This Old Man
On life as a nonagenarian:
I get along. Now and then it comes to me that I appear to have more energy and hope than some of my coevals, but I take no credit for this. I don’t belong to a book club or a bridge club; I’m not taking up Mandarin or practicing the viola. In a sporadic effort to keep my brain from moldering, I’ve begun to memorize shorter poems—by Auden, Donne, Ogden Nash, and more—which I recite to myself some nights while walking my dog, Harry’s successor fox terrier, Andy. I’ve also become a blogger, and enjoy the ease and freedom of the form: it’s a bit like making a paper airplane and then watching it take wing below your window. But shouldn’t I have something more scholarly or complex than this put away by now—late paragraphs of accomplishments, good works, some weightier op cits? I’m afraid not. The thoughts of age are short, short thoughts. I don’t read Scripture and cling to no life precepts, except perhaps to Walter Cronkite’s rules for old men, which he did not deliver over the air: Never trust a fart. Never pass up a drink. Never ignore an erection.
Our Numbered Days: The Evolution of the Area Code
Long-distance digits long ago shed their monetary worth, but they gained something else in its place: cultural value.
I grew up in Carmel, smack in the middle of the new code region; my first cell phone number—the only cell phone number I have ever had—bears that 831 preface. I have held on to those three digits through happily-multiple changes of location (New Jersey, New York, Boston, Washington) and through unhappily-multiple losses of handset. The powers that be—hardware salespeople, cell service representatives—have, at one time or another, tried to force me into a 609 and a 917 and a 617; each time, I have resisted. Because I am not, fundamentally, a 609 or a 917 or a 617. I am not even, my current residence notwithstanding, a 202. I am an 831, wherever I may be in body, and will remain an 831 until they pry those three otherwise totally meaningless digits out of my cold, dead iPhone.
Taking Care of Business: A Reading List
This week’s picks from Emily include stories from Orange Coast Magazine, The New York Times, Business Insider, and Bloomberg Businessweek.
Bad Cops
Rafael Perez’s testimony on police misconduct ignited the biggest scandal in the history of the L.A.P.D. But was it the real story?
Eventually, Perez implicated about seventy officers in wrongdoing, and the questions he raised about police procedure cast the city’s criminal-justice system into a state of tumult. More than a hundred convictions were thrown out, and thousands more are still being investigated. The city attorney’s office estimated the potential cost of settling civil suits touched off by the Rampart scandal at a hundred and twenty-five million dollars. A city councilman, Joel Wachs, said that it “may well be the worst man-made disaster this city has ever faced.” The Rampart scandal finally broke the L.A.P.D. in a way that even the Rodney King beating, in 1991, and its bloody aftermath had not, forcing the city to accept a federal role in overseeing the police department’s operation. Yet in the view of the lead investigator, Detective Brian Tyndall, members of the task-force team investigating Rampart have come to believe that Rafael Perez is not just a rogue cop who had decided to come clean but a brilliant manipulator who may have misdirected their inquiry. “He’s a convict,” Tyndall says. “He’s a perjurer. He’s a dope dealer. So we don’t believe a word he says.”
Street Fighter 2: An Oral History
Twenty former Capcom employees and business partners look back on the creation and massive success of the game that ‘helped revolutionize the industry’: Street Fighter 2.
So I remember being down in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and we’re launching the game down there. And I didn’t even have the earnings back yet. I mean, they were coming in — we had one unit in Sunnyvale Golfland; the other one was in Milpitas. So I had my testers go out there and I said, “Hey man, I’ve gotta have some kind of idea what’s in there.” So they said, “Well we opened the cash box up. We haven’t even hit the weekend yet, just been cruising through the week.” And … I think it was like $650 that was in there. I go, “That’s not bad. That’s not bad.” So I said, “Well, let me just do a little surmising. Eh, it’ll probably end up doing about 800. That’s a really good report.” So I’m down in Florida basically telling my distribution network, “I think it’s gonna be about an $800 a week game, based on testing in Milpitas.” And then seven days came up after my distributor meeting, and the thing made $1,300.
So one of the things that we quickly found was, Golfland says, “We’re having problems with the players, because everybody’s backed up on the unit. Can we get another one?” “Yes, you can get another one.” We bring another one out. Now I’m afraid if I put a second one in there I’m gonna cannibalize it. I’m gonna have two doing $600. Not the case at all. They both do 14. So now we know we’ve got a juggernaut on our hands. Sunnyvale Golfland and Milpitas, I believe at the peak, were probably operating up to 15 units inside there. And you know, the game went through the ceiling.
