We're all in this together!

It's Friday night and Fosco is staying in. And not (just) because he's too engrossed in Armadale to hit the bars. No, tonight Fosco will be in front of his television to watch the premiere of "High School Musical 2."

Fosco has considered himself an honorary tween for several years now, at least in terms of his taste in music (Aly and AJ) and lip gloss (raspberry, baby!). But even more so, Fosco adores the tween sensation made-for-TV movie HSM. He owns the CD and the DVD and can do serious karaoke to all of the songs. Oh and someday he's going to write about the latent queerness in the script (yay Lucas Grabeel!). (Hmmm. Am I now going to get some tween commenter to write in to tell me that HSM isn't queer? Ooooh, I can't wait.)

And tonight... a whole new HSM! With all of the original cast returning (and yes, I'm sure some of them did have other things to do)! From the reviews I've read, it sounds as if HSM2 wisely takes its cue from the "Saved by the Bell" summer episodes in which the characters all get jobs at a beach resort. Beach resorts are the perfect place for singing and dancing and romance! Although let's hope there is no dirty sanchez action in this one.

Here are some HSM-related titbits:

• My good friend Nathan found the best blog today: Zac Efron Please Stop Tanning. The title refers to the male lead in HSM and HSM2 and his quite unfortunate exposure to ultraviolet radiation. It's a hoot. I think I'm going to add it to my "Blogs I Read" sidebar...
  
• You can purchase life-size cardboard cutouts of the main characters in HSM (see photos accompanying this post). Lucas Grabeel, who plays Ryan Evans, is 5'9" in real life. Did you know that his character wears nine different hats during the first movie? How many will he wear in the second movie? I hope very many. They are like his trademark.
  
• The character Sharpay (played with scene-chomping gusto by Ashley Tisdale) is a dead ringer for one of Fosco's ex-girlfriends.

Oh, and just in case you were interested, Fosco now knows what flavor lip gloss he would be. See below.

You Are Raspberry Chocolate Lip Gloss

You tend to approach life as a fun game - being playful at every turn. You're a flirt with flair, and your the type most likely to surprise your date. But you're popularity doesn't stop with guys... you've got a great group of girlfriends too! You're fresh, aggressive, and more than a little sassy. The tangy taste of raspberry and watermelon goes great on your lips.

What Flavor Lip Gloss Are You?

Decline and Fall: What's Wrong at The New Yorker?

Even during the school year, Fosco always reads The New Yorker. I would like to suggest that it is a defining characteristic of any New Yorker subscriber to feel as if the magazine was at its best when she began her subscription and that ever issue since then has been symptomatic of a decline. Fosco still cherishes his memories of the editorship of Tina Brown and execrates the muscular current events focus of Dandy Little David Remnick. But suddenly, in the last few months, The New Yorker has been getting pretty bad. Ergo...

Welcome to new recurring feature here at Fosco Lives!: a column grousing over editing/fact-checking/writing problems at The New Yorker.

This week's offense is from the "Talk of the Town" piece by octagenarian baseball aficianado Roger Angell. Read closely:

Bonds's record dinger, in the fifth inning of a night game against the Washington Nationals at Petco Park, in San Francisco, came in his third at-bat of the evening, succeeding a loud double and a single. (p.25)

I don't think you have to be Morganna the Kissing Bandit to notice the factual error in the above sentence. Of course, Petco Park is in San Diego, not San Francisco. The San Francisco ballpark in which Barry Bonds hit his "record dinger" is, as millions of people know, AT&T Park. Do they have fact checkers at The New Yorker anymore? Do editors read Talk of the Town pieces? And is Roger Angell senile? I want answers.

Oh, let's do one more... I owe this one to the editorial-eye of my good friend Jean Goddard. It's from John McPhee's essay on the US Open golf tournament from the 8/6/07 issue.

Soon, though, a day of epiphany came, on a specific round, when, aged twenty-four, clearly, if not for the first time, I envisioned golf as a psychological Sing Sing in which I was an inmate.

Readers of this blog know that Fosco is a longtime admirer of John McPhee, but the above sentence is hideous. McPhee should have to give back the Pulitzer for writing it. And even if McPhee thought this was a good sentence, is he now beyond editing? Couldn't a New Yorker editor have done something about all those commas?

Go Rimbaud!

In the sheets
there was a man
dancing around
to the simple
Rock & roll
song

Fosco saw Patti Smith in concert last night. That's right: the legendary Patti Smith. She's a prophetic poet. She's a rock goddess. She's a shaman. She's the godmother of punk. She's an ecstatic visionary. She's #47 of the 100 Rock and Roll Immortals as identified by Rolling Stone (below Bruce Springsteen, but above Elton John).

It was amazing.

She played the Catalyst in downtown Santa Cruz, which is a much better club than it looks from the street. The club holds 800; I'd say there were 600 there (how does Patti Smith not sell out this show?) The crowd was totally Santa Cruz: aging hippies with hash pipes, packs of graying lesbians, the painfully sincere. Oh, and Fosco's academic advisor was dancing right in front of the stage. And further back in the scrum, Fosco sighted both the current and former directors of UCSC's Center for Cultural Studies. Nothing like the presence of some academic heavyweights to make a newish grad student feel self-conscious.

But it didn't matter once the show started. Fosco was about 20 feet from the stage. Patti Smith looks great. She's sixty this year, and has some lines and some gray; but even so, her eyes are compelling and her smile winning. She was wearing jeans, cowboy boots, a t-shirt with a peace sign and "LOVE" written on it, and a cool black blazer with flared cuffs (Fosco wasn't quite close enough to see the label when she took it off). Her hair is long--well past her shoulders--and a bit frizzy. She may be older, but she's still unmistakably the woman in the famous Robert Mapplethorpe album photograph from "Horses" (below).Damn, that's a good picture. Here's a not good picture, taken by me last night:When she's dancing, she does these wonderful hand gestures.

She seemed extremely friendly and down-to-earth. When she came on stage and between the first four or five songs, she walked to the corners of the stage and waved to the crowd with both hands. She reached down to shake hands with the people in front.

As the show went on, she seemed to lose a bit of her equanimity (and who can blame her--crowds are always so annoying). At one point, she confronted a bleached blonde lesbian in the front who was videotaping her with her camera: "Get that fucking camera out of my face." After the song, she elaborated: "If you're going to take a fucking picture, take a picture. But don't make a fucking documentary film. I fucking hate that." Hear hear!

