Garvey

I've been blogging for George Mason University's new Mason Votes page. 

My brother and I started West on 13 August, a journey that will take us from Northern Virginia down through Tennessee, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, into Southern California, where we are picking up a friend, seeing a few other friends, and then heading north, hopefully up the 101 along the coast for a bit, maybe to San Francisco, and eventually to Lake Tahoe in Northern California, near Reno.

Our first day of travel -- roughly 425 miles down I-81 -- took us through Virginia, into Eastern Tennessee, and eventually to Knoxville. My brother knew a little back route from my mother's house out in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains to Interstate 66, a winding road that took us by beautiful, extravagant farm houses owned by Virginia families who garnered their wealth from horses, crops, the extensive tracts of land they own, or other sources of good fortune.

From the notes I've been occasionally scribbling on the road:

"[This backroad has taken us by] gravel-lined railway tracks, weeping willows bleeding out over the rails, with the sun, after slipping between the swaying tendrils, playing off of the various surfaces, at times enhancing them, other times bleaching out the softer hues... It's beautiful here along this lost and winding road."

688 took us almost all the way to Front Royal, and soon after we exited from 66 onto 81 and began our trek southwest. At first, that part of the journey slipped by easily -- at least for me as it was the third time this year that I have been down the stretch of road leading from Virginia to Knoxville. Later, though, as we approached Bristol, the last Virginian city on 81, the sky opened up and torrential rains cut our visibility down to almost nothing at times. Once a car or a tractor trailer moved fifteen feet away from our vehicle, we had to strain to see their red tail lights. Some cretins driving an SUV didn't even have their lights on, flying by our car in excess of 60 miles per hour. Neither my brother nor I spotted them in a ditch once the sporadic, frightening downpours ceased; I'm often amazed how stupidity is rewarded, or at least not punished. I'm glad they didn't cause harm to anyone else.

Once the weather cleared, we made good time to Knoxville, despite the fact that the entire section of Interstate 40 West was closed by the city. We took an exit leading us downtown and grabbed a drink at the Urban City Bar and Cafe, a locale that my roommate Alan and I discovered on our first trip to Knoxville this past January, and, as before, the bar staff assisted in helping us find a place to stay that night.

Due to the suddenness of the trip -- one that I thought had been canceled, sparking back to life almost as suddenly as it died -- my brother and I are traveling on a rather limited budget. Due to our financial concerns, we bedded down for the night at a Super 8 just outside of Knoxville, near McKay Used Books off Papermill Place Way. After showering, a welcome relief from the heat of the day and the tension of the rains, we proceeded to start on the bottle of Sailor Jerry rum we picked up. Anyone who has stayed at a budget hotel like Super 8 knows that a little alcohol (or other chemicals) can be quite helpful in making one come to terms with the situation you've put yourself in, to eventually accept or overcome them, and to finally sleep.

Today started early, my alarm clock startling me from an uncomfortable sleep at eight in the morning. By nine the car was repacked, our room keys had been returned, and we headed to McKay’s to browse for a few minutes. I found a copy of Norman Mailer's The Deer Park for a dollar, and my brother Karl found the second part of Batman: Knightfall (he had already read the first trade paperback, but had been without luck when searching for its companions), Chris Ryall and Ashley Wood's Zombies vs. Robots, and Leah Moore's Raise The Dead.

By 09:30 we were back on I-40 West, slipping along the dense green corridors of thick forest lining the highway. As I wrote to my editor at It's A Trap!:

"Tennessee was a bit desolate west of Knoxville, only blistering to life around Nashville and Memphis, and Arkansas was a strange, flat expanse, dotted every hundred miles or so with a depressingly sparse, run-down little town. We didn't see Little Rock, I-40 swerved too sharply around it, so -- at least as far as we know -- there is very little in Arkansas. Oklahoma has been the most beautiful country we've driven through, a mix of the visibility we had in Arkansas due to the flatness, but instead of continuing on endlessly into the horizon, the views in Oklahoma have had a few hills, trees, much more varied and interesting landscapes to stare out at. The beautiful sunset didn't hurt our first impressions either."

The sunset was truly beautiful -- a slow fade behind low hanging, windswept clouds.

Arkansas was a strange experience, and one that I am glad I was exposed to from behind the windows of a moving vehicle. Billboards promoted Jesus and Christianity almost as much, if not more, than the cheap hotel and restaurant chains that line this nation's interstates. The only building that we saw in Arkansas -- though as I wrote Avi (owner and editor-in-chief of It’s A Trap!), we didn't see much -- that could be described as ‘decent looking’ was the First Pentecostal Church near Little Rock. Judging from its size, it was most likely a megachurch. A trucker we passed had a roadmap to Jesus (and away from Sin) emblazoned on the rear of his semi. God's Country is also dotted with Cracker Barrels.

