La Vita Bella

2012 Reading Project, Books 7-23: A Year in (Visual) Recap

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 18:10:43 -0400

In 2012, I made a resolution on this blog to review every book I read over the course of the year. Like most Milligan resolutions, I defaulted on it about 1/3 of the way through. But, having still kept a detailed list on all the books I read in 2012, I decided to belatedly rescue the endeavor by posting a visual summary of my year in reading. Enjoy below!

(Note: I’m currently on book 12 in my 2013 reading adventure, so I may attempt to do some kind of quarterly posts with short descriptions/reviews this year - versus full-length individual posts - so I can continue the project in a way that a) fulfills my desire to share great literary finds I come across and b) accommodates my extreme laziness.)

Book #7 - “Lone Wolf” by Jodi Picoult

Book #8 - “March” by Geraldine Brooks

Book #9 - “Ask the Dust” by John Fante

Book #10 - “Songs of Slaves in the Desert” by Alan Cheuse

Book #11 - “The Wave” by Susan Casey

Book #12 - “What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets” by Michael Sandel

Book #13 - “Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake” by Anna Quindlen

Book #14 - “Phil Gordon’s Little Green Book” by Phil Gordon

Book #15 - “The Green Shore” by Natalie Bakopoulos

Book #16 - “The Historian” by Elizabeth Kostova

Book #17 - “In Pursuit of Giants” by Matt Rigney

Book #18 - “The Devil’s Teeth” by Susan Casey

Book #19 - “The Devil All the Time” by Donald Ray Pollock

Book #20 - “The Collected Short Stories of Ray Bradbury” by Ray Bradbury

Book #21 - “My Heart is an Idiot” by Davy Rothbart

Book #22 - “Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore” by Robin Sloane

Book #23 - “Lying Awake” by Mark Salzman

Traverse City: What the Truck?

Thu, 14 Feb 2013 14:17:00 -0500

OK, Traverse City, let’s have a heart-to-heart. For the past several weeks, I’ve been following a growing debate among various bodies of local leadership about what to do with food trucks in the community. This is not the first time this topic has made the rounds in TC. Several months ago, the City Commission made the decision - based partially on input from the DDA - to double the daily vending rates in peak season in the downtown district, from $50 to $100 a day. These fees were considerably more relaxed outside of downtown, but as anyone who has sold $3 tacos from a cart can tell you, that price hike essentially made it prohibitive for transient vendors to operate in the DDA district. Which, for all intents and purposes, was likely the goal.

Not everyone agreed that downtown should be the exclusive domain of brick-and-mortar businesses, however, and so critics of the fee structure have grown increasingly vocal in challenging the City and DDA to reconsider the policy over the last several months. That criticism gained traction, and now an ad hoc committee of the City Commission has taken up the issue, again turning to the DDA for input. On Friday morning (February 15), the DDA board will vote on whether or not to make a recommendation to the City Commission on transient and mobile food vendors, particularly as it relates to locations downtown where they might operate. From there, the City Commission will consider that and other aspects of the mobile vending policy, such as fee structures and the number of vendors allowed downtown.

I’ve been following this issue from both a concerned citizen and intrigued journalist perspective for some time now. Because of the journalism aspect, I have both a) undertaken considerable research on the topic, talking to many of the parties involved and reviewing case studies and national data on mobile vending trends, and b) have felt it necessary to keep my opinions mostly to myself, outside of the occasional 1 a.m. bar ramblings to a friend. However, as the debate heats up, and city governmental bodies begin making decisions that could have long-term repercussions for the community, I wanted to share some thoughts on some problematic issues I’ve observed during this process (which has been complicated, as happens with many policy processes in Traverse City, by a heady mix of protectionism and fear of the unknown).

A quick disclaimer before we begin: Common public perception has it that reporters must be unquestionably objective on every subject on which they report, a notion I personally find unrealistic, and to be honest, a bit absurd. Journalists aren’t robots; we have opinions on almost everything, just as everyone else does. The important caveat is that a journalist - at least a good one - will make sure their writing does not become a conduit for their own personal agenda. A good journalist will check, and then recheck, themselves throughout their writing process to ensure editorializing does not sneak into a non-editorial medium. My personal blog is a decidedly editorial medium. But when writing elsewhere, I subscribe to The Newsroom maxim: Do your damndest to represent everyone’s clearest, best arguments, and let the readers decide for themselves where they stand. When covering the food truck issue for local press, that’s exactly what I’ve tried to do - but here I hope I can be more candid.

The single greatest force of resistance to allowing food trucks and other transient vendors downtown seems to originate from brick-and-mortar businesses - or those defending brick-and-mortar businesses - who see mobile vending as a threat to the sustainability of those businesses, a source of “unfair competition.” The unfair aspect originates in the belief that brick-and-mortar businesses (let’s call them BAMs from here on out, for simplicity’s sake) have operational costs and regulations that mobile vendors do not. A BAM pays for property taxes and utilities, invests in their building, pays for year-round staff, and so forth. Costs and regulations incurred by mobile vendors themselves - the cost of the trucks or carts, the cost of storing the trucks or carts, installing commercial-grade mobile kitchens, paying for staff and inventory, paying for gas and electricity, meeting the same health code and insurance regulations BAMs must meet, etc - have been characterized as trivial compared to BAMs’ investments.

This is one area where the debate for me sours. It reflects either an unwillingness to engage in equitable comparisons to operational costs versus profits across the spectrum (BAM may have x overhead a day, but also has x profit), or simply shows an unfamiliarity with costs and regulations outside one’s own business model. No one disputes mobile vending is a cheaper entrepreneurial start-up than a BAM, but then again, a mobile vendor doesn’t necessarily have the same potential profit yield of most BAMs. Selecting one model over the other is an entrepreneurial decision, each with its own advantages and disadvantages. Most critics of mobile vending I’ve spoken with, however, have dismissed out-of-hand the costs and challenges associated with being a mobile vendor versus a BAM, and have focused instead on the perceived astronomical advantages mobile vendors have.

Which brings me to the next issue: Mobile vendors, in most regards, do not have astronomical advantages over BAMs. They have perhaps two distinct advantages I can see, inherent in their design: They are mobile, and they are less expensive to operate than a BAM. BAMs have their own unique advantages, of course. They have seating. They traditionally have higher profit margins (more expensive products + greater capacity to distribute those products). They are protected against the elements and weather that affect mobile vendors. They have an environment in which people can gather and linger, ordering additional products as they do so. They have bathrooms. They have ambiance. They are destinations.

Food trucks and mobile vendors, however, are designed for grab-and-go dining. They typically offer cheap or low-cost food. They are not a place you go to celebrate a birthday with 10 friends, or have an important business lunch. They don’t offer bathrooms, or environmental ambiance (though many look great!). They are limited in the products they can offer - typically, whatever can be produced in a mobile kitchen, and without a liquor license. They are, essentially, an entirely different creature than a BAM, serving an entirely different audience. Some days you feel like having a five-course journey through gastronomical heaven at Red Ginger. Other days you feel like grabbing a cheap fish taco and going back home to sleep off your hangover. Those needs represent two different consumers, with two different desires. Why can’t we have two different kinds of businesses servicing those demographics?

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the greatest source of BAM criticism has come from restaurants whose models are closer in nature to those of food trucks - those whose clients right now may not have many alternatives in that niche, and who suspect (likely correctly) that their days of competition-free business ownership will be threatened with the introduction of mobile vending. The most vocal critics at a recent DDA study session on food trucks were the owners of House of Doggs, J&S Hamburg and U&I Lounge. Now first off, it’s important I note that I love and eat at all of these places on a regular basis. I appreciate a 2am hot dog, affordable Greek gyro and delicious, cheap cheeseburger as much as the next person. But as a consumer, I find myself questioning my loyalty to a business when I hear that business’ owner essentially demand that other vendors - who wish to offer products in a similar price point or at a similar time of day (read: late night) - be banned from competing with them, simply because they’d rather customers be forced to give them their business. That kind of rationale gives me serious pause about patronizing those businesses going forward, food truck alternatives or not, because the modus operandi of a consumer in a capitalistic society is almost always choice. When a business starts limiting a customer’s options to protect its own financial interests, rather than choosing to elevate its game or collaborate with other vendors or convince the customer it deserves their support, the customer’s desire to be a loyal patron understandably wanes. Suddenly, coming to that restaurant anymore no longer feels like the customer’s decision. It feels like the restaurant’s.

I’m not unsympathetic to the stresses, physical and financial, of running a restaurant. I deeply and genuinely want to support these downtown companies, as I’ve done now for many years. But having supported these companies for many years, I know that my business - and that of other customers - will not immediately vaporize with the introduction of a handful of food trucks downtown. J&S Hamburg is not going out of business after 75 years because someone else decides to sell falafel wraps. If someone else decides to sell $5 burgers, and customers begin going there instead of J&S for quality or taste or convenience factors, I suspect J&S will quickly learn how to make a better $5 burger and compete. That’s the nature of entrepreneurship.

Entrepreneurship is really at the heart of this discussion, in the end. I find it puzzling that businesses who often complain about government regulation or intervention are now asking that same government to step in and protect them from marketplace competition. This is the question I’ve struggled with most in reporting on this issue, one that I’ve asked of nearly every business owner I’ve spoken with: In a capitalistic, entrepreneurial society, what rational grounds can you point to for preventing someone else from entering your market and competing? City attorney Lauren Trible-Laucht has already cautioned the DDA and the City that the answer to that question is essentially “none” - removing or limiting food trucks “merely to prevent economic competition” with BAMs does not comply with legal precedent, she said, and could leave the city vulnerable to litigation.

