You gotta wake up at 6 tomorrow.  You gotta wake up at 6.  You always say you’re going to, but the alarm goes off and you’re too tired so you set it for 7.  I know.  But if you don’t get up at 6 you won’t have any time to exercise, or write, or meditate, or whatever.  If you wake up at 7 you’ll only have time to take a shower, figure out what to wear, eat breakfast, make lunch, watch a little Sportscenter, and take off for work.  No you gotta wake up at 6 if you wanna get anything done.  Tomorrow you wake up at 6.  Even if you’re tired.  I know you’ll be tired.

Fuck my day is straight meetings tomorrow.  Busy as hell and I won’t get anything done.  You know when you’re knocking out projects all day its just fine, you know it all pays off.  But days it’s a struggle to stay above water, just trying to get done the shit people need – those are the days that really take it out of you.  Jesus I can see my calendars in my sleep.  Calendars, plural.  There’s mine and there’s the clients’, eating either side of me slowly.  Forget it, you can do it.  I just wish I didn’t have so many meetings.

Maybe I’ll go out for lunch.  Take my book.  What book am I reading?  I think I’m like…yeah I’m a quarter through Tess of the d’Urberviles.  I really dig how he describes the like, vices of people as everyday things, like drinking and lust is a part of the natural world same as rivers and overgrowth.  I miss books like this, books so sure in their ideology – people don’t write like that now.  Things are so murky, we’ve spent decades in uncertainty.  Unreliable narrators.  God if I read another unreliable narrator I’m gonna go live in the goddamn woods.

Damnit I need to sleep.  Have to wake up at 6.  Why is it always that I’m so tired all day and wide awake when I get into bed?  I get out around 7, home just before 8, and then there’s time for dinner and one other thing of my choosing.  I can exercise, read, write.  But of course, most of the time I just watch TV.  Like every other lazy American slowly killing the world with lethargy.  Here I am in bed while people are dying.  God that’s a stupid sentence.  Just go to sleep.

What’s going on this weekend?  Ugh I’ll just go to bars and stuff.  Feel like hell both mornings.  I should stay in and like, watch a movie.  Wake up Saturday and exercise, read, and write.  Then Saturday I can go out.  That would be perfect.

What if I went out Saturday in a werewolf costume and refused to discuss it?  Hah and like, I just sit away from my friends drinking silently and glaring at like, one person that I’ve never seen before, all night.  And then the next day that guy’s at brunch with his friends like, “No joke, this fucking guy in – I shit you not – a werewolf costume, like teen wolf or something, was just STARING at me all night!”  Oh god I want to write a story of the night from that guy’s perspective.  He’s trying to hit on a girl but this creepy guy in a werewolf costume is staring at him the whole time.  Yes I’m going to write this.  Fuck.  Awesome.  I’m gonna write it.  Tomorrow morning.  I’m gonna get up and write it.  6 am.

There is an overwhleming sense that things suck in general but not in particular, like it’s cold out, always, but not cold and rainy, and anyway you have a good jacket.

There are two people who go to bed together at night to enjoy themselves, get some rest, find a small meaning, but mostly because they have work in the morning.

Outside are people in cars and beer is pouring continuously, all over the city, so that there is never a single second in a year were beer is not being poured into a glass somewhere in the city, and not many seconds, comparatively, say maybe 5-10% of the seconds in a year, when no two-or-more people in the city are clinking beer glasses together in a sign of camaraderie.

.Inside there is a frantically grasping confusion of a something that seems to be permanently just waking up.  There are 97 books in 3 boxes under the dining room table, 32 DVD of movies and TV shows in the drawer under the TV, and 642ish different TV shows available at any given time, and 15000 songs on the laptop’s harddrive, including the entire Beatles discography.

There’s this sense that you need something else.

There are 4 eggs left in the carton, 3 slices of bread remaining and $66.32 in your checking account, somehow.  There are a large amount of reports to go out and you have to check facebook.

There is a fuzzy soreness behind your eyes and 68 minutes remaining in the day, and you are writing angsty prose-poetry and wishing you could do something, anything, worth doing.