Karl and I decided to stop at one of the casinos in the Cherokee Nation, just over the Oklahoma-Arkansas border, but, because of the semi-dry nature of the county (only beer, no liquor), we soon abandoned the casino (and its hotel where we had initially thought to stay), and continued down 40 until we hit Henryetta.

Once again, my brother and I are in a Super 8. This one is worse than its Tennessean counterpart. The aging air-conditioner is fighting an all out battle against the sickly damp and humidity. It's been faring a bit better as evening blurred into nightfall.

Tomorrow we head to Albuquerque, and then on to Vegas the next day.

In Charles C. Mann's article "The Coming Death Shortage", he writes:

"According to Joshua Goldstein, a demographer at Princeton, adolescence will in the future evolve into a period of experimentation and education that will last from the teenage years into the mid-thirties. In a kind of wanderjahr prolonged for decades, young people will try out jobs on a temporary basis, float in and out of their parents' homes, hit the Europass-and-hostel circuit, pick up extra courses and degrees, and live with different people in different places. In the past the transition from youth to adulthood usually followed an orderly sequence: education, entry into the labor force, marriage, and parenthood. For tomorrow's thirtysomethings, suspended in what Goldstein calls "quasi-adulthood," these steps may occur in any order."

For me this appears to correspond with what Anke C. Plagnol and Richard A. Easterlin wrote in their piece "Aspirations, Attainments, and Satisfaction: Life Cycle Differences Between American Women and Men" in the Journal of Happiness Studies:

"The saddest period of the average man's life – his 20s – is also the period when he is most likely to be single."

It seems peculiar that a man's unhappiest years encompass the period of his life where he is most likely to have the freedom to travel and study and move about the world. At the same time, though, this revelation is not all that surprising. No matter what view is available outside of the room where you sleep, in spite of all the photographs and entry visas and memories one can collect through travels and moves, companionship in life seems to be a desire that is hardwired into our sense of happiness and our sense of self (and self-worth).

One could even argue that the affects of a period of profound freedom do not present themselves fully until years later, until some meaning has been derived from the blur of airports and apartments and experiences. Without a clear sense of how we are being changed by our education or wanderlust, it doesn't seem unreasonable to believe that a person in their 20s could more strongly feel the affects of loneliness than appreciate the benefit of learning a second language, of having lived or traveled abroad, and so on.

From what I have gathered from discussions with my parents, friends' parents, professors, and friends, and from articles like those of Mann's and Plagnol's and Easterlin's, is that a person is more likely to develop themselves as individuals in their twenties, and not necessarily to develop much of a "life" as it has become defined today: a 9 -5 job, a significant other, a home in the suburbs, and so on. In the face of the security a life like that offers, the freedom to travel and study can feel superfluous, empty, indulgent, without substance -- like treading water instead of choosing a path.

Plagnol and Easterlin write later in their article:

"But age alters many things, including men's money woes and lackluster love lives.

After 34, men are more likely to be married than women, and the gap only widens with age, mirroring men's growing satisfaction with family life.

Men also become more satisfied with their financial situations over time, as reflected in their increased spending power. The researchers found that men tend to covet big-ticket items that might not be within reach until later in life, such as a car or vacation home."

For most Americans, it seems that the sooner they can mirror the family they grew up in -- or attempt to create the family they never had -- the happier they will be.

What I can't seem to fully ascertain from my conversations or readings, or even from my own life, is what affect taking advantage of the freedom that is available in our 20s will have on individuals and their happiness later in life. We hear so often about the sacrifices that must be made when children enter into the equation, so I can imagine that trying to move beyond feelings of melancholy and loneliness while a twenty-something and taking risks and chances can only be beneficial, especially if a family life appears to be the hopeful existence of a person.

As Dennis Wilson croons in "Time":

"I'm the kind of guy that loves to mess around,
Know a lot of women, but they don't fill my heart with love..."

I decided to try my hands again at blogging after a number of people, my father among them, told me that writing every day (or almost every day) was a good way to promote a healthy work ethic, especially for someone who is trying to write for a living. During the school year, there isn't a day that passes where I am not writing something, but summer can be a rather empty expanse.

That said, I don't think I have nearly enough energy or time to write anything of substantive value today... So, I shall instead pass along a few music-related things that piqued my interest recently.