The best response I’ve heard to that question when asking a BAM owner has essentially been that mobile vendors don’t have to play by the same rules, thereby they have an unfair business advantage over BAMs. But for the reasons outlined above, I simply can’t find enough reasonable evidence to substantiate that claim. What I have most commonly encountered instead are a chorus of hypothetical scenarios, representing the worst-case fears of BAMs and the consumers who support them. “Food trucks will only come in the summer and skim off all our best business, then skip town!” “There will be 10 hot dog stands lining Front Street!” “It will look like a cheap carnival downtown!” “There will be nowhere to park. Trucks will take all our spots!”

None of these scenarios, as best I can tell, are based in realistic market or operational conditions (as much as I would love to spend an entire afternoon taste-testing 10 different hot dog stands on Front Street, the market here would never support more than, say, one). Furthermore, all of these scenarios can be addressed through reasonable regulations and ordinances. In fact, some are addressed already in the recommendation before the DDA: Mobile vendors voluntarily banned themselves from Front Street between Boardman and Union (unquestionably prime vending real estate, and where many of downtown’s BAMs are located), and restricted themselves 20 feet from all intersections for safety and traffic reasons. The City Commission has the ability, if it so chooses, to allocate a certain number of permits for downtown, or for certain blocks or parks. Reasonable discussions can be had on all these fronts to ensure the aesthetics and traffic flow of downtown are preserved.

In terms of year-round operations - Simon Joseph, owner of TC food truck Roaming Harvest, is already running a permanent year-round business, operating in both blizzards and boiling sun in front of Right Brain Brewery and out on Eighth Street. Gary & Allison Jonas, who are opening a new bar in the former Jack’s Market building on Front Street this spring, are planning to open their parking lot to up to five food trucks at a time - all of which will be full-time, year-round vendors. I suspect many other mobile vendors who dream of being a part of the culinary landscape in this community and are willing to put their life savings on the line to do so also envision themselves becoming a permanent part of the local economy.

So, if we removed the “seasonal” aspect of mobile vendors, would BAMs still object to their presence? I suspect the answer is yes, because that argument can only fairly be seen as a deflection from the true heart of food truck resistance: Economic competition. Food trucks are being characterized in an exaggerated and unflattering light - I’ve heard people use the term “transients” in the same distasteful tone as “renters” was used a few years back when we were talking about ADUs and affordable housing - to alarm the consumer into opposing their presence. Accusations are being made that the trucks will look cheap (have you seen Roaming Harvest’s truck, or Porterhouse Production’s 1940’s food truck Curbie? They look, frankly, kick-ass), or that the food will be low-quality (again, see above examples - plus, in a town with this many choices, the market would quickly eliminate mediocre vendors). Even when faced with the prospect of a beautiful food truck owned by a local entrepreneur serving high-quality food on a year-round basis, critics retreat and resort to: “Well - we have enough restaurants already! We don’t need anymore. We’re not Austin or Portland - we’re Traverse City! Leave well enough alone.”

And part of that is true. We’re not Austin. We’re not Portland. We’re Traverse City. But we are Traverse City, now, existing in the year 2013. We are not the honeyed, sleepy-eyed resort town of some halcyon 1970s summer camp fantasy. This town has grown up. This town has gotten older, bigger, loftier and noisier with each passing year. This town has become known; it is no longer our private paradisaical secret. When Michael Moore is running your local movie theater and Mario Batali is name-dropping you in The New York Times and Good Morning America is calling your backyard the most beautiful place in the country, it’s time to give up the small-town ghost and embrace the progressive, visionary, dazzling potential your beloved city has to offer. And that potential must be, above all things, inclusive. It must be forward-thinking. It can’t just protect; it must also embrace.

I love the restaurants of downtown Traverse City. I love our BAMs. But just as I’ve supported them - will continue to support them - I look forward to supporting our food trucks as well. We may not be a bustling cosmopolitan city, but we are a city nonetheless, and a city that deserves a culture where entrepreneurs from all different business models and visions and walks of life are invited to participate - where consumers have choice, and businesses have healthy competition. It’s our next greatest chance at continuing the vibrancy and creative, thoughtful growth that has made - and continues to make - this community such a wonderful place for all of us to live.

2012 Reading Project, Book 6: "Open City" by Teju Cole

Tue, 03 Apr 2012 19:14:00 -0400

“To be alive, it seemed to me, as I stood there in all kinds of sorrow, was to be both original and reflection, and to be dead was to be split off, to be reflection alone.” -Teju Cole, “Open City”

“Open City” is a novel without a plot. There’s no other way to say it - hardly anything of consequence happens in the story. Or, I should say, hardly any action of consequence happens in the story. A young Nigerian doctor roams the streets of New York, musing on the people, places and mundane rituals of daily life he encounters. He describes the strange and beautiful buildings he sees. He ponders the wandering impressions that drift through his mind when he runs a hand through the waters of the Hudson river. He details his memories of his African homeland, and the family he long ago left behind. The book moves at a slow, meandering pace, the same pace as the borough-exploring character. And it’s absolutely riveting. “Open City” is a poetic, spiritual and deftly intelligent read with sentences so perfectly crafted it’s almost impossible to believe the author is a debut novelist.

Since there is no real plot to speak of, I’ve decided to just include a selection of some of my favorite passages from the book. The author’s words will do his work more justice than anything I could write. If you appreciate finely honed reflections on life, mortality, religion, politics and the generally bewildering and beautiful experience of being alive, “Open City” is a book not to be missed.

The sight of large masses of people hurrying down into underground chambers was perpetually strange to me, and I felt that all of the human race were rushing, pushed by a counterinstinctive death drive, into movable catacombs. Aboveground I was with thousands of others in their solitude, but in the subway, standing close to strangers, jostling them and being jostled by them for space and breathing room, all of us reenacting unacknowledged traumas, the solitude intensified.

How easy it would be, I thought, to slip gently into the water here, and go down to the depths. I knelt, and trailed my hand in the Hudson. It was frigid. Here we all were, ignoring the water, paying as little attention as possible to the pair of black eternities between which our little light intervened. Our debt, though, to that light: what of it? We owe ourselves our lives. This, about which we physicians say so much to our patients, about which so little can reasonably be said, folds back and also asks us questions.

It suddenly occurred to me that, even if he had been alone, I wouldn’t have wanted to talk. He, too, was in the grip of rage and rhetoric. I saw that, attractive though his side of the political spectrum was. A cancerous violence had eaten into every political idea, had taken over the ideas themselves, and for so many, all that mattered was the willingness to do something. Action led to action, free of any moorings, and the way to be someone, the way to catch the attention of the young and recruit them to one’s cause, was to be enraged. It seemed as if the only way this lure of violence could be avoided was by having no causes, by being magnificently isolated from all loyalties. But was that not an ethical lapse graver than rage itself?

I became aware of just how fleeting the sense of happiness was, and how flimsy its basis: a warm restaurant after having come in from the rain, the smell of food and wine, interesting conversation, daylight falling weakly on the polished cherrywood of the tables. It took so little to move the mood from one level to another, as one might push pieces on a chessboard. Even to be aware of this, in the midst of a happy moment, was to push one of those pieces, and to become slightly less happy…How petty seemed to me the human condition, that we were subject to this constant struggle to modulate the internal environment, this endless being tossed about like a cloud. Predictably, the mind noted that judgment, too, and assigned it its place: a little sadness.

He had paused again, standing perfectly still and continuing to look outside. The birds were hardly visible now. Then, in a low voice, almost as if he were talking to himself or regarding his body from a posthumous point of view, he said, The reality, Julius, is that we are alone out here. Perhaps it’s what you professionals call suicide ideation, and I hope it doesn’t alarm you, but I often paint a detailed picture in my mind of what I would like the end of my life to look like. I think of saying goodbye to Clara and other people I love, then I picture an empty house, perhaps a large, rambling rural mansion somewhere near the marshes where I grew up; I imagine a bath upstairs, which I can fill with warm water; and I think of music playing all through this big house, “Crescent,” maybe, or “Ascension,” filling the spaces not taken up by my solitude, reaching me in the bath, so that when I slip across the one-way border, I do so to the accompaniment of modal harmonies heard from far away.

2012 Reading Project, Book #5: "The Hunger Games" by Suzanne Collins

Fri, 16 Mar 2012 10:59:00 -0400

This one is a bit of a cheat. I actually read and reviewed “The Hunger Games” last year - you can read the post here. But in anticipation of the movie coming out this month, I decided to give it a quick reread to refresh myself on the details - which took me all of, like, two hours. Sigh of relief: It was every bit as good as I remembered it.

Speaking of the movie - OH MY GOD, THE MOVIE! How excited are you, HG peeps? Jennifer Lawrence! Woody Harrelson! Elizabeth Banks! Miley Cyrus’ boyfriend! Lenny “The Smooth Rocker” Kravitz! Be still, my nerdy heart. If you haven’t seen the trailer - which would mean you’ve seen it 4,789 fewer times than I have - you can watch it here. Just be prepared to lose an afternoon hitting refresh ad nauseum, and staring dreamily out the window pondering all the creative ways you would assassinate people if you were forcibly dropped into some kind of future apocalyptic murder arena.

2012 Reading Project, Book #4: "Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close" by Jonathan Safran Foer

Thu, 01 Mar 2012 15:12:00 -0500

“Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close” is on a lot of people’s radars these days, primarily because the film adaptation is out and earned a few Oscar nods during this recent past awards season. I read the book first, then saw the film, and as happens all too often with adaptations, loved the former significantly more than the latter. I’ll talk about both, but I have to note upfront that if you’ve only seen the movie, you need to do yourself a favor and go out and get this book immediately. The film simply doesn’t do it justice.

