Mix #15: Shoggoth Shoulderpads

Part and parcel of this winter’s training marathon is to expand the horizons of my running mixtapes. I’m trying to cut back on my doe-eyed twee intake, to say nothing of my guilty pleasure for marshmallow-y synth pop (M83, I promise to you I will one day return). Even my voyeuristic, increasingly-less-earnest foray into gangsta rap has turned stagnant and moldy; picture Mrs. Haversham clutching a rotted limited pressing of Grip It! On That Other Level to her putrid bosoms and you’ll know how I feel. I used to throw out embarrassing, Usher-inspired “nuh-uh, nuh-uh” hand motions while rounding my final lap of mile repeats while Mos Def ravaged my inner ear. But I just don’t have it in me anymore. Blame the frattiness of the town I teach in. I mean, if the guy in the cut-up tank top who smells like cheap aftershave and who probably has “Rohypnol” tattooed in big gothic letters across his beefcake chest… if that guy knows all the rhymes to “The Humpty Dance,” too, shouldn’t I be reassessing the musical company I keep? And asking gut-punching questions about appropriation and identity?

Yes. The answer is yes.

So what’s next?

Guitars. Guitars are what’s next. Very, very loud guitars. Vulcan-forged, grim metal guitars. Hardcore riffs that sound so angular it’s like they ate Euclid’s corpse for breakfast. Fuzzy, toxic sludge guitars.

Two disclaimers:

1) A guy I used to live in Nevada with was really, really into metal, and all this is probably his fault. I’m more than a little squeamish about running to Maiden, because I’m aware of the stereotypes. Metal, viewed from enough distance, seems the province of hirsute enfants terribles who keep their set of d20 dice on the nightstand and make battleaxes out of aluminum foil regardless of whether or not it’s Halloween. Good luck shaking off that Hot Topic vibe. And some people are prolly all, “Look, metalheads, I inhabit plenty of fantasy worlds, too… but at least I don’t trick myself into thinking that a world of necrotrolls, being electrocuted in blood, or griffin-riding Carmen Electras can somehow ameliorate our actual world of shitty 10-hour workdays at the Dairy Queen, shopping for car insurance online, and calling grandma on her birthday. So let’s not go overboard.” Well, screw you people. Go back to your boring, homogenized, yogurty lives.

2) Metal is totally righteous. It’s hard to believe, I know, but I was once thirteen years old. And I would’ve burned down my church if Billy Corgan had subliminally told me to in a “hidden track” on Gish. Why did I like the Pumpkins and Tool so much as a middle/high schooler? Because their carefully concocted rhetoric of wearied cynicism, baroque guitar solos, fixations on mortality, and freaky bodily-manipulation seemed “grown up” in a way that other music wasn’t. Given: these Salingeresque traits are really just the same old teenager-bait, and I harbor no illusions that many alternative/grunge acts were more interested in making money for their labels than serving as musical reincarnations of Keats and Shelley.  Part of the reason I am now ironically returning to “rock” (ugh) is that the otterpop-colored iCulture of hipsterdom aims to keep us in a state of perpetual adolescence. (For some talking points, see last year’s contentious Adbusters feature, Pitchfork fellating singles this summer that sounded like it belonged in a Gidget film, and the “see you at detox after the afterparty!” photosets on The Cobra Snake.)

Here lie wolf traps within wolf traps, however. Everyone who’s stumbled home from a Guitar Hero bar outing in recent months can attest to the fact that hipsters have recently gravitated towards metal. As Ari Abramowitz notes in “Die Hipster Metal, Die!” these recent converts turn metal into another empty signifier, hovering in an irony-copter above the blighted landscape of “hairmetal” to pick off one target after another with sniper (or should I say “snide-per”) bullets to confirm their self-importance and stratospheric tastes. Abramowitz writes that

Some people (and many hipsters) claim fandom to things in order to stick a flag in virgin soil that has not yet been despoiled by their hipster peers/competitors. For the hipster, the goal is to be hip, to know something that his peers don’t know, to get there first, to get the scoop and gain all of the perceived social prestige that comes with it. Of course, we all play and enjoy this game, to greater or lesser extents, to feel that our hard work to obtain knowledge pays off and somehow makes us special. We all build parts of our identity off the self-expression of others. But to the hipster (the “fanatical dilettante,” as Reynolds puts it), knowledge of music is part of a strategic arms race for more hipness, more coolness. This is problematic because it requires a social context. It cannot exist alone, between oneself and one’s personal relationship to music. That is, for the hipster, one’s tastes only matter to the extent that they are seen and acknowledged by others. The music itself does not matter as much as the privileged positioning within the arms race that it confers. This is what makes all of the extra-musical elements [a given band's politics, image, or ostensible erudition], I mentioned earlier so important: those elements form the currency that enables fellow hipsters to keep score versus each other.

