Check Out That Seersucker.

This is my grandmother and her brother, my great uncle. I think this photo was taken in 1910.

I was going through some random photos I have because I'm contemplating a short video piece using old photos and my high school journal, and I found a few very old ones that I ended up with after my grandmother died a few years ago. I love them. (Check out the dog. He has the same expression as my grandmother.)

I never noticed this before, but in pictures of me at that age I look very much like my great uncle. My grandma had lots of brothers, and she adored them.

I have only one sister, and I adore her. Below is a picture of her and me from 1973, which makes me 12. I'm doing her hair. (Whatever.)

They get bigger if you click on them.

I Need a Job.

We live near I-35, the Interstate that runs through Austin on its way from San Antonio to Dallas. At most of the intersections on the access roads along I-35 going through the central part of the city, there are one or two panhandlers working all day, asking for money. J found a dirty, wet piece of a cardboard sign on the street when we were walking home from somewhere a while back, and it's hanging on our kitchen wall now. Part of it was torn off and missing, so it reads:

Cold
Hung
Please
Help

That wasn't what I was going to write about -- it just came to mind. I was going to mention here that I'm looking for a summer job in New York. There's a little web site I can go to and look at a map that has dots on the cities where my readers are, so I know a few of you are in New York. Just puttin' it out there, as they say. I can cook, I can type, I'm pretty smart and easy to get along with. I'm willing to do anything ... I was going to say anything legal, but that's not true; I don't care if it's legal, as long as it's ethical.

Facebook.

I don't get Facebook. What are all those people doing? I hate to get left too far behind, so I joined, but maybe the social networking thing is not for me because I can't find much of interest there. And whenever I do find something interesting, I have to click through five screens of permission to give up my privacy, so I usually end up backing out.

My friend T is very anti-social networking because it obliterates privacy. Or, rather, it takes away your personal control over the parameters of individual relationships. It forces you to have the same relationship with your mother, your life-long best friend, the guy you just met at a party last weekend, and your boss.

Maybe that's where we're headed, but it makes me nervous. Do I want everybody I know, no matter how well they know me, to read a little note I write on an old friend's "wall" which makes reference to an old joke between us that, without the context of our long relationship, may be meaningless or hateful to someone else? One of the things I like most about conversation is that it's ephemeral. I was horrified a few years ago when I realized that every google chat I had ever had was stored in a Steven file somewhere in the big google sky. Somebody is making a list and checking it twice, separating the sheep from the goats. It smells too much like judgment day to me.

I can see you raising an eyebrow at all this apprehension about loss of privacy coming from someone who writes about his sex life on a blog for the world to read. You have no idea how carefully calibrated this writing has become. I might be telling you a lot, but I'm not telling you everything.

What I like about Facebook -- and this happened when I first joined Myspace, too -- is the flurry of contact with old friends. We're so peripatetic these days -- maybe some of the appeal of Facebook et al. is that it relieves some of the sadness and tension of having friends and family so far flung. Social networking brings us all together. I think I would just like to have a little more control over how together we are, and when, and with whom.

Fifties Day.

This morning I put on my favorite pair (my only pair) of 501s and a white t-shirt. Lately I've been putting lots of goo in my hair and slicking it back because I never know what to do with my hair and I don't like the way it looks if I don't do anything. But I realized just now when I looked in the mirror that I look like I'm dressed up as Fonzie for a Halloween party.

I also look quite a bit like my dad. I have a few pictures of him from the late fifties, from just before and just after he and my mom got married, in which he's wearing exactly what I have on right now and his hair is slicked back. It's not hard to see why my mom fell in love with him. So, though it's not not weird, it's not necessarily horrifying that I resemble him more and more. But, in those photos, he's in his early twenties. I'm pushing fifty. Tomorrow is my forty-seventh birthday.

New York.

I got back from New York at midnight last night. I feel like I was gone for months or years. What I'm doing here is so removed from what I was doing in New York, which is not quite the past and not quite the future, but somehow both.

I spent most of the week in T's apartment working, writing, recording. But we went to see Spring Awakening on Broadway on Wednesday and a show that my good friend K directed on Friday. Also on Friday, I went to the Met to see the Courbet show. So I was out and about a little. New York, as always, made me a little sad, but now I think I have a better idea of what that feeling is, so it doesn't hurt as much. I think of New York as my hometown. It's the first place I ever felt any strong attachment to.

I grew up in Indiana listening to my parents disparage where we lived. They're both from farther north: my dad grew up in Minnesota, my mom north of Chicago. They were married and I was born in Waukegan, Illinois, but we moved to Indianapolis when I was 3, and then to a small college town an hour west of there when I was 12. My parents complained about the hicks and the Christians constantly, and for the most part I agreed with them and couldn't wait to get out of there. I moved to New York when I was 20 and stayed for 17 years. I left in 1998.

