Some Facts About the Okapi from Anne Elizabeth Moore on Vimeo.

My first fake ID was from a five-foot, thirty-five-year-old woman named Rosario and, surprisingly enough, it worked—so long as I ducked down nine inches, wore a wig and put on my I am not eighteen face.  It was either that, or the bouncers were drunk.

I’m betting on the latter.

Anyhow, it was my freshman year at Boston University and I worked nights at The Cottonwood, this upscale Southwestern restaurant.  I was too young to serve liquor so instead I was a food runner, which means when a plate of jalapeno poppers came up in the kitchen, I carried it to table twenty-five.  Yep, that was it.  I carried jalapenos across a room.

Rosario worked the line: chopping carrots, peeling potatoes and making Guacamole with other illegal immigrants, not unlike every kitchen in every restaurant in the entire country.  What made Rosario different was she wanted US citizenship, and she somehow thought I could help her.

“I spoke with Callie.” she said—Callie, FYI, was this cocktail waitress who was suuuper into the club scene, which in 1994 meant she wore blue lipgloss and glowsticks and was always making me listen to techno on her headphones.  “Isn’t it, like, spiritual?” she’d say, moving around like her joints were made of jelly.  “It’s what love would sound like if love had sound.”

(Yeah, I know.  And this was before she took the ecstasy).

Anyhow, I hated techno, but I’d never admit that to Callie, ‘cause I really needed a friend.  You’ve done that, right?  Latched onto someone you really don’t like ‘cause it’s better than being alone?  Luckily, I didn’t have to spend too much time with her—she was always at the clubs, and I was underage.

“Callie say you study English,” Rosario said. We were in the Cottonwood kitchen: her washing cilantro and me folding napkins.

“That was last semester,” I said. I’d realized that majoring in classical literature would in no way guarantee me a job, and since I didn’t like carrying jalapenos across a room, I’d changed departments to something more realistic.  Something with a future.  “Now,” I told Rosario, “I study philosophy.”

The day before, in Ethics class, we’d started Aristotle.  Can you imagine what three hundred eighteen-year-olds can do to Aristotle?  We sat in this giant lecture hall, the professor talking in front while TA’s ran up and down the aisles with microphones.  The discussion that day concerned the true nature of the self. “Aristotle wrote that one’s actions define one’s true self,” said the professor.

I wrote the word ACTIONS in my notebook.

“As in, a knife’s true self would be defined by cutting.”

I wondered if a knife could have a true self.

“So consider,” the prof went on, “what action defines your true self?”

Hands shot up all around me, and the TA handed the mic to some Brainiac in John Lennon glasses.  “Professor,” he said, his voice Oh So-Higher Academics.  “Shouldn’t we first discuss what defines TRUTH?”

Okay.  So, no matter how many drinks anyone’s had, we’re all waaaay to sober for the whole What is Truth conversation so I’ll just shorthand it—Jesus rose, relativism, Buddha, Ghandi, e=mc squared and James fucking Frey—but back THEN?  When I was eighteen?  WHAT IS TRUTH was a terribly profound question and of course I was the only one pondering it because I was rare and enlightened.  Who IS my true self? I wondered, putting lemon garnish in the tortilla soup, and, like most college students, I spent the next four years searching for that self, as exhibited by the following list of my favorite songs (which were, of course, accompanied by the appropriate clothes, attitude and friends):

• Closer to Fine, Indigo Girls.
• Ironic, Alanis Morisette
• Jesus Doesn’t Want Me for a Sunbeam, Nirvana
• Seasons of Love, Rent

(Yes, I was a Renthead, shut up).

• Stay, Lisa Loeb
• Stirb Nicht Vor Mir, Rammstein

(I recognize that the jump from Lisa Loeb to Rammstein is a large one. This

happened because of a boy, so I had to get real cool real fast).

• I am Not a Pretty Girl, Ani DiFranco

(Boy and I broke up).