Photography by Carlos Detres

Titus Andronicus
The Monitor
XL Recordings

Having established themselves with the album The Airing of Grievances in 2008 as a lo-fi thrash-rock band, Titus Andronicus issued their follow up this year in the form of a heady, loud, and grandiose record that covers topics ranging from depression to alcoholism to the American Civil War.  The album reaches far, and though it reaches its thematic goals, The Monitor‘s true victory is that it’s also a really kick ass rock album.

The album feels like an argument, a thesis.  Its songs are long, none of them shorter than 5 minutes.  Each track sprawls into different musical themes but never leaves the realm of blues-based chords and progressions, as if to say “this is enough, we can work with this forever.  It’s this conceit, that rock is eternal and still true and still kicks lots of ass, that could be called the ‘concept’ of the album.

This is significant in the context of the state of today’s alternative music scene.  There are of course no synths, tape loops, or fuzzy vocals on The Monitor (though the sporatically placed clips of old speech recordings are a bit grainy).  It wouldn’t be fair to say Titus Andronicus are out to make something uniquely new or that they’re aim is to buck today’s music, because nobody and everybody making music today is trying to do both, but it is clear they are striving for something that is essentially out of style.  All of the songs on The Monitor are pop-based, but none could really be called pop songs.  The (popular) contemporary band they most resemble is The Hold Steady, in their bar band feel.  But they really sound very little like The Hold Steady.

Yet their sound is immediately recognizable.  They sound like The Replacements, and Bruce Springsteen, and Bo Diddly, and The Exploding Hearts, and late ’90s New Jersey Hardcore bands.  They play R & B chords and sing about getting drunk in the suburbs, taking the cheap bus to the city, and feeling isolated and alone, yet excited and full of hope.  Rock and Roll at its core will always be an inherently teenage art form; its primary themes are sex, anger, excess, and above all boredom.  My first listen of The Monitor, I thought about driving home in my ’92 4-Runner at 2 a.m. from a party in the suburbs, windows down and just ecstatically happy about being young and free.  That this feeling stays with us a lifetime is what makes Rock music so lasting, due to be revived every few years by a band like Titus Andronicus.  Things like Chillwave and Psych revival come and go, and while there’s nothing wrong with these trends, their appeal is too rooted in context to exert significant staying power.  There may not be many bands playing right now who sound like Titus Andronicus, but The Monitor still sounds like the familiar return of an old transient friend.

You know, you should just listen to it.  Put it on in your car at the end of the work day or blast it from your home system as you get ready to go out.  Heck, Summer’s not over: grab a boombox and some beers and play it next to the grill.  Better yet, go see the band live.  They’d like that.

Release Date March 9, 2010

Track Listing

1. A More Perfect Union
2. Titus Andronicus Forever
3. No Future Part Three: Escape From No Future
4. Richard II
5. A Pot in Which to Piss
6. Four Score and Seven
7. Theme From ‘Cheers’
8. To Old Friends and New
9. …And Ever
10.  The Battle of Hampton Roads

Corfu

By Peter Kelly

From thelocal.de comes this piece about German PMs suggesting that Greece sell its uninhabited islands to help shore its tattered economy. It contains this gem:

“We give you cash, you give us Corfu.”

Two years into the global economic unfooting, the suggestion that Odysseus’ stomping grounds be auctioned off is no longer shocking. It comes as just part of the large narrative, that all of civilization is connected and that nothing is above economics. We were lucky to have once, not too long ago, had the privilege of forgetting this.

What’s shocking about the article is: How does Greece still have uninhabited islands?

I mean, this is Greece, a nation of nearly unrivaled historical prestige which also just happens to host impossibly pleasant weather about 365 days a year. How many millions are lost each year by not opening these islands to tourists?

It reminded me of a comment by my coworker: “I hate national Parks. All I see is wasted potential.”

I hope he was kidding. I love national parks – the very idea that we decided to conserve just because, even in the face of obvious economic incentives to the contrary. We have quite a few of them in New York, and they are essential to our cultural identity. What would Manhattan be without the wide strip of protected green at its heart?

