Our Racist Dogs

★★★★★ The light in the street was a stage-lighting treatment of daytime, so that a Mercedes, not a particularly well-kept one, gleamed down to its hubcaps. The temperature was a tiny increment higher than ideal for long sleeves; there was a little eyestrain at the crosswalks. This was summer again, remnants tidily packaged. Loose open-backed dark shirts were falling off tanned shoulderblades while they still could. The air conditioning had gone fully insane—it took layers and a raised hood to fight it off. Eventually it was time to take off the layers and go out, to stand on the far, sunny side of Fifth Avenue, by the gutter full of dry trash and sediment, absorbing the gentle blessing of the heat. 

Some people say they have no regrets. I regret things about this morning. (Also yesterday morning. Pretty much any morning.) Show me a person with no regrets and I’ll show you someone who hasn’t considered all the possibilities. It’s this kind of catastrophe-awareness, though, that can make dating feel impossible. By the time you’ve been through a few relationships, it’s hard not to size up anyone you have feelings for as an ambassador of future regrets. Time misspent. Integrity diminished. Memories that follow you everywhere like Pac-Man ghosts.

Every new relationship is a potential future ghost. It takes an almost delusional level of optimism to ignore the possibility. But we try our best. We’re like the nomadic survivors on The Walking Dead—skeptical of new people, but maybe not enough. The dwindling principal cast on that show always stumbles on a fresh community, gives them the benefit of the doubt, and then somehow it all ends in a bloodbath. Still, they continue searching. Even though I’ve never personally witnessed blunt zombie-fingers rip through buttery chest cavities, I relate to The Walking Dead more than any of the infinite TV series about thirtysomething white-guy malaise. It’s the unlikely suspension of distrust. No matter how badly I’ve been ripped apart before, I never lose faith in the dream of sustainable shelter from the zombiepocalypse of solitude. When I met my girlfriend on a holiday party couch, starting a conversation about her electric blue pants of all things, a voice in the back of my head was already whispering that maybe this time it will be better. Maybe this time it will be the last time.

“I’ve long had an irrational hatred of tight clothing. A bandage dress? I’d rather actually be in the hospital. Lululemon Apparel? As John Galt once said on a Lululemon bag, ‘don’t tread on me.’ By far the worst phenomenon of the last decade has been ‘skinny jeans,’ designed by a male sadist, miniature pairs tested on dead lab rats. Women are expected to wear tight clothing to be ‘sexy,’ which is bullshit, and similarly many women say that tight clothing makes them feel sexy. The word ‘tight,’ in our current parlance, has positive connotations, as in describing someone’s excellent and modern style or the fine intricacies of the female sexual organ. But tight clothing is threatening to the body. It strangles you, it leaves marks on your skin. It is an undertaking: a person is restricted in a tight garment, and even simple tasks are difficult to accomplish.”#

“Yeah, we’re going to be doing modern takes on classic Brooklyn-American food of our grandparents’ generation, and the only way to do that right is with real meat. So it’s another period restaurant… a throwback to the late twentieth-century, early twenty-first century—but at a much higher level. Think roasted pig’s belly, lots of vegetables charred in cast iron dishes and seasoned with more pork, heirloom borecole salads, steak and beef tartare and tubers, of course, and in a couple of years, aged meats. Unfortunately, not poultry or oysters—which were key to that era’s style of dining—because they’re gone, obviously. What I wanted to get back to again was this period of a certain kind of casual luxury, an era where everyone could afford to be inefficient, when eating meat was normal and natural, and we’re taking the re-creation of that culture very seriously.”
—How will rich people eat out in 2081? Here’s a preview.#

At first you will find yourself skeptical about this track but as it plays through it will settle itself into your subconscious so that by the third time the chorus comes around you will wonder what you ever doubted about it. Then you will play it again. Enjoy.

★★★★★ Light reflected and refracted all through a flawless crystal morning. The breeze gathered strength as it came up Broadway. Sweaters were out, and sport coats. Instead of last week’s hot exhalations, the subway stairs breathed in cool air. A police officer was out below the Flatiron directing traffic contrary to the signals, and then came more police and police cars, and a surveying tripod right out in Fifth Avenue, and a barrier drape, parallel to the lane markings, that did not conceal the red of a pool of blood. A block beyond, the gorgeous day went about its business. Blinding white flared into the office off the shades and blinds half-lowered on the windows of other offices, across the street. The wind flipped the cover of a paperback of Six Centuries of Great Poetry lying on the pavement by an overflowing trash can. The breeze was cool but warm, some inverse of feverishness; the buildings separated themselves from the sky like thick lines of paint coming off the brush. Bunches of wheatgrass and jars of preserves glowed on the Greenmarket. Uptown, a man sat by the curb of Broadway with a canvas propped up, at work on a picture of a building that bore no obvious resemblance to any of the buildings in his view. The wind inflated the cloth cover over a parked motorcycle. The sunset sky was featureless but orange fires burned on distant shiny surfaces upriver and downriver, and nearer at hand they seemed once more to burn straight through the tower that would stand in the way.

Drivers are far from the only form of Uber non-employee. Meet the person on the other side of the help button:

In 2014, I spent nine months as an Uber Customer Service Representative (CSR). I found the posting on Craigslist while looking for telecommuting jobs. At the time I didn’t think it would be the job I would later leave off of my resume. I interviewed with a woman over Skype whom I never met again. The offer was $15 an hour. I signed the standard non-disclosures.