• Where is My Mind, Pixies
• Night on the Sun, Modest Mouse
• Good Fortune, PJ Harvey

“You help me learn English, please?” Rosario asked in the Cottonwood kitchen, and of course I said yes.  She’d always been nice to me, and there was plenty of time to kill between the lunch and dinner rush.  We’d sit on upturned milk crates by the dishwasher and run flashcards, pronouncing first vowels, then syllables and finally entire words before graduating to their definitions.  One day, Callie came back to stock glassware and found us there.

“Hey, Rosario,” she said, peering over our shoulders the flashcards.  “Are you paying Megan for this?”

Rosario glanced at me.  “I don’t have—“ she started.

“I don’t need—” I started.

“Your ID,” Callie said. “Give Megan your ID.”

And that’s how I started clubbing.

There are three things you’ve got to understand about the scene:

1. The beat

Drop what you’re doing, grab a sledge hammer and bang it repeatedly against your skull. For the entire year I spent in the clubs, that’s what it sounded like inside my head.

2. The clothes

I wore pants that fell like a tent around my feet; Princess Leia buns on the top of my head; glow in the dark bead-necklace chokers and—the worst—putty-thick glitter all over my face.  When THIS me looks back on THAT me, I want to march her in the bathroom for a good scrubbing.

3.The drugs

Callie’s supplier was this hotshot at MIT who mixed his own e in a basement lab—you might have read about him.  He got busted in 96 the month after graduating salutatorian—anyway, ecstasy was readily available, and it did make the music sound like love. It also made the strobe lights, like, SO pretty, and there’s all these PEOPLE, and they’re all TOGETHER, sharing an experience, which is like so awesome and can totally change the world.

If my stupidity in this moment isn’t a SAY NO TO DRUGS advertisement I don’t know what is, but that was me, nearly every night: standing in the back of some trance club, rolling out of my mind and pretending like I fit.  I slept through classes.  My grades dropped.  I was so out of it I couldn’t even tell you what day it was—but I can tell you the day it all changed.

We were at some club, who knows which one, they’re all the same in my mind. Callie was off dancing and I stood by the bar, waiting for the e to kick in.  Without it I felt out of place, like an impostor. That’s when this guy came up to me—totally normal-looking—he could’ve been you or you or you.  “Hey,” he yelled over the music, and I waited for the inevitable pick-up line.

“So, this might seem sort of out there,” he started.

Wait for it, wait for it—

“But can I be your slave?”

I laughed.

“I’m serious!” he said.  “I’m writing a collection of essays.  In each one I’m someone’s slave for a week and I write about what they have me do.”

Show of hands, ladies—who’s gotten hit on by a writer?  Right—oldest trick in the book, but since I was still waiting on the ecstasy I thought I’d kill time.  “What DO they have you do?” I asked.

For the next hour, this guy told me things that my eighteen-year-old self didn’t know were possible.  One woman prostituted him to her gay friends and kept the money. Another made him clean her house wearing only a saddle.  A suburban couple filmed him setting fire to himself—“They made me pour lighter fluid in my hair,” he said, “like it was shampoo or something,” and yes, I know, I was gullible as all hell and he was probably lying through his teeth but the thing is, I believed him.  I was young and lonely and the e had kicked in so this poor poor man was so lovely, he had such nice hair, and aren’t we all just, like, searching for who we really are?

Anyhow, I asked him why he actually DID these things.  Why didn’t he just write fiction?

“Fiction?” he said, like it was a bad word.  “People don’t want fiction.  They want the truth—the blood and guts and piss and shit.”  I could feel the drugs tingling in my fingertips, the beat pounding through the floor in the bottoms of my feet. “Besides,” he went on.  “The things people have you do says a lot about who they are.” He paused.  “What would YOU have me do?”

I didn’t know what to say.