It’s hard to put into words just how much I loved this book. It may have actually cracked my top 5 novels of all time, a feat I thought was all but impossible at this point in my reading career. If you’ve seen the film (or its trailer), you know the story focuses on a precocious nine-year-old narrator named Oskar Schell, who lost his father in the World Trade Center attacks on 9/11. He finds a key hidden in a vase in his father’s closet, and convinced it’s a clue to understanding his father, goes on a city-wide search through the boroughs of New York looking for the lock that fits the key. Oskar is one of the more imaginative, complex, humorous narrators in recent fiction history; you suspect through his voice, though Foer never outright confirms it, that the boy may fall somewhere on the autism spectrum. He has his own charming made-up expressions, for instance - describing the feeling of being depressed as “wearing heavy boots,” or of having a great day as being “like a hundred bucks.” His outlook on life is unique among protagonists: a heady mixture of weary wisdom and beautiful guilelessness, all contained in the small body of a grieving child.

Creatively tackling a subject matter as painfully fresh in public memory as 9/11 is risky business. Foer, however, not only doesn’t blink at the challenge, he doubles down and boldly includes a brief but heartrending subplot about the Holocaust as well. The characters in this book all have secrets, some entire secret lives, and a storyline involving Oskar’s grandmother (who survived the bombing of Dresden as a girl) and a mysterious mute man she falls for is one of the more haunting romantic relationships I can recall. In this scene (written from the perspective of the mute man), she meets the man at a cafe and begins communicating with him through his notebook.

She flipped forward and pointed at, “Please marry me,” and this time put her finger on “Please,” as if to hold the page and end the conversation, or as if she were trying to push through the word and into what she really wanted to say. I thought about life, my life, the embarrassments, the little coincidences, the shadows of alarm clocks on bedside tables. I thought about my small victories and everything I’d seen destroyed, I’d swum through mink coats on my parents’ bed while they hosted downstairs, I’d lost the only person I could have spent my life with, I’d left behind a thousand tons of marble, I could have released sculptures, I could have released myself from the marble of myself. I’d experienced joy, but not nearly enough, could there be enough? The end of suffering does not justify the suffering, and so there is no end to suffering, what a mess I am, I thought, what a fool, how foolish and narrow, how worthless, how pinched and pathetic, how helpless. None of my pets know their own names, what kind of person am I? I lifted her finger like a record needle and flipped back, one page at a time:

Help.

There isn’t a character I didn’t love in the book, but the mute man - also called “the renter” - may have been my favorite. How he came to lose his speech, his relationship with Oskar’s grandmother and his tragic past are all exquisitely and compassionately rendered by Foer. The book is clever in the way it’s unafraid to use pages as though they were actual pages in the man’s notebook, taking up a whole page to have just a sentence or word on it, as someone who communicates through a notebook actually would. (The book also uses photographs, letters and images from other character’s perspectives to powerful - and in one instance, reversing the stills of a body jumping from a Twin Tower to make it seem as though the body is returning to the building - deeply emotional effect.)

Everyone in the book is acquainted with suffering - some unbearably so. Foer doesn’t shy away from plumbing those depths, and there were times reading EL&IC - in bed at night, at a coffee shop - where I simply had to put the book down and have a good long cry, and give myself permission to take a break and return to it another day. But Foer is not a nihilist, and he doesn’t leave his characters without hope. Beauty and joy are as essential to the book as tragedy and grief; often, they are inseparably intertwined. Foer writes about that paradox poetically here, in a vignette from the perspective of Oskar’s grandmother:

When I was a girl, my life was music that was always getting louder. Everything moved me. A dog following a stranger. That made me feel so much. A calendar that showed the wrong month. I could have cried over it. I did. Where the smoke from a chimney ended. How an overturned bottle rested at the edge of a table.

I spent my life learning to feel less.

Every day I felt less.

Is that growing old? Or is it something worse?

You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness.

The film adaptation left out the entire subplot about Oskar’s grandmother’s background and her experiences in Dresden, as well as the mute man’s history, which to me were among the most potent scenes in the book. I’m not sure why the filmmakers neglected these subplots; most likely for budgetary reasons, or to keep the running time commercially viable. I’ve heard from many people who only saw the movie (and didn’t read the book) that they didn’t especially like it, and I can understand why. I was moved by the film, but that was primarily because my mind was filling in the blanks of the book’s backstory. It’s like enjoying a short snippet of music because you’ve heard the entire piece before; without that context, the snippet must stand alone, and unfortunately with the film, it doesn’t. There is a three-hour version of this movie that could exist somewhere, perhaps directed by Terrence Malick, that would be one of the most beautiful movies you’d ever see, and would actually deserve its Best Picture nomination. But in the case of the current film adaptation, the book is the far superior medium.

To prove the point, I’ll leave off with this dream-like scene from the book, written from Oskar’s grandmother’s perspective. She’s remembering the night before the bombing in Dresden - the night before, as a little girl, she lost everything and everyone she loved. Like Oskar, like all of Foer’s other characters, like the larger work itself, the scene is a bittersweet mixture of sorrow and hope - one that will leave you wearing heavy boots, and still, mysteriously, feeling like a hundred bucks.

At the end of my dream, Eve put the apple back on the branch. The tree went back into the ground. It became a sapling, which became a seed.

God brought together the land and the water, the sky and the water, the water and the water, evening and morning, something and nothing.

He said, Let there be light.

And there was darkness.

Oskar.

The night before I lost everything was like any other night.

Anna and I kept each other awake very late. We laughed. Young sisters in a bed under the roof of their childhood home. Wind on the window.

How could anything less deserve to be destroyed?

I thought we would be awake all night. Awake for the rest of our lives.

The spaces between our words grew.

It became difficult to tell when were talking and when we were silent.

The hairs of our arms touched.

It was late, and we were tired.

We assumed there would be other nights.

Anna’s breathing started to slow, but I still wanted to talk.

She rolled onto her side.

I said, I want to tell you something.

She said, You can tell me tomorrow.

I had never told her how much I loved her.

She was my sister.

We slept in the same bed.

There was never a right time to say it.

It was always unnecessary.

The books in my father’s shed were sighing.

The sheets were rising and falling around me with Anna’s breathing.

I thought about waking her.

But it was unnecessary.

There would be other nights.

And how can you say I love you to someone you love?

I rolled onto my side and fell asleep next to her.

Here is the point of everything I have been trying to tell you, Oskar.

It’s always necessary.

Stephen Colbert: “What are the things I can get from a...

Fri, 24 Feb 2012 15:03:27 -0500

Stephen Colbert: “What are the things I can get from a local bookstore that I’m not getting from shopping online?”

Ann Patchett: “This is what I want from you. Your book comes out, I want you to come to Nashville. You can see your friends - Jack White, Al Gore. We’ll have a party for you. We’ll get the Goat Rodeo guys to play at the store as your warm-up. You’ll sign, you’ll have such a great time. Then the next week, you’ll take your Sharpie, you’ll go to the warehouse at Amazon, they’ll cut the boxes open for you, you can sign all day. You see which one you like better.”

This is just one of the many reasons I’m proud to be part of the National Writers Series - putting on community author events, connecting writers with their readers, and supporting local independent bookstores. Cheers Ann!

"I’m not sticking with people who are homophobic, anti-woman, you know, moral values while..."

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 14:43:00 -0500

““I’m not sticking with people who are homophobic, anti-woman, you know, moral values while you’re diddling your secretary while you’re giving a speech on moral values. Come on. Get off of it.””

- Former Sen. Alan Simpson (R-Wy.), discussing Republicans in his party who prioritize issues like abortion and gay marriage. He also said of Rick Santorum this week: “He is rigid and a homophobic. He said, ‘I want a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage,’ and they said, ‘Well, what about the people who are already married?’ And he said, ‘Well, they would be nullified.’ I mean what is, what’s human, what’s kind about that? We’re all human beings, we all know or love somebody who’s gay or lesbian so what the hell is that about? To me it’s startling and borders on disgust.”

Well said, sir.

Interview with Vince Gilligan (Creator of "Breaking Bad")

Sun, 19 Feb 2012 23:06:00 -0500

The National Writers Series kicked off its 2012 Winter/Spring season at the City Opera House on February 4 with “Breaking Bad” creator and “The X-Files” executive producer/writer Vince Gilligan. In addition to creating one of the most nuanced, exciting, well-written shows on television (if you’re not a “Breaking Bad” fan, do yourself a favor and don’t admit that to anyone), Vince is one of the genuinely nicest people I’ve ever met, which is something of a miracle for someone who’s worked so long in Hollywood.

Vince Gilligan & Doug Stanton at NWS.

Shortly before his NWS appearance, I interviewed Vince by phone for a short Q&A for Traverse Magazine/MyNorth.com. We discussed the inspiration behind “Breaking Bad,” the show’s upcoming fifth and final season, and the surprising personal connection he has to Northern Michigan. You can read the complete interview online here.

2012 Reading Project, Book #3: "The Art of Fielding" by Chad Harbach

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 13:52:00 -0500

Publishers and book critics love to tell you that a certain book is the “next great American novel.” Or a “return to the glory day of the novel.” Or the “single-handed savior of the novel and all of publishing as we know it.” Usually this is in reference to whatever books Jonathan Franzen or Jeffrey Eugenides have most recently published, which typically average about 5,000 pages and can easily be used to bludgeon someone to death, if you’re in the market for that kind of thing. (Admittedly, they also make for pretty great reading.) Beginning with the Book Expo of America (BEA) last May, I started hearing murmurs that “The Art of Fielding” by Chad Harbach was going to be one of these next epic masterpieces of the written word. The author was a debut novelist, which was surprising - usually the most lavish prophecies of greatness are reserved for writers with a classic or two already under their belts. Perhaps even more surprising, the plot of the book wasn’t about some grand historical event or doomed love affair or racial tension in the U.S. It was about…wait for it!…baseball.

