Xark!

The Never Ending Trail

On the recommendation of friend and fellow distance runner, Cara Finnegan, I recently read Pam Reed’s The Extra Mile.  Finnegan and I have individually played around with the idea of trying a few ultamarathon events at some point in the future and Reed’s book, subtitled One Woman’s Personal Journey to Ultrarunning Greatness, seemed to be a great place to start thinking a bit more seriously about it. 

Ultramarathons are loosely defined as any race going beyond the normal 26.2 (and change) miles required by a marathon.  When distance is the defining characteristic, normal ultramarathons are 50 and 100 miles (although there are odd numbers and some are much longer).  When time is the defining characteristic, ultramarathons are normally set at 24 or 48 hours with the “winner” being the person who covers the most distance during that time period. 

There are a number of aspects of an ultramarathon which make it interesting, especially as you get a bit older.  For one, my times in half-marathons and marathons are going down rather than up.  I see no feasible personal records in my future.  As a result, an ultra would give me a different way of judging myself.  Given that there are so many of them of so many different lengths and on so many different terrains, I imagine I would never have a personal standard against which to judge. 

Secondly, there’s just something romantic about the idea of such long distances.  I find myself particularly attracted by the idea of the “timed” race, even if it means going around and around on a track.  I can imagine the brain working in extraordinarily odd ways in such a race, and I can imagine a very strong sense of community between those who finish such a run. 

It was with a mind like this that I approached Reed’s book, then. While I expected that her words would only add to the romanticism with which I was approaching ultras, there are ways in which Reed’s book—and subsequent reading--work against such romanticism. 

Trumpet of the Living Dead

While I have more than a passing knowledge of most of the jazz canon from the 1950s to the 1980s, I never became much of a Chet Baker fan.  While I listened to his work with Gerry Mulligan, there was something about the . . . well . . . the lyricism of much of his playing that didn’t appeal to me.  Indeed, I always had something of an unearned snotty attitude about west coast jazz.  Nonetheless, it was with some excitement that I went to see the “revival” of Let’s Get Lost, the 1988 Bruce Weber documentary.  Evidently, in anticipation of a new print going to DVD for the first time this year, the film is making its rounds at art film houses, and it arrived in Nashville just this week.

My reactions to the film were wildly different than I had expected.  I had read that the film provided a poignant portrait of Baker, counterposing images of Baker as a young James Dean with a trumpet with contemporary (1987) images of an older Baker, ragged from a lifetime overuse of speedballs and alcohol.  While some question the veracity of the film’s narrative (i.e., the film makes it seem as if Baker’s life was in complete decline while, according to some accounts, his career was on something of a late upswing in the mid 80s), the accuracy of the narrative—hell, Baker himself--was the least of my concerns as I sat in the theater shaken by the awful physical transformation one sees between the young and older versions of him.

Jimmie's Thorny Kiss

My father’s given name—the name on his birth certificate—was Jimmie.  While I never heard him protest when someone referred to him as “Jim,” he was always quick to correct anyone who attempted the formality of “James”:  “It’s Jim” or “It’s Jimmie,” he would assure them, as if there was something important about maintaining the name his parents had given him.  But there was something else I couldn’t quite put my finger on; it seemed almost as if it were important to him to maintain the slightly impish sound of a boy’s name in the context of his large male body.

What made the name even more anomalous was the fact that, as far as I can imagine, no one would ever have used the word “impish” to describe any aspect of my father’s personality.  He was a stern man; I can literally count the number of times I remember him seeming to genuinely smile on one hand.  Our family’s picture album may contain photos of him with a smile on his face, but none of them come to mind as I write this. 

While he was later in life diagnosed as being clinically depressed, he always just seemed distant and distracted to me and the siblings.  To our friends and romantic interests, he could be terrifying.  It wasn’t that he was angry; it wasn’t that he meant to be frightening; it’s more that there is simply something about silent masculinity that—to the right people at the right age—reads as cold anger.  My brother and I used to take a secret delight in how much our friends seemed to be scared around him.  It didn’t hurt that he was also the Captain of the Asheville Police Department during most of our teenage years. 