My Two Emilys
Death, love, chemo and Kierkegaard:
There is, however, some reassuring tonal quality in the voices of the doctors and nurses, something there now that I didn’t hear three-and-a-half years ago. They know Jennifer’s daughter will be okay. They’re telling her this with every sentence they speak and every sentence they leave unsaid. I know this because I have been present in a room very much like this one. I have listened to terminology very like the words being spoken to us now. I have been present when the voices had no comfort to offer, voices desperate to stay as steady as possible, as if one careless syllable might launch an avalanche of uncomprehending anguish.
“Will I lose my hair?” Emily asks her mother from the bed. No one can answer. Only after the surgery will they discover that she will need three rounds of chemo. Though her prognosis is a very good one, much more promising than most of the children she and her mother will meet during their stay at the Ronald McDonald House, they will need to remain in Memphis until midsummer.
David Foster Wallace and the Nature of Fact
On David Foster Wallace, storytelling and the slippery line between fact and fiction:
Before he sat down with the best tennis player on the planet for a noonday interview in the middle of the 2006 Wimbledon fortnight, David Foster Wallace prepared a script. Atop a notebook page he wrote, “R.Federer Interview Qs.” and below he jotted in very fine print 13 questions. After three innocuous ice breakers, Wallace turned his attention to perhaps the most prominent theme in all his writing: consciousness. Acknowledging the abnormal interview approach, Wallace prefaced these next nine inquires with a printed subhead: “Non-Journalist Questions.” Each interrogation is a paragraph long, filled with digressions, asides, and qualifications; several contain superscripted addendums. In short, they read like they’re written by David Foster Wallace. He asks Roger Federer if he’s aware of his own greatness, aware of the unceasing media microscope he operates under, aware of his uncommon elevation of athletics to the level of aesthetics, aware of how great his great shots really are. Wallace even wrote, “How aware are you of the ballboys?” before crossing the question out.
The Brief, Wondrous Life of Zina Lahr
Remembering the life of a talented young artist who went missing on a trail in Colorado:
After she died, a five-minute video surfaced of Zina standing in her bedroom in her grandmother’s house, which had shelves crammed with robots she’d built and other art projects. In the video, she explains that she has “creative compulsive disorder” and can’t stop making things—especially robots. The video was the first hint at what Zina was: an impossibly innocent and gifted eccentric on the verge of breaking out in the world of animatronics and stop motion. It was an audition for a Los Angeles–based reality show called Jim Henson’s Creature Shop Challenge, a SyFy channel program premiering March 25 that’s sort of like Project Runway for animatronics artists. She’d turned down a spot on the show in order to move home and care for her grandmother, who’d been diagnosed with lung cancer in September.
Ghosts of the Tsunami
The writer visits a Zen temple in Japan, where he meets with a priest who has been exorcising the spirits of people who had drowned in the 2011 tsunami and taken possession of the living. A story about loss and Japan’s cult of ancestors:
Over the course of last summer, Reverend Kaneda exorcised 25 spirits from Rumiko Takahashi. They came and went at the rate of several a week. All of them, after the wartime sailor, were ghosts of the tsunami. For Kaneda, the days followed a relentless routine. The telephone call from Rumiko would come in the early evening; at nine o’clock her fiancé would pull up in front of the temple and carry her out of the car. As many as three spirits would appear in a single session. Kaneda talked to each personality in turn, sometimes over several hours: he established their circumstances, calmed their fears and politely but firmly enjoined them to follow him towards the light. Kaneda’s wife would sit with Rumiko; sometimes other priests were present to join in with the prayers. In the early hours of the morning, Rumiko would be driven home. ‘Each time she would feel better, and go back to Sendai, and go to work,’ Kaneda told me. ‘But then after a few days, she’d be overwhelmed again.’ Out among the living, surrounded by the city, she would become conscious of the dead, a thousand importunate spirits pressing in on her and trying to get inside.
Not Feeling Carolina: Depression on One of the Nation’s Happiest Campuses, Our College Pick
Every week, Syracuse University professor Aileen Gallagher helps Longreads highlight the best of college journalism. Here’s this week’s pick.
You must be logged in to post a comment.