And, in response to some women in the front who kept trying to have a loud shouting conversation with her between songs: "You must be from New Jersey like me, because people from New Jersey can't shut the fuck up."

Here's another bad picture:

Between songs, she told great stories in her charismatically laconic way:

• about her day in Santa Cruz and how she and the band went to beach and how she saw an attractive girl in a bikini doing a seal call. It reminded her of something out of H.P. Lovecraft.
  
• how the girl who sold her pizza earlier in the day warned her not to order the anchovies because they had been in the freezer way too long. (She dedicated "Redondo Beach" to her.)
  
• how she used to watch Television at CBGB.
  
• how she ended up making out with a seal near a muffler shop in Santa Cruz (actually, this may have been more of a vision than an actual story).
  
• about one of her favorite shows when she was growing up which featured a Buddhist bunyip.
  
• how she browsed a great Santa Cruz bookstore earlier in the day (almost certainly Logos) and bought another copy of William S. Burroughs's Interzone, even though she owns six copies at home. But she wants to read it while she's on the road...
  
• how her father once turned off a television when Frank Sinatra missed a note and how that made her "break out in a cold sweat."
  
• and about how much she misses Jerry Garcia.

And the music? She played for almost 2.5 hours. Fosco stood near the front for the first hour, but then got tired and hot (and tired of having pot smoke blown in his face) and moved farther back. For that reason, the first part of the setlist below isn't really in order (note-taking so close to the stage is difficult):

• Dancing Barefoot
  
• Redondo Beach (the order gets iffy after this one)
  
• Are You Experienced? Jimi Hendrix, of course. (with a kickass clarinet solo!)
  
• Summer Cannibals
  
• We Three (was GORGEOUS tonight)
  
• Within You Without You (George Harrison).
  
• Ain't It Strange
  
• Beneath the Southern Cross
  
• some other song I can't recall...

The second half of the show...

• a song performed by her lead guitarist Lenny Kaye.
  
• White Rabbit, Jefferson Airplane.
  
• Because the Night
  
• Soul Kitchen, The Doors.
  
• Smells Like Teen Spirit, Nirvana. This is a great cover, check it out on her cover album Twelve.
  
• Gloria. My favorite moment of the concert? When Patti sang: "Jesus died for somebody's sins, but not miiiiiine."

And the encore:

• Perfect Day, Lou Reed. She changed one of the lines to "Shakespeare and anchovies and Santa Cruz--What fun!" Then she traded singing "you just keep me hanging on" with the audience. It was pretty powerful.
  
• Not Fade Away, Buddy Holly. Dedicated to Jerry Garcia.
  
• Babelogue-Rock and Roll N*****. It was impressive, especially when Patti demanded that we form our own political party and that we refuse to buy the "shit" that corporate American keeps trying to sell us. I was a little disappointed she didn't speak my favorite line: "I spare the child and spoil the rod. I have not sold myself to God." But it still rocked.

Oh yeah, and then Patti Smith ripped the strings off her guitar.

She RAWKS! See her if you can, my friends. Oh, and check out her very cool website. What other rock legend would have a tribute to Victorian essayist Thomas de Quincey? Shweet.

Hidden Meanings Department

This is pretty cool. For the past year or so, there's been an art installation at the top of Adobe's Almaden tower in downtown San Jose. It's called the "San Jose Semaphore" by artist Ben Rubin. The idea is that there are four rotating orange circles that produce, over time, a coded message. It looks like this:


What is the coded message? That's part of the fun!

Deciphering Semaphore’s encryption technique and decoding the message is posed as a challenge for the public. To the first person or group to successfully crack the code, Adobe will award bragging rights and acknowledgment on both the Adobe website (www.adobe.com) and the San Jose Semaphore website.

Well, there is finally a solution. Two San Jose research scientists have cracked the (extremely complicated) code. You can read about (but probably not understand) their work here. You can read the (somewhat more comprehensible) artist's explanation of the cipher here.

Basically, the code uses portions of the text of James Joyce's Ulysses (and why not?) to encode the entire text of Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49. The entire novel is playing in the air in San Jose! What a hoot!

In the same spirit, Fosco would like to offer a similar event for his readers. Fosco has embedded a secret message in the gibberish below. The first person who decodes this passage (title and author are required as well) will win a special feature story here at Fosco Lives!

Secret gibberish passage:
Ce livre a son lieu de naissance dans un texte de Borges. Dans le rire qui secoue à sa lecture toutes les familiarités de la pensée--de la nôtre: de celle qui a notre âge et notre géographie--, ébranlant toutes les surfaces ordonnées et tous les plans qui assagissent pour nous le foisonnement des êtres, faisant vaciller et inquiétant pour longtemps notre pratique millénaire du Même et de l'Autre. Ce texte cite << une certaine encyclopédie chinoise >> où il est écrit que << les animaux se divisent en: a) appartenant à l'Empereur, b) embaumés, c) apprivoisés, d) cochons de lait, e) sirènes, f) fabuleux, g) chiens en liberté, h) inclus dans la présente classification, i) qui s'agitent comme des fous, j) innombrables, k) dessinés avec un pinceau très fin en poils de chameau, l) et caetera, m) qui viennent de casser la cruche, n) qui de loin semblant des mouches >>. Dans l'émerveillement de cette taxinomie, ce qu'on rejoint d'un bond, ce qui, à la faveur de l'apologue, nous est indiqué comme le charme exotique d'une autre pensée, c'est la limite de la nôtre: l'impossibilité nue de penser cela.

Good luck, codehounds!

Psst. The fun is elsewhere.

For those readers who have been missing the fun at Fosco Lives! over the past few days, here's the tip: check out the strange comment thread currently going on here.

Apparently, Pat Buchanan is the way to spice up a blog (or your marriage? Hmmmm.).

Sunday Reading: "My Favorite Book Is... Magazines."

This begins a new weekly feature at Fosco Lives!

It wouldn't be Sunday without my favorite column in the Santa Cruz Sentinel, the musings of "Crazy" Dan Harper. Every week, I count on Dan to say something both banal and insane.

Who is Dan Harper?

