My relationship with the first-person voice gets a little deeper in the latest issue of Wired, which features my account of going full gonzo in the world of OnlyFans chat specialists. This is probably the most immersive assignment I’ve tackled since my 2010 foray into the culture and science of Alcoholics Anonymous; it also required a lot of emotionally harrowing (albeit darkly comic) reporting about an industry that traffics in the illusion of genuine affection.
The nutshell version of the story is that I got a job impersonating an OnlyFans creator, and thus spent much of my 2024 trying to convince subscribers that I’m a 21-year-old computer-science student who enjoys sushi, Pink Floyd, and masturbating outdoors. It was a bewildering experience at times, to say the least:
I had to wade into several prosaic fantasies about babysitters and office blowjobs, some of which included laughably florid professions of love for me. I couldn’t help but ponder how disappointed these men would be if they could somehow see me sitting in my home office, sipping hibiscus tea as I typed out commands for them to manipulate their genitalia or deposit their semen on certain parts of my body. The most surreal moment came as I noticed the faint sounds of my daughter and her puppy watching Bluey together down the hall, right as a subscriber was waxing poetic about how much he wanted to eat a macaron from between my ass cheeks; the juxtaposition made me question the entire course of my life.
Being something of a Type A weirdo, of course I wanted to be the best at chatting once I started. But as you’ll hopefully see in the piece, I didn’t have the killer instinct necessary to excel. I went in thinking that the job was literary in nature, but really it was all about sales—about establishing emotional connections for the sole purpose of pushing outrageously priced content. My reluctance to embrace that game is why I wouldn’t get far enough with the Glengarry leads.
A few weeks ago, after a lengthy writing session, I switched my phone off Work mode and noticed that I had a voicemail from an unknown number with a Los Angeles area code. I’ve been noodling with a couple of long-term projects connected to the city of my birth, so I figured it was a callback about one of those ventures. But the message could not have been more unexpected, nor more welcome:
Hey Brendan, this is Alfred Anaya. I’m just calling to tell you I’m out now. I’m at a halfway house here in Hollywood. I’d like to talk to you, man, if you can. I still haven’t learned how to use this phone, so if you call Aimee, she’ll give you the number. I hope you’re good and your family’s good. Talk to you later.
Those words startled me because Alfred, whose story I first wrote about here on Microkhan and later expanded into a Wired feature, wasn’t due to be released from federal prison for a few more years. I was beyond elated that he’d caught a well-deserved break and was now free. But a piece of me couldn’t help but dwell on how I’d failed him.
When I first started working on Alfred’s story a dozen years ago, I was still sussing out what kind of writer I wanted to be. I knew I was drawn to tales of people swept up in extreme circumstances, but I hadn’t devoted enough thought as to why that was the case—I was too busy pinging from one assignment to the next, constantly worried I’d lose my toehold in the industry if I stopped churning out copy. Once I got enmeshed in piecing together what had happened to Alfred, however, I finally paused to contemplate why tragic stories like his get their hooks into me. My chief takeaway was that I’m wired to be moved by narratives in which someone tries to carve out a new life for themselves, only to find that the quintessentially American act of reinvention can have unforeseen and destructive side effects. And because of the way I’ve always viewed myself, I instinctually empathize with the people who fell short of their lofty goals, especially when they were doomed by rash mistakes.
To tell those upsetting stories in a way that honors the trust that sources place in me, I have to get emotionally invested in the labor—often to a point that it’s impossible to maintain a wall between my professional and personal lives. Once a piece is published, how can I move forward when the characters I wrote about must continue to live through the hardships I chronicled? Alfred’s story was the first time I had to deal with that issue in a heavy way. During my reporting, I found that he’d received terrible legal advice, and that the prosecutor had told at least one major lie during the trial. So when Alfred’s family asked me to help them explore what post-conviction remedies might be available to him, my conscience obliged me to do what I could.
And that’s where I fear I fell woefully short of the mark. I studied up on habeas corpus petitions and the clemency process, and I tried to alert influential people to the depth of Alfred’s plight. But in the end, nothing I contributed had any impact on the length of his sentence. And though I know there’s nothing in my job description about serving as an advocate, I still lament how powerless I was to do anything except spin Alfred’s story into a semi-readable format.
That sort of mournfulness has been my constant companion ever since, as I’ve gotten stuck into numerousharrowingstories that I can never quite expunge from my thoughts. I know I need to reorient the way I approach these projects, but I’m afraid to keep things at arm’s length—a big piece of me can’t envision writing anything worthwhile unless I allow myself to be emotionally drained. There are times, however, when I wonder whether I’ve reached the point where I can no longer bear the psychic cost of being close to so much pain.
