Here We Go Again: Foxcon Report Retracted by “This American Life”

I was surprised when a friend commented on my last blog, saying it seemed like I was “writing just for writers,” because I spent the post venting about nonfiction writers who twist or alter facts to create a better story. When a fresh fraud broke this week—“This American Life” retracting their Apple factory exposé—I thought about those comments, but I couldn’t help myself. I had to write again.

I get that the writer I referenced in my last post wasn’t a household name, but I was writing more about the issue of truth-telling itself. Shouldn’t truth-telling—whether it’s in a nonfiction book or a newscast or a bank statement—be everyone’s concern?   Shouldn’t we all demand some level of accuracy and integrity?

I realize we live in an age where facts seem fluid—history is constantly rewritten, photographs are endlessly altered, news is spun one way and then the other, depending on whether it’s on NPR, Fox News, or the Colbert Report—but does that mean we shouldn’t care? I’m not talking about taking the story-telling out of nonfiction, or turning nonfiction books into dry list of facts and dates and places—but I refuse to accept that art comes before integrity or that the two can’t coexist.

But what on earth do I know—I’ve never been on “This American Life,” and my book hasn’t been published, much less been reviewed by the New York Times—maybe all I need is a good old-fashioned scandal and my career will take off. And if I can’t get embroiled in one, I’ll just make it up as I go along. . .

Truthiness

It’s been a while since I’ve posted so I figured I’d better come up with some excuses for why the blog’s been silent . . . let’s pick one, shall we?

1. I’ve finally succumbed to my celebrity gossip obsession and now spend most days and nights fervently surfing the net for salacious news tidbits on former child stars gone bad . . .

2. I’ve thrown the manuscript into the backyard firepit, deciding I’ll have better luck if I write one of those memoirs where I work in a cupcake shop for a year or I join the Merchant Marines or I move to a villa on the Rhine and rediscover my inner child or renew my spirituality or rejuvenate my old “glass half-full” view of life and the movie rights will be sold before the ink’s even dry on the contract. . .

3. I’m hunkered down arguing with my fact-checker, John D’Agata-style, trying to convince him even though my manuscript, My Brief History of Sex Education, is a memoir, I’d far prefer to attest to the manuscript’s “truthiness” than attest to its truth. After all, memory is a funny and fallible thing. . . 

But I’ve never been much of a liar so I’ll be pathetically honest and admit it’s none of the above, though the John D’Agata controversy has stirred my inner fact-checker—that little voice I hear as I write that asks, “Is that really how it happened? Is that really how you felt then?” And they’re tough questions to answer, especially when writing memoir, because unlike essays, memoirs are nonfiction in the form of a novel. We use facts to attain the truth, but we also have to tell a great story. The great story is why we LOVE memoir, right? And the truth of a story just adds to its appeal. It’s why we ask, “Did that really happen?” after finishing a book. It’s why we’re prepared to be transfixed by any movie prefaced by “Based on a true story. . . ”

But you can’t—or you shouldn’t—preface a memoir or a piece of what you’re claiming is nonfiction with the words “based on a true story,” which is essentially what John D’Agata has done. For those of you new to the D’Agata brouhaha, he’s recently published a book in which he argues with his fact-checker over actual facts vs. truthiness in his memoir (my words, not D’Agata’s—or rather my words plus my favorite Stephen Colbert word). In the book, D’Agata actually claims that facts are different from truth and thus facts can be changed if they result in greater truth or better art. And D’Agata isn’t tweaking little facts here and there because he doesn’t quite remember the actual course of events; he’s taking verifiable, irrefutable information—such as the method by which a boy killed himself one night in Las Vegas—and altering it for greater impact. If you want the full story and his mind-boggling argument, here’s an article from the  New York Times.

A sample of John D'Agata's story after the fact-checker has his way with the ubiquitous red pen.

It is true (and, I hope, factual) that writers are artists—we want to create something whole and beautiful, even if memory is a funny and fallible thing—and it’s tough sometimes to know how far to go when filling in those gaps, hard to know what role nostalgia or bitterness or shame should be allowed to play.

Memory

And, having read D’Agata’s work in the past, I absolutely recognize his talent and skill. But I don’t believe we should use that creativity to convince ourselves that the ends justify the means—memoir is not Machiavellian. The struggle in creating art is the talent of working with what you’ve got—and in memoir that’s your facts as well as the truth of what those facts lead to. You mess with one, you mess with the other.