Dan Harper is an Aptos photographer, journalist and former English department chairman at Cabrillo College.

While I've never seen Dan's photography, I've read plenty of his writing and I'm not too optimistic about his work with a camera.

Today's gem:

I'm sorry but this is not a column about heavy petting. Magazines are nothing more than little books, so for the sake of this argument I will include magazines with books.

Learn more here.

One More Blog

Fosco's sister, Maggie Tulliver, has decided to take that hiatus from a life in retail that we like to call "graduate school in the humanities." (Fosco is no exception--there is a sales associate position at Sephora waiting for him upon completion of his PhD in Literature.) Sister Maggie will be attending the intellectually intimidating University of Chicago and just moved to a small studio in Hyde Park. As part of her grad student life, she's got a new computer and a new interest in all things internetish. She wants to start a blog, but she doesn't know what to name it. Let's help her, shall we?

Good Names for a Blog by Fosco's Sister

• Everybody Poops
  
• A Taste of Chicago
  
• The Bob Loblaw Law Blog
  
• Fish Tacos
  
• Being Singular Plural
  
• Hyde Park Serenade
  
• Everything That Rises Must Converge
  
• The Hammock District on 3rd
  
• Lohaniana

Getting to know me...

Fosco's been tagged again. As far as blog memes go, "Seven Things You Don't Know About Me" isn't a bad one (although it does raise some epistemological questions that I really don't know what to do with... I mean what do "you" really "know" about me anyway? But let's bracket those issues). It's certainly a preferable meme to

• Ten Things I Hate About You. (N.B., #3 is the way you always try to embarrass me at cocktail parties.)
  
• 8 Simple Rules for Dating my Teenage Daughter. (N.B., #5 is not to make me angry, as I have a congenital heart defect.)
  
• Five Places to Dig Up Family Treasures. (N.B., #2 is my pants.)

But anyway...

1. I don't really like movies. The last movie I went to in the theater (excluding art installations) was in calendar year 2005 (hint: there was "no day but today"). There are indeed movies I love (and I do tend to follow which movies are in theaters), but I can always think of about 15 things I'd rather do than watch a movie (including making out with Lindsay Lohan).

2. I've met Pat Buchanan not once, but TWICE. Let me insist that I am not proud of this fact. You know how some people use college as a time to experiment with drugs and lesbianism? Well unfortunately, Fosco experimented with fascism. I have since repented and am working on my redemption--redemption is a long process. I wish I could say the same for Buchanan. And what is that stuff he's covered with? Banana cream?

3. I have been to 41 of the 50 US states. And by "been to," I mean "spent non-trivial amounts of time in." What am I missing? Alaska, Hawaii, Washington, Oregon, Montana, North Dakota, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Kansas. Luckily, at least five of those states will be worth visiting (guess which won't be).

4. My favorite flower is the grape hyacinth.

5. In one of his former academic incarnations, Fosco published a journal article and a book chapter about nonverbal behavior and deception.

6. In January, I sat next to Florence Henderson at the bar at Jean-Georges in NYC. She looked lovely. At first I thought it was a woman who looked like her, but when she spoke to the obsequious maitre d', it was clearly her.

I guess that was before she started dating that handsome-looking ear.

7. In college, I once worked for an entire summer at Au Bon Pain. Remember: it's not fast food--it's good food fast.

Here's hoping that this list doesn't become "Seven Things You Now Hate About Fosco."

Fosco tags... no one. Unless you want to do it. Then consider yourself tagged.

The Kooch Is Back!

Fosco thought the local vegans looked especially excited this weekend (one of them may have even been smiling, although it's so hard to tell with vegans). But now Fosco knows why: local favorite Presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich was back in Santa Cruz!

Kucinich's earnest pro-peace progressivism is a home run in Hippietown USA. (And, all snarkery aside, Fosco does appreciate Kucinich's politics.) According to the Santa Cruz Sentinel, the Kooch is back in Santa Cruz to take his rightful place as the local fundraising leader:

While Kucinich had ranked eighth in Santa Cruz County for fundraising in the 2008 presidential race, Friday's event had a chance of putting him up with Barack Obama as the local fundraising frontrunner.

C'mon Santa Cruzers, let's take Barack down!

But seriously, can you imagine what a Kucinich fundraiser must look like? Let your cynicism run free...

With Monterey Bay behind him, Kucinich spoke to a typically diverse Santa Cruz crowd: some in attendance were barefoot — including Kucinich's wife, Elizabeth, 29.

Ummm, barefoot? And wait, the Kooch has a 29 year-old wife?

Yep, it's true. Sixty-year-old DK is married to a redheaded British giantess less than half his age. Fosco will withhold judgment on the hotness of Ms. Kooch until he hears from his favorite connoisseur of redheads. But even so, if Fosco were a vegan, apparently he could date a sixteen-year-old. Eeek! That's just not right.

Actually, it appears that the love story between these two is pretty sweet. Read a sympathetic account of it here. Is America ready for a First Lady with a tongue stud? I bet you know how FoxNews feels about that.

Fosco plans to spend the afternoon baking some hemp peanut butter cookies. Mmmm, sustainable.

From the Annals of Not Blogging

Why was Fosco absent from blogging for so long? He has promised some explanations. Here's one now.

Fosco couldn't blog because he was busy... writing student narrative evaluations. Here's the thing. When it was created by a bunch of hippie academics, UC Santa Cruz did not use letter grades! The policy was described in an assessment conducted in 1994:

UCSC opened in 1965 during a time of unprecedented university growth, student protest, and introspection. The founding faculty, dissatisfied with traditional forms of grading, opted for a system that was intended to provide a better understanding of what a student had achieved in a course, while downplaying the competitive aspects of learning. Faculty-authored narrative evaluations were adopted in lieu of letter grades. UCSC instructors would write a personalized narrative evaluation of each student's academic performance in all courses in which the student earned credit.

How progressive! How admirable! How... much work for the instructors!

Because, of course, guess who writes the narrative evals...

If you answered "the TAs," you are correct.

Wait. It gets dopier. In 2000, UCSC added mandatory letter grades for its undergraduates... in addition to narrative evaluations. So, as a TA you have to prepare TWO different types of evaluation for each student: a letter grade and a written narrative evaluation.