Uber is not the employer of record of its CSRs: that’s ZeroChaos, essentially a pass-through HR agency that touts itself as a clearinghouse for “contingent worker solutions.” At the start of our two-week orientation we were introduced to “Hector,” who walked us through the mechanisms Uber uses for client satisfaction and tracking: programs with names like Hipchat, Zoom, Zendesk.

Of course we had other questions for Hector. Vacation time? No. Work holidays? Mandatory. Performance incentives? We’ll mail you an Uber T-shirt.

Read the rest at The Billfold.#

The first time I encountered the 1982 movie White Dog was on a lazy laundry-folding afternoon in 2012. I’m a weirdo who is completely obsessed with dogs, and I have a bad habit of searching for the word “dog” on Netflix and watching whatever absolute garbage turns up. I think last week’s pick was Snow Buddies, the second movie in the indomitable direct-to-video Air Bud spinoff franchise about talking holiday puppies. I’m not terribly selective with my laundry-folding films, as long as they feature a dog (especially many dogs), despite the fact that I make my living hanging out with dozens of cool shelter dogs every day. So I assumed that the film was schlocky German Shepherd Hero matinee fodder for 80s tweens—gee, a racist dog… who is literally a white dog?? lol—and pressed play.  

White Dog, adapted from the autobiographical novel of the same name by French author Romain Gary, is the story of a diminutive white starlet named Julie who takes in a stray white German Shepherd dog, who—oops!—turns out to be violently racist. But she straight up denies that he might be a problem for society until he maims not one, but THREE people. Three. Finally, after she inexplicably brings her giant murderous dog on the set of a commercial job, he mauls her black costar, provoking Julie to take this shit a little more seriously. She refuses to give him a name so I will just have to refer to him as White Dog.

Dog trainers have a tendency to pan animal movies for being unrealistic. Cinematic liberties are easy to take when the results of a dog behavior rehabilitation program are often chalked up to a combination of animal whispering and magic. So on that basis alone I think I spent a good 90 percent of this movie laughing to myself. Additionally, the very notion of the White Dog was completely ridiculous. A dog that’s so virulently racist that he kills every black human being he sees? How does a dog even detect skin color? Can’t they only see the colors blue and yellow? If so, do I look blue or yellow? Sure, white people’s dogs have jumped at me a few times, but they never seem to be intent on ripping me apart. Does the movie conclude with the revelation that the dog is just a furry robot programmed by members of the KKK? Does the KKK put little dog-sized hoods on their robot dogs, or do they only make custom hoods for horses?

Julie visits the city pound after the dog goes missing (to kill a black truck driver in the film’s most Stephen King-esque murder, of which she is unaware).

The shelter is brimming with poor defenseless pets waiting to be executed in an old-school gas chamber. She can’t possibly bear the idea of bringing her murderous, treacherous, gigantic dog to the shelter, or even to an actual dog trainer, so naturally she drives him to an exotic animal trainer deep in the Valley. Lo and behold, the white trainer Curruthers (played by a jocund Burl Ives teetering on the edge of senility) and his black assistant Keys (Paul Winfield, at his most strapping) happen to believe their life’s work lies in “curing” racist dogs, despite their primary focus of taming snakes and tigers for movies. Keys even volunteers to work for three weeks—day and night, without pay—to reprogram the dog with advanced training techniques such as:

1. Yelling expletives from the other side of a fence while White Dog tries to bite him;
2. Standing around in a full body bite suit while White Dog bites him;
3. Eating hamburgers in front of White Dog;
4. Lifting up his shirt to show White Dog his big brown tummy, which enrages White Dog, then rubbing his tummy to enrage White Dog even further, then giving him a hamburger for not biting the tummy;
5. Waiting until White Dog is tired and then taking an afternoon nap together in a cloud of dust. White Dog is still mad, but also he is too sleepy to be racist.

Progress is derailed for the next few weeks by Julie’s guilt-fueled coddling with secret bonus hamburgers (the dog is only supposed to eat from black hands, so this is a big no-no). Despite these exploits, Keys’ training seems to be wearing down White Dog’s resolve to bite the brown tummy. Meanwhile, Julie is approached at her doorstep by a hail-fellow-well-met white man accompanied by two little girls. “Please lady, can we have our dog back?” they lisp. The man claims that White Dog ran away from the trailer park, then boasts proudly that he trained the dog himself. Julie suddenly grows a backbone and barks back that the dog has been “CURED, BY A BLACK MAN!!!” before she righteously speeds away in a roadster to witness the final test of White Dog’s newfound sanity.

“I loved losing weight; I loved being more fit. I hate that the weight crept back. But it did, and anyone who would sneer at me for lack of willpower is welcome to walk a mile in my size-44 trousers. What I’ve been wrestling with now that I no longer quantify myself is why I don’t want to write the stories and take the pictures that made my diet blog compelling. I think it’s because it’s too detailed a mirror. I’m not in denial about the calories, or the snacking, or the judgments of the scale. I just don’t want to tell that story any more.”
—If you haven’t read this yet, read it.#

I can’t overstate how much I am enjoying Masayoshi Fujita’s Apologues. Watch this solo version of the track “Tears of Unicorn” and then compare it with the album version. (Here’s an actual review.) Even if you are someone who usually has an aversion to the vibraphone I have to believe that there is something on this record you will be able to enjoy.