There have been many responses to the D’Agata book and the NY Times interview, and many suspect (rightfully so I believe) that D’Agata went looking for controversy as part of a self-promotional scheme—after all, success now is achieved by 1% work and 99% just getting your name out there—but either way I felt compelled to take a minute from the manuscript to join in on the debate. My friend and fellow memoirist, Dinty Moore, also wrote a succinct commentary if you’re looking for a more thorough discussion of the fact or fiction debate. . .in Brevity. 

The Thanksgiving Post: The Last Waltz

After I take my pumpkin pie out of the oven and before I dive into solving the equation of x = y x 15 (+/- 30)–where y = weight in pounds and x equals total minutes in oven and (+/- 30) is the time it takes for any turkey to either come out absolutely perfect or, alternately, pink in the middle and black on the outside leading to a Thanksgiving where mashed potatoes will serve as the main course–I will take one of those minutes to reflect on my favorite Thanksgiving Day movie.

 Thirty-five years ago, The Band decided to throw a little concert on Thanksgiving to commemorate the end of an era spent on the road. They opened up the Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco, served up a few thousand turkey dinners, and then played music all night with a bunch of their friends. And since one of their friends is Martin Scorsese, we all have the privilege of watching the night play out in the film, The Last Waltz.

The boys play nice on stage, which is just one reason The Last Waltz is one of the greatest concert films ever—fantastic for its footage of all these terrific musicians playing at their peak. But backstage it’s just another classic Thanksgiving, full of all the love and bitterness and age-old grievances that every family has after so many years stuck together.

Robbie Robertson is the big mouth, commandeering every conversation and taking credit for whatever he can, while Levon Helm sits and smokes, interjecting wry comments in a slow, careful drawl, barely containing the loathing for his blowhard brother behind a polite, Southern smile. Rick Danko is your happy-go-lucky ameliorator—the middle kid I guess—who drinks too much and plays the sad clown, wishing everyone could just get along, and Richard Manuel and Garth Hudson are your classic bachelor brothers, shy and eccentric and in the shadows.

Every other guy in the concert is a cousin or long-lost uncle—from Ronnie Hawkins and Dr. John to Neil Young and Van Morrison—and every other girl is singing backup or hiding out in the kitchen (except for Joni Mitchell, who of course is the exotic, astonishing aunt that everyone’s a little in awe of). Neil Diamond is there just so everyone can whisper “Who invited that guy?” before Bob Dylan comes out to lead a heartfelt and satisfying sing-along before we all escape back home.

So if you’re looking for reasons to slip away from your own family for a few moments today, or if you’re on your own this holiday, waxing nostalgic (or not) for Thanksgivings gone by, take a minute for The Last Waltz. Thanks to You Tube you can watch pretty much the entire movie in a series of three-minute clips, so I’ll leave you with my favorite for today—in memory of Rick Danko and Richard Manuel—because every Thanksgiving should begin with a moment of silence for those who won’t be pulling up a chair to the table.

Happy Thanksgiving.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6QxPkXzEQ4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cqJJdiG61jo

Thanks Gerry

     My friend and teacher, Gerry Shapiro, would have laughed at my last blog, a recounting of a near-death experience with a vacuum that was as pathetic as it was unspectacular. Ezra Pound might have waxed tragic about life slipping by like a field mouse not shaking the grass (before we meet our end in a stupid and embarrassing fashion), but that’s precisely what Gerry would find funny about our time here on earth.

When I heard Gerry had died, I was reminded again of how he delighted in exploiting those neuroses in fiction, creating characters who worried so much about everything that they inevitably pitched headlong into horribly awkward situations entirely of their own making, the theory being that the best way to excise fears is by making their worst nightmares come true.

I also thought of how much I learned from Gerry and how productive I was under his tutelage—in Gerry’s classes I wrote what became the first chapter of My Brief History of Sex Education as well as several short stories that will become the basis for my next book once I put this first one behind me. One reason I flourished was because Gerry recognized in me another anxious, uptight soul, but more important was that he taught me—in class and with his writing—how essential it is to create the imperfect person.

