One time me and my friend Tim saw the Silver Jews at the Ottobar in Baltimore. During the show we were bothering the band to play an old Ectoslavia song called “Air Force Fight”, which they never did. Later on I puked in the bathroom. At the end of it all, when we were walking down a back alley into the parking lot, we encountered Berman. He was standing alone, practically blocking our way. We started to freak out as we approached. What do you say in such a situation? Not knowing what to do, I squared up my shoulders, picked up my gait, stuck out my arm and said, “David Berman, I want to shake your hand.” Everything was awesome after that. We bro’d down for about 15 minutes. Berman’s wife, Cassie, showed up. Tim sidled up to Berman and started tugging on his arm, lowly imploring him to “introduce us, introduce us.” He did, and she was a babe. Bob Nastanovich was loading up the van the whole time. When he was done he called out to Berman that it was time to split. And that was that. As the van drove off me and Tim yelled out to Nastanovich in an almost heckling kind of way, “Air force fight! Air force fight!”

He replied, “AIR FORCE FIGHT!!!”

Conservatives fight like Indian warriors in the French and Indian War. They prefer a cunning and sly kind of warfare, a guerrilla warfare.

Liberals fight like British general Edward Braddock. He got shot through the chest. Like Braddock, liberals use formalized, conventional tactics. The fight civilized. This is the only way they know to fight, and that hampers them. They lose more battles than they win.

However, if the struggle between liberals and conservatives is viewed as a larger sociopolitical war, then the liberals will win in the end. They will win by default. The values and demographic reality that conservatives stand for are yielding to a new American reality.

Herein lies the danger: While the conservative cause is a lost cause in a fair fight, if they don’t fight fair — if they bring the fight into the woods — they can take the other side down with them, and no one wins.

Such was the temptation of the Confederate Army towards the end of the Civil War. Robert E. Lee said no to the guerrilla option, sparing America what would have likely become its own Vietnam.

Modern conservatives?

Everything sucks.

— V

A cramped and crowded airplane prepares to detach itself from the jetway. Passengers, frustrated by a delay, try to wait patiently as they suffer in the cabin’s cloying, uncirculated air. An announcement from the cockpit reveals that they will continue waiting for a tardy passenger. At the last moment, a loud, overweight young woman barges through the plane’s door, her iPhone glued to her ear. The woman forces her exceedingly large baggage into an overhead bin, removing another passenger’s bag in the process. Complaining loudly into the receiver of her phone, she motioned that the owner of the displaced bag will have to stick it under his chair. Flushed, emitting palpable body heat, she finally takes her seat. Her conversation continues. Apparently she will not be taking any public transportation or riding in a taxi when she arrives at her destination. She demands that the person at the other end of the phone retrieve her personally. The garishly colorful appearance of her clothes suggests that she spent a semester abroad — an experience, no doubt, that broadened her horizons. Fanning herself recklessly, she concludes her telephone conversation by announcing that she will be drinking heavily upon arrival.  The flight crew begins its rituals.  Still stressed, the woman groans and says out loud to herself: “I hate America.”  The other passengers sit quietly by. 

— C

Jackie’s, at 5th Ave. and 7th St. in Brooklyn, is a Depression-era vintage. For years old timers and burnouts have been showing up bright and early to see the doors open, every day. They teeter in, buy a round of beers (six pony bottles on ice in a bucket), totter out, smoke a cigarette, observe the upwardly mobile, shrug and head back in again. This is their basic routine.

Like any good wallowing hole, a few garrulous regulars blabber away to the bar tender about their various ailments and disorders, or sports. Others prefer to find a corner to sit in and shut up to themselves.

People like to call Jackie’s a dive bar, or a “real” dive bar or something. I wouldn’t. I don’t even know what that means any more. There are no fights, that’s for sure. The place doesn’t give off enough energy.

— V

Salemi sits atop a foothill in the countryside of the Sicilian west. It’s a lonely little place. Little known fact: it was the first capital of Italy. In May of 1860, after invading Marsala and marching eastward into modern-day wine country, Giuseppe Garibaldi announced the annexation of Sicily from a castle inside Salemi’s central piazza. The honor lasted one day only.

