The Dangerous Joy of Dr. Sex and Other True Stories

by Pagan Kennedy

  I have been Conor Oberst. And you can be him, too. One of his fans has created an online game that lets you inhabit Oberst’s body (albeit a very crude, pixelated version of his body) so that you can lob seven-inch records at Steven Tyler, the members of Creed and Fred Durst until you eventually destroy them. I contacted the inventor of the game, 23-year-old Jason Oda, to ask him what exactly prompted such a labor-intensive tribute to his hero.

  “I’ve never seen anyone in music be so tormented,” Oda said. “The song about the coughing, shaking fit on the bathroom floor—I don’t know if I’m sounding teenaged, but when you are drunk and passed out on your bathroom floor and screaming out loud and no one can hear you because your apartment’s lonely and cold, it’s the perfect music.”

  Because of such raw emotionality, fans and reviewers used to peg Bright Eyes as an emo band—“emo” being a branch of hard-core punk in which it’s O.K. for boys to cry. Oberst feels no allegiance to emo; in fact, the word has become a slur lately, especially after Seventeen magazine asked “Am I emo?” in a spread featuring a girl model with black-dyed hair and a boy model in nerd glasses and a grandpa sweater.

  The question for Oberst is not “Am I emo?” but “Am I pure?” Even now that he’s preoccupied by global politics, he continues to be fascinated with his own inner landscape. Because if you produce exactly the songs you want to for your own label, even then, the pressure of fans’ expectations can push you toward fake sentiments and slick hooks, songs that are nothing like what you would have written if you’d been strumming in your basement with guys from down the street, back in those days when you had no expectations beyond playing at a coffee shop in downtown Omaha.

  Oberst goes through gyrations to stay true to that original spirit. For one thing, he gave the 2002 Bright Eyes CD a long, Dickensian title (“Lifted or the Story Is in the Soil, Keep Your Ear to the Ground”) that makes it hard to list on a sale rack. For another, he chose to begin the CD with a song that’s almost painful to listen to, a cracked voice backed by desultory guitar-strumming—you must tolerate the broccoli of authenticity before you get to the treats that follow.

  Critics have raved, though some wonder if Oberst is spreading himself too thin. Peter Choyce, a longtime college-radio D.J., praises Oberst as an “icon” but wishes he would edit himself. “Every time I go to the station there’s more product. Him with the guy from Spoon. Him in Desaparecidos. Him with a new EP. I can’t keep up. Better to release one strong, solid 10-track CD a year and make people want more.” It is, of course, exactly this kind of logic that Oberst resists.

  On tour, he writes songs in his motel room, on the bus, while everyone else is napping off hangovers. The band has incorporated one of the just-finished songs in its set, a daring move.

  “If there’s a song that stops meaning anything to me, then I’ll quit playing it,” he says. And if a song does mean something, he’ll stick by it, as he has stuck by the friends he has known since he was 14, whom he has turned into his bandmates and collaborators and business partners.

  In the winter, when Oberst and his friends decided to release a CD of hard-rock songs, they did so under the moniker Desaparecidos, naming themselves after the disappeared activists in Argentina. “Read Music/Speak Spanish” is an odd and amazing artifact, a rock album that examines the sociopolitics of urban sprawl. Instead of condemning the suburbanites who have chosen to live behind vinyl siding, Oberst’s lyrics imagine the mental life of America’s disappeared: “If you need money for bills, my lover I could cover you.…I’m saving up. We can get that house next to the park. I’ll get more hours at my dad’s shop, yeah we’ll plan for everything. And we’ll enroll in that middle class. Get a compact car full of discount tags. If you’re feeling trapped or too attached remember we wanted that.” Oberst has created a Raymond Carver story in 4/4.

  Though the lyrics seemed taboo in that flag-waving period after 9/11, the band released the CD anyway. “It was the worst time to be singing anything unpatriotic,” according to Oberst.