My early stories were full of naïve and helpless characters—people who rode the waves of life in a near-constant state of befuddled surprise—and Gerry was remarkably patient with them and with me. But soon I learned—from Gerry the teacher and Gerry the writer—that it’s also important to show the dark side of your characters.

The characters in Gerry’s stories—my favorite creation of his was Leo Spivak—can be charming and ingratiating and funny, but then the page turns, the mood shifts, and that other side comes out. The vindictive side, the vengeful side, the side that makes a reader catch her breath and say, “Did Leo really just do that?” (And I won’t tell you what Leo does—just read Bad Jews or watch The King of the Corner and you’ll quickly see what I mean.)

One question we often try to answer—in fiction or memoir or life—is why bad things happen to good people. And that’s probably the question I began with when I wrote my first stories for Gerry’s classes—but the trickier and more interesting questions Gerry forced me to tackle are why good people do bad things to other good people and why on earth they’re forgiven after they do. They’re certainly questions I had to face in My Brief History of Sex Education because despite my early fondness for the befuddled ingénue, I have certainly been responsible for more than a few moral failings myself. It would be disingenuous if not outright deceitful to pretend that I had been an innocent, and the book is far better for it.

What I also learned from Gerry is that the reason we are so often granted forgiveness—and the reason we grant it ourselves—is because our lives are left unfinished. There’s always another chapter, there’s always another edition, there’s always another revision. So we grant others the chance we want ourselves—the chance to finally get it right. Gerry told me he used to agonize over his stories that had been published in literary magazines—he’d read them over and over and beat himself up over typos or mistakes or stilted dialogue or endings he wished he’d rewritten—until he realized that the publication was just one more stage in the process. “I can fix it before the book comes out,” he said. “It’s not the end of the world.” And he was right. We can endlessly revise our stories and our lives.

And I don’t think death ends that process of revision, that chance for redemption. Gerry won’t be continuing Leo Spivak’s story here on earth, but Leo’s story—like Gerry’s, like mine and yours—will continue because there’s an infinite chance for another story, another chapter, another chance for forgiveness. (And yes, Gerry often commented on my habit of repetition—“Kate, you have a way of repeating words and phrases over and over—it works sometimes, but sometimes it really doesn’t. Keep an eye on that.”)

So Gerry’s friends will continue his work—his fellow writers, his students, and of course the wonderful writer and teacher Judith Slater, his wife—and we will write that next chapter, we will write that next story. And others will follow us when we leave our own work unfinished. And all of us—and the characters we create—will continue to make mistakes and do bad things to good people and hope to forgive and be forgiven for our imperfections. But for now we will miss you Gerry. . . thank you.

Life Intervenes

Yesterday morning as I was vacuuming for probably the first time in a couple of months, my silk scarf was suddenly sucked up into the machine, yanking the hell out of my neck and giving me a pretty crummy wake up call.  “Are you kidding me?” I thought. “I’m going to die doing housework?” At least Isadora Duncan was riding in an open top car in Nice when her scarf led to her downfall.  

I know we’ve all had these fatal visions: choking on a Dunkin’ Munchkin, running off the road while fiddling with the radio, being run off the road while riding your bike or walking your dog. And we’re certain our last thoughts will be some variation of Why didn’t I? Why didn’t I check the weather? Why didn’t I stay home? Why didn’t I chew more thoroughly? Why didn’t I listen to my mom? You can fill in the blank.

So I spent the rest of the morning rubbing my neck and contemplating the unsettling phrase, “She died doing what she loved,” and then I wondered if I’d ever get my act together and finish editing my book so if I did in fact die doing what I loved I’d have something to leave behind other than a partially cleaned rug. I recently gave an interview to a magazine I used to screen fiction for where I said, once again, that I was in the final stages of finishing my book and I needed to get ready to send it off. Admitting that made me a little queasy. I’d planned on sending it off a year ago. A year ago. 

A phrase I often like to use whenever I get stuck in the writing process is Life Intervenes, as if that’s an excuse for anything. Life intervenes for all of us in some way—we move, we take new jobs, or we get married or we have kids or we get sick or the kids get sick or the parents get sick or a tree falls on the roof or the water heater explodes—you know what I mean.

Not my house, thankfully.