Given that hipsters are often described as “curators of consumerism”–self-conscious and ultimately bourgeois lovers of the disposable, deconstructable, and originless–I like Abramowitz’s claim that metal (generally) promotes dedication, sincerity, community, and primacy of experience. So here’s my rule for metal mixtapes while running: I will attempt to sever the umbilical cord on the parasitic literary critic and cultural bean counter in my head. I will enjoy first and rediscover my primordial love of the riff and chug.  What better music to run to?

1 / Iron Maiden – Aces High
2 / The Sword – Freya (Austin’s own)
3 / Mastodon – Iron Tusk
4 / Cult of Luna – Adrift
5 / Pelican – March to the Sea (Pt. 1) (This album should come with a “listen responsibly” label. I remember one time I was listening to this while running on the treadmill at Lombardi and had to resist the urge to SET IT AS FAST AS IT COULD GO UNTIL THE TREADMILL CAUGHT AFIRE)
6 / Led Zeppelin – No Quarter
7 / These Arms Are Snakes – Horse Girl
8 / Fugazi – Shut the Door
9 / Sleater-Kinney – Good Things
10 / Sebadoh – Rebound (Come back, early 90s indie rock ethos! We hardly knew ye!)
11 / Drive Like Jehu – Caress
12 / Detachment Kit – Sitting Still, Talking About Jets (Totally underrated band, and one of the best concerts I’ve ever seen)
13 / Shellac – Steady As She Goes

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Days remaining until the Austin Marathon: 107

Miles completed since I (really) began training for said Austin Marathon: 19

Hey.

So, I don’t know if you’ve noticed. But we’re teetering on the brink of the apocalypse. The signs are everywhere. The Afghan election was a joke. Thom Yorke has officially gone BANANAS and furthered the Mormon Teenager Celebacy Empire by including a song (hey, at least it’s a very good song) on the new Twilight soundtrack. Glenn Beck now foals a slimy baby stallion of pure, incoherent hatred every night on television while the nation cheers and drools into KFC buckets resting gently in their quivering, fatty laps. Health care reform is going the way of the dodo. Coyotes are apparently now indestructible.  Leslie, Austin’s favorite local homeless transvestite and homeless advocate, is in the hospital with brain damage and the sitch doesn’t look good. And it turns out that even the simplest joys of life–like picking your own apples–are all big Ponzi schemes, too. I feel like the Publisher’s Clearing House just knocked on my door only to burn that oversize, novelty check right in front of my eyes, then rub the ashes into my teeth. What happened to the glimmering, impossible, electric peacock-feathered hopes that so dazzled our eyes when Obama took the stage that fateful evening last November? Why is everybody unemployed? Why do we get old and wrinkly? Why do people wear rainboots when it’s raining out and they end up slipping on hilly streets anyway, because apparently there’s no tread on the bottom of those things? And why does everyone who lives in Austin look like this:

I dunno.

But somewhere, Steve Nash is probably studying a pre-algebra textbook and rocking a sweater vest, figuring out a way to save us using the Pythagorean theorem and sea algae. He probably has a lukewarm can of Diet Coke sitting on the desk in front of him.

The good news is that I’m running the Austin Marathon. According to my (and Steve’s) calculations, me running just over 26 miles on Valentine’s Day, 2010 will draw the planets back into their proper alignment. All will be right with the world again. The woodland animals looting our Circuit Cities and liquor stores will be struck dumb and mute once more, and return to their forest homes. The Democrats will retain their control of Congress. Cormac McCarthy will show up at my front door and ask to go dutch on a six-pack of New Belgium’s finest while we talk about common sentence patterns. And a new and glorious dawn will break in hushed tones over the firmanent. Somewhere, in the background, the Verve will play. Everyone will cry their guts out.

Believe me when I tell you that I’m doing this for you. Most of me doesn’t even really want to run a marathon. I don’t even like running, people. I’d rather sit around in my own filthy bedsheets, feeling the sweat pool in my kneepits and gumming fistfuls of Crisco.

