Don't Get Too Comfortable by David Rakoff

You know how you meet someone, and you end up thinking he's a jerk after a few minutes of conversation, but he's friends with some of your friends, so you end up hanging out with him again anyway? That's pretty much how my reader/writer relationship has gone with David Rakoff. Most authors don't get a chance to re-engage me after severely disappointing me on the first go-round. (Just ask any number of chick lit and hipster writers.) But Rakoff did--mostly because I felt like I should like him. He's genuinely witty underneath the abrasiveness of Fraud (despite how obnoxious I found a lot of the writing); he's got the NPR hipster pedigree I usually love so well; and he's really entertaining when you see him on The Daily Show and the like. So I decided to pick up Don't Get Too Comfortable: The Indignities of Coach Class, the Torments of Low Thread Count, the Never-Ending Quest for Artisanal Olive Oil, and Other First World Problems.

The format is pretty much the same as Fraud's. Even the covers are nearly identical (I guess branding is a First World issue as well). It's another collection of nonfiction essays, most of which were first published elsewhere. But the writing is better, on the whole. Where Rakoff used to be too abrasive and judgmental about his subjects, now he's a little more contemplative, like he's learned more about profiling instead of condemning. And the latter must have been pretty tempting, given that George Bush, Hooters Girls, and Log Cabin Republicans are among the characters here. Rakoff is less likely to go for the instant scoffing payoff than he was before. The dry humor stays, without the shrill need to bond with the reader by saying "Oh my God, will you look at this guy?"

However, there are drawbacks to a deeper approach, in that Rakoff apparently feels it's necessary to end most of the essays on a moralizing note. Sometimes it works (as in a brief contemplation of the wonder of human travel at the end of a piece on contrasting airlines), and sometimes it just doesn't (like when an essay on working at the pool of a posh hotel finishes with a random musing on Floridian socioeconomics). It's like he's trying to give a journalistic overtone to what are very much fluff pieces. It's too bad, because the fluffiness is probably the best part. If you're gonna write about what happens to a person when he goes on a juice fast, great. I'd want to read that. Ditto on what it's like to work undercover as a poolboy. Explore, share, but don't bother pretending you're doing this for society's sake. I like Rakoff's curiosity about random things, and I'm coming around on his voice. I just wish those were the dominant elements here.

The highlights of the book include the aforementioned Log Cabin Republican piece, in which Rakoff tries to look objectively at how fellow gay men can align themselves with "the enemy;" a quasi-scientific profile of the cryogenic preservation movement, and all the related implications of mortality; and a reflection on the bureaucratic process involved in his becoming an American citizen. (Side note: the latter essay has a random appearance by Sarah Vowell as a character. Between this, the peer references in her own books, and Nick Hornby's shout-outs to her in his Believer columns, someone should be tracking this stuff. Clique lit is the new hotness, apparently. Too bad I'm too lazy and easily distracted by other projects to attempt such a chart on my own.)

And now for the usual Bits I Liked:

On a faded NYC billboard for a long-defunct strip club: "Nostalgia has always been a bit of a bunko scam. Authentic charms of its signage notwithstanding, it's worth remembering that those must have been pretty grim circumstances for the young ladies of the Whirly Girly. Unless it's your own heyday as a peepshow dancer you're fondly recalling, it's dangerous to drag a sepia-dipped brush over the sleaze of yesteryear."

On writing: "If seated at the computer, I check my email conservatively 30,000 times a day. When I am writing, I must have a snack, call a friend, or abuse myself every ten minutes. I used to think that this was nothing more than the difference between those things we do for love and those we do for money. But that can't be the whole story. I didn't always write for a living, and even back when it was my most fondly held dream to one day be able to do so, writing was always difficult. Writing is like pulling teeth. From my dick."

On leading the Log Cabin Republicans: "We go out to lunch together at a nearby Mexican restaurant. The only two people in the place on this gray day, we sit underneath strings of chili-pepper lights. It makes for a very sad fiesta. Perhaps abjection is in the air as I can't help wondering why someone would take a blowtorch to such a promising political resume. With the exception of that Jai Rodriguez fellow--the culture expert on Queer Eye for the Straight Guy--Patrick Guerriero might just have the worst gay job in America."

Character Studies Redux

P.S. A little research turns up the Ricky Jay piece ("Secrets of the Magus") and the Donald Trump essay ("Trump Solo"). They're long, but pretty entertaining. The Trump one is even better if you keep in your head the old SNL skit with Darrell Hammond playing Trump at a Domino's commercial shoot.

Character Studies: Encounters with the Curiously Obsessed

Oh, Mark Singer, I really wanted to love Character Studies: Encounters with the Curiously Obsessed. I liked your "Talk of the Town" pieces on an amateur nudie photographer, and got caught up in the glamour of the New Yorker Festival that put your book on its convenience marketing table. Maybe the early headiness was too much. I expected too much from the relationship before it had a chance to blossom.