The upbeat news is that Alfred and I finally managed to connect, and I was heartened by his positive vibes. He’s still trying to figure out a lot of the technology that has emerged over the past decade—the payment options at Target knocked him for a loop—and he’ll have to cut through a bunch of red tape to make it out of the halfway house. But I got choked up listening to him gush about how much he’s looking forward to hanging out with his first grandchild. I could only respond by promising that whatever he needs, I’m here for him.
I’m generally against nostalgia, since I think it’s obvious charms can insidiously blot out our ability to live in the moment. But I’ll confess to being overwhelmed with sadness upon learning a few minutes ago that Sports Illustrated has essentially been swept into the dustbin of history. As I’ve discussed on this here site several times, my SI subscription made me fall in love with writing as a young’un, and I still recall the weekly thrill of scanning the table of contents in search of a yarn that would teach me something new about the world. The last feature in every issue was always a big swing, of the sort that doesn’t get commissioned any more—a profile of someone who’d touched the darkness during a roller-coaster life, or a snapshot from a corner of America quite unlike my own. Curled up in the corner of my bedroom on a Thursday evening, mere hours after the magazine’s arrival, I’d picture myself out in the field with a tape recorder and a notebook, doing my best to understand the full dimensions of another human for whom sports were everything.
I could’ve chosen a zillion covers to headline this elegaic post, but I had no choice but to pick the one above—the lead-in to a story about a college basketball star who found out the hard way that cocaine isn’t the jovial friend it first appears to be. I know I’ll labor my whole life and never come up with a first line as effective as, “I was standing in the Rose Garden, wired on cocaine.”
Check out my archive of SI appreciations here. And hope with me that the stories from the magazine’s golden age don’t vanish entirely from The Tubes.
I used to resist the first-person voice in my stories at all costs, but no longer: I’ve come to accept that everything I write is at least partly about the personal doubts and fixations that keep me up at night, and there’s really no shame in being frank about that aspect of my work. And so when I was poking around for a way to start my latest Wired feature, about an ex-metalhead from Mexico City who’s become a successful talent manager, I thought to myself: What was the subconscious reason I was attracted to this story in the first place? My ultimate answer was that I’m increasingly uncertain about how to sustain the whole writing gig, and so I want to develop a better understanding of how technology is mutating the business of creation. I chose to make that anxiety explicit in the story’s lead scene, the beginning of which is excerpted above.
But fear not, only a fraction of the story is focused on its teller. There are also less navel-gazey strands about the immigrant experience, the algorithms reshaping our culture, and the work ethic required to achieve even minor fame. I hope you’ll check it out.
Whenever I’m stuck on a writing project—an all-too-frequent occurrence—I usually try to find my way forward by contemplating a single question: How can I shift what I’m trying to say without reaching for cliches? Because a lot of the time, the reason I’m banging my head against the wall is because I’m taking an approach to the material that’s too conventional or predictable. So I force myself to take a step back and think of some other way into the story, some other theme I should make it my mission to explore.
I’m pretty sure I can trace my embrace of this tactic to something I read in Peter Biskind’s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls. It’s a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it aside about George Lucas and an experience he had while studying filmmaking at USC.
[Lucas] and a couple of other USC and UCLA students got a Columbia Pictures scholarship to shoot a short documentary on the making of MacKenna’s Gold, which was being shot in Page, Arizona. It was a lumbering, elephantine studio Western, very much in the style of the bloated musicals of the ’60s, and it was Lucas’s introduction to the Old Hollywood. “We had never been around such opulence, zillions of dollars being spent every five minutes on this huge, unwieldy thing,” he said. “It was mind-boggling to us because we had been making films for $300, and seeing this incredible waste—that was the worst of Hollywood.” While the other students shot conventional “making-of” documentaries, Lucas shot an imagistic film about the beauty of the desert, with the production barely visible in the far distance.
As always, the story worthiest of telling is rarely what’s right in front of your face.
The illustration above should give you some sense of how I spent my summer: Learning everything I possibly could about the current state of hibernation research, the unheralded key to getting our species to Mars and beyond. I did so in order to write this new Wired story, which came out on Thanksgiving morning. The piece’s narrative throughline is about an Alaskan researcher who’s dedicated the bulk of her adult life to trying to understand how Arctic ground squirrels power down for two-thirds of every year. But I also make a stab at grappling with how humans might use and misuse the power to turn ourselves off and on at will:
As for myself, what I find most alluring about hibernation is its potential to offer a brief holiday from the constant din of my own thoughts. In a time of exhausting overstimulation, anxiety, and dread, I find myself wondering what it would be like to switch off for a week or two. In his novelization of 2001, Arthur C. Clarke depicted one of his main characters as longing for the psychological liberation of torpor: “Sometimes Bowman, as First Captain of Discovery, envied his three unconscious colleagues in the frozen peace of the Hibernaculum. They were free from all boredom and responsibility.”