But I’m going to do it, anyway.  I bought new shoes over the weekend that are bioluminescent blue. As soon as I finish wading through the quagmire of grading the rest of this week’s student essays, this web-log will again discuss important matters. Some will pertain to running (e.g. interval training suggestions, nipple creme comparison shopping, whether or not to “pick up a water moccasin with a big stick just to show it to your girlfriend–surprise!” while running through Texas hill country), and some will fall well beyond the pale of pounding the pavement (how to train a pig to hunt truffles, what kind of food is good to eat when you’re crying, Sugar Ray, where to allocate my retirement savings, etc.).

I’m back. Brace yourselves.

-The Camercorn

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Days remaining until the Austin Marathon: 110

Miles completed since I (really) began training for said Austin Marathon: 10

On my most recent running soundtrack: the frostbitten righteousness of “Freya” by The Sword

Saw District 9 last night. Go see it! Seriously! It’s the best (albiet only) South African science fiction allegory featuring talking shrimp I’ve ever seen.

(Reader beware: spoilers ahead). The film’s protagonist is Wikus van der Merwe, an affable if occasionally unnerving bureaucrat, who contracts a nasty alien virus that begins to recode his DNA and turn him into a “prawn.” (Prawns are the film’s spindly, slimy aliens who–in a deft reworking of the space invaders trope–show up in an enormous ship over Johannesburg, South Africa as malnourished refugees from an unspecified interstellar conflict, and who find uneasy harbor in the slummy compound of the film’s title.) Wikus’ gradual transformation from man to intergalactic crustacean is bio-horror at its finest: black ichor drips from his nostrils, his toenails and teeth plop out, he vomits up grey goo, and, in the final stages of his metamorphosis, black insectoid ridges erupt from underneath his skin like freaky tectonic plates.

Cool, huh?

What’s remarkable about District 9 is its sensitive treatment of Wikus’, uh, lifestyle change. Unlike similar films featuring extraterrestial parasites/viruses (Alien, The Thing, and Invasion of the Body Snatchers), the audience isn’t encouraged to dismiss Wikus as an abomination in need of extermination. Or to condescend to him as a freaky creature necessitating a mercy killing. You, squirming in your seat as your girlfriend turns your phalanges into powder in her why-am-i-watching-this grip next to you, live his transformation with him. One of the hardest scenes to watch happens early on, when Wikus grits his teeth and agonizingly deciding whether or not to lop off his mutated tentacle-hand with a rusty hatchet. The film gets away with grody, but captivating scenes like this one thanks in no small part to Neill Blomkamp’s delirium tremens cinematography, which lends District 9 a veneer of gritty realism.

The film, as you’ve probably guessed, got under my skin. (Wakka wakka wakka.) Not only because it’s a superb and tightly wound exercise in science fiction, a genre that seems to be enjoying an indie rennaisance of late between District 9, Moon, and Cold Souls. But also because, with its focus on corporeality and justice, it made me think specifically about the reasons that I like running, a sport and practice that is intimately tied to flesh and fleshly appearance. One reason many people take up running, especially at the beginning, is to sculpt their body until it glistens and glitters like one of the Greek gods and goddesses regularly featured on the cover of Runner’s World. (An old friend-of-a-friend once made up a rhyme that she’d chant while running that went, “Jog all day / Jog all night / Jog until those buns get tight!,” which always sounded to me like something you’d hear in a Lenin-era Soviet Olympic training camp for talented children.)

Personally, I blame ultramarathoner and ultra-asshat Dean Karnazes for inflaming an already-scary strain of body dimorphia among runners. Yeah, okay, so Dean is probably the “fittest man in America.” And yes, it is quite an accomplishment that he ran 50 marathons. If I have to stare at his cheese grater abs one more time, or read another Outside interview where he spews up some narcissism-posing-as-enlightenment bullshit about “making a life plan journal” and “turning your passion into your vocation,” I’m going to burn a gasoline pentacle into his front lawn while bumping “In The Air Tonight” from my Civic’s stereo.

The cosmology that Dean Karnazes’ image and philosophy presupposes–that we live in a prosaic world in which things are fundamentally Under Control and in which your Bootstraps are always Available for the Pull-Uppance–is a conservative wet dream underwritten by invisible classist and gendered mobility.