Oh, well. Mild disappointment aside, my issues probably aren't as much with Mr. Singer as they are with the problematic aspects of profile writing. In magazine format, it just comes across so much better. Maybe it's that the expectations are different: structure is rarely as important in a feature than it is in a book, where you know that you're investing a certain number of pages' worth of attention in any given chapter/story. So when the pieces are taken wholesale from a magazine as they are here, the transition feels bumpy. (I assume the pieces were left largely unaltered from the original appearances, although I find it difficult to believe that the New Yorker would run such long articles. This is untested, as I haven't yet caved in to buying the Complete New Yorker software to check these pieces, and apprently couldn't be bothered to drag my ass to a library that could help with such research.) The pieces feel rather rambly and unfocused--and for a book that promises obsessiveness in its title, that's not so much an asset.

However, Singer gets a gold star for effort. While some of the subjects are no-brainers (Martin Scorsese and Donald Trump, for example), others obviously took some roundabout thinking and random connection-making (like an upscale produce farming family in California, or a quirky book dealer in New York). Also to his credit, he pretty much allows the subjects to speak for themselves. He emerges periodically as an "I"--enough to establish voice--but never lets his perceptions color anything gleaned by the reader.

The pieces themselves are pretty uneven. A few are recommendably entertaining: the one about Trump basically lets him hang himself with his own blowhard noose. Another, about Martin Scorsese ("The Man Who Forgets Nothing") shows what a freak the man is. But in a good way, since said freakiness has given us Raging Bull, Goodfellas, and Casino. It makes him look like a lunatic, but an amiable one. It's also a little sad, though, because the timing of the piece frames Gangs of New York as the big push for lifetime achievement. After reading about his "process," it's easy to see how Mr. Scorsese would blame himself for losing out on the big prize--and that he's gone even more years without that piece of validation seems even worse. Maybe this year, Marty.

The chapter on the Japanese-American farm family in California, selling fancy eggplant and lettuces to Wolfgang Puck and roadside stand customers alike, is also interesting, but draws out the story way too long. Is it about these adult children who remain on the family farm, afraid to trust the family business to strangers? Is it about a family that survived the horrible US internment camps during WWII and went on to create something successful? Or is it about how an obsession with food quality is an art unto itself? Singer never really comes down in any quadrant that might focus and refine the story.

Same deal with a piece on Ricky Jay, a fascinating magician/performer/magic librarian whom I unfortunately only recognized due to his more pop-ish TV and movie work. At first it seems like a piece about a guy whose sleight of hand is so good that it seems uncannily real. Then it's a profile of someone whose art has been corrupted by the likes of David Copperfield. Then there's a lot of grousing about the nature of magic book collection. Lots of fantastic detail, but very little narrative to hold it all together.

Other pieces are just not as good, period. One, about a group who may or may not have stolen Pancho Villa's skull, I stopped reading about five pages in. There's also an extremely long one about a cult of Tom Mix obsessives. Maybe it would have been more interesting if I knew who the hell Tom Mix was--but I didn't, and not much effort was made to get me to care. The personal and descriptive details are cute, but not really grounded in much.

But the language is sharp, and that redeems several of the negatives. So while it'll be a long time before I pick up one of Singer's anthologized books again, I do look forward to reading his new stuff in my overmentioned favorite magazine.

Some fun bits from the book:

From "Trump Solo":
"As Dr. Ginger, out of earshot, manipulated the sore back of a grateful [Trump resort] member, I asked Trump where she had done her training. 'I'm not sure,' he said. 'Baywatch Medical School? Does that sound right? I'll tell you the truth. Once I saw Dr. Ginger's photograph, I didn't really need to look at her resume or anyone else's. Are you asking, 'Did we hire her because she'd trained at Mount Sinai for fifteen years?' The answer is no. And I'll tell you why: because by the time she's spent fifteen years at Mount Sinai, we don't want to look at her."

From "Secrets of the Magus":
"When he had performed several dazzling illusions and seemed ready to retire, a guest named Mort said, 'Come on, Ricky. Why don't you do something truly amazing?'
Baron recalls that at that moment 'the look in Ricky's eyes was, like, 'Mort--you have just fucked with the wrong person.'
Jay told Mort to name a card, any card. Mort said, 'The three of hearts.' After shuffling, Jay gripped the deck in the palm of his right hand and sprang it, cascading all fifty-two cards so that they traveled the length of the table and pelted an open wine bottle.
'OK, Mort, what was your card again?'
'The three of hearts.'
'Look inside the bottle.'
Mort discovered, curled inside the neck, the three of hearts. The party broke up immediately."

From "The Book Eater":
"The rest of the room was occupied by scores of unopened cartons of pamphlets, dating from the seventeenth to the twentieth century, which Zinman acquired almost four years ago from an ephemera dealer who had procured them, for the price of scrap, from the New York Public Library. This was material that the library had recorded on microfilm as part of a 'preservation' program that deemed the original documents expendable. In 1997 and 1998, Zinman--unable to resist the impulse to rub a great institution's nose in its ill-considered behavior--dispatched to friends, as well as to the library's trustees, poster-size holiday greeting cards devoted to the theme of the library's 'trashing' of its own collections."