  Casey Scott—a tall Georgian with shaggy hair and a Southern Comfort drawl—played bass with Desaparecidos on tour and has toured with Bright Eyes. He is also Oberst’s housemate back in Nebraska. The fans, he says, used to be “college English majors,” but in the past year all that changed. Now Oberst hides his identity when he signs into hotels so as not to be stalked by histrionic 14-year-old girls. “People are always giving him stuffed animals. Because what he writes is so honest, they feel like they know him personally. They tell him the craziest things that they would never tell anyone else.”

  We’re sitting in a cafe in Seattle. Across the street, kids mob the entrance to the club where Bright Eyes will play in two hours, looking from this distance like bees hovering around a hive—they’re not lining up so much as waiting for a glimpse, a stray band member who might venture out of the green room. Whenever I glance out the window, there’s more of them—girls with pink hair, bespectacled boys, black thrift-store overcoats, Dr. Seuss shoes.

  Scott says that until this year, he never bothered to tune into the news much, but he’s scared now. He’s scared of the world. “Even if I didn’t know Conor, by now even I would have taken notice” of the looming war in Iraq, he says.

  Outside, a line has formed, stretching down the block. Kids sprawl on the concrete, drape themselves on the side of the club, take up room the way only high schoolers can. Even from here you can feel the suck of their longing, the weight of the secrets that they dare confess only to Conor Oberst. Maybe years from now they’ll be known as members of the generation startled out of puberty by 9/11. Or maybe we will know these kids, or their peers, as the ones who fought in the streets of Baghdad. But one thing is clear: if any generation ever needed a new Bob Dylan, this is the one.

  How to Make (Almost) Anything

  In 2000, Saul Griffith—then a grad student in the MIT Media Lab—traveled to Guyana as a volunteer. Working with a retired optometrist, also a volunteer, he handed out recycled eyeglasses to people who would otherwise have none. The glasses had been collected in donation bins by a do-gooder organization in the United States and refurbished by prisoners. This, unfortunately, is still the state-of-the-art method for delivering eyeglasses to poor people in remote villages.

  “It was terribly depressing,” Griffith says. He remembers particularly the young road-crew worker who came to him one day. The fellow had waited a long time for glasses; a line of about two hundred people stretched out from the door of the community center, people patiently shifting from foot to foot near gutters clogged with water lilies. The guy had terrible vision, though otherwise he was the picture of health, a handsome charmer, in fact. Griffith searched through boxes for something that would address the man’s nearsightedness and astigmatism, and he found just one pair that would work: pink cat-eyes with rhinestones at the tips.

  The man laughed and said, “I’ll never get laid in those.” Then he left without his glasses, walking back out into the smeared sunlight and indistinct streets with his pride intact.

  That’s when Griffith decided it just didn’t make sense to try to match people with recycled glasses. He estimates that each pair he fitted cost about a hundred dollars, if you figure in airfare for volunteers, jeeps, refurbishing, shipping, etc. He thought it could be cheaper to bring small factories to rural villages, and to make eyeglass lenses on the spot. “Usually, you need 2,400 prescriptions to cover a population. It’s terribly hard to have that inventory” in a remote village in Africa or India, he says. “I asked myself, ‘What about a manufacturing system? Can I allow someone to be their own manufacturing center and service 10,000 people?’”

  You might say that he was exactly the right person to explore this question. At the Media Lab, Griffith belonged to a milieu—and indeed, helped create a milieu—of designers who are excited about the advent of cheap manufacturing.

  Neil Gershenfeld, a professor at MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms, calls them “personal fabrication”
machines—affordable devices that will let us mold anything from plastic to computer chips. Gershenfeld already uses one. By hooking together a series of off-the-shelf fabrication tools, he has created a machine that can itself make machines. “This technology is here today,” he says of his rig. It costs about $20,000 for all the equipment, but prices are dropping quickly. With a milling machine, a laser cutter, a vinyl cutter, a PC and some “glue software” to let the machines talk to each other, you’ve got enough power to etch your own circuit chips and sculpt any flat shape you want out of wood, acrylic, copper, or what-have-you. Gershenfeld encourages MIT students to dream up new uses for such fabrication tools in his popular class, “How To Make (Almost) Anything.”