The worldview of District 9, while wholly unnerving, is probably more accurate. Anything, at any time, could go horribly and irrevocably wrong. Your toenails can turn black and fall off. A shadowy multinational corporation can evict you from your shack without legal recourse. Your shit can be vaporized by alien weaponry. You’re at the behest of the tyranny of your genes, gender, and national origin. Running through the South African slums is not an act of Karnazesian self-gratification, but a reminder of the ugly contingency and positionality of existence. Or, better, a means of basic survival. To quote Babette’s Feast: “What is fame? The grave that awaits us.”

And to further the intellectually onanistic direction this post is rudderlessly drifting in, I’ll call upon my fave feminist body theorist, Elizabeth Grosz, who analyzes fitness fads of the 1980s (!!) in her landmark book, Volatile Bodies, as follows:

The preferred body was one under control, pliable, amenable to the subject’s will: the fit and healthy body, the tight body, the street-smart body, the body transcending itself into the infinity of cyberspace. A body more amenable, malleable, and more subordinate to mind or will than ever before. Just pick the body you want and it can be yours (for a price). Such a conception never questioned the body’s status as an object (of reflection, intervention, training, or remaking), never even considered the possibility that the body could be understood as subject, agent, or activity. This pliable body is what Foucault (1997b) describes as “docile,” though with an unforeseen twist: this docility no longer functions primarily by external regulation, supervision, and constraint, as Foucault claimed, but is rather the consequence of endlessly more intensified self-regulation, self-management, and self-control. It is no longer a body docile with respect to power, but more a body docile to will, desire, and mind” (2).

Long live the insubordinate body! Long live stubborn zoology! Long live slimy and brackish unwilled tentacles erupting from our mouths!

Mix #14: Nevermind That Storytelling Taxidermied Moose Head

G and I spent last night watching 1998’s Prefontaine biopic, Without Limits. Mesmerized by Billy Crudup’s cheekbones (which rise, terrible and majestic like the cliffs of Dover from the sere plain of his face) as he ran endless, slow-motion laps, I knew the hour was nigh for a new running mix. One unholily combining Fleetwood Mac remixes, Swedish power metal, dreamy French electronica, and Senegalese pop.

The joy of watching a movie like Without Limits is inherent in its unabashed nostalgia and shameless naval-gazing. Donald Sutherland, playing Oregon capofamiglia Bill Bowerman, muses early on in the film: “Running, one might say, is basically an absurd past-time upon which to be exhausting ourselves. But if you can find meaning, in the kind of running you have to do to stay on this team, chances are you will be able to find meaning in another absurd past-time: Life.” The mix (below) celebrates continuities between the Prefontaine era of filmy shorts and today’s decidedly more international, colorful, estrogen-driven running scene. Too often, running seems the province of the lonely. On occasional, gloomy runs, I’ll feel like I’m watching a Mickey Rourke film on loop. Without Limits is (an, at times, admittedly cornball) attempt to remind us of our common bondage to the past, and to one another, in the face of the bleak and unforgiving uncertainties of living, along with its existential nastiness.

In my blacker moods, Sutherland’s backwashed runner-as-philosopher schtick might have caused me to quietly vomit into my shirtsleeve. But maybe I’m still giddily coasting on the rainbow-Koolaid fumes of Obama’s election. Or maybe moving to Texas has put chinks in the cold exoskeleton of irony I’d fashioned protectively about myself in order to weather day after day of living in Reno, Nevada. Maybe it’s because I’m in a hyper-functional relationship that makes me suspiciously happy. Maybe I’m growing up. I mean, my girlfriend and I went to the outlet mall last week to buy pants for teaching and I ended up eating really terrible food court pizza and, somehow, someway, being okay with that. Let’s just hope I’m not mistaking equanimity for complacency. Will somebody sic the counterculture German Shepherds on me if I start talking about “how underrated Tom Clancy is,” or betting on UFC matches?

1 / Jackson Browne – Running on Empty
2 / Fleetwood Mac – Never Forget (Cut Copy Lifelike remix)
3 / Flying Lotus – Fall In Love (J Dilla tribute) (Put on some good headphones and marvel at this, pls)
4 / Air France – No Excuses
5 / Cheikh Lô – Bamba Sunu Goorgui
6 / Midwest Product – A Genuine Display (Telefon Tel Aviv remix)
7 / MF Doom – Charnsuka (instrumental)
8 / HammerFall – Hearts On Fire
9 / New Order – True Faith
10 / Daft Punk – Make Love

The best–VERY best–part about having an extended family is that, very occasionally, members of it remember that you’re near-broke and send you packages of blueberry pomegranate trail mix crunch via post.