Park Hotell - "Dead ringers"
Featuring Jari Haapalainen on drums and the girls from Taxi, Taxi! on backing vocals, the first track since Park Hotell's "The guest who stayed forever" EP is absolutely fantastic. As It's A Trap! editor-in-chief Avi Roig writes, "No more synths, no more shoegazer vibes, just organic indie rock'n'roll." He then goes on to compare Park Hotell's newest creation to Laakso and "peak-era Swedish indie such as Eggstone or The Wannadies, the sort of stuff that defined the scene back in the 90s and is rarely emulated today."

Cut City - "Replacement"
It's A Trap! interviews Max Hansson from Cut City/White Knives, and then tacks on my favorite Cut City track to seal the deal.

Voices Break The Silence - "This awful friend"
You know you are working for the right man when he writes, "I love big, 90s-style indie guitarrock and I am unashamed." Voices Break The Silence exist somewhere between the influences of Mineral and the more ethereal compositions from Sonic Youth.

And while we're on music, Dennis Wilson's recently re-released solo album Pacific Ocean Blue is definitely worth checking out.

Known mostly as the only Beach Boy who actually surfed and for his taste for drink and women, Dennis Wilson was also a phenomenal musician whose talents were unrecognized for a large part of his life. I first became interested in Dennis Wilson after finally picking up a copy of the Criterion release of Two-Lane Blacktop, Monte Hellman's existentialist road movie, in which Dennis Wilson plays 'the Mechanic' (alongside fellow musician James Taylor as 'the Driver').

Pacific Ocean Blue sounds every bit as thought it was released in 1977, but if you have any soft spots for Eric Clapton and Elton John, you should find some wonderful gems in Wilson's more upbeat compositions, and his slower, piano-driven ballads are... hauntingly beautiful. I'd recommend listening to "Time" or "Thoughts Of You" if you aren't quite sold. There isn't any Beach Boys sheen anywhere on this record, and Wilson's voice, damaged by years of substance abuse, is raspy, yet soulful, and adds an authoritative, experienced air to his compositions.

My friend Gina passed along a fantastic article from Adbusters today, "Hipster: The Dead End of Western Civilization."

Douglas Haddow, the article's author, writes with frightening precision: "An artificial appropriation of different styles from different eras, the hipster represents the end of Western civilization – a culture lost in the superficiality of its past and unable to create any new meaning. Not only is it unsustainable, it is suicidal. While previous youth movements have challenged the dysfunction and decadence of their elders, today we have the “hipster” – a youth subculture that mirrors the doomed shallowness of mainstream society."

While the attraction to a "hipster" lifestyle is obviously a problem now, showing our generation's attraction to, as Haddow puts it, "a self-obsessed aesthetic vacuum," there will also be consequences further down the line. What kind of bildungsroman will come out of this substanceless void?

As anyone who has seen a film like Joachim Trier's Reprise or read a novel like Douglas Coupland's Generation X knows, the social movements occurring in our youths and adolescences have a profound affect on the choices we make with our lives -- even if our life is defined by a rejection of a popular subculture or counterculture (and maybe in this there is still hope that some profound works of art can come out of this "hipster" movement, out of the shortened attention spans of the Internet Generation...). Films like Reprise and novels like Generation X would not be as powerful if their audience could not see a warped reflection of their own life in the work, if the viewers/readers could not relate to the pasts presented in the creations. These facets of our lives were important, and the knowledge and self-awareness we garnered from our passage through various social movements subsequently make the works more "real" or "true" to us.

When my father asked me when I was 12 whether I'd like to study in England, a significant amount of the reason why I said "yes" was because of, as ridiculous as it seems now, The Clash. I though the UK would be full of punk rockers, that possibly my proximity alone to many of the pioneers of this musical and social revolution would benefit my life in a way that suburban Virginia was not. The fact that I moved over just as the rave scene was on its final, faltering legs and midway through the Brit Rock movement was... devastating.

I met Ella Torkelsson, the girl I ended up moving to Sweden with, in Oxford City Parks with a bunch of street punks and other assorted miscreants. I started a punk record label with the help of close friends Anna Maria Pelot and Daniel Grönblad, and with the added support of numerous others during the label's short run. It wasn't until the twilight of my teenage years that punk ceased to be one of the driving forces of my life. Other influences filtered in, as they always do in our formative years, and as soon as I shifted my focus from the anger and youthful energy that started in the late-70s to bands that progressed the punk sound (Joy Division, Wire, etc.), there was no going back -- I continued to stumble forward.