Awesome.

These days Salemi’s become a bit of a ghost town. The streets are dusty. The houses are cheerless. Many are in disrepair. In the 1960s an earthquake hit. Salemi was practically shattered. It never recovered.

In 2008 the town attracted a short-lived burst of media attention after mayor Vittorio Sgarbi announced a plan to sell dilapidated buildings for 1 euro, provided that the purchaser spend an additional 100,000 euros on renovations using “traditional methods” and local labor. A novel plan. Will it work?

I visited Salemi with my girlfriend. This was about a year ago. There wasn’t much to see and there was almost nothing to do. As it was a particularly hot day, we decided to get out of the sun and take a break. A mess of white plastic lawn chairs and rickety tables sat scattered along a sidewalk underneath the shade of a tree.

It was a wine bar. Bar Crystal. A unshaven man wearing a floppy baseball cap was reading the paper there, his feet kicked up on one of the tables. He was lost in an article. I approached him and asked if he knew whether or not the place was open.

“Ah!” he said. The man folded his paper into his lap and flipped a finger into the air as if to say, “just a second.” He dropped his feet off the table, grabbed the arms of his chair, pushed himself up onto his feet and walked across the street and into the bar.

About a minute later he reappeared, drink menus in hand, wearing a white apron and a hot dog vendor hat. He took our orders. And we got super, super drunk.

—V

Shortly after a rain shower in Park Slope, Brooklyn, scores of chestnuts lay scattered along the curb at the intersection of 13th St. and 7th Ave. The nuts were fresh. Beads of water clung to their skins. A short distance down 7th Ave., fluorescent lights from Union Market cast a lazy glow over the sidewalk. A song by Steely Dan played inside the store, which caters to the area’s upwardly mobile. It included the lines, “Who makes the morning fabulous? Who says today’s a fun day? Why do I feel like sailing again? Honey, it’s you - Janie Runaway. Let’s grab some takeout, from Dean and Deluca.”

—V

In the corner of the shop, some five feet off, two white men in their 70s were in the middle of a conversation about suicidal cops.

“Shooting themselves over stress. Having heart attacks over stress,” said the first man. “Every year, the same thing: Dead cops. I think, when you work that job, you become desensitized. Long hours, all that antagonism. It’ll get you.”

“Terrible” said the other, his hands folded over his right knee. “Senseless.”

My mind drifted off. Moments later I heard something that jarred it back into attention.

“And then he used the N word.”

What in the fuck?

It was the first guy who said it, a heavy set man with a broad, round face. He looked an awful lot like Dick Cheney. He was leading the discussion.

“The what word?” said his friend, a sort of conversational pushover.

“The N word.”

“The M word?”

“No, the N word…the word that, well, the word that refers to black people.”

Just as the moment began to grow properly weird, a wild child named Johnny ran over and pounced on the second man’s back.

“Got you!” he yowled.

Johnny wore a blue and black rugby shirt. He had a mop of sheeny black hair. He was energized. The second man grabbed his shoulders and gave him a good tickle. Then the boy’s father walked up, an Icelandic man with an absurd voice. He sounded like the host of a children’s T.V. show.

The adults exchanged handshakes and smiles. And then the conversation picked back up. The leader resumed court: The N word.

The Icelandic father acknowledged that he knew what it was.

“Oh, yes, I’ve heard that one,” he offered lamely.

Johnny had been busy crawling around, but with all this talk about this word, this N word, he got curious. He picked himself up, marched over to the leader and tugged at his arm.

“What’s the N word?” he asked, interrupting.

The leader’s eyes fired down at the boy. He answered with comical intensity.

“Listen Johnny, it’s the N word, and that’s all you got to know.”

The boy was transfixed.

“If you ever hear it, and repeat it, I’ll tell you what it is.”

Silence.

At this I took to my feat and tried to sneak a shot of the scene with my phone. The above photo is what resulted. The flash started going off.

—V