Personal Politics and the Unwritten Future

Julien Temple's documentary, Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten, about the career/life of Clash and Mescaleros’ frontman Joe Strummer is, to be generous, an engaging collection of sometimes rare video clips and new interviews that offers an adequate introduction to the singer and irritatingly dogmatic politico.  To be more frank, it—like The Filth and The Fury, Temple’s Sex Pistols’ documentary—is something of a cobbled together mess of new and vintage clips that leaves someone like me—a Clash fan from jump--fairly bored.  Not that I can’t find a way to talk about it; I can always do that; it’s more that I wouldn’t want to encourage you to go see it. 

About the documentary itself:  while it is no doubt a nice pleasure to watch documentary clips of the Clash throughout their career (nothing warms a middle aged heart more than mass mediated self-absorption), and while it was both informative and charming to learn (and see) Joe’s early life and upbringing as well as his life post-Clash (about which I knew little), the composition of the story telling was baffling. 

Temple tells Strummer’s story by interposing archive footage of Strummer with interview clips of a variety of unnamed friends sitting around campfires in different global locations. When you know the person being interviewed, and understand their connection to Strummer, this is charming.  When you don’t know the person and/or don’t know their connection, this is distracting and irritating (“Who is that bearded guy?” “Why is Johnny Depp being interviewed?”)

What Joe said

"One of my first lessons from Joe — when I failed to remember the name of someone to whom he had just introduced me: 'If you care about people, you can remember their names.'"

--Richard Franck remembers Chapel Hill activist and politician Joe Herzenberg in the comment thread on orangepolitics.org

Too Easy

Heh.

In other news, Owen Wilson called his recent suicide attempt a "near death experience," and Brittney Spears reportedly called a glass of water she was given during a deposition, "wetty."

Glad to hear everyone's doing okay out there.

Kurt Vonnegut: And so on.

Now I'm thoroughly depressed, and it's only 8 a.m.

Safe on Third in West Asheville

At this moment, you are reading words written by the worst player ever to wear a glove in Little League Baseball history. I know that many people have laid claim to the title, but I am the one you’re looking for. 

As evidence, I submit: I was so bad that when I was 8 years old—and had already been chosen by Coach Hawkins to play on the 3A Malvern Hills Pharmacy team in West Asheville, NC back in 1971—I ended up being designated the batboy when the Coach deemed that my awkwardness was too much of a health insurance hazard.

I hardly believe this story myself, but I’ve been assured again of its veracity. So, it’s not just that I played right field and only played in the last two innings of the game—that’s the normal routine for a bad player—it’s that for one year, I wasn’t allowed to play at all. It is as the world’s worst Little League player that I offer this brief anecdote to you today, both as a tribute to the maligned sport of baseball and to a long forgotten Assistant Coach for the Dial Finance Franchise of 4A baseball in West Asheville in 1973.

In Asheville back in the 70s, Little League baseball was a big deal. Heck, as a result of Cal Ripken, Sr. coaching the local Double A Orioles team in Asheville (now the Asheville Tourists), I actually played Little League baseball against teams featuring both Cal Ripken, Jr. (an All-Star even then) and his younger brother Billy (no ball player back then was Billy). There were multiple teams, multiple fields and two divisions in each of two different leagues. Kids from 8 to 12 years of age played in either 3A or 4A teams. I don’t know what 1A or 2A signified, but I know we didn’t have teams in Asheville with those designations. In my small town imagination, I figured that was because we were just too damned good to have digits that small.

Who We Are, Who We Will Be

Before I go to sleep each night, like a lot of folks, I read until I drift off.  Most nights, that means I only get a few pages in before I have to close the book.  On nights of insomnia, I read a little more.  Nonetheless, the reading is slow, so anytime I go off on a reading project (e.g., "I will read all the books I can find about bare knuckle boxing"), it's a long, slow road.  So, that brings me to my latest project which may well go on the rest of my life--I'm reading a "good" biography of each of the U.S. Presidents in order.  While the very idea would have made me shudder with shame in the past (books about men, and all white men), I've almost decided--as I turn the corner into Thomas Jefferson--that this project should be required of all citizens (well, maybe it should be required that they all read bios of the early founders).

Old pictures, old friends

Arlie Porter

Here's something you probably didn't know about Arlie Porter: His name wasn't Arlie.