It wasn't just the music, there was a sense of belonging and acceptance in the punk scene for me. Even as the varied post-hardcore movement sprung up in the late 90s and early 00s around an amalgamation of different sounds and influences, this open mentality remained thoroughly in focus, at least as far as my experiences in England and Sweden were concerned. Youth has a lot to do with this as well, but I remember at 20 and 21 going to see bands like Devotion to Trust, The Kind That Kills, Cursed, or When We Fall and finding myself in alleys drinking cheap cider and liquor with newly-found, likeminded kids.

The youth movements of the previous decades have had a profound impact on the artistic creations we have today, whether the artist or author or filmmaker was a punk when they were younger, or a New Waver, a Springsteen fan, a prog-rock fanatic... I am not sure what this elitist "hipster" movement will produce in years to come. Where punk was a refuge from the various difficulties of my youth and adolescence, a liminal territory where outsiders no longer had to feel cast off, this current scene is more akin to being popular enough to sit at the Cool Table in high school -- and popular kids know that acceptance is the surest way for them to lose their positions of esteem.

I'm not sure what is more laughable, the fact that John McCain stated a few months back that he planned to run "a respectful campaign," that he so quickly retreated from this statement, or the outrageous ads that he has since endorsed.


Even one of McCain's former strategists John Weaver has balked at McCain's juvenile ad, saying, "There is legitimate mockery of a political campaign now, and it isn't at Obama's. For McCain's sake, this tomfoolery needs to stop."

Strangely, Weaver's words echo and parallel what I wrote on 27 July: "I just hope McCain does not ruin what he stands for (or at least stood for in 2000) in, for all intensive purposes, an offensive strike against Obama politically and personally. McCain has done too much for this country, both in uniform and on the Senate floor, to be remembered as 'the angry old man' who threw everything at Obama, much like Clinton did earlier this year, in an gamble for the Oval Office."

Beyond the peculiar and sickening tactics that McCain's campaign has brandished recently, the fact that it seems to have slipped McCain's and his advisors' minds that going negative, especially extremely and very publicly negative, often has significant consequences.

Daniel Larison, on both the supposedly sympathetic The American Conservative site and on The Atlantic's "Daily Dish," rather harshly takes McCain to task not only for trying to brand Barack Obama as a vapid celebrity like Britney or Paris, but "treat[ing] Germans in an essentialist way and try[ing] to reduce them to the most cartoonish stereotypes, as if a cheering throng of Germans in Berlin, c. 2008, must necessarily conjure up associations with Nazi rallies."

There have even been accusations of "racist" intent in McCain's ads -- a claim I think is fundamentally without base, but does show the type of fallout that can and will occur when a candidate takes such a negative turn, and some of these accusations have a few logical threads running through them, enough to give "The Daily Dish's" Chris Bodenner "pause."


BusinessWeek's David Kiley reported on 28 July in his piece "The New Normal: McCain's Desperate Ad Hours": "What the McCain campaign doesn’t want people to know, according to one GOP strategist I spoke with over the weekend, is that they had an ad script ready to go if Obama had visited the wounded troops saying that Obama was...wait for it...using wounded troops as campaign props."

While it was sad enough that McCain, after basically baiting Obama into his 'world tour,' tried to brand him as "unpatriotic" for saying that he was, after first proclaiming himself "a proud citizen of the United States", a "fellow citizen of the world," he then tried to say he had some problem with America's troops because the Pentagon intervened in a planned trip to visit wounded soldiers in Germany.

Is McCain out for blood?

Ever since returning from Sweden, I've had some strange attraction to novels and films depicting the human experience at war.

I've rewatched Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now and Andrei Tarkovsky's Ivan's Childhood, and attempted to finish (and this time fully appreciate) Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line on multiple occasions -- though, sadly, most of these occasions were between the hours of 3 and 4 in the morning, and I would slip into unconsciousness after a half-hour or so.

Yesterday, I picked up Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead and received Joel Turnipseed's Baghdad Express in the mail, a purchase made solely on the recommendation of my roommate. What sealed the deal was when Alan said that there was a controversy focused around William Broyles, Jr., the screenwriter who adapted Tony Swofford's memoir into the largely overlooked and ignored Sam Mendes film Jarhead, over whether sections of Baghdad Express were used in the Jarhead script without permission.

At the beginning of the summer, I found myself tearing through the works of Henry Miller, and still have the last third of Tropic of Capricorn to finish, leafing back through the highlighted and annotated pages of my Sartre novels, finally taking a turn at Albert Camus' The Fall and Fyodor Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground while en route to Scandinavia (both novels now sit, in various stages of completion, on the top of the sizable piles of texts that have formed a monument of sorts next to my bed)... and yet from these absurdist/existentialist/stream-of-consciousness explorations of human existence in Paris, New York, Amsterdam, and [St.] Petersburg, I now find myself attracted to analyses of the horrors of war on the human mind; the affect of war, not as seen in headlines or read in the paragraphs of history books, but on the individuals whose orders were to kill until directed to do otherwise, for the safety and security of their families at home, for the "betterment of the world," for, ironically, another attempt at a peace.