And then a scarf gets caught in the vacuum cleaner or a big bite of burrito clogs the airways and I’m quickly reminded that everything I do is life, whether it’s flossing my teeth or watching my son’s first cross-country meet or going to the library with my daughter to find just one more book to read rather than working on my own. And once again I tell myself to get my act together, to face the truth that’s there’s a limit to how long I can keep my nose buried in the laptop before I have to admit the book’s as good as it’s going to get and if it gets accepted or rejected it’s not going to be because I have a perfectly placed semi-colon on page 172.

Goes with almost anything . . .

So I will do my best. In the meantime, here’s that interview I just gave, posted on the Ploughshares blog http://word.emerson.edu/ploughshares/2011/10/05/an-interview-with-ploughshares-senior-reader-kate-flaherty/ where I discuss editorial pet peeves, egalitarian reading tastes, and how strange it seems now to have grown up in the pre-Internet, pre-blog age.

All the Wrong People Were Naked: The Reunion Recap

Okay, no one was naked, but I’ve had this title in my cache since my friend Reynard used it as the subject line for a post-Mardi Gras email he sent me years ago and I just had to use it if only so now it’s copyrighted under my name. (Reynard’s a painter not a writer, so I feel no qualms about stealing it). Plus, it works in so many ways: All the Wrong People Were Drunk, All the Wrong People Were Dancing, All the Wrong People Were Swindled. Try it, you’ll see!

Anyhow, here I am with the post-reunion blog. . . I came away from the night feeling that curious mix of fulfillment and frustration—glad I reconnected with friends I hadn’t seen in ages, sad that time ran out too soon or was spent in idle group banter about bad haircuts, growing midriffs, and the unfortunate effects of too many Jell-O shots. I wanted to pull one friend after another aside so I could get down to the truer business of how their lives really were, as if I were working on a ninth grade biology project and could (theoretically!) slice down their middles with a scalpel. I wanted to see their inner workings as if, through looking at their lives outside and in, I could understand my own life—the choices I’ve made, the mistakes I’ve made, the triumphs I’ve had that now seem too distant and unremarkable.

But I’m a writer—I assume everyone understands their own lives by explicating the lives and stories of others—perhaps I expected too much from this one event. And while I did file away some terrific anecdotes I heard that I’ll be able cannibalize for future fiction, ultimately the reunion was just another slightly awkward social event that everyone experienced with different degrees of anxiety and delight. I spent part of the night assigning updated senior superlatives to various attendees: Most Likely to Have A Diamond Studded Pinkie Ring, Most Likely To Still Know Every Word to Back In Black, Most Likely to Maintain the Same ‘80s Hairdo Until Death (and no, I’m not being snarky—I could easily win every one of these superlatives myself).

I spent the other part of the night wishing the band–as they got tired of playing all the ‘80s tunes they knew and the lead singer began Googling lyrics to ‘80s tunes on his iPhone so they could try out new songs–had begun playing live Karaoke for the crowd. I know for sure they could have gotten each and every one of us behind the mic for blistering versions of “I Love Rock and Roll,” or “Melt With You.” It would have been wonderful and excruciating, yet overall an event to remember.

And here’s where I look back at the yin and yang of this blog: fulfilling and frustrating, mistakes and triumphs, anxiety and delight, wonderful and excruciating. That doesn’t just describe a high school reunion—it also describes high school to a T, no? We all relived that mix of emotions on Saturday night, and just like we were ecstatic to graduate and be gone so many years ago, my guess is that on Saturday night we also were all happy to get out of Gunstock and escape back to our homes. But it doesn’t mean we won’t come back to give this reunion thing another shot ten years from now, straggling in to Gunstock or Pheasant Ridge with our anticipation and reservations equally intact.

And while many were missed this year because they didn’t attend or, sadly, couldn’t attend, as they’ve left us way too soon—Mark Merlini, Gar Green, Dave Musacchio, Brian Bean, and Tom Fabian—we all were together in spirit. So I’ll end by saying with firm conviction: All the Right People Were With Us.

Your Label Here: Another Reunion Post

 I woke up yesterday with a nagging feeling of dread—my high school reunion is coming up this weekend and I really don’t want to go. It seems silly to whine about a high school reunion because it’s not like school—I don’t actually have to go. A truant officer is not going to collar me and threaten to throw me into a high school reunion detention center if I don’t drag myself to the party and engage in reminiscing over bad fashion choices and cheesy music and questionable late night behavior.