The kind that costs more than a Land Rover and comes in a package the size of a former Soviet republic.

I’ma eat until I frow up.

I frequently make notes in shorthand to myself in my journal. Or on gas station receipts or  the other nasty bits of paper that inevitably fill my pockets. I started doing it in 2003 during my junior year of high school. I noticed that my short-term memory was starting to work in fits and starts, becoming increasingly unreliable. (Juvenile onset Alzheimer’s?) In addition to propping up my rotting neurons, I also use my Lil’ Notez (TM) in service of my writing.

It should be mentioned that the latter application often works better theory than in practice. Most times, when I’m trying to pull of that ascetic-artist-poleaxed-by-his-own-brilliance-which-is-why-he-absolutely-HAS-to-get-this-down-right-now-and-you-wouldn’t-understand-anyway-you-PEOPLE-you-awful-people kind of writing, I end up freezing and being unable to write about anything except what’s right in front of me. (“Tacos tacos tacos.”)

The Italian humorist Achille Campanile reportedly did most of his writing squinting at the backs of tram tickets through his monocle while riding around Rome. One can only assume he was not paid by the word.

I still haven’t figured out how to run and write at the same time. Unless somebody wants to run alongside me with a steno pad and take dictation. (Note to Wes Anderson: if there’s a sequence like the one I just described in your next movie, I’m suing.)

My system of shorthand, originally sexy yet functional, like Danish furniture, has since been so pruned over the years that it’s become a kind of Lovecraftian cipher that it occasionally baffles its inventor. (See, for example, a library fine slip from last week that bears the cryptic phrase, “kt f/mcsween(?!?).” It wasn’t until I was on the precipice of sleep later that night that I remembered that I’d meant to “buy more cat food” and “reply to that email from my friend about that really sad story about the circus elephant that might have been published in McSweeney’s, but probably wasn’t, because it was something more like Tin House, or maybe even Fence.“

Next to the Valentine’s Day entry in my running log from earlier this year, there’s a note that says, “red balloon.” Red balloon. Red balloooooonnn. What do you meannnn?! (I wrote a song.) Since I re-read the entry about a month ago, I’ve been agonizing over it like a movie archeologist who, after falling through a wall of crumbly ye olde stone while wandering off to relieve himself, accidentally stumbles into a deserted underground metropolis that seems to be simultaneously from the past AND the future.

Was I drunk and/or high, rocking out to Nena on my iPod during that day’s 7-mile trail run? Was I weighing the merits of post-Occupation French film for children? Was it some freaky Freudian reference to fears of my butt exploding like a lightning bug’s–a note which (gasp) my lower brain hastily penned without the rest of my brain even knowing about it?

Cut to the grocery store. Specifically, me in the grocery store. Today. Drama. Buying a pear and some deli salads for lunch. While staring aimlessly into the middle distance, waiting in the checkout line, I suddenly remembered. Bam.

While running through a thicket of sagebrush last February, I noticed a half-deflated red mylar balloon in the shape of a heart caught on some brush. I ran the last three miles home along the highway, feeling slightly ridiculous, with its string tied around my wrist. Passing drivers probably thought I’d just escaped from a doctor’s office, pumped full of pills, and had decided to run home. A jeep full of former students honked at me. One of them yelled, “way to go, teach!,” the tone and exact meaning of which I’m still trying to unravel.

The balloon hovered, circumspect, on my ceiling for about a week before it slowly descended to the carpet one day, which was so sad that it made me want to cry.

Which is why I’m wondering. What’s the strangest thing you’ve picked up running?

(“My husband” is not an acceptable answer, even though, I know, it’s all wakka wakka wakka, etc.)

It is a source of inexpressible comfort and happiness to find, that even in the sticky heat of a central Texas summer (a heat that makes the skin feel as though it’s covered in Crisco), running is somehow possible. I was originally going to write this post yesterday, kvetching about how unmotivated I am. But then I went for an amazing run at 11:30 last night down San Antonio street in San Marcos, Texas, to this song. Everything suddenly was okay.

This is not, as I originally thought it was doomed to be, a post about demise.

It’s true that I haven’t felt very motivated to write. I’m currently between jobs (I know what you’re thinking, and, no, that’s not a euphemism for impoverished unemployment. Although I’m doing a pretty good job imitating that, as I pad around my girlfriend’s apartment eating Wheat Thins and endless bowls of the chickpea thing, waiting for the start of the school year.)