For that matter, we also have uninhabited islands in New York. Brooklyn’s Jamaica Bay contains dozens of tiny specks of land, in the shadows of skyscrapers and completely undeveloped. I hear they’re covered in trash from storms and passing boats, but hey – no humans. Perhaps these islands are federally protected land, sanctuaries for migrating birds or vacationing sewer Alligators. Or maybe there’s just nobody who wants them: fitting condos on 12’x15’ of sand and rock is tough. Maybe that’s why nobody has yet suggesting selling these islands to help right the state budget.

Not to say they couldn’t sell the islands, if they really wanted to. Any place can be sold. Every spec of land on Earth, no matter how remote or miniscule, is owned by some nation. Just this past week an island in the Indian Ocean disappeared under the waves, ending a 30 year ownership dispute between India and Bangladesh. It appeared after a typhoon, and was sunk by global warming, thus absolving the debate. Few people fight over underwater rocks – it’s stuff you can walk on that people want.

Even Antarctica has been thoroughly carved up by the world’s Imperial powers: a political map of the frozen continent looks like a pie chart.

And of course, every territory with an owner has been mapped down to the tiniest detail. 400 years of profit-driven exploring covered the world in flags, and then the rise of GPS and satellite imaging handed the known world to the masses, extending the reach of humanity to every little patch of moss on the planet. There may still be uninhabited islands out there, but there is nowhere on Earth where humans are not.

We got to this point because we had to know it all. But something was lost. There is no more wilderness. Those National Parks that I love, which I grew up exploring, which cover vast swaths of our country, which I now jog in on the weekends – they are the illusion of wilderness: forest and mountain and water whose dimensions were envisioned by man, planned by man, and now allowed to thrive by the will of man alone. The vistas of the Grant Canyon, and Yosemite, are not Nature, unchallenged; they are the property of the United States, and there is nothing but fortunate circumstance preventing the US government from turning them into highways and shopping malls. They exist primarily to look nice for us. As scenery they are signifiers of a kingdom that was conquered centuries ago, as much artifacts of a past dominion as the pyramids of Egypt. They’ve got “people” written all over them – who cares if nobody lives there?

Is there anything left to find? Well, there’s the deep ocean. And of course there’s always space, which according to my credible sources is the final frontier. Imagine the untouched worlds out there. Imagine what we still don’t know about the place we see through telescopes, and how learning about these places will expand our understanding of the universe and in turn, of ourselves. The possibilities of such untouched realms seem endless.

But here’s what I’m imagining: The year is 2410. Citizens across the galaxy are tightening their space belts to make ends meet during the Great Galactic Financial Crisis. Neptune’s local economy has been devastated by debt, and one forward-thinking, Earth-based politician has devised an ingenious plan to keep Neptune liquid:

“We give you cash, you give us Triton.”

The way telemarketing works, they bring in a group of thirty temp workers for a trial period then keep the ones they like.  During the first meeting of our first day at the call center we were told our name was Simon.

“This is so, when the clients call back saying they spoke to Simon, the sales representatives will know which campaign they’re dealing with.”

It was weird at first, being Simon.  We were so used to our real names, they often just came out.

“When I forget to say Simon,” one of my coworkers said, “I immediately hang up, and try again later.”

 I would have done the same, except I messed up nearly every time.  The phone would ring, and someone would answer, and I would say hi, and then my real name.  Is it possible to be addicted to calling yourself yourself?

“Not only does it affect your performance,” my boss told me in a whisper as he leaned next to me by the coffee, “but not saying you’re Simon could jeopardize the entire campaign.”  And he reiterated the need from the sales perspective

So I wrote Simon on my hand.

“Hi this is Simon,” I said on the phone, “calling on behalf of EDC software…”

And that was my first real sell. 

“What do you think Simon is like?” my coworkers joked.  “What’s his full name?”

“Simon Cowell…Simon le Bon.”

“So British?”

“Ha ha yeah he’s definitely a Brit.”

“So like a go-getter Brit guy, mid-twenties, squeaky voice.”

“And a faux-hawk haircut, just an inch or so too long.”