If you’re keen to read more about how NASA’s planning to incorporate hibernation tech into Mars missions, I urge you to check out SpaceWorks’ in-depth report on the topic.
A thought I’m frequently comforted by is the realization that most of my fellow humans understand the absurdity of life. It’s a truism that shines through in the jokes people create when there’s nothing outwardly funny about their circumstances. Take, for example, the humorous anecdotes that Soviet citizens crafted under Stalin, a topic explored in this 1957 journal article. Comedy rarely gets much darker:
A peasant on a collective farm, visiting an exhibition, is shown a radio station powerful enough to be heard in foreign countries, even in America. He pleads for permission to speak over the station and is finally given permission to say just one word. Stepping up to the microphone he shouts “Help!” with all the power of his voice.
I’m now motivated to delve into the literature the jokes that North Koreans tell each other in those rare moments when they’re sure no one’s listening. I refuse to believe that even the most suffocating form of totalitarianism can snuff out our species’ desire for levity.
One of the animating principles of Microkhan is the steadfast belief that the recent past was more chaotic—and thus immeasurably more interesting—than most of us realize. Take, for example, the prevalence of hogs on the streets of New York City in the mid-19th century, the subject of this paper by a pair of Spanish professors. It took a public-health catastrophe—the cholera epidemic of 1849—for municipal officials to realize that the well-inhabited portion of Manhattan wasn’t an ideal stomping ground for our porcine friends. And so the pigs were exiled to what was then the city’s equivalent of Siberia:
Overcoming sometimes violent resistance by impoverished owners, the police flushed five to six thousand pigs out of cellars and garrets and drove an estimated twenty thousand swine north to the upper wards that summer…The authorities, moreover, kept up their campaign year after year, banishing from lower Manhattan all bone-boiling works along with the putrefying carcasses piled high in their yards. In the late 1850s, Hog Town was invaded and the west side piggery complex between 50th and 59th Streets dismantled. By 1860, New York´s porkers had been definitively exiled north of 86th Street and transformed into a distinctively uptown menace.
According to the authors, the ejected pigs flourished in Manhattan’s northern hinterlands, under the care of Irish immigrants to who slept rough in what would later become Central Park. If anyone can point me in the direction of documents that detail those swineherds’ experiences, please advise.
I recently went down the rabbit hole on the history of American bullfighters in Mexico, thanks in large part to this incredibly niche book. One of the characters who jumped out at me was New York native Diego O’Bolger (née James Bolger), who was affectionately profiled in Tucson Weekly some 19 years ago. The story really drives home the physical grind of O’Bolger’s chosen profession, as well as the meager financial rewards on offer for the typical matador. But what stuck out to me the most was this observation about O’Bolger’s pre-fight ritual—a reminder that there’s a subtle ghoulish streak to so many exercises of caution:
After the bulls were assigned, we headed to Elvira’s for chiles rellenos. O’Bolger went back to the hotel. Traditionally, bullfighters don’t eat before a fight. If the worst happens and surgery is required, the doctors don’t want to have to go digging through a lot of tamales and beans to make repairs.
At the tail end of June, I stopped posting on Twitter. I’d been inching toward that decision for a while, in large part because the space had become so joyless. I realized I was mostly there out of a sense of obligation, or maybe fear—if I wasn’t out their touting my own work, would anyone lay eyes on a single word I ever write? But though my particular line of work seems to demand some sort of constant public presence, I became increasingly convinced that I wasn’t garnering many new readers by, say, briefly opining about old training films. Add in some personal turmoil (including a maddening situation that drew way more attention than I’d bargained for) and I reckoned it was time to step away, at least from the creative end of the equation. (I elected to still reply to people if need be, though it’s rare that someone reaches out to me that way.)
Now that I have a little distance from the rapidly changing app, I do feel a bit nostalgic for those early days in 2007 and 2008—the era when I used Twitter to flag the weird and the wonderful for a handful of my fellow travelers. Accounts that hew to that ethos are still out there, and it’s my hope that they’ll remain as the platform morphs into whatever comes next. For me, the archetype of Twitter perfection is this stream of information about lighthouses, authored by the founder of the Lighthouse Directory. If only Twitter could be filled with millions of accounts that share its spirit, rather than people who seem to revel in sourness above all.
