MAILER BUBBLE

  Right upfront I need to warn you about something.

  I’ve been reading essays by Norman Mailer. And I can’t shake the feeling that his style is creeping into mine. Style does this. 

  Those of you old enough to recall the days when writers could be celebrities are probably already working up the smartass comments, along the lines of, “Does this mean you’re going to start punching bloggers at cocktail parties, stabbing your current wife, and so forth?” 

  I can put all that to rest. No. If there are cocktail parties where bloggers cluster, I doubt I’ll be invited to them. And if I were in the mood to punch a blogger, a cocktail party wouldn’t be the right place to do it. First of all, I don’t know about you, but whenever I’m at a cocktail party, I never have both hands free. I’m lucky if even one is available— I’m nearly always carrying a drink, because a wife or husband of somebody is always asking me what I’m drinking, and they rattle off a long list of the fluids they have available, and to avoid having to stand there looking interested while they go through the specials, I generally just pick something quick. (I hate that “telling you about the specials” ritual in restaurants, too. It always makes me feel like I have to react as if it’s amazing that these specials exist. “We sauté the fish in a reduction of this that and the other and then garnish it with this other thing.” “You do all that, eh? It’s encouraging to hear that in this lickety-split modern age, YOU take the time to apply heat to the food and dump a bunch of junk on top of it before whisking it to the table with a great deal of pomp and peppermill brandishing.”) 

  So, I’m saddled with a drink in one hand, and in my other hand I’m carrying a little plate that can’t really accommodate my byzantine stockpile of Tiny Meat Wrapped in Flexible Meat, so I have to walk very carefully, lest I spill something saucy onto the carpet which was just vacuumed. There’s a perverse logic at work when you clean a carpet just before letting loose a bunch of drunks carrying shrimp. I’ve never been on a battlefield, but I recall from reading The Red Badge of Courage that even in a war that breeds romanticism, due to the great number of young people dying in it, they don’t really clean the battlefield first.

THE AMAZING POWER OF GENE

I was eating breakfast in public, a thing I do from time to time. Whenever I do this, I see others doing it too. To my left, to my right, and presumably behind me as well, Americans are eating breakfast with a bunch of other people around. I can’t help but think that there must be something “going on,” or something “behind” this. Whenever I’m in the mood for a little anthropological and socio-cultural analysis, I pick up a book about some rock album, because books of this nature are guaranteed to be packed with it. Unfortunately, in this particular area, they’ve let me down. I’ve read books about everybody from Toto to Sonic Youth, and rock writers are eerily silent on the subject. It can’t be because they’re embarrassed to discuss something they don’t know anything about— we have to get that out of the way immediately— so perhaps they just sense, with their quivering rock critic ganglia, that it’s not the right time to get into it. 

  But, in the absence of a rock writer’s “take” on this phenomenon, I find myself at a loss. Sure, I’ll speculate about it, but this leads nowhere. When my speculation peters out, it’s dangerous for me to overhear a conversation, because I’m more or less begging to be distracted. If a stranger is talking into a phone, I’m always drawn to it, as a moth to a flame. This is due to my constant amazement that the cell phone has made possible one of the most impressive breakthroughs of modern times— the newfound ability for a pair of blowhards to simultaneously annoy people in two different geographical locations. This was the main reason satellites were invented, in fact, and it was worth every penny. 

  In Olden Times, a group of blowhards of any size— be it two-top, trio, fourpiece, quintet, half dozen, giant muttering mob, what have you— was at the mercy of science’s grave limitations. Sometimes technology enabled blowhards to extend their zone of annoyance (I’m thinking of the bullhorn here), but it would still have been a stretch to describe even, say, the giant mud farm at Woodstock, as more than one location. People died there, and babies were born, and Sha-Na-Na played their history-making set with the forty-plus-minute version of “At The Hop,”

WORKINGMAN’S DEAD

(Excerpt from the 33 1/3 book about the Grateful Dead’s album, “Workingman’s Dead”)

  Ten days into the sessions, a crisis developed. The first few songs the band cut had an alarming lack of viscosity and clamminess, and rumors circulated that they were working on a final product that would be considered listenable. 

  Bill Kreutzmann was particularly hard hit by these allegations. He called a band meeting, asking his colleagues to gather at his new place in Laurel Canyon. When they arrived at the address he’d provided, they were puzzled to find a vacant lot with a tiny gingerbread house in the middle of it. It was covered with marshmallow frosting and gum drops, in many different colors. 

  Jerry Garcia, their leader, immediately spotted the problem. “That’s not even a real house, man.” 

  Phil Lesh, who played the instrument with the big fat strings and really long neck, said what they were all thinking. “If Bill was small enough to fit into that house, he wouldn’t be able to play the drums.” 

  “Not the kind of drums we use, anyways,” said Bob Weir. “Don’t we use regular drums, Pigpen?” he said, apparently addressing Ron “Pigpen” McKernan, although Weir was staring at a mailbox at the time.