Now Fosco hates to complain about life as a TA (after all, isn't it all part of the apprenticeship process?) But it does take a remarkable amount of time to sum up the performance of a student in a narrative, especially since an evaluation has to

• contain enough detail about the student's work in the course to make it clear that you know who he or she is.
  
• follow a specific format (there must be a sentence describing each major assignment in the course).
  
• avoid making any reference to personal attributes of the student or your impressions of the student's behavior. You can only talk about the work itself.
  

In the end, you write extremely formulaic evaluations that you attempt to enliven with novel adjectives. The Thesaurus is a good friend during eval writing.

What makes this process even worse is that throughout it you have the gray feeling that no one (not the student nor any prospective employer of said student) will EVER read this evaluation.

Are you curious? Here's a sample:

Lindsay's performance in the course was generally quite good. She attended lecture and section almost without fail and occasionally participated in section discussion. Her first paper, a comparison of Captain Singleton and Oroonoko, showed good close reading skills and evidenced room for improvement in argument development. Her second paper showed great improvement in extending a close reading; however, the thesis was not as strong as it could have been. Lindsay’s final exam was her best work of the quarter and showed a deep understanding of the course material.

This one took about, say... 30 minutes to write. Ouch.

Boo!

I mentioned in passing in yesterday's (new, improved, and expanded) post that ghosts and haunting are hot, hot, hot right now in critical theory.

But what is doing all this haunting? As a service to my non-theory-head readers, I offer a primer that I will call

What's Haunting Us Now

• history
  
• queer things
  
• Marx
  
• the postcolonial
  
• gender
  
• bees
  
• our childhood
  
• pre-modernity
  
• Enya
  
• the academic job market

Feel free to add your own...

Fosco's Professor Crush of the Year

You know how some professors are just so brilliant and eloquent that you develop a huge crush on them? Like when George Michael Bluth had that thing for Ms. Baerly (incidentally, one of only two good performances in Heather Graham's career)?

Meet David Marriott, Associate Professor of History of Consciousness here at UCSC. He's both a theorist and a poet. His "French Hegel" seminar was one of the two greatest intellectual highs of Fosco's life.

You know how ghosts and haunting are hot in the humanities right now? You should check out David's book Haunted Life.

Here is a poem from David's collection Incognegro:

Bridge

laws of the city for nothing gets lost,
the unwritten laws of the dead for the dead,--

I feel old here, defeated,
lean, unshaven, sick and limp,

surprised at the flesh sagging,
reacquainted with my indifference to sex:

too old to change, too young to love anybody but myself--
listen, then, to my story:

of how the streets are narrower, the buildings smaller,
than remembered; of how a tree in a park was rescued

from the developers of mainland classical culture.
Who are they, standing around doing nothing?

Ten years of my life lost to the weight of things,
the constant reversals, the humbling taste of glory,

and think of the rooms, the tiny shared rooms where family gathered,
a loss barely glanced at in the light of day.

Amazing, huh? I recommend checking out the whole collection. Instead of blogging during the Spring quarter, I served as co-president of the David Marriott Fan Club with my friend Juliana (a distinguised poet in her own right). We're having a bake sale this fall to raise money for our activities.

Rumors of Fosco's death..

...were slightly exaggerated.

I'm back, baby!

In the next few days, I'll be posting a series to help you catch up on Fosco's life since mid-February.

I'll tell you

• what Fosco has been doing instead of blogging.
  
• what it was like to finish year one of literature grad school.
  
• about some exceptional meals I've eaten recently.
  
• who to contact if you'd like to buy property in lovely Bonita Springs, Florida.
  
• where Fosco went on his summer vacation.

Oh yes, and I'll continue the tradition of music criticism, cultural commentary, and snarkery.

Fosco's New Car (No Spoiler!)

Today, Fosco finally got around to buying a replacement car for the one that was totalled in The Accident. Why did he wait so long? It's not the fault of the insurance--they sent me the replacement check like two weeks ago. However, it has taken almost two weeks for me to continually revise downward my expectations about what I could buy with that insurance check. It turns out that cars are expensive. In the end, it came down to the following decision:

a non-American car several years old with quite a bit of mileage on it

OR

a 2006 Ford Taurus with 21,000 miles on it.

So, as much as Fosco thought he might enjoy a Honda or a VW, he ended up buying another Ford Taurus. Plus ça change.

In a way, this was the perfect choice for Fosco in that it allows him to avoid traumatic thoughts about the accident: from the interior, it is possible to believe that you are sitting in my last car (as only the exterior color is different). Continuity can be so comforting.

And what has Fosco named his new car? Say hello to Moby-Dick.


Moby-Dick seems like the perfect name for the car for several reasons:

1. It's big. (Fosco likes roomy cars).
   
2. It's white.
   
3. Somewhere out there is a ditsy teen (named Ahabiana?) in a giant SUV, waiting to destroy it. You can't avoid Nemesis.

Just think how cool my "Suck My Drunk, I'm Dick" bumper sticker will look on it.

Fosco Returns

Well, this is a little awkward... You know how apologies are sometimes... Do you forgive your Uncle Fosco? Please?

January is never a good month for Fosco--just ask his longtime pals. He tends to fall out of contact during that month. This year was a bit better, as Fosco remained aboveground for almost the whole month (let's try to forget that whole "Hibernation 2005" thing).

But now it's February, so let's sit down and catch up. What's new with you? Read any good books lately? Yeah, I know: that new Norman Mailer book about Hitler is totally lame. I mean, who writes about Hitler anymore? See, we're back to being friends--it's like I never left! And what is new in the life of Count Fosco? Oh, I have some stories...

It's a new quarter at UCSC and Fosco (thanks to a unexplained Regents Fellowship) isn't teaching and is taking a three seminars:

• "American Renaissance and Expansion"--let's learn about the 19C in the American hemisphere! Or, more interestingly, let's read Moby-Dick. Sailor novels are HOT.
  
• A seminar on Spinoza, taught by the legendary humanist Wlad Godzich. He's like a vortex of knowledge...
  
• A course on 20C French reception of Hegel. Fosco finally accepts the necessity that he has to know Hegel.
  

And you know what? It turns out that this is slightly insane. Two serious theory seminars are testing the limits of Fosco's abilities. It's a great intellectual high, but the end of the quarter is fast approaching and three research papers are looming...