I’ve been trying really hard to fall back in love with the English language, and this gargantuan compendium of racehorse lineages is really helping. There’s such a pleasing alchemy to the way the names evolve over the different generations, and then often end up with a thoroughbred whose moniker can be interpreted as having multiple meanings. It ain’t quite Jack Gilbert, but it’s helping me reacquaint myself with the snap and patter of the written word. And trust me when I say that’s sorely needed these days: There’s been a certain going-through-the-motions quality to my writing in recent months, and I need to do everything in my power to extricate myself from that trend. If reading up on the great-grandparents of horses with names like Lear Skywalker and Diablo’s Number is what gets me over the hump, then so be it.
In the name of getting better as a writer, I’ve been grappling with the aspects of the craft that I’m pretty terrible at. High up the list is final paragraphs—I just struggle so much with concocting a hefty parting thought that naturally connects to all that has come before. On the rare occasions I manage to create one that’s halfway satisfying, it’s usually an idea that popped up in the course of my reporting and instantly struck me as worthy of those last lines; the quote that wraps up this extremely long piece is a good example. But more often than not, I just stick a placeholder at the bottom and brute force my way to something meh in the run-up to publication.
So in my quest to improve, I’ve been studying some classic stories that end with tremendous oomph. The one I want to recommend today is something I should have read years ago, given its massive reputation among fans of the genre: Teresa Carpenter’s “Death of a Playmate,” which infamously became the basis for Bob Fosse’s much-loathed Star 80. In addition to being spectacularly reported, Carpenter’s story is notable for how sharply it eviscerates the narcissists who hovered around her main character. The ending drives home the point in such a clear and chilling way—I envy both its economy of language and its moral disgust.
Hype, of course, often passes for prophecy. Whether or not Dorothy Stratten would have fulfilled her extravagant promise can’t be known. Her legacy will not be examined critically because it is really of no consequence. In the end Dorothy Stratten was less memorable for herself than for the yearnings she evoked: in Snider a lust for the score; in Hefner a longing for a star; in Bogdanovich a desire for the eternal ingenue. She was a catalyst for a cycle of ambitions which revealed its players less wicked, perhaps, than pathetic.
As for Paul Snider, his body was returned to Vancouver in permanent exile from Hollywood. It was all too big for him. In that Elysium of dreams and deals, he had reached the limits of his class. His sin, his unforgivable sin, was being small-time.
Related: If you want to know more about why Star 80 is so execrable, I beseech you to check out this recent episode from one of my favorite podcasts, Blank Check. Fosse entirely missed the main theme that Carpenter was trying to convey in the source material.
I’m still immersed in trying to get a hard-to-corral Wired story out the door, so deeper thoughts will have to wait another day or two. In the meantime, let me point you toward one of the better microprojects I’ve come across in recent days: A year-long effort to chronicle art that depicts reflections in space helmets. My personal favorite is no great work of beauty, but I’m an obvious sucker for any artifact from the Golden Age of Hijacking.
If Goal A with the revival of Microkhan is to get myself back in the habit of writing and creating stories, then Goal B is to celebrate folks completely nerding out about the most random of subjects. I find few things more admirable or adorable than people who’ve clearly fallen in love with some arcane subject and want to share their enthusiasm with the world.
The brilliant mind (or minds?) behind Indigenous Boats is an excellent case in point. In addition to chronicling the minutiae of all sorts of small seacraft, they’ve also made public this comprehensive 1962 guide to the junks of South Vietnam. It’s just incredible how much labor the guide’s authors, who were U.S. Navy personnel, poured into scouting the nation for different types of junks, all of which are described and documented in loving detail. A small tidbit from the intro to whet your appetites:
If a craft is large enough to carry a water buffalo standing athwartships, it is clearly a junk. If the animal must assume some other position, or perhaps cannot even make the voyage, the vessel is a sampan.
Back on Monday after a hard weekend of churning out the third draft of a Wired story. Wish me luck.
Though the jury’s still out as to whether it was wise of me to reboot Microkhan, I’m happy to report that this endeavor has had one incredibly positive outcome so far: While hunting for some daily material the other week, I came across an idea that I’m tempted to to make my next major project. I need to keep the particulars under wraps for the moment, but I will say it led me to check out some memoirs of football stars. And that little quest brought me in contact with the delightful The Boz: Confessions of a Modern Anti-Hero, Brian Bosworth’s gloriously self-aggrandizing account of his first quarter-century or so on Earth. In tearing through the “as told to” pages, I marveled at how much the book is an artifact of an era when athletes felt no need to try and humanize themselves. The Boz is the polar opposite of the sensitive The Players’ Tribune essay that now dominates the genre; there are no frank admissions of weakness here, no attempts to assure the reader that the elite athlete has anything in common with Joe Q. Public. And though I have doubts about some of the veracity of Bosworth’s anecdotes, I can’t help but admire his willingness to declare his total disdain for anyone who admits that they yearn for a simpler existence. This passage pretty well encapsulates his attitude from page one to the final line (which, I kid you not, is simply, “Later!”).