Despite the fact that America is engaged in two wars in the Middle East, both of which are extensively covered by this nation's reputable newspapers, it seems as though most people's opinions of the wars are based on sheer, at times almost feral, emotion, and not on any of the materials and facts all too available on the internet. In my previous post, I linked to a story in the World Politics Review about why a "Surge-like" strategy would not work in Afghanistan... I have serious doubts that many who voice their opinions so loudly about America At War have even glanced over articles like this.

Like a woman's right to choose, capital punishment, and the rights of homosexual couples, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have become ideologically divisive issues. John McCain has said that Barack Obama "would rather lose the war than the campaign." Those of us who have criticized George W. Bush's decision to go to war since the beginning have been labeled "unpatriotic" and "un-American." It has also been brought to my attention by a number of my countrymen who align themselves with the Republican Party or a Conservation Ideology that, because I do not support the War in Iraq, I therefore do not (and, because of my stance, can not) support the American troops in these theaters of war... and anyone who does not support our troops, our president, and our country in this time of war is nothing short of a coward and sorry excuse for an American.

I wonder what these people would make of Alan Rogers, an exemplary American solider who also happened to be a homosexual.

The saddest fact of all is that all this chest-thumping and hollering about the Spread of Democracy to the Darkest Corners of the World overlooks something rather important: young American men and women are fighting and dying for a war that was sold to the American public packaged in lies and half-truths. This fact is no longer in dispute. Even if the Iraq War was legal and morally just (and this question of the morality of war opens a can of worms that I'm still not quite sure how to untangle), soldiers are dying, civilians too. War should never be about forcefully imprinting one's beliefs on another culture, but a frightening last resort. War should not be a divisive political issue, but something that should make us all fearful that events led us to that point... and because of this sickening aspect of war, the loss of life on all sides, no one should be called "unpatriotic" because they are against violence and death, and every informed opinion should be allowed to enter the public discussion without ridicule or theatric shows of disgust.

It's been a long time since I held any real estate on the blogosphere...

To be rather honest, I often find myself nostalgic for "The World That Was" before the advent of the internet. I miss long phone calls, receiving letters in the mail, reading the paper in the morning, watching the news in the evening, finding an answer in the pages of a book instead of on a Google search or in a Wikipedia entry... but that world is gone, and, as much as I'd hate to admit it, I abandoned it as quickly as my peers.

I'm not positive, but I don't remember feeling nearly as alone surrounded by books and records when I was 17 as I do now surrounded by the myriad avenues of the vast and varied landscape of cyberspace. A friend once told me she felt horridly alone in New York City despite being encircled by millions of people all the time, and I wonder if a similarly bitter statement could be formulated about the infinite expanses of the internet, or even the strange distance that the internet has put between us... Instead of calling one or two good friends to see if they are going out, we change our Facebook status or post a MySpace bulletin asking numerous people, not all friends, if, when, and where they are planning to be that evening.

I seem to remember people saying the internet would make our world smaller, but it seems to have done the opposite. Where once we were happy with our towns, with calling around looking for our friends, with the local bookstore, now we have hundreds of "friends," we know where they are through Twitter or their AIM away messages, and I can't seem to count how many times I've picked up a record or a novel at a local store and thought, "I saw this cheaper on Amazon."

But this is the world in which we exist, and I am as guilty as the next person -- I do not believe that a knowledge of what it is that I am doing offers me any safe haven or immunity... if anything, it makes my actions all the more reprehensible if I am to continue to chip away at the Pinnacle Achievement of the Information Age.

And it's not all downhill...

Just yesterday, I spent the morning reading about the differences between the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (and why the different ground conditions in Afghanistan would make a "Surge-like" strategy ill advised); how 24's Jack Bauer has influenced America's interrogation policies; that Sam Raimi has, at the very least, said there is a chance for another installment in the Evil Dead franchise at Comic-Con; and felt wonderfully relieved to have an open mind when confronted with American Conservatism.

Obviously, the fact that I have decided to have another crack at a blog should also demonstrate the peculiar blend of feelings I have for the internet. As complicated as these feelings may be, our lives have been vastly changed by the world wide web -- one could even go so far as to say much of our lives are lived here.

If this is indeed the Brave New World, I'm already a part of it, for better or worse.