 

Then again I do have to go—at least this year—because I live only an hour-and-a-half away and I was best friends in high school with two-thirds of the reunion committee. If I didn’t go, they would serve as the high school reunion truant officers, dragging me through the door. But truthfully, reunions aren’t that bad—especially if I look at them the same way I look at exercise—something I have to talk myself into, because I’ll end up thinking “That wasn’t so bad, now was it?” and feeling a little better when I’m done.

So I decided to gear up for the weekend by watching a YouTube clip here and there of my favorite high school reunion scenes, where I made the disturbing discovery that almost every reunion plotline involves either lying and subterfuge if not outright fraud. And so I wondered—does high school trauma run so deep that we obsess over returning in triumph to something as seemingly insignificant as a high school reunion, or does it just make for an easy screenplay story? As I think back on reunions I’ve actually gone to rather than watched on the screen, I think the former might be true. In high school it’s easy to feel like we’ve been slapped with a label, and even if (or especially if) that label is all in our heads, we’re going to want to go back and prove, without a doubt, that we’re no longer that same loser/jerk/jock/nerd/snob/slut that everyone thought we were. And perhaps that’s why I began the memoir I wrote—a memoir that’s set almost entirely in high school—because I felt the need to set my own record straight.

CHOOSE YOUR OWN LABEL

But what I discovered—in writing the book and in reconnecting with friends at reunions and elsewhere—is that there really isn’t much to straighten out. A label is just a label and those can be changed as often as we change tires or hairstyles or underwear, so going to a high school reunion with an embellished story or in a rented sports car or with a newly dyed head of hair is pretty meaningless.  Who we were in high school is who we are now. While the labels might fall away—as I discover the snob was painfully shy or the jerk was getting tooled on at home, I might also find the jerk is still a jerk and the loser has lost it completely—I think our characters stay the same.

The problem is that, just like in high school, I think most of us still don’t completely know who we are or what we want or what we can’t admit we’re afraid of. So as often as we try to escape labels, we also cling to them like we might cling to the idea that having the right car or occupation or pair of shoes will somehow help say whatever it is that we can’t. Instead of saying we still don’t have a clue, we’ll  share pictures of our families and swap stories of our lives and our struggles and our adventures as if to say, “You’ll have to figure it out for yourself, because frankly, I’m stumped.”

So as I consider what I’ll wear and what I’ll say next weekend, as well as whether to color the gray from my hair—I’ll leave you with that list of my favorite scenes, if only because music and movies also serve as labels of sorts, saying whatever we can’t.

1. Grosse Pointe Blank

When I say that our characters stay the same, that doesn’t mean every guy who stood up his prom date is a hitman waiting to happen, but who knows. . . This movie also has both a terrific soundtrack (and great soundtracks, like the theme of lying, also is quite common in reunion movies) and the best—and most literal—“you can’t go home again” scene.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WgLr6qlpec4

1.  Romy and Michelle’s High School Reunion

Yes, this movie could easily be classified as a chick flick and it does have a bit of bizarre sci-fi business Alan Cumming must have brought with him from the Spy Kids franchise, but what can I say? It’s your classic fairy tale story of the high school nerds hitting their peak long after high school ends, plus Janeane Garofalo lurking around the corner whenever the plot gets too saccharine.

1. The “Reunion” episode of 30 Rock

It’s a little troubling for me to include this, mainly because several friends have compared me to Tina Fey either because we share unfortunate taste in eyewear and fashion sense and mouse-brown hair or because we have a similar sense of humor (sadly we share nothing in terms of artistic success—but I’m not dead yet). What disturbs me about this episode is that Liz/Tina goes back to her reunion believing she’d been this witty nerd who’d flown beneath the radar only to discover she’d been the class bully. . . but since I’ve only had one post-high school experience where an old classmate drunkenly informed me, “You know what? I never liked you,” I hold out hope that I’m not the jerk who’s still a jerk.

1. Something Wild

Not Jonathan Demme’s best movie, and not really a reunion movie, but with the best reunion scene—because how can any high school reunion go wrong if The Feelies are the band!