And what about fun? At some point in the next week or so, I will have to update you about:

• Fosco's amazing trip to New York City with his sister, Maggie Tulliver.
  
• recent eating adventures in Santa Cruz.
  
• the beginning of Fosco's physical therapy to repair his damaged right pectoral (remember that pre-Christmas accident?)
  
• Fosco's new car!
  

Stay tuned...

An Open Letter to the Harvard Corporation

To Members of the Selection Committee for the New Harvard President:

I am beginning to develop the suspicion that the Harvard Presidency is a lot like the job of Head Football Coach at the University of Notre Dame: it's one of those jobs that seems desirable to the general public, but no one well-qualified for it actually wants it. Who really wants to try to wrangle with such a notoriously arrogant and powerful faculty?

But if that isn't the case, allow me to throw my full support behind Amy Gutmann. Her qualifications are exceptional:

• current president of Penn, responsible for their recent return to academic relevance.
  
• brilliant political theorist at Princeton.
  
• Harvard College alumna, with a Harvard PhD.

But the most important reason for my support of Dr. Gutmann is that she is smokingly hot. In the above picture, you can see her (bottom) in relation to another potential Harvard Presidential candidate, Ruth Simmons of Brown (top). This excellent comparison (thoughtfully provided by the NYTimes) demonstrates that, while Dr Simmons may be an excellent leader and administrator, she cannot compete with the sheer wattage of the delectable Dr. Gutmann. I mean, look at her. Damn.

With the pulchritudinous Dr. Gutmann at the helm, think of what Harvard could do! It would not be an exaggeration to say that Dr. Gutmann would be the most attractive Harvard President since the coy and dainty Increase Mather--and remember all of the amazing things that she did!

If it will assist in the decision-making process, allow me to commit to a donation in the amount of $10 million to Harvard University contingent on the appointment of Luscious Amy as President.

Sincerely,
[Redacted], Harvard Class of [redacted]

P.S.: Can you give Amy my email address? I want to ask her how she gets her skin so radiant.

Weekend Update: A Little Bit of Outrage

Two news stories today that intrigued Fosco:

1. The NYTimes reports on the progress of the search for a new Harvard president. As an alumnus of the "Big H," Fosco is naturally interested in this topic (and wouldn't mind seeing the job offered to Al Gore). However, the Times took at different angle. Here's the lede:

Could Harvard be preparing to select a woman as its new president? A scientist? A female scientist?

Is it me, or are those increasingly incredulous question marks a bit offensive? I'm a little surprised the headline isn't something like "Harvard Seeks Scientifickal Lady: Feminine Charms Still Required."

One possible candidate for the position? Non-scientifickal political theorist Amy Guttman, president of Penn. That's her in the picture to the right during her 2006 Halloween party. She's posing with a Palestinian suicide bomber (costume). She's dressed as Glinda the Good Witch. As the Times article points out, this photograph may be enough to prevent her ascent to the Harvard presidency.


2. This story, from the Santa Cruz Sentinel made Fosco really mad at first. But then it started to make a little sense. Now Fosco is a bit ambivalent about the whole thing.

It seems that an anonymous donor has been paying for one-way bus tickets out-of-town for the Santa Cruz homeless. The program is being administered by the local Homeless Services Center. This sounds absolutely evil, right?

Well, except that, the idea sort of makes sense. According to the article:

the idea of helping homeless people move is gaining traction among people who think it makes little sense to provide meals and temporary shelter in a city where even the working poor have a hard time finding housing.

It is expensive to live here. And the program is totally voluntary, as the tickets are only offered to homeless people who want to leave Santa Cruz and start over someplace else.

Apparently, some other communities have been much less conscientious about the whole thing. According to the article, this is different from the "practice of dumping homeless people into other jurisdictions, as in 2004, when officials in San Benito County gave their homeless one-way bus tickets to Santa Cruz."

Now that's evil. Go to hell, San Benito County.

Alex Ross Reviews Fosco's Winter Plans

Although Santa/Satan failed to put hunky music critic Alex Ross in Fosco's stocking (despite Fosco's request), Fosco did have the pleasure (over the last month or so) of Ross's New Yorker reviews of both of the opera premieres that Fosco plans to attend this winter.

At the beginning of December, Ross reviewed the Vienna premiere of John Adams's new opera A Flowering Tree. (Fosco is going to see the US premiere in San Francisco in March.) This is exciting as, according to Ross's review,

the score is opulent, dreamlike, fiercely lyrical, at times shadowy and strange—unlike anything that the fifty-nine-year-old composer has written.

This sounds perfect, as Adams is Fosco's favorite contemporary composer and this opera seems to place him at the height of his powers. Look for Fosco's review in March.

Approaching sooner (i.e., in three weeks) is a Fosco trip to NYC to see the would-be blockbuster The First Emperor at the Met. How could Fosco (and his sister, Maggie Tulliver) resist taking a trip to New York to see this production? Music by superstar composer Tan Dun. Libretto by National Book Award-winner Ha Jin. Directed by Zhang Yimou, director of the films Hero and House of Flying Daggers. And singing the lead? Oh, just Placido Domingo (who is approaching retirement from the stage). How can this opera not be brilliant?

Well, it turns out that it isn't. According to Sexy Alex-y's review, some of the music is fascinating:

A Peking opera singer invokes the forces of yin and yang in a wailing chant. The chorus shouts, claps, slaps, and stomps. A zheng, or twenty-one-string zither, is savagely strummed; ceramic pots are struck with sticks. A variously blaring, trilling, rustling, and rumbling mass of sound rises up from the orchestra. Across the front of the stage, twelve drummers beat on drums with stones and knock the stones together. It adds up to a strictly organized thunder—and perhaps the most far-out music that has ever been heard at the Met.

But, alas, some of the music is not quite as thrilling:

long stretches of conversation are set to nondescript, tootling music of the kind that plays in movies when naughty pets or children are on the loose.

Ouch.

What else does my dear Alex have to say about the production? The libretto?: "inept." The production?: "misconceived." Placido Domingo?: "to have a Spanish tenor pretending to be Chinese while singing awkwardly in English stretched plausibility to the breaking point." Ouch, ouch, ouch.

Of course, Fosco is still excited about the trip. And still excited about seeing the opera--after all, maybe Alex is wrong... And even if the opera really is a disaster, it should still be fun to see. Watch for Fosco's review at the end of January.