Last night, I asked Mme. Freckleowl (my heart of hearts) while we were lounging about on her (too-small) couch if she ever had trouble writing in Texas. “Yes,” she said, “but only for the first year or so.”

I could blame it on the weather. The heat here, as I have mentioned, produces a certain, dreamy fog in the brains, making it difficult to remember why this blog’s original nemeses (the commodification of running, dreamcatcher keychains, Soulja Boy, the nation-state of Jamaica, non-alcoholic beer being served after races, GPS watches, etc.) so raised my hackles in the first place. What was the source, and ultimate end, of last year’s bile? And why has the Texas weather (if that’s what’s really causing this) stolen my moxie away? Full confession: most days I just want to stay inside and play Dungeons & Dragons all by myself.

But complaining about the weather is lame. I don’t want to end up like a drunk, legless, syphilis-ravaged mariner who, pinning his many misfortunes on the wind itself, strings of angry phlegm in his beard, shakes his fist at the rainy gale as he sits on the prow of a ruined vessel, only for a mischievous gust of sea wind to knock him into the hungry black waves below. To therein drown. Or, worse, I’d sound like someone’s mushroomy grandmother, who talks ONLY about the weather ALL of the time.

But that’s not much of an excuse, is it? O. Henry, despite the intemperate weather, lived and worked in Austin for most of his career. He once said, “There are stories in everything. I’ve got some of my best yarns from park benches, lampposts, and newspaper stands.” Despite my best efforts to motivate them, though, my running shoes haven’t penned the next Harry Potter whilst I slumbered. There’s no shortage of material around here. I was at work last week (a job that I have since abandoned with the giddiness and fecklessness of a rodeo bull jumping the arena partitions to gore one spectator after another with my mighty mighty horns), a front desk job at a luxury hotel. A woman called down at about 7:45 at night to report that she wanted engineering to come up to her room because she was having trouble with her television.

“Yes, ma’am. And what seems to be the trouble with the tv?”

“There are people coming out of it. Tall people.”

Given episodes like this one, it’s clear that every time I say, “this weather makes it impossible to run/write,” it’s actually code for, “I’m lazy.”

Part of the problem, too, is that I tend to overthink both running and writing, and would probably be much better at both if I loosened my meta-deathgrip a little and, you know, actually did them.

The good news here is that G’s got some new shoes. She can now happily run without turning her knees into the physiological equivalent of bath grout. Better yet, we’re going to do a half-marathon later this fall, which means (caveat, gentle reader) lots of upcoming posts about how adorable running couples are when they wear matching windsuits and lovingly apply Bodyglide to one another’s armpits to stave off chafing. I mean, talk about motivation! Wowza!

I’m also taking a trip to southern Alabama in a couple weeks. Yep, which hopefully means an on-the-road edition of the Belfry about the joy of running red dirt roads and trying to trap an alligator to enter into/terrorize next year’s Furry Scurry in Denver. That’s right. Running in Alabama. (Or, if you pronounce it like I did as a child, “Abalama”). Which means that, after years of waiting patiently in the wings, my true vision quest can descend upon me and congeries of cherubs can raise me aloft on a glowing platform, singing something regionally appropriate, as I rise up to gator-wrestle my destiny into total, humiliated submission:

I’d be lying if I said that my new job has turned me into a habitual liar. I’ve probably been telling lies of varying complexity, with varying levels of success, since I was a zygote. Work certainly encourages the habit, though. If I was honest with the people I interact with everyday, I’d have their claws at my throat. I can’t go into too much detail, but suffice it to say that withholding particular information from customers is often the lifeblood of both my sanity and my workplace’s financial stability.

It’s not something of which I’m particularly proud–the moral residue of a well-wrought and bought lie, the inescapable ickiness of it that lingers long afterward, is a lot like that filmy onionskin of sugar on your teeth after a candy binge. Even worse is the beartrap trap squirm of being caught in the teeth of your lie. But I still do it, as I think everyone does. (The unspoken consensus seems to be that people who don’t lie are either nastily blunt or naive. Or, worse, that they’re boringly pious, or are sociopaths who snap one day and start making lampshades out of people in their basement.) Sometimes it’s unthinkingly: the lie as a phosphorescent octopus swimming up from the Freudian sea within in order to dazzle, bait, or obscure the truth in a briny cloud of lie-ink.