NOW, now I know exactly what I’d say—I just had a baby, so I’d be all do my laundry, cook my meals, burp this child and clean the poop off my floorboards—but back THEN?

Could he help me study?  Carry jalapenos across a room?  Buy me liquor, take me shopping, take my virginity, bend time so I could hurry up and be an adult, light years away from this stupid, desperate eighteen-year-old want?

“Well, think about,” he said. And he gave me his card.

I still have it, and every now and then I type his name into Google, looking for that book.  It’s not out—yet—but I recently found an essay of his about the couple who set him on fire.  “It’s an interesting study of their character,” he wrote, and I thought, Dude, what does it say about yours? I mean, granted, I’m thirty-two years old and I still can’t put my finger on the elusive action that sums up my whole being but I never LET STRANGERS SET ME ON FIRE while I looked for an answer.

For me, what’s easier than defining who I am is defining who I’m not.

That night, nearly fifteen years ago, I went in search of Callie and found her dancing by herself in a corner. Her eyes were glassy from the drugs, her movements choppy and robotic. “You don’t understand,”  she said when she saw me.  She put both hands on her head, like she was trying to hold down her brain.  “This song, it’s like, ME.  It’s who I AM.”

I was low on patience by that point: the e was wearing off and I wanted out of my skin.  “Let’s go,” I said—but she wouldn’t.  “You don’t understand,” she kept saying, and I thought, You’re right.  I don’t understand.  I really really don’t.

That was the end of me the Club kid.  I went home, washed the glitter of my face and put the baggy pants in the back of my closet—funny how at that age you can take a personality off as easy as a sweater—and while I’d later try on all sorts of other selves, just then I was … sort of nothing, an empty slate waiting for my next influence.  I went to classes.  I carried jalapenos across a room.  I sat on milk crates with Rosario.

Her citizenship exam was coming up fast, and every day we ran vocabulary flashcards.  That lady was a champ, I tell you what—her English was better than my own and she knew more US policy than probably everyone reading this combined.

“Inept,” she read, enunciating each syllable.  “Care.  Cruel.  Ironic. Trivial. Truth.”

TRUTH.

I stared at the definition on the back of the card as Rosario recited aloud: “TRUTH.  Genuine, not pretended, insincere or artificial.”  I looked at her, this tiny woman with her black hair plastered back under a mandatory food-service hairnet. Every day she chopped potatoes; every day she cried because of the onions; every day she sat on that milk crate, working her ass off, repeating definitions, her accent wrapping thickly around the harsh English words.  These were the actions that defined her.

“Rosario,” I said.  “What would you do if you had a slave for a week?”

She laughed like that was the funniest thing in the Universe. “That will never happen,” she said.

“But if it did,” I insisted.  “What if it did?”

She didn’t even need to think about it. “Run flashcards,”  she said, as though this whole Who is my true self thing wasn’t so complicated after all.

The only way I expected to hear Polisar’s voice again was in my own living room, maybe after buying an old record online somewhere. And yet, a few weeks ago, twenty years after last hearing "My Brother Thinks He’s a Banana," I was sitting in a coffee shop and I heard that voice. It was in the background, under the hiss of the espresso machine, but unmistakable. The song was as familiar to me as one sung in kindergarten, like the ABC’s. The teenage barista didn’t know who was singing, but we were listening to the soundtrack from "Juno." A quick Google search showed what I hoped — the song was "All I Want Is You," and it is from that very same record that was in constant rotation on our living room hi-fi.

[mp3] "All I Want Is You"

I downloaded the whole album for a mere eight bucks, and it was just as good as I remembered. Some of the songs were even funnier from the perspective of a "grown up" and a parent. Others seemed more edgy — even a little creepy. I convinced a friend to buy the album for his kids, but it was quickly banned in his home. It’s not hard to see why — lyrics about taking a little sister to the woods and tying her to a tree don’t sit well with parents. Others, such as "My Mommy Drives a Dumptruck," would seem to be in line with modern progressive values, until the song takes a turn for the absolutely ridiculous and, to some, offensive. I find it easier to overlook these slights to parental values when seen as part of the album’s overall tone of complete and unapologetic silliness. Children hear the gender-twisting "Mommy Drives a Dumptruck" just before "I Have a Dog and my Dog’s Name is Cat." For them it’s not progressive or postmodern — it’s just fun and funny. And good.