Of course, the city is very different now. All things change. No place stays the same. There's the simple, nostalgic sadness of that. What is particularly sad though is that the changes to New York in the last ten years are not just the regular changes a city goes through, the gradual shifting and displacement of businesses on a block. Old buildings gone, new buildings in their places. It is the fact that the new businesses are so often international banks, Starbucks, chain restaurants. It's not just that New York is changing, it's that New York is changing into Dallas, or Orlando. Or Indianapolis.

I do miss New York. It's a city I know my way around. I never feel lost or stranded there, even now. Pedestrians rule there. And I realized on this visit that I still believe somewhere deep down what I believed before I had ever been there and what I confirmed when I was 18 and visited for the first time: that New York is special, better. I think I will always be a New Yorker who lives on Austin. I know I could not live there now, even if I wanted to. I could not afford to live there.

Rocks in the Head.

We had our second Geology exam on Monday. I studied like a motherfucker, memorized all the really arcane stuff that I figured would show up on the test -- most of it did -- and I got a 98. Not bad, and it makes up for the 88 I got on the last one. Still, I'm not satisfied. I missed one question. It was the last question on the test, and here's how it went: "Hydrothermal water is _____." Multiple choice, two options are obviously incorrect. The other two are: "B. groundwater heated by contact with a magma." and "D. any heated water (e.g., your water heater)."

Notwithstanding the shaky grammar, both of these are correct. I know this as soon as I read it. What's going through my head while I'm trying to decide which little bubble to fill in with my #2 pencil is: "Hydrothermal means hot water. That's what the word means. I don't know for a fact that this word is used in other contexts, but I know that hydro means water and thermal means heat. I also know that, in our class discussion of the hydrosphere, hydrothermal water was mentioned in the context of groundwater making contact with magma and producing steam. So I imagine, in the filed of geology, this is how the expression is used. Since they're both right, which answer does he want? Am I to consider the larger picture? Or should I narrow my thinking to only include the concerns of a geologist? I finally went with D because I couldn't get around the fact that it is the more correct answer, and I hate second-guessing. I should have known that he wanted B.

I'm not sure what to take from this. Even on the surface, it's annoying because it's a trick question -- I don't know how else to see it. But if you're going to write a trick question, the decoy answer should be in some way incorrect, shouldn't it? I even looked up hydrothermal when I got home, and the first definition is "Of or pertaining to hot water." The second definition is "Geology. Of or relating to hot magmatic emissions rich in water."

Isn't the point of a university education to broaden our minds, not narrow them? I feel like I'm being asked to act as if I know less than I know. Maybe that's the point. Don't assume anything.

J gave me some perspective when I was complaining about this to him. He said, "Well, if you were taking a Spanish exam and you came across a word that could also be Italian but mean something different from what it means in Spanish, you'd go with the Spanish meaning, right?" I guess I would.

Anyway, how can you be worried about a stupid Geology class when there's Spade Cooley?

The So-Called Koolaid.

I hear and read criticism of these pro-Obama music videos, some of it critical of the suggestion of celebrity worship (as in, "the beautiful people love Obama, you should too") or just the generally worshipful tone, the chants, etc. But most of the negative comments I've read have boiled down to something along the lines of "they're creepy."

These videos, as well as Obama's best speeches, have the whiff of the evangelical, and god knows we're scared -- and sick and tired -- of that. Obama has been called a "movement politician" as opposed to a party politician, and movements share characteristics with cults, one of the most obvious being that they attract the dissatisfied. And movements often, like cults, grow around charismatic leaders.

Is the president supposed to be a charismatic leader or a competent manager? Well, both -- but I think the charismatic leader is the more important function. (There's no way a president can really be the CEO of the federal government. The executive bureaucracy is too big and unwieldy, much of it is not accountable to the president, and the president doesn't have a lot of say in its organization. The president can't "make" the various offices and bureaus go along with his ideas. But they'll go along with him if they have a good feeling about him, if they like him. Not to mention the legislative branch of government, which is constitutionally outside of the president's authority but usually ready to help a popular president with his legislative agenda.)

Still, I think most of the negative reaction to these videos is no more interesting or complicated than a distrust of anything that provokes an emotional response. The head vs. heart debate. Music and images are very good at disarming us. When something makes us cry or feel sad or excited, we're out of control, at least for that moment in between our reaction and our response. It's hard to argue with tears.

These videos are so moving because they evoke that paradoxical American feeling which is a mix of deep sadness and shame (the feeling we feel when we learn about slavery, or the extermination of the Indians, or mountaintop removal, or Mexicans dying in the desert, or Iraq) with the optimism and pride we feel knowing that, in America -- though it's not always strictly true, and it's certainly not true equally for all people -- if you work hard you can succeed. And they remind us of how some problems that seem unmanageably huge, like racism, boil down to the simplest thing: changing how you feel. Music can do that, it does it easily and it does it all the time -- it changes how you feel.

In the end, all of the above is over-thinking it. The people making these videos are artists. They are famous, and their particular skill is emotional persuasion. Those are the two things they bring to the effort to promote Obama. They're doing what they do.