When I get so sick of Hollywood people that I can’t make movies anymore, I’m going to start spending all my money. I’m going to buy an island, an entire island, and kick everybody else the hell off of it and invite only who I want. What do you think Maui would go for?
I’ll build a dream house on it. After years of sleeping in puny hotel beds, I’ll have a bed the size of two kinds. I’ll have a shower as big or maybe slightly larger than the Dome in Seattle. I’ll have speakers in every room. I’ll have a bunch of wild animals on the island, lions and bears—and not the Detroit and Chicago kind. Maybe I’ll invite Pete and Elway and some of my pals from the NCAA and Horton. I’ll lock the door and let them fend for themselves with my furry friends. Maybe they’ll eat each other.
I know one thing I don’t want to do on that island is grow old. I can’t stand the thought of being old. I don’t want to be an old prunehead walking around, growling at all the kids, my mind so closed up you can’t squeeze anything in it that didn’t happen before 1979.
When I start to feel old, I don’t want to continue living. I define “feeling old” as when you’re just sitting around, going, “Sheeee-ut. I can’t do this no more. I can’t do that no more. I never have sex anymore. I might as well call it a goddamn day.”
If you know of any other 1980s athletic memoirs that are replete with grievance and devoid of humility, please advise.
Like most folks who spend too much time on The Tubes, I’m signed up for dozens of newsletters that I rarely, if ever, crack open. But I never do a thoughtless delete of The Prepared, a weekly publication about the nitty-gritty of how complex and gargantuan objects get made. Though a fair chunk of each email isn’t germane to me—I wish I was smart enough to take advantage of their high-falutin’ job listings—I always find something worthwhile to ponder and explore. The curators’ genuine affection for the topics they cover never fails to shine through, and they clearly spend more time writing their meditative intros than I put into the typical Microkhan post. This week’s lede about the concept of the sublime is an excellent case in point.
Most of us have been rendered speechless, even frightened, by something truly awesome in nature. What about the objects we make ourselves? They can be sublime too. Throughout history, inspiring awe, veneration and fear would have been front of mind for the people building our places of worship. These same ideas – awe, veneration, and fear – feature prominently in modern starchitecture, and one can imagine that every person working on megaprojects (from bridges, to dams, to highways) sees themselves as working towards a grand, transcendent goal. I think we can go even further: even when we don’t intend it, many human creations go on to acquire the quality of the sublime. Despite being borne of our own minds and bodies, they become things we cannot ever truly know. It is in that space, beyond rational understanding, that we encounter the sublime.
Back tomorrow with something related to a new project I’m pondering, an endeavor that has brought me in touch with a genre of nonfiction whose heyday coincided with my childhood: The self-aggrandizing athlete memoir.
When you pick through the work of accomplished nonfiction writers, you’ll usually find that they keep exploring the same general theme through multiple projects. In the case of Randall Sullivan, that theme can be neatly summarized as, “Charismatic individuals whose delusions of grandeur exert a strong gravitational pull on people in search of meaning.” It’s most evident in his first and best book, The Price of Experience, the definitive account of the Billionaire Boys Club murder case in 1980s Los Angeles. But it also runs throughout a lot of his early magazine work, all of which is admirable for the depth of Sullivan’s reporting and his palpable empathy for characters who crave a sense of belonging.
One hard-to-find example, thankfully included in this anthology, is his 1986 Rolling Stone story about the rise and fall of Fight for Freedom FFF, a punk-band-turned-gang from the San Fernando Valley. The piece is front-loaded with material about FFF’s founder, a narcissist if there ever was one, but it really picks up steam once Sullivan delves into the backstory of 15-year-old Mark Miller, whose murder brought about the gang’s demise. There’s nothing particularly flashy about the prose here, which discussed the differences between the ill-fated Mark and his slightly older brother; instead, Sullivan evokes teenage heartache through the steady accretion of detail.
While Larry found comfort in the mainstream, though, Mark was drawn to sharp edges and dark corners. When the older brother was decorating his bedroom with Springsteen posters, the younger was collecting LPs of a band called the Germs, whose lead singer, Darby Crash, cut himself onstage with shards of glass and spawned a cult of kids who marked themselves on the left wrist with cigarette burns; he told an interviewer, “Blue circles and hard drugs are everything—one day you’ll pray to me,” a few months before his suicide by heroin overdose at age twenty-two.