The simple tunes, carved out with a twelve string guitar and catchy melodies, come straight from the stripped down folk style pioneered by Pete Seeger and hipsterized by Bob Dylan. Those influences are apparent when listening to Polisar’s songs. His lyrics also have much in common with the innocently sinister poetry of Shel Silverstein. The guitar playing is nothing special, but provides the perfect platform for Polisar’s theatrical voice and expressive story-songs. The rhythm of each song is derived from the familiar "chung-chaka-chunk" heard in Johnny Cash’s "I Walk the Line," played either fast, medium or slow. And yet, after playing the album for several days straight on my laptop (On my wife’s insistence we burned a CD so our daughter could listen in her room), the songs haven’t grown old or any less hilarious.

Polisar seems to know exactly what kids want: good melodies, simple music, and lyrics they can relate to. To be sure, Ella doesn’t catch every phrase of every song. The brother who thinks he’s a banana, we are told, has read the Bhagavad Gita. But those details are overlooked. The unfortunate scenario in "My Brother Threw Up on my Stuffed Toy Bunny" is instantly recognizable to anyone in a family with children.

Will the classic recordings of Barry Louis Polisar be rediscovered as children’s music for our generation? Not likely. But for those who like their kid’s music raw and unrefined, these songs are a welcome alternative to the sweet, overproduced, unimaginative fare marketed for children. Even Raffi, who is always popular at our house, sounds like a Canadian milk-toast after listening to "My Brother Thinks He’s a Banana." And who knows? Maybe one day we’ll trust our kids enough to let them listen to songs that make us a little uncomfortable, which is probably how they feel when we listen to NPR. At the very least, the digitized version of Polisar’s record is a gaunlet thrown down for the twenty-first century. There is no excuse for lame children’s music.

At this time, I suspect the true genius of Barry Louis Polisar may be lost for a few generations. Parents who keep their toddlers on leashes are unlikely to see the educational benefit of the brief existential tune, "My Name is Hiram Lipschlitz and my Problem’s Pretty Clear." And the iPod generation, while temporarily infatuated with the sweet and unchallenging "All I Want is You," will not likely be making "One Day My Best Friend Barbara Turned Into a Frog" a staple on their playlist. Perhaps, however, Polisar’s legacy will be heard in other ways. For those of us inoculated in childhood with those irreverent songs, we know kid’s music doesn’t have to be boring, or dumbed down, or even safe. My own post-toddler anthem, "You’ve Got to Keep That Pee in Your Body," has quite a bit of Polisar influence, despite having been written before his rediscovery. The seed was sown long ago, with a scratchy record playing in our suburban townhouse.

At this point, my daughter has half the songs on the album memorized. When I played it for her for the very first time, she sat perfectly quiet beside the laptop with her hands in her lap. After the seventeen songs had finished, the play list instantly queued up the Beetle’s "Get Back." Ella sat upright and looked at me. "What is this? I want to hear the funny songs."

I’m intrigued.

Extracting the truth or uncovering some hidden meaning from a movie or book is not always the easiest thing to do. I hate to be a hater, but when you’re in the business of writing reviews it happens. This collection of essays is quite frankly sophomoric; filled with far-reaching musings by what I picture in my head to be a group of film undergraduates wearing horn-rimmed glasses. References to Lord of the Rings and The Matrix are abundant. One writer waxes on about their theory on the motif of soap. Others attempt to analyze Palahniuk as a writer. Again and again I kept reading summarizations of the plot to a numbing degree.