I laughed by myself, but I didn’t join in.  The truth is I played my own Simon game.  Calls like these can’t be like normal calls.  You try to picture you and the other guy in a room talking, and it sickens you– the lines you feed him, the things he says because of the lines you feed him.  And you deserve it, because you’ve changed the act of conversation from sharing to pushing.

So I pretended to be Simon.  Simon was the guy who can do that.  Simon was good at it. 

My sales got better.

“Simon Superior!” my coworker called me.  “Big Simon On Campus!”

Even the higher-ups started to notice.  The moment I walked in the door, at 8:30 sharp every Monday through Friday, I picked up my stride to the long-legged trot of The S Man, Si Guy to his friends, the prick in Brooks Brothers who calls all his acquaintances “chief.”  It got so natural going home felt disorienting.  I had to remember to drop the act in front of my girlfriend.

“You’re not ‘Simon’ here,” she would remind me with a kiss.  “When you come home I get the nice guy with the dopey grin, that’s the deal.”

One day I went to the French sandwich place for lunch.  After ordering no mayo and getting mayo, I went up to the counter and demanded a new sandwich.  Leaving the shop, it occurred to me that I had never stopped being Simon since I left the office.  Then, instead of going back to my desk to eat my lunch, I somehow wound up in a men’s boutique two blocks away.  I returned to my desk with a new tie, and had the most productive afternoon of my career. 

In the mornings we all greeted each other with a smirk:

“Hey Simon.”

“Morning Simon.”

“How’s it going, Simon?”

I saw the same ties I had taken to wearing, power stripes replicated on thirty unique necks.  Among the women I noticed a new hair trend– cropped hair, short as a boy’s, gelled to point in the center.

It was the kind of thing where, you hate this song on the radio.  You hate it so much it obsesses you.  When it comes on, you have to mock it, so you and your friends will crank up the radio and scream out the miserable lyrics.  Just for a laugh.  And then eventually, after so many laughs at the expense of the song, the joke becomes the whole point.  You don’t hear the music, you hear the joke.  And then when you’re driving by yourself, and the song comes on the radio, you don’t know how you feel, and you can’t decide how to react. 

“We’re very pleased with your output,” our boss told us in a morning sales jam session.  “It takes a family.  We’re all pulling together.  Noses to the grindstone.  Power through.  It takes a team of Simons.”

“It takes a team of Simons.” We all said.

Yet discord percolated in the cubicles. 

One of the Simons, the short Puerto Rican who I think used to call herself Alicia, had been coming in early and staying late.  Those hours of the day were rarely fruitful, but what few sales she could scrape up gave the Simonita a leg up on the rest of us.

“It’s not what Simon would do.” Said a fellow Simon as we conspired in the break room.  “Simon works normal business hours.”

“We have to confront her,” another one suggested.  “We can’t allow this to continue, it just isn’t fair.” 

“Who are you to say what Simon would do?” The Puerto Rican Simon countered when we cornered her in her cube.  “When I come here, I’m Simon– and what I do is work hard to be on top.”

“We all work hard,” someone said.  “That isn’t the point.”

“And it’s not about being on top!”

“I think that’s exactly what this is about!” The Puerto Rican Simon yelled.  “You’re all so jealous that I’m doing well, that soon I’ll get promoted, that I’ll stop having to say I’m freaking ‘Simon’ on the phone and I’ll be allowed to just be myself.”

Then I got animated.  I shoved through the crowd of blue button-down shirts and gelled hairstyles and grabbed the insubordinate woman’s chair firmly at the arm rests.

“Now you listen to me.” I said.  “You think this is about you but it’s not.  What you’re doing…you’re messing with who people are.  You can’t go around saying Simon is whatever you want– Simon is what we are.  It’s not up to you, it’s up to us.  All of us.  Together.  That’s how it works.  And if you don’t want to be a team player, then maybe some day soon you’ll wake up some morning to find you aren’t Simon anymore.  You’re nobody.” 