Larry wanted to go to college on the beach in Santa Barbara and maybe be a plastic surgeon; he had heard it paid well. Mark had no idea what he wanted to do with his life and said money didn’t matter. After Karen moved over the hill into Hollywood during the fall of 1984, Mark would come home from school and hike up the hill the the Cahuenga West Motel, a fading establishment filled with war vets and old men on welfare. “Mark liked to hear their stories,” Karen recalled. “He’d spend his allowance on them, buy ‘em cigarettes, invite ‘em home for dinner.”
I have a lot of good things planned for next week, including pieces about an obscure cinematic ending I’ve grown to love, a punk band with delusions of grandeur, and mouth-to-snout resuscitation. For the moment, though, I’ll confess to feeling out-of-sorts and thus not up to writing anything of particular value today: I’m pretty burnt out from a couple of big endeavors. So I’ll just share something I recently revisited, Stephen King’s 22-year-old story about his struggle to resume writing after getting hit by a van. This right here is the paragraph I stopped to ponder for a while, especially the rich and weighty last line:
I had been in terrible situations before, and writing had helped me get over them—had helped me to forget myself, at least for a little while. Perhaps it would help me again. It seemed ridiculous to think it might be so, given the level of my pain and physical incapacitation, but there was that voice in the back of my mind, patient and implacable, telling me that, in the words of the Chambers Brothers, the “time has come today.” It was possible for me to disobey that voice but very difficult not to believe it.
The title of today’s post could easily be yesterday’s: “Commitment to the Bit.” Because what I find most fascinating about the field of hitchhiker studies is the effort that its practitioners pour into gathering data. I don’t know many social scientists who would throw themselves into their work quite like the authors of “WHO PICKS UP WHOM: The Fleeting Encounter Between Motorist & Hitchhiker”:
In order to test the similarity-attraction assumptions of balance theory (Layton and Insko, 1974; Touhey, 1974; Stephen, 1973) the senior author assumed the role of a hitchhiker. The independent variable was manipulated by changing the researcher’s appearance, a technique employed by Gelfand, et al. (1973) in the study of individual reactions to shoplifters in various modes of dress. In the first phase an effort was made to communicate to the approaching motorist the image of non-conventionality by dressing in sandals, tie-dyed T-shirt, grubby work pants, and a railroad engineer’s cap. The hitchhiker was unshaven, with shoulder length hair, and carried a canteen, sleeping bag, and backpack. Forty rides were obtained in this longhair phase.
During the second phase of the research the hitchhiker altered his appearance to that of a conventional “straight” by dressing in slacks, sportshirt and/or sweater, loafers and being clean shaven with moderately short hair. In this context the hiker carried a small athletic bag and a windbreaker jacket. Thirty-five rides were obtained during the short hair phase.
Also recommended: A far more recent paper on whether hitchhikers can improve their odds by holding flowers. The answer is unsurprising, but once again the description of the experimental design is worth the price of admission; I long to get stuck into my work to such a marvelous degree.
It would honestly have been super-easy for me to blow off posting here today, mostly because—and I have the page-view statistics to support this contention—literally no one is reading what I write. But I didn’t want to betray the main reason I opened Microkhan back up, which is my desperate need to get back in the habit of writing every day no matter what. And so here I am, doing the simplest thing possible in order to keep my streak alive—one small step, I hope, toward extricating myself from the creative doldrums that have enveloped me since summer.
The above comes from a booklet worth your time, Ricky Jay’s extraordinarily tongue-in-cheek Cards as Weapons. I’m amazed he was able to keep the joke going for 130 pages, and would love to know more about how he developed the discipline to keep puttering forward with complete (albeit entertaining) nonsense. I yearn to possess just a sliver of Jay’s literary energy.
My Grand Unified Theory of Celebrity Profiles™ is that they should only be written when the subject is smack dab in the creative valley between their early peak and their first real comeback. Because that’s when a writer worth his-or-her salt is able to capture the character traits I find most interesting in accomplished artists: resilience, regret, and raw fury.