I thought what better way to talk about this collection than to contribute my own essay on the book/movie. To save you guys from what you probably already know, I’m not going to summarize the plot. If you’re interested, you can read the plot synopsis at the IMDB.

What is the appeal of Fight Club? Why almost ten years after the release of the movie and almost 15 years after the book came out are people still talking about it? Why was I intrigued about this collection of essays to begin with?

In talking with some friends in Seattle about this piece I was working on they had a few anecdotes to share of their own. One guy said when he was in high school around the release of the movie and a kid in his class had a Fight Club themed graduation party. The invitations all said something like “You do not talk about Bobby’s graduation party.”

The same guy who is working on his masters in atmospheric sciences told me one of his peers is starting a group for aspiring scientists to learn and practice the art of arguing because “scientists don’t have these skills” and naming said group “Fight Club.”

So again — what’s the appeal?

It’s edgy. The one part of the collection I actually really enjoyed with the foreword written by Mr. Palahniuk himself — “The Future is in the Fringe.” I know it sounds like a cheesy title, but in it he writes that about how the appeal of this is all because the characters in Fight Club and their antics are outside of societal norms.

I believe that these characters offer us an escape. They are about living outside of our everyday selves but not in a completely fantastical Lord of the Rings fantasy-world kind of way. It’s more feasible. Just on the brink of being possible. These are the characters that push boundaries and are where we often daydream our lives to be. Who doesn’t wish that they had a little Tyler Durdin in their step? That’s the appeal. That’s why we’re all so into it. The idea of freeing yourself from your everyday self is a nice thought to have.

Despite how great (or not so great) the essays within the collection are You Don’t Talk About Fight Club are, it’s still noteworthy because people are obviously still talking; and that’s saying something.

A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of stumbling across Walter Benjamin’s Archive, a book published by Verso earlier this year. The text consolidates material pertaining to a fall 2006 exhibition at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin which cataloged a variety of Benjamin related ephemera for public display. This material included notebooks, postcards, drafts and scribbles, project outlines and photography. Given Benjamin’s obsession with the analysis of historical waste, it follows that his legacy would inspire a rigorous archival project. This gorgeously designed text provides a side-door into his life and work enables a proximity that is both fascinating and somewhat melancholic.

[benjamin’s paris address book]

The text is organized into thirteen short chapters which cover a diverse range of topics including collecting, traveling, graphic forms, puzzles and Benjamin’s time in Paris researching the Arcades Project. Each of these sections is comprised of a selection of documents, many of which are extensively annotated and a few of which are translated. The chapters are also accompanied by introductory texts by Ursula Marx, Erdmut Wizisla and Michael and Gudrun Schwarz which frame specific interests, obsessions and spans of time in Benjamin’s life. There is some great material pertaining to his interest in toys, his linguistic adventures in parenthood and several plans and outlines analyzing the life and work of Franz Kafka.

What is so interesting about this project, is rather than approach Benjamin as the subject for a standard biographical profile, this text employs his research and writing methodology to dissect and taxonomize his interests. In many ways, working through this text felt like a continuation of a reading of the Arcades Project as all the content is fleeting, self-contained and schematic. Despite the fragmentary nature of this collection, the whole is indeed more than the sum of the parts and a very vital, humane impression of Benjamin shines through this (curated) marginalia. Beyond the content of the text, Benjamin was a steady-handed craftsman when it came to writing – his research, documents and notebooks are meticulous constructions with the potential to inspire both scholars and designers.

The following two images and related excerpts made quite an impression on me, perhaps you’ll find them of interest. The first, annotated by Ursula Marx, deals with Benjamin’s editing process. The second is a trademark Benjamin observation, dealing with one of his favourite topics — the intangible nature of memory.