“Baseball?” I asked the publishing rep at the BEA, skeptically. Don’t get me wrong: I love the Tigers as much as the next crazed Michigander, but I don’t feel particularly inclined to read about ground balls for 500 pages.

“It’s about baseball, yes,” the rep responded, then smiled and added: “But it’s not really about baseball.”

And there you have it: The next great American novel is by a first-time writer, about baseball. But not really.

As it turns out, the rep was right. On both fronts.

First off: “The Art of Fielding” is definitely about baseball. There are countless detailed descriptions of games, of positions, of training, of coaching. The protagonist is a gifted college short-stop poised on the edge of a lucrative career in the majors. Baseball is his entire life, which necessarily means the book is entirely about baseball. But it is also about: The dreamy world of intellectualism and academia. The complexity of loyalty and jealousy among teammates. The crippling fear of failure. Death. The inability to resist love, no matter how forbidden its form. Restlessness. The crippling fear of success. Friendship. Talent realized. Talent wasted. Addiction to routine. Desire for freedom. Hopelessness. Hopefulness.

“The Art of Fielding” is about all of these things, which is why it is about baseball, but not really. Even in the parts that are definitively about baseball, Harbach elucidates the mysterious, even mystical metaphors contained in the sport to comment on universal themes. Take, for instance, this passage, where protagonist Henry Skrimshander struggles to understand his obsession with baseball and why it’s become the single most important element in his life.

All he’d ever wanted was for nothing to ever change. Or for things to change only in the right ways, improving little by little, day by day, forever. It sounded crazy when you said it like that, but that was what baseball had promised him, what Westish College had promised him, what Schwartzy had promised him. The dream of every day the same. Every day was like the day before but a little better. You ran the stadium a little faster. You bench-pressed a little more. You hit the ball a little harder in the cage; you watched the tape with Schwartzy afterward and gained a little insight into your swing. Your swing grew a little simpler. Everything grew simpler, little by little. You ate the same food, woke up at the same time, wore the same clothes. Hitches, bad habits, useless thoughts - whatever you didn’t need slowly fell away. Whatever was simple and useful remained. You improved little by little till the day it all became perfect and stayed that way. Forever.

He knew it sounded crazy when you put it like that. To want to be perfect. To want everything to be perfect. But now it felt like that was all he’d ever craved since he’d been born. Maybe it wasn’t even baseball that he loved but only this idea of perfection, a perfectly simple life in which every move had meaning, and baseball was just the medium through which he could make that happen. Could have made that happen. It sounded crazy, sure. But what did it mean if your deepest hope, the premise on which you’d based your whole life, sounded crazy as soon as you put it in words? It meant you were crazy.

For those who’ve never competed in sports, or even understood the passion athletes and fans have for seemingly inconsequential games, Harbach succinctly summarizes the primal, even ancient allure underlying competitive pursuits:

For Schwartz this formed the paradox at the heart of baseball, or football, or any other sport. You loved it because you considered it an art: an apparently pointless affair, undertaken by people with a special aptitude, which sidestepped attempts to paraphrase its value yet somehow seemed to communicate something true or even crucial about The Human Condition. The Human Condition being, basically, that we’re alive and have access to beauty, can even erratically create it, but will someday be dead and will not.

You’ll notice from both of these passages that Harbach’s prose is simplistic, perhaps even plain. His language is not especially florid or poetic. However: The ideas he’s describing, the nuanced characters and their poignant, detailed lives, are unbearably so. If you’re not a baseball fan, you may not walk away from “The Art of Fielding” loving the game any more, but you will feel you understand it on some significant deeper level. And maybe understand something deeper about humanity as well. Because it’s not about baseball. Not really.

2012 Reading Project, Book #2: "Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? And Other Concerns" by Mindy Kaling

Sun, 29 Jan 2012 17:41:00 -0500

Like everyone else in America, I first came to know Mindy Kaling from her role as Kelly Kapoor on “The Office.” It took me a decent amount of time before I realized she was also a writer on the show, and an indecent amount of time before I realized (thanks to my sister) that she also wrote a hilarious blog, called “Things I Bought That I Love.” In my reasonable fantasy world - which is the more measured world below my ultimate fantasy world, which consists of being some kind of Important American Novelist - I’d be working on a television show, preferably a comedy, and joining the ranks of women like Tina Fey and Amy Poehler who continue to stun and amaze people with the incredible realization that females can actually - gasp! - be funny. I would count Mindy in that group of smarty-pants femme fatales, and since I have major girl crushes on women who succeed in traditionally male-dominated environments, I was already a little bit in love with her when I met her at the Book Expo of America in New York this summer and picked up an excerpt of her debut book “Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? And Other Concerns.”

My short encounter with Mindy sealed the deal on my girl crush. She graciously posed for a photo, which I normally don’t like to do with celebrities (how much of a loser do you feel like posing with someone you don’t even know who usually would clearly rather be elsewhere?), but made an exception for on account of said girl crush and also the fact I thought it would make my sister uber jealous - which it did. Anyway, even when one particularly creepy mouthbreather couldn’t get his camera phone to work and kept making Mindy take photo after photo with him, she was poised and cool and sweet to him, which made me extremely glad when I spoke to her next that I was able to nail this photo in one take:

BFFs. Whatevs.

The book excerpt was everything I’d come to expect and love from Mindy’s work: witty, fun and breezy, with the added bonus of being completely girl-next-door relatable. I had to wait several additional months for the full book to come out, and then had to wait even longer after that for my sister to finish reading it so I could borrow it, as I had used the last of my book budget for that month to buy it for her for Christmas. (This was my sort of apologetic compensation for making her jealous by meeting Mindy.) But it was worth the wait: The book, which is a collection of humorous essays on Mindy’s life and thoughts on various subjects (much like Tina Fey’s recent “Bossypants”), fully delivers on the promise the entertaining excerpt made.

Unlike some celebrities’ self-deprecating style, which can feel faux humble or flatout insincere, Mindy comes across as genuinely and ruefully in acknowledgment of her (relatively minor) flaws, while still being confident and joyful about the gifts she’s been given and perks she enjoys with her career. I always appreciate a book title that makes you laugh in and of itself, which this one does, and you get a sense right away for Mindy’s personality with the list of “Alternate Titles for This Book” she provides at the outset, which includes “Harry Potter Secret Book #8,” “When Your Boyfriend Fits into Your Jeans and Other Atrocities,” “The Girl With No Tattoo” and “So You’ve Just Finished Chelsea Handler’s Book, Now What?” The titles of other essays throughout the book give you an idea of the humorous ground she covers: “I Am Not an Athlete,” “Someone Explain One-Night Stands to Me,” “Revenge Fantasies While Jogging,” “Strict Instructions for My Funeral.”

One of my favorite essays was an unexpectedly poignant and heartfelt piece called “Married People Need to Step It Up.” One of the things I admire most about Mindy is that while she has some of the customary starlet trappings - the circle of celebrity pals, appearances at swank Hollywood events, expensive splurge purchases - she’s refreshing traditional, even old-fashioned, on the Big Life Issues like family and dating and friendship. She speaks often and fondly of her parents, confessing that she “loved” spending time with her family growing up, even at the age when it became unpopular to do so, and she eschews “hooking up” and one-night stands for getting to know someone or developing a friendship before dating. In “Married People Need to Step It Up,” she talks about the overwhelming divorce rate in Hollywood, and how much she longs to have a great marriage someday, like her parents have. Up until reading this essay, I’d always considered myself to be highly cynical about marriage, and doubtful of my prospects or willingness to ever enter into that kind of maligned institution, but she hit two points on the head that made me realize it’s not marriage I’m cynical of, but rather the kind of marriage most people I meet seem to have. Her first point is that she wants to be pals with the person she’s married with, with she expounds upon in this section:

My parents get along because they are pals. They’re not big on analyzing their relationship. What do I mean by pals? It mostly means they want to talk about the same stuff all the time. In my parents’ case, it’s essentially rose bushes, mulch, and placement of shrubs. They love gardening. They can talk about aphids the way I talk about New York Fashion Week. They can spend an entire day together talking nonstop about rhododendrons and “Men of a Certain Age,” watch Piers Morgan, and then share a vanilla milkshake and go to bed. They’re pals.

Not to belabor the Amy Poehler of it all, but I’ve always really admired her marriage to Will Arnett. I remember at the “Parks and Recreation” premiere four years ago, Amy was looking for her husband toward the end of the night. She stopped by me and a couple other “Office” writers who had scammed invites to the party.

Amy: Hey guys. Have you seen Arnett? I can’t find him.

We didn’t know where he was, and she shook her head good-naturedly, like, “That guy,” and went on looking for him. I had never heard a woman call her husband by his last name, like she was a player on the same sports team Will was on. You could tell from that small moment that Will and Amy are total pals.

*****************************************************

C’mon, married people. I don’t want to hear about the endless struggles to keep sex exciting, or the work it takes to plan a date night. I want to hear that you guys watch every episode of “The Bachelorette” together in secret shame, or that one got the other hooked on “Breaking Bad” and if either watches it without the other, they’re dead meat. I want to see you guys high-five each other like teammates on a recreational softball team you both do for fun. I want to hear about it because I know it’s possible, and because I want it for myself.

Reading that made me realize that if I were to ever get married, that’s exactly what I’d want: someone I could be pals with. Mindy’s second astute point was that married people always complain about how much “work” marriage is, which makes it sound pretty much like hell for us as-yet unmarried folks. But I had a friend recently who made the wise observation that there are different types of work in life: there’s the work you do when writing a poem or painting a canvas or composing a song, and there’s the work you do when your toilet’s plugged up or your garage needs to be cleaned out. That analogy makes perfect sense to me, and is one Mindy makes in her essay as well:

Maybe the point is that any marriage is work, but you may as well pick work that you like. Writing this book is work, but it’s fun work, and I picked it and I enjoy doing it with you, Reader. It’s my job, and it’s a job I like. Tim [ed note: a married friend of Mindy’s], on the other hand, had chosen a very tough and kind of bad-sounding job, like being the guy who scrapes barnacles off the pylons of an oil rig in the frigid Arctic Sea.