Then things were different.  When we smiled at each other in the morning it was no longer because of a joke.  Our wardrobe wasn’t a costume, it was the clothes we preferred.  No airs were put on for phone calls, and I went home each night to a clean bathroom full of products and an increasingly distant girlfriend.  My numbers quietly climbed to the top, and my coworkers started coming to me with questions.

“Hey Simon,” one would say.  “Do you think Simon likes Basketball or Baseball?”

“Hey Simon, I’ve got this rash, see, and I’m wondering if Simon ever chafes?”

They were becoming frequent, but easy enough to dispatch.  The idea of Simon was so clear to me, like a poem I’d memorized and could recite backwards.  All I had to do was read it to the disciples. 

Then our bosses called a meeting.

“OK guys, big news today.” Said one boss.

“Huge news!” Said the other.

“We’ve got a brand new client.”

“Major client.”

“Massive return potential.”

“Stratospheric.”

They handed out packets on the new product.

“Now when you guys call, the client has requested you use the name Jesse.”

There was no movement in the room.

Then somebody asked, “Why?”

“Well,” said a boss, “Simon was for the last campaign.  This one is Jesse.  We think it’s better, anyway.”

“Kind of androgynous!” the other boss said.

We floated back to our cubicles, silent and listless.

“This can’t be happening,” somebody said.

“That’s not who we are.”

“Simon,” somebody asked me, “What do we do?”

I gnawed on the end of my pen and tapped my desk.  Arranged in front of me was my phone, my computer, my jar of pens, a motivational poster, a tiny statue of Bart Simpson, a Chicago Bulls mousepad, and a printed out joke email that someone from the office had sent me.  I looked upon my stuff. 

My bosses were in a glass-walled conference room at the other end of the office.  I could see them ranting and gesticulating to three or four other middle aged men in fitted suits as I marched hurriedly down the hall.  I felt pushed, and I kept remembering pieces of the argument I had with my girlfriend that morning, pictures of her face red and moist from tears, the sound of NPR in between her shouts.  When I got to the conference room I flung the door open like it held stolen goods.

“What is your name?” I asked the room.

My two bosses looked flabbergasted, the men in suits looked mildly amused.  “Excuse me,” said one of my bosses, “can you see we’re in a meeting?  Can this wai–”

“My name is Simon,” I told them.  “What is your name?”

“Your name isn’t Simon, your moron.” The other boss said.  “Your name is–”

“What makes you think,” I asked.  “What makes you think you can decide who I am?  Huh?”  The men in suits made motions to leave but the bosses gestured for them to remain seated.  “You just decide to get in front of a room of people, all smiles and bullshit, and tell them suddenly they have to change who they are?  Do you know who I am?  Do you even know?”

“You’re fired.”  Said one of my bosses.

“Fine.”  I said.  “Whatever the fuck ever,”  I said.  “Simon–out.”

I packed my things and left. 

It was hot outside.  It must have been June, because there was plenty of green to offset the city’s neutral grays.  I walked for a while, 

carrying my briefcase and a cardboard box filled with pens and a motivational poster and a tiny Bart Simpson.  The sun made my head perspire, and my hair began to sag with each step.  Finally I stopped at the park and sat on a bench.

There was this squirrel who grabbed a fallen piece of pretzel and ran up a tree with it.  I had no idea squirrels could eat pretzel, but then I guess it makes sense being a scavenger when you’re an animal living in the city.  Underneath the tree was an old white man in high waisted pants talking to a young, fashionable black girl.  It was hard to say what their relationship was, but they didn’t seem close enough to be family– blood, adopted, step, or otherwise.  Maybe family friends, or maybe this old guy used to teach this young girl.  But where did they come from?  The same place?  The same country?  What was it like being him, and what was it like being

In humors like these, in weather like this
Plans nag like canker sores
I count my friends present
Because we’re all stoned today
As the 3 o’clock sun paints
Highlights
On my plain blue carpet

I remember the sharp motion times
It
Felt
Like
A playground slide that whooshed you off to anywhere
And she would ask me,
“Do you want another line?”
In a locked door room
Into the inchoate blue eyes
I say to her “Yes of course Yes”
I would fear to say no
I knew about the afternoons
Even then
When your aspirations pass like a bird across the window