an Academy member or know someone who is?
Our friend Mitch McCabe has made a student film called "highway 403, mile 39" and the wise folks who are in charge of these things have nominated it for a Student Academy Award. There is screening for the final voting on Wednesday May 12. If she wins she gets money to pay off the credit card it took to make it, as well as a free trip to LA with a hotel and stuff.

If you are an Academy Member, go to the films and vote for our Mitch. If you know someone who is an Academy Member, get them to vote for Mitch.

Amazing Study Finds People Care What Women Look Like:

In all of these three studies, women were more accurate than men in describing their partners. In addition, participants of both genders were more accurate in their descriptions when their partners were women than when the partners were men.

Women in general may be more memorable than men because their hair and clothing styles and use of jewelry tends to be more varied than that of men. For example, in many offices men may look similar in their suits and ties. But women may be wearing necklaces and earrings, or have other jewelry or clothing that makes their appearance stand out more, Horgan said.

[Women Remember Appearances Better Than Men, Study Finds]