Reading can be work, too, which is one reason I always tend to research potential titles before I start reading them. In the case of Mindy’s book, I chose well: I picked work that was fun. I picked work that I liked. If you’re not normally a big reader, either because of the time commitment involved or the difficulty of the text or the effort needed to get through it, this book might be the right line of work for you.

2012 Reading Project, Book #1: "Consider the Lobster" by David Foster Wallace

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 14:10:00 -0500

I’m a little embarrassed this is my first time reading David Foster Wallace. In the world of literature, his oeuvre casts a shadow a mile long across the landscape - reviews of every new Jonathan Franzen novel, carefully curated bookstore displays, articles probing the relationship between suffering and art, dinner conversations among writers who mention his name in a reverent voice like some ancient god. I’d seen “Infinite Jest” on shelves - of course I’d seen “Infinite Jest,” you couldn’t hardly miss it. But I could never bring myself to pick it up, no matter how many reviewers exhorted me to, because the book seemed so unfathomably epic - not just in sheer size, but in scope and content and craftsmanship - that it practically rebuked approach, like “Anna Karenina” or “War and Peace.” But now that I’ve read “Consider the Lobster,” Wallace’s second nonfiction collection (the first being “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again,” which also comes highly recommended), I’ve realized with great relief that while he’s every bit the genius he’s made out to be, and yes, at times perhaps even a wee bit incomprehensible, he’s also wickedly funny, keenly observant and thoughtfully empathetic.

Wallace’s essays in “Consider the Lobster” cover a wide gambit of diverse topics, from tennis ace Tracy Austin to adult-video stars to presidential campaigns to the World’s Largest Lobster Cooker. The book starts off with the essay on adult-video stars, “Big Red Son,” a placement choice as a publisher I might have considered twice - not because the essay isn’t incisive and brilliant, which it is, but because plumbing the depths of an industry as derelict and at times flat-out depressing and hollow and soul-numbing as pornography is an exercise in queasiness some readers might need to work up to. But the book quickly recovers with a hilarious critical essay on John Updike (following a sentence describing Updike’s “Toward the End of Time” as “a novel so clunky and self-indulgent that it’s hard to believe the author let it be published in this kind of shape,” Wallace dryly continues, “I’m afraid the preceding sentence is this review’s upshot” before proceeding to eviscerate Updike for another eight pages), then “Some Remarks on Kafka’s Funniness,” which are in and of themselves quite funny.

I had a hard time getting through the essay “Authority and American Usage,” which is Wallace at his most academic and dense, but there are diamonds of observation to be gleaned on the English language and the prejudices that influence how we use it for those willing to put in the work. Much faster reading comes in essays like “Up, Simba,” an extremely entertaining piece covering John McCain on the 2000 presidential campaign trail that would make for timely and insightful reading for anyone following this year’s campaign circus. (One small, offhanded observation by Wallace that coffee at a campaign stop tasted like “hot water with a brown crayon in it” inexplicably made me laugh so hard I shot water out my nose; I still giggle about it now whenever I have bad coffee.)

Anyone who’s ever read a celebrity interview or autobiography in which the celebrity appears to be truly and wholly incapable of the smallest carat of self-awareness will appreciate Wallace’s stinging essay “How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart,” in which he reviews Austin’s autobiography “Beyond Center Court.” As Wallace astutely observes, Austin has the kind of Greek-tragedy life and career that should make for gripping reading: picked out of the crowd as a toddler by a coaching guru, won every championship and title available through her childhood and early teens, was ranked number one in the world at seventeen, then spent the next four years watching her career dreams fall apart as she was crippled by a series of bizarre injuries and freak accidents. An athlete with unlimited potential, brought down - unlike so many other promising athletes, who willingly self-destruct - by circumstances completely outside her control. What goes through the mind of someone who’s lived through a devastating ordeal like that? What happens when one’s primary identity - in this case, athlete - is irrevocably destroyed? That premise should make for fascinating reading. And yet Austin, throughout her entire autobiography, clings solely to empty niceties, bland cliches and stupefying bon mots like: “There is that little bit extra that some of us are willing to give and some of us aren’t. Why is that? I think it’s the challenge to be the best.” And Wallace, in all his savage adoration of Austin, and utter contempt of her book, is there to spin a boring, mediocre autobiography into long-form commentary gold, providing through his critique the kind of closely-observed and contemplative reflection on Austin’s life the athlete herself was never capable of.

The essay “Host,” about conservative talk radio, closes Wallace’s book, and is a must-read for those interested in talk radio specifically and the proliferation of political talking-head commentary in general. But for me, the real piece de resistance of the book is the penultimate title essay, “Consider the Lobster.” What starts out as a routine assignment from Gourmet magazine - to cover the popular annual Maine Lobster Festival - slowly unravels into a provocative examination of the ethics of eating animals. The transition is one that must have surely caused discomfort to innumerable Gourmet readers; you have to give credit to Wallace for being ballsy enough to bite the hand that feeds him here, so to speak.

In recent years, I’ve had a complicated relationship with the idea of eating animals myself - there’s just too much information out there to ignore the horrors of our modern factory-farm practices, while remaining equally difficult to ignore how damn delicious meat is. My hunch is there is a safe ethical middle ground - eating only sustainably-raised animals, likely, or animals you’ve hunted yourself in the wild, and I’ve put “Eating Animals” by Jonathan Safran Foer on my reading list for this year to force my hand on the matter. What’s so refreshing about “Consider the Lobster” is that Wallace tackles the subject from a genuinely curious and non-proselytizing standpoint. His thought experiment begins simply enough: he just wants to know whether lobsters feel pain, a query prompted by his witnessing of mass boilings of live lobsters at the Maine Lobster Festival. That simple question, of course, opens an entire Pandora’s box of moral quandaries tied to that possibility, and Wallace considers each of them thoughtfully and with great moral clarity. He boils down his inner conflict succinctly here, in a summary that pretty much parallels my own (admittedly selfish) view on the subject:

Is it possible that future generations will regard our present agribusiness and eating practices in much the way we now view Nero’s entertainments or Mengele’s experiments? My own initial reaction is that such a comparison is hysterical, extreme - and yet the reason it seems extreme to me appears to be that I believe animals are less morally important than human beings; and when it comes to defending such a belief, even to myself, I have to acknowledge that a) I have an obvious selfish interest in this belief, since I like to eat certain kinds of animals and want to be able to keep doing it, and b) I haven’t succeeded in working out any sort of personal ethical system in which the belief is truly defensible instead of just selfishly convenient.

Wallace goes on to directly address the Gourmet audience at the end of the essay, saying he’s curious “whether the reader can identify with any of these reactions and acknowledgments and discomforts.” For those who enjoy gourmet meat dishes, he wants to know: “Do you think much about the (possible) moral status and (probable) suffering of the animals involved?” After all, he shrewdly points out, “isn’t being extra aware and attentive and thoughtful about one’s food and its overall context part of what distinguishes a real gourmet?” Point, Wallace. But, in his typical self-deprecating and wryly humorous style, he ends the essay by admitting that “these questions lead straightaway into such deep and treacherous waters that it’s probably best to stop the public discussion right here. There are limits to what even interested persons can ask of each other.”

And, that to me, is the summation of Wallace’s brilliance. At the very moment he’s ready to walk away from one subject and move on to the next, the reader’s mind is still reeling, only just then beginning to gain ground - to gather itself and catch up. When something as simple as a lobster is worth considering, the whole universe opens itself up to wonderful and wondrous scrutiny.

New Year's Resolution: The Reading Project

Tue, 10 Jan 2012 17:24:00 -0500

I’m not a New Year’s resolution kind of person. I’m all for setting goals and trying to better one’s life, but if the point - as it seems to be - of New Year’s resolutions is to delude yourself into thinking this year will be different than any other in your ability to stick to a gym plan, I’ll skip the denial > failure > self-hatred stage and go straight to the part where I make peace with my thighs and abject laziness.

However, I saw a great article (on The Millions, maybe? I could look it up, but see above re: laziness) about keeping track of every book you read in a given year as a rewarding resolution to undertake for New Year’s. The idea is that at the end of the year, you’ll have a journal of sorts of those previous twelve months, comprised - in looking back - of the memories associated with those books: how they made you feel, the new ideas you encountered, the discussions you had with others about them, the places and seasons and moods in which you were reading each title.

This seemed like a resolution I could get behind. For one, I’m a pretty hardcore reader, a trait that has spilled over from my personal life into my professional life as I interview authors and plan book events for a living for the National Writers Series. Two, because of said job, I have access to a ridiculous amount of free books throughout the year, plus literary journals, publishing reports and advance reviews of anticipated titles. Being such a book junkie, it seems selfish to keep these resources to myself. If possible, I’d like to try and share these perks with others, and help separate the wheat from the chaff for those interested in finding the next great thing to read.

In 2012, then, my goal is to keep a running list of every book I read, which I’ll share and rank periodically here throughout the year. But as I go, my secondary goal - which may ultimately be the more fulfilling of the two - is to write a review of every book I read this year on this blog. Some of the reviews may just be short posts - a couple good quotes from the book, or a “yay or nay” graf on whether it’s worth the read. Other reviews may be more in-depth. Along the way, I’ll post links to great literary articles I find online, highlight insightful author interviews and share inside scoop on publishing news as it comes across my desk. I tend to read a wide variety of books, from fiction to nonfiction to graphic novels to short stories and everything in between, and also try to mix it up between new titles and older classics I’ve been meaning to get to. So I hope this reading adventure - if you’ll join me on it - will be an entertaining one for both of us.