But more often I lie to protect myself and keep other people from getting angry at me (or at least that’s what I tell myself). Or I lie make myself appear more intelligent, worldly, masculine, feminine, or idiosyncratic than I actually am. You probably remember certain middle school classmates who, after claiming to have seen certain hot, recently released blockbuster films (Independence Day, I’m looking in your direction), would be remarkably vague about their favorite scenes. If they could recall any at all, they’d often be from the film’s trailer. That kid was me. The tragedy of this sub-genre of lie is practically the stuff of Greek theater. Why? Because kids (and adults) tell lies like this to feel included–they’re a palsied attempt to reach out and commune with someone else’s experience, closing the schisms between wildly different people. Yet it’s a strange feeling to suddenly fabricate a bit of yourself, obscuring other bits, so that other people finally notice you there, like a wet kitten abandoned on their stoop, breathing awkwardly and shuffling your feet.

None of what I’m saying is particularly revelatory. (See, for example, any number of Twilight Zone episodes about how “we all wear masks,” the plot of Mean Girls, or just wander down to your local marketing firm or shopping mall.) I think we all more or less make ourselves up as we go along, depending upon circumstance and who’s watching us. This is the greatest insight from the furor of the culture wars of the eighties and nineties: that “who you are” is what you do at particular times, rather than a universal who you are.

Then why does lying bother us so much? Why does it continue to send irritable, sticky waves up and down the spine? Is it the Judeo-Christian system of ethics that still clings like a stubborn bathtub ring to our age? Why can’t we just get over it and accept that our everyday transactions are going to be ones where we’re going to have to be at least a little fake to even keep your head above water? (Anyone who’s ever written a resume, gone shipping for business casual clothing at Ross, or attended a “networking function” knows what I’m talking about.)

Maybe it’s not because–as iconoclastic, by-now-irritated readers are probably thinking–that you’re compromising a basic authenticity or moral fiber by telling the occasional fib about how many people you’ve slept with. The act of wearing a shirt that’s “not really you” probably isn’t going to send you into a full-blown existential meltdown. And don’t get me wrong. It’s not that thinking long and hard about authenticity and values aren’t crucially and overwhelmingly important. Truth and trustworthiness are, after all, the spinal column of intimacy. I’m talking here less about how we treat others on personal ground, which is often terrain of our choosing, and more about how we’re expected to navigate the foul-smelling bogs of polite working society, where we must more carefully manage others’ impressions of ourselves. I guess what I’m really after is how capitalism (the bête noire of this conversation) encourages certain falsehoods in order to perpetuate itself, and how it uses these falsehoods to organize our patterns of behavior.

Maybe it’s because, like other unpleasant necessities (regular dental cleanings, suffering through Hootie and the Blowfish while waiting to mail a package in an un-air-conditioned post office), the art of self-creation somehow intimates the hollowness at the heart of Western modernity–the Lovecraftian Black Slavering Nothingness lurking in the dusty floorboards beneath a century’s worth of technological and cultural innovation.

In his acclaimed short story, “Good Old Neon,” the late great David Foster Wallace writes:

There was a basic logical paradox that I called the “fraudulence paradox” that I had discovered more or less on my own while taking a mathematical logic course in school. . . . The fraudulence paradox was that the more time and effort you put into trying to appear impressive or attractive to other people, the less impressive or attractive you felt inside–you were a fraud. And the more of a fraud you felt like, the harder you tried to convey an impressive or likable image of yourself so that other people wouldn’t find out what a hollow, fraudulent person you really were. Logically, you would think that the moment a supposedly intelligent nineteen-year old became aware of this paradox, he’d stop being a fraud and just settle for being himself (whatever that was) because he’d figured out that being a fraud was a vicious infinite regress that ultimately resulted in being frightened, lonely, alienated, etc. But here was the other, higher-order paradox, which didn’t even have a form or name–I didn’t, I couldn’t. Discovering that first paradox at age nineteen just brought home to me in spades what an empty, fraudulent person I’d basically been ever since at least the time I was four and lied to my stepdad . . .

That gives me the heebie-jeebies. I prefer the relatively sunnier outlook provided by sixteenth century Italian courtesan Baldassare Castiglione, who sustained that, to survive the cold-blooded courts of Florence, you had to cultivate the quality of sprezzatura: “a certain nonchalance, so as to conceal all art and make whatever one does or says appear to be without effort and almost without any thought about it . . . an easy facility in accomplishing difficult actions which hides the conscious effort that went into them.” It is the art of disguising the art of living. And, in doing so, it blurs the lines between act and life, and between genius and practice. Andrew Bird’s whistling comes to mind.