1. Music and Lyrics

 

Again, not a reunion movie, but the reunion scene is brilliant in evoking that strange emotional mixture of pleasure and boredom and pain that is the high school reunion—and Hugh Grant, as an aging pop star, is brilliant in emulating the absolute cheesy nature of eighties pop. 

The High School Reunion Update: 300 Words or Less

I recently was asked to contribute a brief bio for my upcoming high school reunion, and while I have been working on a memoir for more years than I care to admit, may I say that I look forward to writing things like this about as much as I’d look forward to writing a yearly Christmas letter, where every statement seems to require an exclamation point and all news is good news.

I revel in good news—don’t get me wrong—I love the joy of graduations and state championships and blue ribboned art projects, I love new jobs and new babies and new driver’s licenses and straight A report cards. But I also love the truth of life—bad backs and fender benders and midlife crises, the smaller triumphs of finding a great pair of jeans at the thrift store or picking five bucks off of the sidewalk.

And most of all I love revelations, like figuring out that croissant is the French word for crescent because the pastry is shaped like the new moon, or determining that four-year-olds can still be amazed by the fact that red paint and blue paint make purple, or finally decoding that The Clash aren’t singing “stand by me” in their song, but instead “you didn’t stand by me,” a discovery that just makes you want to lie down on the floor and cry because true disappointment really does hit you lightning-quick that way.

 

 

So while I was unable to bring myself to write a proper bio, I was able to submit this small paragraph for my Gilford High School Reunion Booklet. There are no exclamation points or pieces of actual news, but everything below is completely true:

Katie Flaherty–Gilford Middle High School–What Has She Been Up To?

Over the years I’ve stuck my nose where it didn’t belong, acquired sunburns and poison ivy in uncomfortable places, walked my dog, wondered how the heck I got here, complained about my co-workers, yelled at my kids, ate squid tacos and tongue tacos and tacos al carbon and more Grape Nut ice cream than I could ever measure, drank too much coffee and wine and Diet Coke, ignored surgeon general’s warnings, finished all my vegetables, believed God was my DJ, camped on the beach, fell asleep on the couch, watched bad TV, danced the Polka, put pennies on railroad tracks, read cheesy books and great books and annoying books and far too many books I wish I’d written myself, been shocked and jealous and panicked and pathetic and proud and devastated and deliriously happy, been a sucker for the corporate ploy, plucked my furniture from the city dump, saw great bands and crappy bands and bands that were somehow both at once, went to the opera and wondered what the heck the hype was all about, been underpaid and overworked, demanded my money back, had my heart ground to dust on the sidewalk and then swept up and put back together, had poppy seeds and parsley and popcorn stuck in my teeth, drooled on my pillow, cried at the movies, got blisters from new shoes, and hugged my kids, grateful still to be here in this world.

21st Century Culture is Wearing a Condom: The Manifesto Blog

This morning I began reading Patti Smith’s memoir Just Kids; I know I’m a little behind the times, but in the spirit of my grandmother who rarely went to movies at the theater, claiming “Everything makes it onto TV if you wait long enough,” I tend to wait until books are not just in paperback, but in paperback and at the used bookstore. . . so yesterday was the day for Patti Smith.

I have alternately loved and feared Patti Smith ever since I heard “Pissing in a River” on the soundtrack of Times Square, one of the best movies of all time for any girl stuck in a small town who suspects there’s a wider world out there.

Patti Smith is scary to me because she’s fearless and open, and while I admire her, I’m also afraid I might never achieve that level of honesty myself.  Times Square sets out to be that kind of movie too–one that celebrates being bold enough to embrace life with all its edges and imperfections and while the movie is far from perfect–its version of Times Square in the early eighties is more fairy-tale funky than gritty reality–it mirrors what Smith writes about how it’s necessary to escape into art and books and especially music in order to survive adolescence. As we age, our tastes might expand and refine–or in the case of some stay completely stagnant–but I think any later musical or literary discoveries will lack that same sense of release that comes in adolescence when everything is new and raw and exciting.