Happy Anniversary!

Fosco Lives! has been around now for exactly six months. As Fosco is a homosexual and therefore unable to be trusted with that most sacred of bonds (i.e., marriage), he isn't quite sure of the appropriate etiquette for celebrating a six month anniversary. Is fellatio involved? I sure hope so.

Or perhaps a brief post about the tiny (yet non-zero) impact that Fosco Lives! has had on the blogosphere in the last six months. How about that?

Most Popular Post: the all-time most popular post on Fosco Lives! is Fosco's meditation on Playboy's "Girls of the Big 12" pictorial. Read it here. Why has it been so popular? Several reasons:

• Composer John Mackey linked to it from his blog and recommended it to his numerous loyal readers.
  
• For a month after the publication of that Playboy issue, it got a hit a day from .edu domains in Texas and Oklahoma searching for "Playboy" and "Girls of the Big 12."
  
• At least once a week, this post gets a hit from someone searching for Tasia Bauman (NSFW). Clearly, websurfers want to see more naked cowgirls (or at least this one). It's fun to watch the domains from which these searches are conducted: the US State Department (could it have been lesbian Condi?), gillette.com, and (interestingly) quakeroats.com. Do you think Quaker is looking to replace spokesgrampa Wilford Brimley with some sort of nude rodeo? Signs point to yes.
  
• Even now, aat least once a day, this post gets a hit from someone who is searching Google for the phrase "shaved pubes." The strange thing is that, much of the time, the searcher actually clicks through to this post and reads at least a portion of it. Most of these searches come from foreign domains, which maybe sort of explains it. But, I have to ask: is it really so hard to find shaved pubes on the internet? Isn't there an easier way than to route through this page? I love the traffic and all, but jeez... Who doesn't know where to find shaved pubes online? Ten-year-olds?

Best Press: Fosco's post on Gay American and former New Jersey Governor James McGreevey (yes, that is his official portrait above). Read it here. The day that McGreevey's tell-all book came out (snicker), AOL Cityguide featured a link to Fosco's post on both its "North Jersey" and "Washington DC" pages. See screen cap below:



That "Sexy Back?" link takes you right to moi. Well, I thought it was cool.

Most Validating: Fosco's review of a Diamanda Galas concert in Santa Cruz (which you can read here). The review got picked up by the official Diamanda Galas website and is prominently featured in the Press page on that site. Now if only I can get Matthew Barney to read some of my reviews of his work...

Hungriest Readers: for several weeks last summer, Fosco was eating at San Francisco restaurants recommended by perpetually chirpy chefette Rachael Ray. Read Fosco's reviews of Chow and Bocadillos. Fosco's reviews were included in the weekly "RR Roundup" conducted by the surprisingly charming blog Everything Rachael Ray. For those two weeks, Fosco got an interesting mix of new readers and he enjoyed the chance to scandalize Rachael Ray lovers with references to Lindsay Lohan's vagina.

That's probably enough self-congratulation for now, so allow me to say "Thank You" to all of you who read Fosco Lives! You have made the first six months a hoot and I look forward to the next six.

Back to School: Facing West from California's Shores

OK, I'm done blogging about The Accident (barring new developments). That's because school's back on. This is going to be a seriously academic quarter for Fosco: no teaching, three seminars, a seriously cool Foucault reading group.

I've only been to one seminar so far, but it reminded me of one of the reasons that I like UCSC. Look at this seminar room:

Where else can you talk about literature while staring at a stand of majestic redwoods? Well, except for other colleges/universities where redwoods grow.

Interestingly, on Day 1 in my American Renaissance seminar, we read a charming little poem by prancing homo Walt Whitman. I wasn't familiar with it, but it's kinda fun:

Facing West from California's Shores

Facing west from California's shores,
Inquiring, tireless, seeking what is yet unfound,
I, a child, very old, over waves, towards the house of maternity,
the land of migrations, look afar,
Look off the shores of my Western sea, the circle almost circled;
For starting westward from Hindustan, from the vales of Kashmere,
From Asia, from the north, from the God, the sage, and the hero,
Long having wander'd since, round the earth having wander'd,
Now I face home again, very pleas'd and joyous,
(But where is what I started for so long ago?
And why is it yet unfound?)

Of course, Whitman never actually made it to California, but that makes it more interesting, no?

Mental Health Minute with Count Fosco

I've recently been enjoying the anonymous blog entitled (with economical precision) "blog." The spectral blogger has pointed me in the direction of a strange little quiz, which helps you to determine which historical lunatic is most similar to you. I recommend it.


Which Historical Lunatic Are You?
From the fecund loins of Rum and Monkey.

Here's an excerpt from the description of "me" as the 5th Duke of Portland:

Having inherited the stately home of Welbeck Abbey, you proceeded to construct miles of underground tunnels and a ballroom, in pink, beneath it. The ballroom was complete except for one small detail. It had no floor. Despite this vast home, you lived exclusively in a suite of five rooms, each one also pink.

Having been turned down by your opera singer objet d'amour, Adelaide Kemble, in your youth, you suffered a broken heart and never married. This did not stop you from caring deeply about the wellbeing of your servants. Occasionally you would even help them muck out the stables. However, you did not neglect discipline, forcing disobedient underlings to skate themselves to exhaustion on your subterranean skating rink. Servants were given strict instructions regarding conduct: if they met you in a corridor, they were to ignore your existence while you froze to the spot until they were out of sight; and a chicken was to be kept roasting at all times in case you felt like sneaking into the kitchen for a snack.

To tell the truth, I have started "freezing" recently when people walk by me. Maybe it's a good thing that school is starting again--it helps to calm the mad.

CHOMP!

Fosco got a bill today from the Community Hospital of the Monterey Peninsula, where Fosco was taken after The Accident two weeks ago (exactly two weeks ago, come to think of it). Strangely enough, Fosco still isn't too into car crash jokes, but he did laugh a little over this bill. As it appears that Fosco's insurance will be covering the entire bill (fingers crossed!), he feels free to enjoy the dark humor here.

• perhaps my favorite part of the whole thing is that the Community Hospital of the Monterey Peninsula reduces to the acronym CHOMP. And that's their website: www.chomp.org. Seriously. What are the chances I could get the hospital to start using an exclamation point after their name? CHOMP! I like it.
  