Here’s to a great year of reading!

"Nourish beginnings, let us nourish beginnings. Not all things are blessed, but the seeds of all..."

Sun, 01 Jan 2012 16:40:42 -0500

“Nourish beginnings, let us nourish beginnings. Not all things are blessed, but the seeds of all things are blessed. The blessing is in the seed. -Muriel Rukeyser”

Interview with Chuck Klosterman

Mon, 26 Dec 2011 18:33:00 -0500

Last month, I had the honor - the particularly entertaining honor - of interviewing Chuck Klosterman on stage at the City Opera House for the National Writers Series. Chuck has been one of my favorite writers for almost a decade now, ever since I first picked up his collection of essays called “Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs” in a bookstore and discovered someone who loved Billy Joel, sugar cereal, sports, reality TV and the absurdities of pop culture as much as I did. He’s written some of the most incisive celebrity profiles I’ve ever read, for outlets like Spin and Esquire and GQ, and is a frequent (and brilliant) contributor to Grantland.com.

On stage, Chuck was witty, intelligent, insightful, engaging and frequently laugh-out-loud hilarious. We discussed everything from the TV show “Breaking Bad” to Top 40 music to nonfiction versus fiction books to the superpower of invisibility. Interviewing him was one of the highlights of my career to date. You can watch the complete interview online here.

Chuck Klosterman & I at the City Opera House

Festival Update #2

Wed, 14 Dec 2011 08:03:00 -0500

Here is the second and final announcement Porterhouse made regarding the Microbrew/Comedy Fest situation yesterday. I have to give them kudos for being willing to compromise and still attempt to collaborate at this point in the game. There was hope that this solution would allow Comedy Fest to continue this year, as they only cancelled a few days ago and still have the venues (and presumably, access to any booked comedians). However, Comedy Fest emailed Porterhouse, the DDA and the City yesterday and informed them that regardless of any new developments, they still intend to cancel this year. The positive side of all this is that this move should at least allow Comedy Fest to return in 2013, and in terms of this year, we can all breathe a collective sigh of relief that the back-and-forth is finally over, and move on to better and brighter things.

And now for some good news: We’re pleased to announce that the 2012 Third Annual Traverse City Winter Microbrew & Music Festival will be held at the Village at Grand Traverse Commons on February 11, 2012. In light of recent scheduling conflicts with the Traverse City Comedy Arts Festival, Porterhouse has determined the best compromise for all involved parties is to relocate the festival outside of downtown Traverse City. It’s our sincere hope that this will allow the Comedy Festival to return in 2013, and that both organizations will enjoy successful, cooperative events in the future. We’d like to thank Mayor Michael Estes, the City of Traverse City and the Minervini Group for working together this week to help make the venue change possible, particularly as this and other venue alternatives were previously unavailable up until now. The Minervini Group has been a committed partner of the summer incarnation of the festival, which has been held at the Village for the past three years, and we look forward to partnering with them again on the winter event. As with past festivals, the weekend will be a celebration of the craft microbrews, food, music, art and culture that make our region unique, as well as the natural beauty of the Village and the many wonderful merchants and residents who reside there. We thank the Traverse City community for its ongoing feedback and support, and look forward to celebrating with you this February!

Festival Update #1

Tue, 13 Dec 2011 16:57:55 -0500

This is one of two statements Porterhouse announced they are releasing today regarding the Microbrew/Comedy Fest conflict. This is in response to a second email Michael Moore and Jeff Garlin sent out earlier this week about the ongoing feud. I’ll post the second update from Porterhouse here once they release it today.

Many of you have asked us for a response to the latest Comedy Fest email that went out this week regarding DDA emails on event dates. While we’d prefer to move past the back-and-forth and focus on the future, we understand our supporters would like an explanation. Here it is: During last January’s DDA meeting, Porterhouse agreed to consider moving - but did not confirm it would move - to the first weekend in February 2012. We expressed clear concerns about moving weekends, as the first weekend in February is Superbowl weekend (and has been since 2004). Time was needed to conduct market research and investigate whether a date change was economically sustainable, particularly in terms of competing with the Superbowl and moving close to other regional/state beer events. The DDA sent out an email within an hour or so of the meeting with a proposed 2012 calendar, which put Porterhouse on the first weekend and Comedy Fest on the second weekend. As we’d just been told we had time to research the date change, we assumed this calendar was of the same nature as that agreed to in the meeting - a proposed, not a confirmed, one. We hope moving forward in future years that communication between all parties will improve, and that an emphasis on collaboration and mutual support will be embraced.

A Tale of Two Festivals

Fri, 09 Dec 2011 16:35:00 -0500

This is a difficult post for me to write. For the past several years, I’ve been a dedicated volunteer at two major event organizations in Traverse City - the Traverse City Film Festival (which also produces the Traverse City Comedy Arts Festival) and Porterhouse Productions. I’ve worked with both organizations since their inception. For TCFF, I’ve written the official blog for Film Fest, Comedy Fest and the State Theatre since the second year of the film festival - a job I was personally approved for by Michael Moore. I’ve interviewed countless filmmakers and comedians for the organization, covered TCFF news and events, and reviewed innumerable films. For Porterhouse Productions, I’ve worked both as a volunteer and as an occasional contractor managing PR, media relations and marketing for the company’s festivals and events since it began in Traverse City in 2008.

Last year, I had an unusually busy weekend in February when these organizations overlapped and held anchor festivals on the same weekend (the Traverse City Comedy Arts Festival and the Winter Microbrew & Music Festival). It was a challenge covering both events in one weekend, but a fun one - I got to bounce back and forth between listening to great music and sampling craft microbrews and hearing some of the country’s best stand-up acts. It was a pairing that seemed to go well together, and judging by the reports I heard from attendees and media partners and performers, many people agreed.

However, there was also a significant amount of drama that occurred behind the scenes because of the festival overlap. The Comedy Fest, which had changed weekends and was now on the same weekend as the Microbrew Fest, was unhappy about the Microbrew Fest taking place on the same dates and in the same approximate vicinity (downtown TC). The crux of Comedy Fest’s concern wasn’t about potential loss of turnout or competition for dollars; it was that “drunken” attendees from Microbrew Fest would crash or disrupt Comedy Fest events. Comments were made to the press implying that this was the modus operandi of Microbrew Fest: getting people drunk and then setting them loose on the community to potentially cause problems.

As someone who worked closely with the Microbrew Fest and with Porterhouse Productions, these implications deeply troubled me. I knew this representation was not accurate, and also that the founders of Porterhouse, Sam and Abby Porter, are compassionate, community-minded people whose focus with events has always been to raise the cultural standard and celebrate the music, food, craft beverages and art that make our region unique. As such, I emailed Michael and expressed my support for both events, and also my concern about the perceived competitiveness. Here is the email I sent:

Beth to Michael, 12/20/10

Hey Michael -

I’m working with Sam on some beer fest planning, and wanted to touch base on the comedy/beer fest overlap. I know Sam’s been working with Deb on this, and from what I can gather, it sounds like there may be some perceived competitiveness due to being on the same weekend. I plan to be involved with both events again this year, and am concerned about any conflict arising between the festivals. I can just say from talking to people my own age - who are a primary demographic for comedy and beer - there’s a lot of excitement about the possibility of both being downtown this year, and the ease of attendees being able to park in one spot for the night and jump from one to the other. It’s also made talking to downstate press and markets much easier, as they’re more interested in promoting a “package” weekend in TC with multiple events than a one-off.

I think both festivals have enough branding and following to be successful alone, but I’ve never seen a situation like this in a town this size where both parties didn’t benefit from collaborating. I’m obviously vested in seeing both events work, as I work/volunteer for both, so I hope no matter the outcome it can remain friendly and successful for everyone. I’ll let Deb and Sam continue their conversation, but since I’m involved with both events, I just wanted to connect with you personally and share my thoughts.

Hope all is well,

Beth

Michael’s response, which I’ll paraphrase here since he didn’t know he’d be publicly quoted when writing to me, was that they were considering canceling Comedy Fest because they’d already had issues in the past with drunk attendees at their events, but that he “loved the idea” of a microbrew & music festival. He ended by asking why everyone couldn’t just get along and “work together for the greater good,” and that when he first moved to Traverse City, that was something he hoped to be a leader on.

OK - so far, so good. We agree that we should all work together for the greater good, and that the concepts behind both festivals are good ones. But shortly thereafter, Comedy Fest continued to make remarks to the press implying that Microbrew Fest was only going to cause trouble and send drunk people over to interrupt Comedy Fest events. When I again voiced my concerns to Comedy Fest about the way Microbrew Fest was being characterized in the media, I got a much different response than the first time around; essentially, I was told that my blogging services would no longer be needed at Comedy Fest. As I had several interviews with comedians already scheduled, I responded that I was disappointed in and didn’t understand that response, but that I’d be completing the interviews I scheduled regardless because it wouldn’t reflect well on either myself or Comedy Fest to suddenly cancel them without cause. This was (reluctantly) accepted by Comedy Fest. I did complete those interviews, and continued to blog last summer for the Film Fest, and everything appeared to go back to normal.