But I’d barely gotten through twenty pages of her memoir when I was struck–as I often am–by how antiseptic and stale culture has  become since we left those gritty seventies and early eighties behind. I came of age then, and while I grew up with the main elements of a fairly restrictive, closed culture–Catholic girl in a small town, pre-cable TV, pre-Internet, too far away for even a decent radio signal–I also had the freedoms that came with living in a small town where kids were allowed to discover much of the world on their own rather than having it handed to them in a shiny shrink-wrapped package. But the world shifted in the mid- ’80s when the culture as a whole entered the era of AIDS, and suddenly those laughable plots about the sexually promiscuous dying horrible deaths–like in Friday the 13th and Halloween and Carrie–were now coming true. And because I believe all art, all culture, is undeniably connected with sex and love and how they interact, I think AIDS changed not only how we view sex and love and intimacy, but also how we create art. The age of AIDS awareness might have caused culture to look more deeply into how intimacy connects with sex, but instead culture seemed to retreat even farther into the disconnect by sanitizing sex, slapping a condom on it and retreating from any skin-to-skin contact altogether.

And what’s the result in the 21st Century? I’d say we did such a good job at scrubbing and cleaning and protecting ourselves from any possible pain or discomfort or disease that we’ve smoothed away all the edges of art whatsoever. Instead of looking forward, culture endlessly looks backward, trying to recreate the earlier eras–the’50s, ’60s, ’70s, and now ’80s–but it’s as if everything’s been run through a computer and perfected to such a degree that nothing seems real anymore.

Artists are so busy playing it safe, there’s little life left at all, and yet has life itself really gotten cleaner and safer? Hardly–if anything, the culture that hides behind that perfectly marketed, contrived and pre-packaged facade is dangerous. Sex has gotten younger and more child-like and even farther away from the intimacy it should be connected with, and just like the young faces we see on television and in the movies have been smoothed out thanks to the injection of plastic or poisonous toxins–what hides behind the bright, shiny veneer festers and smolders into a troublesome deviance.

I know I’ll read of deviance in Smith’s memoir too, as she gets farther into her relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe, a polarizing artist who took his series of sexually graphic photographs because he “was looking for the unexpected. . . looking for something that had never been seen before”–always a dangerous motive. But art should be dangerous, art should be unexpected. And while Mapplethorpe’s images were arresting, they almost seem quaint in 2011, and they are completely devoid of either the quirk factor or the gawker, post-car crash shock element that passes for so much of what’s defined as art today when art pretends it’s not playing safe.

But as I write about the state of culture in the 21st Century, I wonder how much I am part of this problem, mainly because I have this manuscript I keep noodling and tinkering with, hoping to make it “perfect,” when what I really might be doing is killing it altogether. I’m not a fan of sloppy writing, but that’s different than being messy, different than being dirty. A clean and perfect book is dull, just like a clean and perfect song is entirely forgettable. I want messy memoirs and novels, and I want funky music, and I want art that makes me take notice without requiring the shock of deviance. I have faith that we will get fed up with being spoon-fed on the fake reality show that is our culture right now. I have found a few of those writers and artists and musicians, and I have faith that there are more, just like I have faith that this antibiotic-obsessed era can’t last.

I will end with a shameless plug for some of those musicians I have faith in–Liz Pappademas and the Level–and not just because Liz is my cousin, though in art nepotism usually hurts rather than helps. . . but Liz takes a good look at a peculiar part of our shallow culture–the game show–with her new album, Television City. I think she and her band do a pretty good job at pulling back the curtain (or pulling off the condom) in the 21st Century, and while I kinda wish she’d offered up one of her feistier tunes as her free video, below find the link and enjoy:

http://www.youtube.com/user/plazaismapped#p/a/u/0/LfcrQRVlbaE

On the Bruins and Bachelor Uncles

I am hardly a die-hard hockey fan, but I am compelled to write at least a few words on the Boston Bruins winning their first Stanley Cup Championship since 1972. In 1972, I actually lived in Boston, but I was only three and my earliest memories were not of hockey but of going to sleep with the sound of horns and sirens and the strange light shows caused from headlights skittering their way across my bedroom ceiling. The only sport I knew then was candlepin bowling because I got to tag along with my mother to her league where I was rewarded with a glazed chocolate donut for sitting still through one string after another.

Hockey entered my life only after my family left Boston for New Hampshire, not because I was suddenly out of the city and enjoying the sport on a frozen, wintery pond, but because we continued to come back to Massachusetts to visit my grandmother who still had at least two or three of her six sons living at home whenever they weren’t doing stints in the Army, and all of them were Bruins fans.