It was "Roy Lee." But he never liked Roy as a first name, so he started signing things "R. Lee." Somehow or another that morphed into a nickname and eventually a professional byline: Arlie Porter, reporter.

Arlie was a military kid, traveled all around. He wound up in the Deep South, living with a relative, attending a rural, predominantly black high school, where he played point guard for the varsity team. Which didn't surprise me. Wherever he went, there he was. Didn't matter what life threw at him. Later on he went to Wofford College in Spartanburg, put on their terrier mascot head and ran around representing his school. Honestly, that surprised me.

I was Arlie's boss for years and he was a total pain-in-the-ass. By this I mean to say: He was good. He covered Charleston County, which was one of our biggest beats, but during his tenure he had covered multiple beats, and he refused to give up any of them. Which meant that if he got a tip from Mount Pleasant, which he used to cover, he wanted to do the story. Didn't give a damn that we had two other reporters trying to cover Mount Pleasant. Arlie didn't want to share.

Why he stayed in Charleston was beyond me. I knew that he followed a girl here from Atlanta and that she dumped him soon after he arrived. She moved on and he never did, just burrowed into the newspaper and the town and that was that. If he ever considered moving up to the Bigs, I never heard about it. He loved The Post and Courier in a way I never understood, and he treated his job with an almost monastic devotion to his journalistic ideals. It was more than a bit weird. He also liked golf.

We were in the smoking room when he told me he was going in for tests because he had been experiencing weakness in his hands, and when he showed them to me I noticed that they looked funny. He asked me not to talk about it. I didn't. And yes, it turned out to be ALS, and it finally killed him last night out in Nebraska, where his father lived.

The Post and Courier became Arlie's family during the last years of his life. His friends would pick him up from his apartment, bring him here. They would help him to the bathroom, help him back into his chair. They would clean him, help him eat. When he lost the physical strength to report and write, he served as a mentor and assistant to other reporters.

Last year we finally had to tell him that he couldn't come in to the newsroom anymore. People were in tears. Others were angry -- they didn't know about the sacrifices his close friends had made to keep him functioning. People on the outside didn't know the risks Arlie was taking, didn't know how multiple reporters and editors had, essentially, put their careers on the back burner to keep Arlie going. That was a hard time for everybody.

Arlie lived in defiant denial of his illness. To some this looked like courage. I disagreed. I don't know what it was, but it taught me that denial isolates you from your own experience and from the people who experience it with you. The fact that he was dying was this pink elephant that he couldn't see, so you had to pretend along with him. And that was a tragedy.

I love Arlie. I'll remember him on our Elizabeth Street piazza drinking beer, the times he helped me move, the trivia nights at Moe's Crosstown Tavern. I'll remember arguing in the smoking room, hanging out with him at his pool (the water helped support his body weight) and the time he poured kerosene on a charcoal grill and almost burned down a 19th century Charleston single house. I'll remember the picture we took of the crew together at Schuyler's wedding. Arlie was in his chair, which was his only concession to ALS. He once told me "If I ever get in that chair, I'm afraid I'll never get out." He didn't.

But I am not sad today. Roy Lee Porter is free.

1982

Xark! authors

Self-written biographies of Xark authors, added as they're added.

Daniel Conover (July 29, 2005)

Janet Edens

Dewey Sasser

Marcus Amaker

John Sloop

Ben Brazil

Catherine Beyer

Keith Olexa

Caleb duh Florida

Patricia Anthony

Armina Familar

Sarah Ragsdale

Jean McGreggor

M.T. Reiten

Daniel Conover: A xarker biography

Editor’s note: The people on the Xark authors list have been invited to contribute their own biographies to the site. We’ll index those biographies with a link under the “Xark Basics” header. First up: Xark-daddy Daniel Conover, who is writing his biography in the third person because he says it makes things sound cooler and much more important.

Daniel Conover, 42, didn’t have a word for the way his brain worked until the summer of 2004, when he woke one morning and told his wife that his habit of moving rapidly and intensely from one seemingly unrelated topic to another was called “zarking.” The spelling was later standardized as “xarking” in 2005 when his wife, graphic designer Janet Edens, told him that “an X would be cooler.”