Move forward to this year. After the conflicts of last year’s events, the DDA had called a meeting with Porterhouse and TCFF to see if a solution could be found for future years to avoid the festivals being on the same weekend. Porterhouse was pressured to move to the first weekend in February, which is also Superbowl weekend, and allow Comedy Fest to keep the second weekend. Porterhouse agreed to consider this move, but did not confirm they would move dates; market research was needed to confirm if the change would be economically viable. An email was sent out shortly after the meeting by the DDA with the proposed schedule, which put Porterhouse on the first weekend in February and Comedy Fest on the second. As Porterhouse still needed to confirm whether the date move was viable, the assumption was that these were proposed and not confirmed dates, and Porterhouse (as requested) would still be granted time to conduct market research on the weekend. As it turns out, market research strongly suggested the festival would not be viable on the first weekend in February. Superbowl weekend would be a monster to compete with on a marketing level for a beer-themed festival that draws strongly on a downstate audience, and moving dates to other weekends put Porterhouse in either close or direct competition with other regional and state beer festivals (this was why the second weekend in February was originally chosen in the first place). Porterhouse kept its originally planned dates, and offered to collaborate or partner with Comedy Fest if they wanted to remain on the second weekend again to help ensure both events would be a success.

If you’re reading this post, it’s because you’re interested in this story, which means you likely read Michael Moore’s letter this morning. As evidenced by the announcement Comedy Fest is canceling, the news that Porterhouse would be keeping its dates clearly was not well received. What has shocked me about this turn of events - and the behind-the-scenes process that lead up to it - is how badly the facts have been misrepresented to the public of what has taken place. This has occurred on two fronts: One, the basic details of what occurred, and two, the spirit in which they occurred. Since both organizations are so tightly woven into the fabric of the community, it seems important that the full story be fairly and accurately presented to the public.

I’d like to address the basic details of what occurred first. Here are some important things to know about this situation.

Dates - A major component of Comedy Fest’s argument is that Porterhouse moved onto or “stole” Comedy Fest’s weekend. Michael writes that he learned last year Porterhouse was going to hold its event downtown and “on the same weekend” TCCAF had “reserved for the second Comedy Fest.” He later mentions that Porterhouse was planning in 2012 to repeat what they “did last year” and “piggyback off” the Comedy Fest. The problem with this argument is that it simply isn’t true. Furthermore, the reverse is actually the case; Comedy Fest moved onto Porterhouse’s weekend. Here are the dates:

2010 - Microbrew Fest = February 12. Comedy Fest = February 19-21.
2011 - Microbrew Fest = February 11-12. Comedy Fest = February 10-12.
2012 (as originally planned) - Microbrew Fest = February 10-11. Comedy Fest = February 9-11.

My guess is that the date conflict began as an honest mistake. Microbrew Fest was on the same weekend as Winter WOW Fest in 2010, and when Winter WOW Fest moved to the third weekend in February in 2011, Comedy Fest switched to the second weekend to avoid conflicting with them. They likely assumed Microbrew Fest would be moving with Winter WOW Fest to the third weekend, and they’d have the second weekend to themselves. The Microbrew Fest had also taken place at Grand Traverse Resort & Spa its first year, so Comedy Fest may have assumed that would be the case again the second year. These are both understandable mistakes to make. What’s not understandable, however, is how those mistakes have morphed into the narrative that Microbrew Fest stole Comedy Fest’s weekend and/or has been attempting to piggyback off Comedy Fest. I was part of the planning process for the Microbrew Fest, so I know that isn’t so. Anyone entertaining the idea that Microbrew Fest stole or deliberately infringed on Comedy Fest’s weekend need only look at the dates above to realize that wasn’t the case.

Alcohol - Another factor Comedy Fest has cited as a major argument against Porterhouse is their concern that drunken attendees from Microbrew Fest will crash Comedy Fest or cause problems at their events. In his email, Michael stated that last year “a number of shows were interrupted by drunks who had been to the beer fest and decided to visit the Comedy Fest for some yucks.” He also stated that he will not ask his volunteers to act as bouncers. Some points to consider on this front:

Veracity of occurrences - I attended both the Microbrew Fest and Comedy Fest last year. I was at numerous Comedy Fest events over the weekend, and while I did see many signs on the venue windows warning drinkers to stay away (some specifically mentioning microbrew drinkers), I never witnessed firsthand or even heard about secondhand any drunken incidents at Comedy Fest taking place on days the Microbrew Fest was also going on. (I did, however, witness some drunken heckling at the opening night event with Bob Saget - see below). That’s not to say that none occurred, but as someone who was writing the official blog for Comedy Fest and hearing most of the behind-the-scenes gossip from attendees, volunteers and venue managers, this was never a topic that came up or was mentioned by anyone associated with the festival. I’m checking with the TCPD to see if any official complaints were filed, but to my knowledge, none were. Furthermore, in three years and six festivals, Porterhouse has never had a reported drunken disturbance resulting from Microbrew Fest. Their track record is stellar, as their relationship with the TCPD and MLLC will attest. This accusation by Comedy Fest is one that’s easy to level, but difficult to prove.

Source of occurrences - Let’s entertain the possibility drunken revelers did in fact crash one or more Comedy Fest events last year. I’m sure this would be a terrible shock to a comedian’s system, as no one in the history of stand-up comedy has ever performed before a drunk audience member before. But let’s say this did occur. Michael’s assertion that every one of these drunken hecklers came from Microbrew Fest is dubious at best. How is this provable? Was every person asked at the door whether they were coming from Microbrew Fest? Was every restaurant, brewery, winery, bar, liquor store and grocery store in the greater Grand Traverse area closed on the second weekend in February last year? The idea that the ideal audience member for Comedy Fest is someone who doesn’t ingest a drop of alcohol before attending - not a glass of wine, not a cocktail, not a beer with friends at the pub - is a wishful, if not downright puritanical, one. Also, the idea that Microbrew Fest is the sole location in Traverse City at which people could procure alcohol is also a wishful - well no, that’s just foolish. But, if that is indeed the case, on either front, that raises another issue: On opening night last year, Comedy Fest hosted a party at the City Opera House directly before its opening night shows. At that party was a bar - and not just any bar, but an open bar. Anyone going to the Comedy Fest opening night party could knock back alcohol as fast as they could ask for it, before proceeding directly to Comedy Fest events. This was the night before Microbrew Fest began, so any incidents then would have been solely the result of drinking at Comedy Fest’s own party, and/or other locations. (Case in point: Bob Saget experienced a fair amount of drunken heckling at his event, which took place at the City Opera House on opening night…directly after the opening night party. Microbrew Fest, which was often blamed as the source of these particular drunken hecklers, did not even kick off until 24 hours after Saget performed.) Also, as Michael mentioned in his email to me, Comedy Fest had problems with drunken attendees before Microbrew Fest was even on the same weekend, so clearly there’s something inherent in the nature of comedy events that causes people to want to enjoy alcoholic beverages before attending them.

The nature of Microbrew Fest: Michael has often stated that he is not a drinker and never has been. As such, it’s probably safe to assume that he’s never attended a microbrew festival. This may account for the characterization of Microbrew Fest attendees as revelers on par with drunken college students on spring break. Admission to the Microbrew Fest includes (5) 7-oz pours - the total equivalent of two pints. The emphasis at the festival is on microbrew sampling, along with food, education and local, state and national music acts. If I were one of the average 3,000+ attendees of the Microbrew Fest - many of them older, upscale microbrew lovers, foodies and music appreciators - I would find the Comedy Fest’s characterization of attendeees highly offensive, in addition to highly inaccurate.

Non-Profit Versus For-Profit - In Michael’s letter, he makes the strong implication that Porterhouse is only interested in its bottom line, because it is a for-profit organization, unlike the non-profit Comedy Fest. He states the following: “Unlike the for-profit beer fest, the Comedy Fest is a non-profit, community-based and community-run project of the Traverse City Film Festival. Our only mission in putting on the Comedy Fest is to improve the quality of life in TC and help the local economy.” The problem is, this paradigm as described by Michael is a misnomer. Being a for-profit organization does not mean you are not a community-run or community-based organization. It also does not mean you don’t improve the quality of life in TC, or help the local economy. There are numerous for-profit organizations in TC - and I would easily count Porterhouse among them - who are community-minded, who improve the quality of life in the city, and who help the local economy. Furthermore, what this statement fails to acknowledge is that every single Microbrew Fest (both winter and summer versions) has had a non-profit partner who benefited from the festival proceeds, as has Paella in the Park (another Porterhouse festival). Thousands of dollars from each festival have gone to community organizations including Little Artshram, the Munson Regional Healthcare Foundation and the Cherry T-Ball Drop (coming up this New Year’s Eve, which collects food for local pantries). This summer at the festival, a new program was instituted whereby 10% of every food vendor’s profits was donated to the local non-profit organization of their choice.

When I go into an event planning meeting at Porterhouse, the first question Sam will often ask is: “What non-profits can we get involved? How can we support the community with this event?” He and Abby will often give to the point where they’ll break even or even take a loss on their events, simply so they can benefit the community as much as possible. Whether it’s giving away tickets to a Halloween festival to dozens of organizations that work with at-risk or disadvantaged youth, or sharing their venue space, event resources and equipment with area organizations in need (ironically, including fencing with the Traverse City Film Festival), Porterhouse Productions has been an exemplary model of what it means to be a for-profit organization that uses its resources for the benefit of the community. If I own my own business one day, I will know how to be a good community steward because of what I’ve learned watching Sam and Abby operate Porterhouse.

So these are the facts, as best I see them, and they bring up one final point worth considering. I mentioned earlier the spirit in which these events have occurred. Since the release of Michael’s email this morning, dozens of angry email messages, Facebook posts and voicemails have come streaming in. The vitriol contained in some of them has been so extreme as to feel like a physical slap in the face. I can’t help but question whether the wording Michael chose to use in his email engendered the inflammatory nature of many of these responses. The picture as painted in the email is that of a clear villain (the evil, for-profit, money-obsessed Porterhouse) and a clear victim (the virtuous, non-profit, community goodwill-obsessed Comedy Fest). Of course, the issue is far more nuanced and complex than any such simplistic reductions, many of which also suffer from being untrue.