Steven Oney’s 1984 Esquire profile of Gregg Allman is a classic case of the genre done right. This was years past Allman’s prime, and well after he’d torched nearly all of his meaningful relationships through a toxic stew of addiction, philandering, and plain-old betrayal. For reasons I can’t quite fathom, Allman let Oney tag along as he tried to tour his way back to fame, with decidedly disappointing results. There’s a ton about Allman’s world view that hasn’t aged well—he declares that a Purple Rain-era Prince “ain’t got no chops”—but Oney’s prose still shines. There’s a bunch of choice passages throughout, but this one about Allman’s detox regime is perhaps the most vivid:
Allman had used heroin before, but by the winter of 1977 his addiction had become so bad that he sequestered himself back east in the house of a Buffalo physician who, in exchange for $29,000, promised to step him down. For several weeks, Allman used methadone. Then he went cold turkey. For days he managed only a few hours’ sleep, brief interludes disturbed by dreams of gore and dismemberment. But mostly, Allman was wide awake. It was the winter of one of Buffalo’s worst blizzards, and he spent almost all of his time walking up and down four flights of stairs in the old house, watching the snow pile higher and higher and feeling his habit freeze over.
If you’re interested in diving deeper into Allman’s many woes, I recommend reading the appellate ruling in U.S. v. Herring, the drug-trafficking case in which he testified against his band’s manager.
The Nakhla meteorite is one of the most famous objects to ever smash into this planet of ours. Originally produced by a Martian volcano some 1.3 billion years ago, the meteorite disintegrated over Egypt in 1911, producing at least 40 individual shards that currently reside in a range of museums. Locals who witnessed the event claimed that one of those shards hit an unfortunate dog, who was instantly vaporized. It’s a tale that sounds vaguely feasible, but one hobbyist has gone to great lengths to disprove the legend. As always, sometimes the best debunkings come from amateurs who can’t shake their weird obsessions over minor details.
I have a heavy writing day ahead: I’m having serious problems with a transition in my lede, and experience has taught me that ironing things out will take a good eight hours. So I’m shirking my Microkhan duties for the day and just tossing up some rare footage of the greatest squash player to ever walk the Earth. If time wasn’t of the essence, I would have jotted down a few thoughts about how he was motivated by his brother’s untimely death, which occurred during a squash game in 1979. But I’ll just leave you to marvel at his moves and bury my head in the ol’ word processor for now.
The lyrics for national anthems are usually testaments to a country’s finer aspects—its gorgeous scenery, perhaps, or the indomitable fighting spirit of its longtime (though not necessarily original) residents. One notable exception is the anthem of Bikini Atoll, the South Pacific island that the United States destroyed with nuclear weapons tests in the early years of the Cold War. Just months after an American general convinced all 167 Bikinians to evacuate their home, having promised that their sacrifice would eventually lead to the end of all wars, Lore Kessibuki composed a song that could not possibly exude more sadness and regret. The translated lyrics:
No longer can I stay; it’s true. No longer can I live in peace and harmony. No longer can I rest on my sleeping mat and pillow Because of my island and the life I once knew there.
The thought is overwhelming Rendering me helpless and in great despair.
My spirit leaves, drifting around and far away Where it becomes caught in a current of immense power – And only then do I find tranquility
Since my current writing project involves thinking about how artificial intelligence will soon upend our world, I’ve also been pondering which professions will forever be safe from silicon-based competition. What I currently do for a living is, alas, not on the list, but there’s a good argument to be made that masonry will remain a human specialty for many years to come. The good folks over at Construction Physics recently did an excellent job of laying out why robotic bricklayers fall short, despite many valiant attempts by engineers and coders:
A brick or block isn’t simply set down on a solid surface, but is set on top of a thin layer of mortar, which is a mixture of water, sand, and cementitious material. Mortar has sort of complex physical properties – it’s a non-newtonian fluid, and it’s viscosity increases when it’s moved or shaken. This makes it difficult to apply in a purely mechanical, deterministic way (and also probably makes it difficult for masons to explain what they’re doing – watching them place it you can see lots of complex little motions, and the mortar behaving in sort of strange not-quite-liquid but not-quite-solid ways). And since mortar is a jobsite-mixed material, there will be variation in it’s properties from batch to batch.
Over the years here at Microkhan, we’ve spilled a lot of digital ink while paying homage to the Sports Illustrated stories that sparked our love for writing. Another one recently bubbled back up to the surface, mostly because it has one haunting line about the link between the physical and the psychological. The piece is about a jockey who was involved in a fatal accident, an event beyond his control that nonetheless shook him to his core. This passage depicts how he started to cope with the realization that he’d rubbed up against the darkness in a most disconcerting way:
Davis was inconsolable, and in a state nearing shock. “He was white,” says his valet, John Mallano, who had opened the closet door. Almost immediately, Davis began to shear himself of his past. After undressing in the jockeys’ room, he told Mallano, “Throw everything away. Throw my boots away, my pants, my T-shirt. Everything I was wearing. I don’t want these clothes around me ever again.”