  In other news, apparently CHOMP (in addition to the hospital and the mouth behavior) is also some sort of math game that involves a poisoned chocolate bar. But that's math and therefore is inherently uninteresting, even with the inclusion of the words poison and chocolate.
  
  
• The letter to Fosco begins with the following sentence:
  
  Thank you for choosing Community Hospital of the Monterey Peninsula for your healthcare needs.
  
  I recognize that this is a form letter, but I still think it's a little funny to consider my "choice" in the matter. After all, at the time of my "choice," I was disoriented and strapped to a backboard in an ambulance heading toward whatever hospital was the closest. And besides, if I had had a "choice" in the matter, I think I would have chosen to go to that one sexy hospital on Grey's Anatomy. I've never watched it, but I think Patrick Dempsey works there and he's cute.
  
  
• Can you guess the total bill for an afternoon in the ER with several CT scans? Take your first guess and add $3000-$5000 to it and you'll be about right.
  
  
• Apparently (to judge by the itemized bill), Fosco was given 2 mg of hydromorphone in his IV. He remembers this and the delightful sense of well-being and reduced pain that it brought. Maybe that's because, according to Wikipedia, "it is one of the most potent of all prescription narcotics" and goes under the trade name Dilaudid. SWEET! Sadly, those 2 mg of happy cost exactly $377.60. OUCH!
  
  
• My favorite part of the whole thing? Right before I left the ER to climb into a waiting taxi for the 45 mile ride back to Santa Cruz (and believe me, it was hellish), I begged for a painkiller for the road (the hydromorphone had worn off). I was given a Percocet tablet (I refuse to imagine the drive back without that Percocet tab). The cost of that Percocet tab? $31.80
  
  Clearly something is awry with healthcare in this country (and not just at CHOMP!).

On the whole, Fosco is basically well-satisfied with his treatment at CHOMP! (although he might have liked a longer-lasting Percocet prescription). Of course, he's never going within 30 miles of Monterey again (but that's not the fault of CHOMP!).

CHOMP! Somebody stop me. CHOMP!

[Disclaimer 1: I'm just having some fun in this post, of course. I fully recognize that the cost for each item/service on the itemized bill includes more than just the item/service. There is clearly also labor, overhead, etc. that drives up the prices for the $32 Percocets. Clearly, hospitals don't bill like mechanics (parts + labor separately). But maybe they ought to?]

[Disclaimer 2: No, I don't know how I received mail on a National Day of Mourning. I guess the bill had been sitting in my mailbox from the end of last week. Come to think of it, I didn't check my mail on Saturday.]

Slogan 2007

For years, my friends and I have had a tradition: we give each New Year a rhyming slogan to help guide us in our lives in the year ahead. Every year, there are many difficult decisions to face and our yearly slogans can sometimes make these decisions a little bit easier. Here are some slogans from previous years:

• "Lose the 'tude in 2002." And let me assure you that 2002 did have measurably less attitude than previous years.
  
• "Blow out your knee in 2003." Frankly, I'm not sure why we chose that one. I'm also not sure why my friend Adam decided to put it into action.
  
• "Be a whore in 2004." That was a fun year.
  
• "Begin to tithe in 2005." That year's slogan was brought to you by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
  
• Let's just say that the slogan in 2006 began with "Suck more..." I think you can figure the rest out for yourself. I fear I might not have lived up to it.
  

So let's unveil the slogan for this year... [drumroll]

"Stairway to heaven in 2007."

And what on earth could that mean? I have no idea. But don't say it backwards, or you will be worshipping Satan.

All I know is that it is really hard to rhyme "seven."

Fosco's New Year

Because of The Accident, Fosco's New Year's Eve plans were a bit less adventurous than usual (NSFW, but a must-see as it is very strange). Fosco's family is still in town, so he spent the evening sitting at home making fun of things with his sister, Maggie Tulliver.

What did we do?

• watched the series finale of Arrested Development. And although I hate to say it, while AD may not have the narrative drive and suspense of a drama like Veronica Mars, it is actually a better show.
  
• watched Bollywood trailers on the internet.
  
• discovered that Mormon cinema is called "Mollywood." Here's a description of one of those Mormon films: "Sons of Provo (2004). Mockumentary about an LDS boy-band named Everclean." It sounds kind of funny, but I'm sure the Mormons found some way to prevent that. Ugh, Mormons.
  
• discovered the Jollywood Moving Picture Co., which appears to be some sort of training project for teens with video cameras. Here's a sentence (from a description of one of their films) that made my sister and me laugh heartily for almost 10 minutes: " The movies [sic] style was influenced by the mockumentary "Dog Show" starring Eugene Levy." I love that sentence so much.
  
• watched the musical numbers from Moulin Rouge!.
  
• and finally, as midnight approached, we couldn't bear to count down with either Ryan Seacrest or Carson Daly (they make our eyes bleed, they do). Instead, we did the countdown en español on Univision.
  

How's that for an exciting New Year's Eve?

If you want to read about a productive/party-filled NYE, visit Ted. He spent time at some place called "The Hole," which practically makes me tingle with curiosity.

Year in Discoveries: 2006

I love this list: the things that Fosco discovered in 2006 that gave the year its identity. Of course, many of these things were actually not new in 2006--just new to Fosco. With that in mind, let's tour Fosco's 2006 discoveries...

• Arrested Development: Fosco watched all three seasons on DVD during his recuperation from The Accident. I don't want to exaggerate (or to come across as a pussy), but I think that without this series, I would have been crying most of that first week.
  
  I've always loved Jason Bateman--ever since as a young queer boy, I crushed hard on him as the lead in the short-lived It's Your Move. I think I even bought a novelization of an episode of that show from the elementery school book club--remember those? But it's not just Bateman that makes AD (as the Kids call it) brilliant: the entire cast is superb and the writing is funnier than anything I've seen on TV, INCLUDING The Simpsons (which is not easy for me to admit...). I mean, this is the show that featured guest appearances from Liza Minelli as a sex-starved widow with vertigo. And then there are the words and phrases that I can't stop repeating to my sister: nevernudes, Bob Loblaw's Law Blog, Motherboy, the dizzies, Anne Paul Veal, "Marry Me."
  