My dad was the oldest of eight—six boys, two girls—and the age spread was great enough that Dad’s youngest brothers were more like big brothers to my own brother Kevin and me. The three youngest—Joe, Sean, and Michael—had set up a lair in the basement of my grandmother’s apartment, and my brother Kevin and I loved sitting down there amidst the sticky beer mugs and lacrosse sticks and record albums stacked against the wall, gorging ourselves on Wise Potato Chips and soda and all the television we were never allowed to watch at home.

Though Kevin and I often were subjected to the losing end of a tickle attack or wrestling match when we overstayed our welcome in the basement, for the most part our uncles were a fairly quiet bunch, especially when they watched television. When our uncles were accommodating, Kev and I got to watch Tom and Jerry and The Monkees and H.R. Puffinstuff, but more often our uncles were in charge and we watched endless hours of Hogan’s Heroes, Three Stooges, and the Saturday Creature Double Feature plus, of course, Bruins games whenever they were on.

I never learned much about the game or the players, I just remember my uncles with their black and gold scarves and their Bruins beer mugs and their shouts of disgust or cheers depending on how the game was going. I elicited a shout of disgust myself, when, one night, I came down the basement steps with one of those Bruins mugs full of milk.

As soon as he spotted me on the stairs, Joe cried out, “What are you doing drinking milk out of Sean’s mug! You can’t ever drink beer out of a mug once it’s had milk in it!”

“I’m sorry,” I said, “I didn’t know.”

“He’ll never be able to drink beer out of it again,” Joe said, and as my eyes got wide, the tears probably soon to follow, Sean piped up.

“That’s okay,” Sean said. “I guess it’s your mug now.”

It seems silly now to think I’d taken Joe so seriously, just like it was silly of me to believe Joe would know it was Sean’s Bruins mug I’d supposedly ruined and not his or Michael’s when they all looked the same, but taking advantage of my naïveté was just another way they had fun with Kevin and me, especially since, as the youngest of eight, they’d probably been the butt of jokes more than once themselves. As I look back at that time I think too I was so young that the memory of what I saw on the television—the Three Stooges, John Wayne, and the Bruins players who might have been tough on the boards but who, in post-game interviews, seemed uncomfortable and awkward—somehow blended together with all my memories of hanging out in that basement with Kevin and my bachelor uncles. Joe, Sean, and Michael were the Three Stooges and John Wayne and those tough and loyal hockey players who were shy if not downright reserved off the ice, and at the end of the day they were the first stand-up guys I knew besides my dad. 

Those years with my bachelor uncles are far behind me—Michael just retired from the Army after decades of service and has two kids who, not surprisingly, aren’t too much older than my own two kids, Joe now lives up in New Hampshire while I’m in Massachusetts again, and Sean, sadly, died too young more than ten years ago. Sean didn’t get to see the Bruins bring the Cup back to Boston this year, but I hope he was rooting for them somewhere, drinking beer from a mug that’s never been tainted with milk even once.

I only watched Game 7 of the Stanley Cup Championship; I couldn’t bring myself to watch the playoffs sooner, because it had been a long time since I’d watched any professional sports game. After following the Red Sox for years, I became disenchanted with the overly polished and entitled attitudes of too many of the players—in baseball, in basketball, wherever, but finally I caved and turned on Game 7.

Immediately I was taken back in time thanks to a pre-game interview with Patrice Bergeron, the Bruins’ Alternate Captain. Bergeron was wearing an ill-fitting suit and an unfortunate tie, and his hair and beard looked as though they’d been cut with a dull pair of gardening shears. He seemed uncomfortable as he gamely answered questions in that thick Quebecois accent that most people outside of New England would think was a language other than English, but I suspected—correctly—that once he got onto the ice all awkwardness would be lost. That night he scored two of the four Bruins goals, and he was just as effective on the boards too; I was thrilled to watch him pull of his helmet and form a celebratory scrum with all the other shaggy, sweaty guys out there once the game was over and the title secured.

While I suspect if I watched an entire season of NHL hockey, I’d find enough reason to become as disillusioned as I am with pretty much every other professional sport out there today, Game 7 left me happy. That night it was as if the Bruins were a team of my bachelor uncles—stand-up guys who, this year at least, deservedly came out on top.