The next day, after a memorial service for Venezia at Belmont Park—at which Davis fell sobbing to his knees—he quietly told his wife, Marguerite, “Let’s go get my hair cut. Maybe I’ll feel better.” So he had the barber “cut all that old stuff off,” he says. “And I cut all my nails down.”
There’s a mirror-image moment in the final paragraph of Raymond Carver’s The Calm, when the narrator’s decision to break with his past is symbolized by the sensation of his hair growing back while still in the barber’s chair. Two beautiful little observations about humans dealing with those inevitable forks in the road.
In the course of revising a Wired story I’ve been working on, I’ve had to dive into the technical history of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. That little research tangent brought me in contact with this lengthy piece about Douglas Rain, the Canadian actor who voiced HAL, the movie’s murderous AI system. There’s a lot to chew over here, including a bevy of info about Rain’s main gig as a Shakespearean specialist, but what I found most gripping was the discussion of accents. The author makes a convincing argument that what made Rain’s performance stand out was the nondescript nature of his manner of speech, a trait that may be a great asset to his countrymen who seek their fortunes down south:
University of Toronto Professor of Linguistics Jack Chambers, in considering what Kubrick was aiming for, says “you have to have a computer that sounds like he’s from nowhere, or, rather, from no specific place.” HAL’s Canadianness stems not from “the specific stuff. It’s not the Canadian Raising (‘out’ pronounced as ‘oot’ and ‘about’ pronounced as ‘aboot’)”.
“Standard Canadian English sounds ‘normal –the vowels are in the right place, the consonants are in the right place, it covers a large piece of ground. That’s why Canadians are well received in the United States as newscasters, as anchormen and reporters, because the vowels don’t give away the region they come from. It’s entirely wrong to describe Rain’s voice as ‘mid-Atlantic’–the Canadian accent has almost no trace of Britishness.”
As someone who’s occasionally been tempted to retreat from the professional life I’ve built, I’m pretty curious about what’s happened with the director Martin Brest. He went from churning out a solid-to-great film every few years, including one of my all-time favorites, to being a non-entity in the movie business: Nearly two decades have elapsed since his last gig. The easy explanation for his disappearance is that he was scarred by the reception to his last film, Gigli, for which the knives were out from the get-go. But how can someone who flourished in such a competitive field be so delicate? This 2013 Playboy story (SFW) doesn’t answer all the questions I have, but it does include a few revealing snippets about the neuroses that drove Brest’s creativity:
Everyone considers Brest a perfectionist. Maybe he was even a little obsessive-compulsive. The descriptor is never laced with insult. Reinhold has a memory for Brest’s Brestisms. During a particularly wide crane shot in Beverly Hills Cop, Reinhold says Brest cut camera, descended from the rig, walked over to him, straightened his tie, and jumped back on the crane for another take. A scene involving a falling cinder block became a strenuous stunt for the production, Brest wanting it to drop and crack in two with just the right split. Eventually, the director decided it would be easier for him to just drop the block himself. “As I evolved as an actor, worked with more directors, I realized if you’re not OCD, you’re not first rate,” Reinhold says. “The details are so crucial. For Marty, that’s it.”
I hope Brest works up the gumption to make another movie someday. But more than that, I wish him the far more elusive prize of being at peace with imperfection.
As someone who’s chosen to write for free on WordPress for a presumable audience of none, I’ve developed a soft spot for age-worn media platforms that are still chugging along. If I so desired, I could make Microkhan nothing but a series of valentines to still-updated BlogSpot sites that chronicle 1950s postcards or models of cement mixers.
I’ll spare you that deluge of esoterica, but I will say an excellent example of what I mean is Cesar Ojeda’s Flickr account, a compendium of thoughtfully curated public-domain art—mostly illustrations from 19th-century books about flora, fauna, exploration, and religion. You want cephalopods? He’s got cephalopods, as well as pulp art from Argentina and the Codex Aureus. Highly recommended if you, like I, are seeking to procrastinate because you rightfully dread revising your own work.
Though this probably doesn’t bode well for the future of Microkhan, I’ve decided to take it easy with the writing today. It’s the annual anniversary of my arrival on this hunk of nickel, iron, and what-have-you, and I’m celebrating by stealing a few hours to sketch out my plans for the next 365 days. (There may also be some barbecue and alcohol in my immediate future.) So no real post for today, though I would like to direct you to the new episode of the Most Notorious podcast, in which I talk at length about the Herman Perry saga. Many thanks to the show’s host, Erik Rivenes, for reading Now the Hell Will Start so carefully and coming up with such incisive questions. And apologies in advance for the frog-like qualities of my voice; I recorded the show while recuperating from a bout of Covid.