“Alongside this work on the sheet Benjamin also used a very different technique: work with the sheet. He cut it crosswise into units which each represent one motif or building block of the text. In the case of the Kafka material [examples shown above] this resulted in about eighty manuscript strips in total. The complexity of Benjamin’s editing procedures is revealed in this process: presumably, as a consequence of previous collations and groups of ideas, individual motifs are formulated and written out randomly on a sheet of paper. Using coloured symbols on the clear edge of the sheet, these are then pooled into units, which are placed in a sequence indicated by the number of the signs. After this—if necessary—the sheets are cut up in order to make the placing of the units in the planned order physically possible.”

“What lends an incomparable tone to the very first view of a village or a town in the landscape is the fact that in one’s image of it distance resonates just as importantly as nearness. This latter still has not yet gained preponderance through the constant exploration that has become habit. Once we begin to find our way around the place, the earliest picture can never be restored.”

This post originally appeared on Greg J. Smith’s blog, Serial Consign

Upon reading his work, one is reminded immediately of Carl Sandburg or Walt Whitman, and Coval himself mentions Nelson Algren as an influence. All three writers capture a hard and masculine reality of America without much flourish. Coval’s America, as portrayed in Everyday People, is Red-White-and-Blue Chicago- roots in Southern Illinois and cosmopolitan flirtations with New York.

this Chicago, this why the world works

under the common wealth of forced gas heat,

open kitchen ovens and corrupt politicians.

this city/country are the same

beauty at first glance

and after toiling in the rush-hour commute

grit sticks and melts the bones

of those called to work in the dirt of empire

- excerpt from The Corner Store

Unlike Sandburg, Whitman, and Algren, Coval’s stanzas beg to be spoken aloud. Indeed, on paper some of his poems appear flat, but to witness Coval perform is to understand that his work is truly a musical, live form of poetry. Coval is the founder of Louder Than A Bomb: The Chicago Teen Poetry Festival and he performed for four seasons on HBO’s Def Poetry Slam. So important is the poetry slam forum to Coval’s ethos that he dedicates a number of the poems in Everyday People to the topic.

But he doesn’t stop there. Coval is also a firm believer in, and vocal proponent of, hip-hop, which he has worked diligently to make accessible to broader populations. “What hip-hop taught us to do,” he explains, “is just tell our stories and where we come from.” He continues: “Hip-hop asks one eternal question: ‘What do you represent?’”

When Coval himself faced this question, having found a creative outlet in hip-hop at a young age, it took him some time to negotiate exactly how he wanted to answer. Having grown up with his mother and one brother in a Jewish household in the suburb of Northbrook, Illinois, Coval said in a recent interview that he was not always up-front about his suburban identity when he first explored Chicago’s hip-hop scene.

However, it was this very same internal question which became the impetus for much of his self-examination and poetic articulation. As he grew as a poet, he worked to educate young adults around the city, across the state, and around the world on the power of this particular art form. Today he teaches at the School of the Art Institute, University of Illinois-Chicago, and is poet-in-residence at the Jane Adams Hull House. In an earlier work, which Coval performed on the opening track of Idris Goodwin’s 2004 EP, he posits:

this is hip-hop

it is alive and well

it lives elsewhere than your radio MTV BET station

it has saved a generation of kids who write

and bomb

and break

and make beats

and read books on their own time outside of institutional gazes

cuz they heard De La or Rakim or Big Daddy Kane or Pac

or saw Style Wars

…

and wanted to do that

tell stories like that

truth like that

rep who you are what you feel where you come from like that

Everyday People is a testament to Coval’s now established presence in the hip-hop world and his influence on the next generation of spoken word artists. His voice is young at times – relatable, expressing frustration with nepotism and learning to make ends meet on one’s own. At other times, such as the more epic Parting the Red, White, and Blues, his knowledge is sagacious, and his words flow quickly and powerfully.

For the fullest experience of the book, read it out loud on a street corner, in a club, or on the train. Backed with the industrial noises of the street or the hum of human voices, Coval’s words come alive.