Salon.com > Ranted by Cary Tennis

I was rearranged by the Velvet Underground in 1967

Thu, 19 Dec 2002 23:36:00 +0000

Cary Tennis considers life's most pressing questions in audio form most every week on Salon.

Struggling to recall who he saw the Velvet Underground with, he resorts to fictive revery. Which, if you ask him, he'll tell you is the memoirist's prerogative.

Postmodernism: Deconstructed

Fri, 08 Nov 2002 11:35:00 +0000

This week, having embarked on a quest to understand postmodernism as it relates to our nation's youth and their baffling indifference toward Carlos Santana, the author reads aloud from a scholarly article by Ryan Moore titled "... And Tomorrow is Just Another Crazy Scam: Postmodernity, Youth, and the Downward Mobility of the Middle Class," in "Generations of Youth," and then expostulates with debatable coherence about how the great divide between the boomers and the Xers is nothing more than the great divide between high modernism and postmodernism.

By the time he has finished, the night is over. The windows of the studio are fogged, the ashtray is full of mashed-out American Spirits, and the engineer has nodded out facedown in his beer. Far across San Francisco Bay, the rosy-fingered dawn is creeping over the hills, looking for a Starbucks.

You obviously don’t know who I am!

Tue, 08 Oct 2002 18:58:00 +0000

Cary Tennis considers life's most pressing questions in audio form most every week on Salon.

This week he comes really, really close to making an ass of himself via e-mail, all because of a litle thing called creative and professional jealousy.

How to become an advice columnist

Tue, 24 Sep 2002 19:54:00 +0000

Cary Tennis considers life's most pressing questions in audio form most every week on Salon.

This week he thinks out loud about how he came to write an advice column but first, and quite tangentially, blathers on about Public Radio International's "This American Life."

An ex-hippie boomer looks back

Tue, 10 Sep 2002 22:07:00 +0000

Cary Tennis considers life's most pressing questions in audio form most every week on Salon.

This week he's been reading the many letters to the "Since You Asked" advice column about what it's like to be young today, and what the aging boomer generation looks like to those in their 20s. He notices that the '60s seem to have been portrayed as a carefree, happy time, leading the youth to believe that all that twirling around in meadows and wearing of flowers meant that everybody was just kicking back and having a good time. But he remembers the '60s as a dark and frightening era on the edge of apocalypse. All that frenetic energy, all that running from coast to coast and hair-growing and face-painting, didn't seem to arise out of exuberance but instead out of a very energetic and youthful hopelessness.

Maybe he just had a bad attitude. Maybe he got a defective mantra. But maybe, if you look closely at the faces in those old Life magazine photos, you'll see the nihilism, the confusion, the fear of nuclear winter.

Expect the worst … and be happy!

Mon, 26 Aug 2002 22:29:00 +0000

Cary Tennis considers life's most pressing questions in audio form most every week on Salon. But it's been a few weeks now since he stepped into that curtained booth in the San Francisco office, turned down the lights, put on the headphones and communed with his twisted brethren. He just couldn't think of anything to say. But then a reader wrote in and chided him, saying it had been a month now.

So he went into the curtained booth, turned off the lights and put on the headphones. And lo and behold a childhood memory about a circus show on television came hurtling back to him, and he was stung by an ancient wound that came of facing his limits, or not facing them and having them pointed out to him, or having life itself demonstrate them in its own emphatic, incontrovertible way.

It was a sobering memory that came with a bittersweet celebration, because what he wanted when he was young is now finally, slowly, coming to pass. All he had to do was not kill himself.

I want my world back!

Thu, 18 Jul 2002 18:55:00 +0000

Steeped in the rough-and-tumble spoken-word movement, boiled in punk rock, roasted in alcohol, pressure-cooked in American literature and turned like a newel post on the lathe of American journalism, Cary Tennis considers life's most pressing questions in audio form most every week on Salon.

This week he considers a problem that has been bothering him for some time but which comes to a head due to a confluence of events involving his home Internet DSL service, an innocent phone call to "information," two American flags planted in a smoked ham and cheese sandwich, and Kate Smith on the jukebox singing "God Bless America."

I can criticize you in public

Tue, 09 Jul 2002 08:01:00 +0000

This week, in a state of mild exhaustion, stage fright and intense soul searching, he just about loses all coherence. But then about six minutes into the rant he seems to get some traction. Give a listen. Take a ride. It's bumpy but interesting!

Beware the fires of hell

Tue, 18 Jun 2002 07:00:00 +0000

This week there's the age-old question of whether the avowedly agnostic girl should date the cute Christian boy. Mr. Tennis is not sanguine about the notion; indeed he thinks there will be holy hell to pay.

NBA, here I come

Wed, 31 Oct 2001 09:00:00 +0000

Steeped in the rough-and-tumble spoken-word movement, boiled in punk rock, roasted in alcohol, pressure-cooked in American literature and turned like a newel post on the lathe of American journalism, Cary Tennis brings his passionate oratory on arts, politics and culture to Salon every Wednesday.

This week, he who has little use for athletic events in general finds something oddly compelling about the prospect of spending the winter watching the NBA on television. Not the "purity of sports" exactly, but something about the fact that the hoop doesn't pray and doesn't make speeches.

For broadcast or other reuse, contact Adrienne Crew.

Roaming the asphalt prairie

Thu, 06 Sep 2001 08:00:00 +0000

Steeped in the rough-and-tumble spoken-word movement, boiled in punk rock, roasted in alcohol, pressure-cooked in American literature and turned like a newel post on the lathe of American journalism, Cary Tennis brings his angry oratory on arts, politics and culture to Salon every Thursday.

This week, he performs a meditation on childhood and the freeway, and tries to evoke the peculiarly primitive yet often elegiac spirit we inhabit while driving.

For broadcast or other reuse, contact Adrienne Crew.

Stop asking me for spare change! I ain’t a-givin’ anymore

Thu, 23 Aug 2001 08:00:00 +0000

Steeped in the rough-and-tumble spoken-word movement, boiled in punk rock, roasted in alcohol, pressure-cooked in American literature and turned like a newel post on the lathe of American journalism, Cary Tennis brings his angry oratory on arts, politics and culture to Salon every other Thursday.

This week, Tennis has an epiphany about civic order and just says no to a street panhandler -- whose persistence rivals that of a telemarketer.

For broadcast or other reuse, contact Adrienne Crew.

A reply to my critics

Thu, 09 Aug 2001 08:00:00 +0000

Steeped in the rough-and-tumble spoken-word movement, boiled in punk rock, roasted in alcohol, pressure-cooked in American literature and turned like a newel post on the lathe of American journalism, Cary Tennis brings his angry oratory on arts, politics and culture to Salon every other Thursday.

This week, in a reply to readers who disapproved of his recent Salon cover story, "My Name is George, and I'm an Alcoholic," he mounts a spirited defense of the First Amendment.

For broadcast or other reuse, contact Adrienne Crew.

God, I hate baseball!

Thu, 26 Oct 2000 23:05:00 +0000

Every fall when the World Series rolls around, Cary Tennis remembers the baseball games of his Florida youth, those long, blistering-hot summer days stuck in the outfield, trembling with fear.

Every year, knowing that if all goes well he may never have to play another game the rest of his life, he sighs with gratitude and says to himself, God, I hate baseball!