  At this point, there is no question that this is the best television series to air in the first decade of the 21C. There, I said it.
  
  
• Illinois by Sufjan Stevens: released in 2005, but Fosco didn't start listening to it until the beginning of 2006. It became particularly important to Fosco in November of this year (and, in fact, he is listening to it as he writes this). While Sufjan's Michigan disc was high-quality (and captivated Fosco because of home-state pride), Illinois is truly exceptional. How is it possible to write an achingly beautiful song about the life of John Wayne Gacy? Or a jaunty bluegrass ode to Decatur? Oh, and did I mention that he's hot?
  
  
• In-N-Out Burger: the West Coast institution, praised extravagantly by Fosco here.
  
  
• Kathy Griffin: I know, I know... This is so cliche: a homosexual who likes Kathy Griffin? Shocking. But, to tell the truth, I never really cared about her until I watched her My Life on the D-List. She's really so appealing and down-to-earth. And she tells such funny stories about Anna Nicole Smith and Gay Gaykin and his Gay-Mates.
  
  
• blogs: As 2006 was the year that Fosco launched this little project he likes to call Fosco Lives!, blogs were clearly an important influence on him this year. But which blogs? Almost every morning, Fosco gets his niche news from several outposts of the Nick Denton Empire, including Deadspin, Defamer, and Gawker. And Fosco never travels somewhere without researching Gridskipper for tips on where the cool kids hang out.
  
  More importantly for Fosco and Fosco Lives! however, are two personal blogs: Ted Gideonse's The Gideonse Bible and John Mackey's blog at OstiMusic. These two blogs have served as inspirations for what Fosco Lives! can be and I read them religiously (which is really the only way to read a Bible). Merci, gentleman for a great year of blogging.
  
  
• John McPhee on geology: his Pulitzer-Prize-winning Annals of the Former World served as Fosco's guidebook as he drove from Michigan to Santa Cruz along I-80 this summer, stopping along the way to pick up rocks. You can read about Fosco's adventures along the way in the Fosco Lives! Archives here and here.
  
  
• "The Nietzsche Family Circus": I have literally spent hours on this website this fall. It cheers me up whenever I'm down. Who would have thought that pairing a random Nietzsche aphorism with a random "Family Circus" cartoon would be the best thing ever? I've permalinked to some of my favorites here, here, and here. Oh God, I'm laughing too hard...
  
  
• Matthew Barney's Drawing Restraint 9: Fosco saw this art film three times, despite it running three-ish hours. Do yourself a favor and watch the trailer. Then read Fosco's earlier review.
  
  
• Lindsay Lohan and her vulva (SFW). First, I would like to explain why I refuse to participate in the popular convention of referring to pictures like these (NSFW) as pix of Lindsay Lohan's vagina. I may be a homosexual who hasn't touched a woman's vagina in like five years (or so), but I did take Health Class in Junior High and I think what we are looking at is actually Lindsay Lohan's vulva.
  
  Whatever we are looking at, I'm pretty compelled by it. Not the vulva per se, but the idea that a popular teen star would regularly flash her privates to the paparazzi. This plus her drinking problems, her barely literate emails, and her strange belief that she will be aided by Al Gore, make her the most fascinating case of pub(l)ic self-destruction I've seen. Britney (NSFW) is a total amateur compared to Lindsay. The way I see it, Lindsay is one marriage to a homosexual (does she know Clay Aiken?) away from becoming the Judy Garland of this generation. And I can't wait to see what degradation is yet to come!
  

Year in Music: 2006

I think it would be better not to embarass myself too much by admitting my too-mainstream taste in non-classical music. Other than my complete obsession with Sufjan Stevens (which I've noted in almost every post in the past week), I would make a top ten list with a truly pathetic amount of emo on it. So I'm not going to do that.

Non-Sufjan disc of the year? Two words: Black Parade.

There, I've said it and I'm thoroughly ashamed.

Year in Books: 2006

It's the last day of 2006: let the Listmania begin! Let's start with the year in books:

Best: Special Topics in Calamity Physics. No surprise here. The long-time reader of Fosco Lives! knows that Fosco loved this book. Haters need not reply.

Second Best: Twilight of the Superheroes. Sometimes Fosco thinks that he is one of the last 100 readers in the world of short story collections. In the past, he has had a fraught relationship with the short stories of Deborah Eisenberg. Not anymore: four of the six stories in this collection are masterpieces.

Best Cover: Icelander. McSweeney's books are almost always beautifully designed. You can't really get a sense of this cover from the picture (because there's glitter embedded in it!). Good cover.

Biggest Disappointment: Against the Day. Fosco was so looking forward to this novel--for months! After all, Pynchon's previous novel, Mason & Dixon, instantly became one of Fosco's five favorite books ever. So you can imagine Fosco's disappointment to discover that Pynchon's new novel is... terrible. I mean really bad. (True-blue Pynchon fans shouldn't bother to accuse me of misunderstanding on this one: I've read every word he's ever written and I understand the virtues of Pynchon. This novel just doesn't contain most of them.)

Second Biggest Disappointment: The Keep. How did this book make the cover of the NYT Book Review? Did the reviewer only read the first half? And why can't Jennifer Egan write a good second half of a book?

Book I Keep Forgetting That I Read: Trance. Huh. Apparently this book came out in 2005. But pretty much everything about this book is news to me anyway.

Book I Started and Never Finished: Icelander. Fosco loves Iceland and so this well-reviewed book should have been a slam-dunk. But he only made it through page 11, to the end of the descriptions of the characters in the novel: a character list which included "Philip Leshio" and "Constance Lingus" (wait for it...). After he read these names, Fosco thought to himself: "Do I really need to read this?" The answer was no.

Book I Probably Should Have Read: The Emperor's Children. I heard it was good.

Well-Reviewed Book I Have No Intention of Ever Reading: Absurdistan. I don't care if the NYTimes Book Review editor knocks on my door and begs me to read this novel. I won't. I read the excerpt in The New Yorker and I hated it. As far as I can tell, this book is like Borat for highbrows.

Book Everyone Hated That I Liked: This Book Will Save Your Life. Maybe most readers found the title to promise a bit too much. I've always had a soft spot in my heart for A.M. Homes and maybe that's why I was willing to accept the emotional resonance of this novel.