  He has also set up one of his machine-making machines at the South End Technology Center in Boston, a community center where anyone can drop in to learn computer skills. There, he says, “eleven-year-old girls are making circuit boards.” The kids use a PC and a milling machine to hardwire instructions into logic chips, and then they drop those chips into their own rudimentary gizmos, for instance, a Pac-man shaped joystick.

  “I have a student,” Gershenfeld says, “who will graduate when his thesis can walk out of the printer.”

  Griffith is frying eggs, gingerly holding the spatula in his injured hand. A wound runs like a dotted line across his palm and fingers. Kite-surfing accident, he says. Griffith invents or alters much of his own sporting equipment, a collection of Mad Max skateboards with fat tires, as well as kite boards made out of plywood planks and pink insulation foam from Home Depot. Gashes come with the territory. On his web site, he has posted extreme close-ups of one of his past wounds, a slice that appears to go deep into his foot.

  Eggs done, Griffith crashes into the living room, shoving away papers, bits of wire and dirty mugs to make space on the table so he can eat his breakfast—I’ve come by his place at nine in the morning, which is painfully early for a guy in graduate school. When he’s finished, we take a look at the eyeglass-lens printing machine, which sits in a closet just off the living room. Griffith has just invented this suitcase-sized factory; it makes eyeglass lenses for any prescription. And it could change the lives of one billion people in the world who need glasses but don’t have them.

  “This is the bottom half of the machine,” he says, pointing to a device the size of a VCR. In its center, a piece of silver foil stretches over a circular frame. Griffith works a hydraulic pump, sucking fluid out from under this foil, which dimples downwards to form a lens shape. You can buy the foil at your local auto-parts store: it’s the stuff used to tint windshields. The fluid that Griffith pumps in and out is baby oil—and it gives the machine its own particular aroma, a faint smell of beaches and tanning.

  Here’s how the machine would work in the field: When the client hands you a prescription, you adjust the foil to the appropriate curvature, pour liquid acrylic into the resulting lens mold, wait a few minutes for the acrylic to harden, and—presto!—you have the front slice of the lens, the part that corrects near-sightedness or farsightedness. The back piece of the lens—the part that corrects astigmatisms—gets molded in a similar baby-oil contraption. A gallon of liquid acrylic costs about nine dollars, and a gallon goes a long way, so the resulting lenses would be very cheap.

  It’s the world’s first machine to print eyeglass lenses on the fly, and the feat has caused something of a sensation. This year, Griffith won the MIT-Lemelson Student Prize—one of the most prestigious awards for young inventors. He has since fielded hundreds of e-mails from people who want to buy the machine right now. The trouble is, Griffith only has one machine, this one, and the road from prototype to shrink-wrapped package will be long and expensive.

  “People call you up and say, ‘Oh we love it,’ and waste hours telling you how wonderful your idea is. You say, ‘All I need is money to get it from here to product’ and that’s when the call ends.” It would cost Griffith from half a million to five million dollars to get his product to market. When you’re designing tools for people who live on $2 a day—it can be especially difficult to raise that kind of money for research and development.

  But Griffith has a plan: call it his first-world strategy. “Bifocals, trifocals, and progressives,” he says. Baby boomers need glasses that are customized for hobbies that involve both close and far vision. “My father plays golf and the progressive glasses that he uses in his office don’t work for a golf swing,” Griffith says. “You can imagine people having different progressives for all their different activities,” from photography to knitting to gardening. With a few tweaks, Griffith says, his machine would be able to spit out customized lenses for fussy first-worlders, and that might help him fund the machine he really wants to make, the one for people who have no glasses at all.

  “Eyeglasses are the ultimate in personal fabrication,” he says, “because everyone has different needs.” It’s the eyeglass lens, that little chip of plastic that comes in thousands of curves, that argues for Griffith’s philosophy: We should be able to mold the things in our lives into any shape we want.