The more moderate responses to the news all seem to have one universal theme: How hard can it be to find two different weekends in a long winter for the festivals to take place so they both are successful and everyone’s happy? Alternatively, why can’t they both take place on the same weekend? What’s so hard about sharing dates? Why couldn’t these organizations just make it work? These are all excellent questions. The short answer is that both organizations have strong cases for why they want this specific weekend, which includes not competing with similar events in the region and working under specific planning constraints (like how Michael cited Sundance and Porterhouse cited competing beer events). The long answer - and this is why this post is difficult for me to write - is a conclusion I reached after going through this process for over a year now: Because both organizations don’t want it to.

Now, I don’t mean neither organization wants it to. From where I stand, one does and one does not. As mentioned in the referenced emails earlier, I was personally invested in both events succeeding, but I was also professionally invested, and as such reached out on Porterhouse’s behalf to attempt to collaborate with Comedy Fest to make the most out of sharing the weekend. Not only were my personal attempts at reconciliation rejected (Comedy Fest revoking my blogging privileges in response to questioning their characterization of Microbrew Fest), but professional overtures were rejected as well. Every manner of collaborative and partnership opportunity was presented to Comedy Fest by Porterhouse when the date conflict began in an attempt to stave off competition. Porterhouse offered to host a VIP tent at Microbrew Fest for comedians. Porterhouse offered to create bundled ticket packages to help sales for both events. Porterhouse offered to cross-promote and market Comedy Fest. Porterhouse offered to collaborate on scheduling of events. The answer was always the same: Comedy Fest is not interested in any collaboration, regardless of what form it takes. The only solution Comedy Fest would accept is Porterhouse moving dates, even if that meant a potential event failure for Porterhouse, and even when there were perfectly viable options on the table for both events to succeed on the same weekend. The stubbornness reached such an inexplicable point that Comedy Fest organizers refused to allow Porterhouse to donate Microbrew Fest tickets for the comedians’ gift baskets…a decision they reluctantly reversed when comedians heard about the Microbrew Fest and asked if they could attend.

The same cycle of stubbornness occurred again this year. Financially and logistically speaking, Porterhouse could not move its dates without risking the failure of the festival. Comedy Fest was also not interested in moving, so Porterhouse offered once again to collaborate. Once again, their overtures were refused. Instead, a threat was issued: Move the dates, or Comedy Fest will cancel. (With the more subtle implied threat being, ‘and it will look like your fault to the community’). Faced with moving dates to a weekend that would be economically unsustainable, Porterhouse apologetically held firm, offering even in its final emails to collaborate and do whatever was possible to avoid the cancellation of Comedy Festival, a move that seemed wholly and bafflingly unnecessary. In the end, Comedy Fest made good on its threat: It canceled, and Porterhouse was blamed as the cause of the cancellation.

So now here we are: Two of the city’s biggest event organizers are locked in an apparent vicious PR battle, the public is disappointed and disgusted with one or the other or both organizations, accusations are flying, and livelihoods are on the line. And all because of…what? There’s not enough room in the Traverse City sandbox for everyone to play? No. There’s more than enough room for everyone to play. What’s missing in this situation is the simple acknowledgment by all parties involved that everyone has the right to play. Everyone has the right to make a living in this town. Everyone has the right to protect their business, and to make decisions that ensure their livelihood is sustainable (as well as those of their employees, partners, vendors and performers). Comedy Fest has that right, and so does Porterhouse.

In writing this, I’ve attempted to leave my personal feelings out of it and just report the facts to the best of my ability. However, I will say this much: I care deeply about both of these organizations. I couldn’t imagine the community without them. I’m saddened and sickened by the way this process has gone down, which could result in the cancellation of not one but two of the community’s biggest winter festivals. And while I hope both organizations will succeed, and that both events will eventually go on to enjoy bright futures, I don’t doubt my intimate familiarity with the way this situation was so gravely mismanaged will permanently affect my views in some way on both organizations involved. In some cases it will be for the better, in others for the worse. But with the reputations for both organizations on the line, the public needs to know the whole story, and to make up their own minds on what to believe. And the conclusions drawn could be as simple as this: Everyone has the right to play in Traverse City, and everyone also - at one time or another - is in danger of letting ego override that fact, and making mistakes accordingly. In the end, this situation could be nothing more than the perfect storm that arises when both of those narratives collide head on.

Dear Women: Stop being bitches and buying our soda. This low-cal...

Sun, 04 Dec 2011 11:55:52 -0500

Dear Women: Stop being bitches and buying our soda. This low-cal treat is for DUDES. Sincerely, Dr. Pepper

"Thanks" by W.S. Merwin

Thu, 24 Nov 2011 10:57:00 -0500

Listen
with the night falling we are saying thank you
we are stopping on the bridges to bow from the railings
we are running out of the glass rooms
with our mouths full of food to look at the sky
and say thank you
we are standing by the water thanking it
smiling by the windows looking out
in our directions

back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging
after funerals we are saying thank you
after the news of the dead
whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you

over telephones we are saying thank you
in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators
remembering wars and the police at the door
and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you
in the banks we are saying thank you
and in the faces of the officials and the rich
and of all who will never change
we go on saying thank you thank you

with the animals dying around us
our lost feelings we are saying thank you
with the forests falling faster than the minutes
of our lives we are saying thank you
with the words going out like cells of a brain
with the cities growing over us
we are saying thank you faster and faster
with nobody listening we are saying thank you
dark though it is

When Society Breaks Down: Power Outage at the Mall Edition

Sat, 19 Nov 2011 14:48:00 -0500

There’s nothing like slightly inconveniencing a large group of people to demonstrate how tenuous the facade of civility is in our society. Yesterday, I made a quick trip to the mall to pick up some skinny jeans, a purchase I make exactly every three months because that’s how long it takes for me to forget that a) I already own several pairs of skinny jeans, b) no one on the planet needs more than one good pair of skinny jeans in their wardrobe, and c) shopping for skinny jeans is a traumatic and soul-crushing experience.

So anyway, I was on my way to buy some skinny jeans, and I was several hundred feet into the mall before I realized something was…off. For one, the mall was supernaturally quiet. Muzak, the omnipresent soundtrack to consumerism, was mysteriously silent. Also, the hallways were gloomy and dark (and not just in the usual metaphorical way); a few of the stores had even pulled their gates down over their entrances. Putting two and two together, Sherlock Holmes-style, I finally deduced the glaringly obvious: The power was out at the mall.

While I processed the implications of this development (getting cash from the ATM: out, using a credit card: out, being able to make any purchases at all due to the likelihood every store’s computer system would be down: out), I noticed a young girl standing in an apron near the Bay Bread stand. While the belly button ring and wolf license plate vendors had cowardly abandoned their outposts, Bay Bread Girl had made the determination to stand by her croissants during the mall apocalypse. I admired her fortitude. I approached, and we had the following exchange:

Me: “Hi. How long has the power been out?”
Bay Bread Girl: “About two hours now.”
Me: “Wow. Did they tell you when it’s supposed to come back on?”
Bay Bread Girl: “They said it could be another hour.” (Looks around nervously at the darkened hallways and closed stores. Drops voice to a whisper.) “I don’t know if I can leave the bread.”

At this point, a small group of female teenage employees emerged from the direction of American Eagle. They crossed paths with a pair of young male employees from that shoe store near the teddy bear stuffing place. Another exchange:

Girls: “Where are you guys going? We were coming to look at some shoes until the power comes back on.”
Guys: “We were coming to look at some clothes! That’s funny.”
(They all laugh)
Guys: “Who’s watching your store?”
Girls: “No idea. Who’s watching yours?”
Guys: “No idea.”

Target, self-contained universe of good deals and useful products for every occasion that it is, was naturally far more prepared to deal with the crisis than everyone else in the mall. It exuded an enticing aura of dimmed lights that shone far into the darkness, calling us lost and dazed shopper moths to its shimmering haven. As I walked toward it, I noticed the dollar store had gamely tried to weather the storm by lighting candles and putting them near the cash register, a detail I found unbearably amusing. (Is there a classier shopping scenario than perusing 99-cent plastic figurines by candlelight? I think not.)

It appeared Target had some kind of back-up generator, because while the lights were lower than usual, people were still shopping and making purchases as though the mall universe had not, in fact, come to a screeching halt around them. However, there was a distinct and palpable sense of unease in the air; people kept inexplicably talking to one another in whispers, and there seemed to be a lot more calls home taking place than usual. At two different points during my time in the store, the lights temporarily flickered out (and then came back on); the first time, a woman audibly gasped and exclaimed, “Oh no! There they go!” in the same kind of voice people used to describe the Twin Towers falling on 9/11. When they came back on literally 10 seconds later, I realized we had all frozen in place, awaiting some kind of unknowable attack. The second time they went out, a mother near me had been looking at greeting cards, her back to her shopping cart with a toddler in the front seat; when the lights came back on (again, no more than 10-15 seconds later), she was gripping the toddler tightly in her arms. Either people saw “The Mist” and “Dawn of the Dead” and thought they were documentaries, or our collective ideal of what constitutes safety and stability is disturbingly dependent on the hum of electricity.

By the time I left Target, skinny jeans safely in tow (natch), power had been fully restored to the mall. I learned later that high winds had caused a tree to topple on power lines near Veterans Drive, resulting in the outage; I was one of approximately 450 customers “impacted” by the catastrophe. I can’t speak for the rest of my fellow shoppers, but I rather enjoyed my electricity-free time at the mall. It reminded me how frail our illusion of social order really is in this country, but more importantly, it injected an urgent sense of high stakes into what is normally a boring excursion to procure slimming denim.

Another pair of which, of course, I’ll need exactly three months from now.