The question appears to be not “what is true?”–that rabid dog at the heels of philosophy’s greatest brow-furrowers–but rather why “what is false?” is infinitely more captivating.

And why these ruminations of a blog (nominally) concerned with the business of running, rather than one about the running of a business? Because while you can fake being a runner, it’s pretty hard to fake a run.

Mix #13: Cubic Feet Per Second

Having left the hallowed, hushed halls of academia (for the time being) and moved to a climate where hot, moist air curls on top of the City of Austin everyday around 2:30 PM like an enormous, radioactive, soaking wet housecat, I’ve spent the last couple of weeks wondering if I’m getting dumber. I can practically feel the lack of annotated bibliography assignments–and the blowtorch of the Texan summer sun–sucking all the smarts right out of me. Or maybe I’m entering some kind of halcyon Cameron 2.0 era, where I emerge from my desert cocoon of bad animal puns and intellectual fakery to grow mutton chops, take up bonsai pruning, and let Zen koans flutter from my lips like autumn leaves.

As I’m currently unemployed (an advanced humanities degree does not a job make, my friends), I’ve been spending my time watching a lot of PBS and getting back into running. And listening to more dancepop and mid-career Springsteen (thanks, Gwynne!) than is probably healthy. And I’ve rediscovered one of the real joys of putting on a pair of trainers and heading out the door: unearthing trails and weird cultural landmarks in a new city. A couple days ago, I got lost in Zilker Park and ended up near the back entrance to Barton Springs pool. AKA the Park’s seamy wet underbelly where I witnessed three different drum circles taking place surreptitiously in the bushes, and almost ran over a crusty punk trainhopper who’d passed out while taking a dump in what looked to be a cluster of poison oak.

I’m mulling over the idea of signing up for the San Antonio Rock ‘n Roll Marathon in November. Even though it seems depressingly corporate and I’m skeptical about the quality of the “rock ‘n roll” that’s going to be served up every mile on the course. I’m picturing lots of white-guy-in-fedora-Dad-rock blues bands and mangled Skynard covers. I’m also increasingly skittish about leaving Austin city limits (zing), fearing the red-state wilderness of Texas-at-large. I’m hesitant to go anywhere outside the safe boundaries of the city, except down to San Marcos to eat yogurt out of Gwynne’s fridge without her knowing about it, or try (unsuccessfully) to nap on her tiny, tiny, tiny couch with my lumbering, man-child frame.

1 / The Hold Steady – Atlantic City (Springsteen cover)
2 / Ghostland Observatory – Sad Sad City (One of Austin’s finer exports, even if their frontman, Aaron, looks too much like an extra from Smoke Signals. Boy sure can swivel those skinny hips, though.)
3 / Ratatat – Wildcat (the song to which all of my future children will be conceived)
4 / The Knife – We Share Our Mother’s Health
5 / DJ Kaos – Love The Night Away (Tiedie Mix) (Perfect poolside. Or, as the typically bombastic Pitchfork notes: “The bongos are pure Balearic disco, and the gruff, assertive, and sincere vocals firmly in the tradition of Italo classics. But the end result is a passionate dancefloor slow burn of intense beauty, an incomparable summer soundtrack.”)
6 / Memory Cassette – Asleep At A Party
7 / Handsome Furs – All We Want, Baby, Is Everything (There is no more direct path to my heart, I think, than the dark, petrol-choked, ice-paved road of Wolf Parade side projects. From this year’s excellent Face Control. And, as Wikipedia reminds us, “The inspiration behind Face Control involves a peculiar aspect of club culture they observed while on tour in Eastern Europe: if party goers wish to reserve a table at a bar in Moscow, they must pay large sums of money through PayPal or with cash; however, their seat is still not guaranteed – bouncers have the authority to turn reserved patrons away from the bar based solely on appearance, which has been coined ‘face control.’”)
8 / Handsome Furs – Radio Kalininbrad (God, this one too–somehow these epic, swirling, shrieking layers reach that pure vein of nostalgic sonic warmness that previously only My Bloody Valentine, The Radio Dept., Slowdive, or somehow stumbling across an episode of The Wonder Years on cable late at night could hit.) <via Winnie Cooper, duh>
9 / Sonic Youth – Tom Violence
10 / Robots in Disguise – The Sex Has Made Me Stupid
11 / Portland Cello Project f. Laura Gibson – Hands in Pockets (cooldown)