  Griffith is showing me one of his favorite books, The Boy Mechanic. When he himself was a boy mechanic in Sydney, his mom (artist) and dad (textiles engineer) presented him with this how-to guide aimed at junior Edisons, originally published in 1913. It was one of the few such books they could find. “Why hasn’t another book like this been written in the last hundred years?” Griffith asks. “Maybe because of liability.”

  Liability indeed. He opens up the cover to show me the illustration on the inside leaf, an engraving of a boy about to fly in a full-sized glider plane, which looks to have been patched together out of canvas and sticks. “They’re telling you to build a plane and you’re twelve years old,” says Griffith. “Look at this. You’re supposed to jump off a cliff.” He stabs his finger at a smaller illustration below. Now the boy stands at the top of a precipice. A dotted line shows his intended trajectory—over a steam train, across a river, and into some bushes beside a house.

  The Boy Mechanic also gives instructions for rigging a Ouija board to produce messages from the spirit world, counterfeiting money, and using a pipe bomb to skyrocket a mannequin high into the air. This was science education a hundred years ago. Girls did not exist at all. And everyone assumed that boys would be jumping off cliffs and blowing things up anyway, so why not teach them to build a steam engine while they’re at it? The book prepared young men for a world in which they would have to know how to handle stuff—they would fix their own tractors, build houses, grow food in the backyard. But over the last century, we’ve turned soft. We’ve grown awkward with hammers and looms, screwdrivers and sewing needles. We’ve become strangers in the land of stuff.

  Griffith plans to change all this. He hopes to help transform the next generation into tinkerers, boy and girl mechanics who will use a new class of desktop factories to design their own toys and, eventually, the world around them. “Adults are a lost cause. You’ve got to get the kids. You’ve got to do a Catholic church on them,” he says.

  Personal fabrication machines could be part of that transformation. He points out that the first generation of kids who grew up with home computers—Bill Gates, for one—learned to be software wizards and hackers. They understood the potential of digital code as their elders never could. Griffith believes that when kids get hold of milling machines and laser cutters and 3-D printers some similar magic will happen. The next generation, he believes, will be the stuff hackers.

  A year ago, Griffith found a new way to advance that cause. One day his friend Joost Bonsen, a graduate researcher at MIT, popped into his office with a big idea. “What we really need to do is create cartoons for kids and show them how to build things,” Bonsen remembers suggesting. By the next day, Griffith had roughed out a sketch for a one-page cartoon, which has since evolved into a series called Howtoons. In it, a cast of kids brainstorm better methods for lobbing marshmallows, shooting puffs of air, and covering their bodies in du
ct tape. While there’s some minimal plot in each strip, mostly these rubbery-looking tykes demonstrate how to build toys out of stuff you can find in the Dumpster—soda bottles being the favorite material. “We have an aspiration to put Howtoons on the back of soda bottle labels so that kids will think about how to continue to use the bottle instead of throwing it out—as a jet car, or jet boat, an underwater periscope, or a water-droplet microscope,” according to Bonsen. While the cartoons do not advocate blowing things up, they retain something of the cavalier spirit of The Boy Mechanic, as well as a muscular quality that strikes me as thoroughly Australian. For instance, one cartoon strip encourages kids to drill through steel, file a blade, and then skateboard across the ice with a sail (wearing a helmet). Griffith and Bonsen lab-test the projects and co-write the text for each cartoon. A professional illustrator does the drawing.

  Howtoons is not just a side project for Griffith—he believes the cartoon could be very, very big. Griffith and Bonsen are now negotiating a contract with a major publishing house that would release Howtoons as a kids’ book. They’ve hired a lawyer to hash out the TV and film rights. Currently, they post the cartoon on the Web (www.howtoons.org), and both Griffith and Bonsen want to make sure that any deals in the future won’t stop them from disseminating the cartoon for free to kids in developing nations, perhaps with the food and clothes that non-governmental organizations hand out. “Our founding goal is to get these Howtoons to everyone everywhere. We’re talking about translations—the top ten languages in the world. The first Howtoon has already been translated into Portuguese,” according to Bonsen. Every kid, they believe, should have access to MIT-style experimentation.