the death of everything

Writing Through Zizek

2012-01-16T23:31:00.002-05:00

from darkness past to light

as if a fuse had been lit

the explosive now a story told

a harvest culled

from a ladder that stretches back

it is not evolution

it’s realization –

something that’s been here

all along

the potentialities

the crushed dream of the future

encoded into history –

we are the materialized ghosts

of past generations

we bear the promise of a future

where our failures

are but seeds of victory

we live as future paradise

split with the pain of suffocation

“the present redeems the past itself

the new emerges

to resolve the unbearable tension of the old”

Fat Friday at History Lesson Pt. 2

2012-01-13T20:20:00.000-05:00

My brother Matt runs a bass-centric (mostly) music blog called History Lesson Pt. 2. I contributed this week's Fat Friday feature on a legendary bass player . . . or, in this case, a legendary bass line. Enjoy!

And follow Matt's blog. He does a lot of interesting stuff, and he's somewhat less of an asshole than I am at times.

Why I Like Occupy Louisville

2012-01-05T00:56:00.001-05:00

On the heels of some negative Occupy commentary …

So, I’m listening to the radio on the way home from work, and Louisville mayor Greg Fischer is being interviewed. He takes a call from someone who wanted to discuss Occupy Louisville. Right now, OL’s status is in question: they were originally given a permit (after being moved site to site several times, getting permits at each site) which has now expired. But the little square of land that OL had been shunted to apparently is operated by the board of public works instead of the parks department, which means that, technically speaking, there are no rules against overnight camping in the location. The city is now waiting for the courts to decide what is going on before they take any kind of action, so everything is currently in a more or less benevolent holding pattern.

In the meantime, the caller (let’s call him Sir Asshat) wants to know what Fischer thinks of Occupy Louisville. Asshat identifies himself as a “social justice” type of guy, inquires about the future of the OL site before opining that OL needs to be taken out to the East End (that’s where most of the rich people are), then proceeds to randomly drop a few liberal political signifiers totally unconnected to each other, and finally starts foaming on about his own visit to the current OL site. He blathered on about how disappointed he was, because it seems that the OL site has more homeless people than activists.

For shame!

Seems that said homeless people weren’t able to answer his questions about liberal political activism in any coherent manner. According to Sir Asshat, “I asked them some questions, and they were like, ‘Huh?’”. Asshat then went on to say that these “homeless mercenaries” where taking advantage of Occupy Louisville to get a warm place to stay, and didn’t really care about the politics of the Occupy movement.

“Homeless mercenaries”. Is it any wonder that people fucking hate liberals?

It seems that a large portion of the Occupy Louisville encampment is indeed composed of the homeless from the streets of Louisville. I’m not sure exactly how this evolved, but it is at very least a symbiotic relationship: OL is small in numbers, and the homeless bolster OL’s visibility. In return, the homeless become much more of a focus for Occupy Louisville … more than, say, student loan forgiveness, or other such bourgeois concerns … and, given the concrete day to day struggles of homelessness, the grand “branding” movement to push OWS into the mainstream political market is short circuited. The exact aspects of homelessness that push it away from Sir Asshat’s market liberalism are the things that make Occupy Louisville interesting to me.

At the end of the day, “social justice” liberal Sir Asshat implicitly wanted Mayor Fischer to close down the Occupy Louisville site because he didn’t approve of having homeless people representing the movement, to the point that he begrudges homeless people the warmth and shelter of Occupy Louisville tents. Sir Asshat apparently has no problem speaking for the homeless, just as long as he doesn’t have to see and hear them himself. Or take care of them. Kinda makes you wonder exactly for whom Asshat’s “social justice” applies.

Fischer, who is turning into a pretty astute political fellow, immediately guided the conversation away from Sir Asshat’s despicable implications, and talked about taking care of the homeless - which, for a pro-business Democrat, always turns back to jobs. Later, when one of the leaders of Occupy Louisville called in to counter Asshat (albeit in the most wet noodle way imaginable), he called Fischer to task over the homeless problem in the city. Fischer promised that, if (or, more accurately, when) the Occupy Louisville encampment is dismantled, he would make sure that social workers showed up first to facilitate the placement of all the homeless protesters into shelters. Louisville is actually “good” at taking care of its homeless, much like it is “good” at recycling: the homeless are sheltered, the recycling is carried away. Not that anyone in Metro government is getting to the core of the homeless problem, which is why a homeless presence at Occupy Louisville is so necessary; but for today, we will give Louisville a pass because it at least goes out of its way to get a roof over as many heads as possible.

Occupy Louisville is not the presentable face of Occupy. It’s not circus hippie drum circles, it’s not articulate young activists shouting and carrying clever signs. Like the Arab Spring, Occupy Louisville is driven by the disenfranchised themselves. More power to Occupy Louisville.

The 51st Revolution

2011-12-19T23:59:00.000-05:00

Ah, the annual report. Seems I was a bit pissy last year. Don't know why, don't care. It was what it was.

New job this year. Not a monumental difference, but this one's not killing me with the death of a thousand cuts . . . i.e., I come home with some energy and the ability to do more than just recover from the job. It's up to me to take advantage of that. So far, so good. I celebrated my first week of non-obscene holiday season working hours by writing a big chunk of crap and recording a new song I am rather fond of. A true memorial indeed!

Sometimes I feel like I'm in my early thirties, and just lagging behind. I have ideas, I've always had ideas . . . now, I know what I can do with my life. I have a plan with a main strategy and a secondary strategy, and both seem (simultaneously) executable. Kinda wish I would have figured this out twenty years ago, but it is what it is: and chances are, knowing where I was twenty years ago, I wouldn't have been able to pull this off back then. It's just . . . well, now there's a little bit more urgency to get something done. Time doesn't seem infinite anymore, even though it feels like I still have plenty of it.

Plenty of time? It wasn't that long ago that I turned forty, seems like . . .

The one thing I am starting to understand fully is the gift of age. It sort of snuck up on me, but I am feeling the depths of my age, and that (mostly) makes me very happy. It turns out that most of what I want out of life will come to me of its own accord, if only I am diligent in living the life I think is right. It doesn't make it easy, but what is?

Anyway, more crashing generalities (just like in years past), but there you have it. This ain't no damn confessional. I am grateful for my wife Sharri, my good friends (and they are many), and my family. I am looking forward to the future with growing impatience: I am just happy to greet every new day, even if it takes me forever to get out of bed to do it.

The Capacity to Affront

2011-12-07T22:00:00.005-05:00

UPDATE (12/16/2011): Dan has added the show here for all to enjoy! Go give it a listen.

I'm not an innocent when it comes to this. The very first time I stepped onto a stage with a guitar in my hands, at Bloomington's Second Story back in '86, the primary goal was to send a few shock waves through the crowd. We had two poets shout poetry over the top of each for a few minutes, then Tony, Matt, and I slunk out behind them, turned on the amps, and laid down brittle screeching sheets of noise for about ten minutes. Cognitive dissonance + sonic dissonance. Of course, we did this at a performance art showcase, so it went over like gangbusters.

Not so much at the next show, which was a rock show. Or an ALTERNATIVE ROCK show, as it was known at the time. People thought they got the joke the first time, but they didn't. The joke was not that we were destroying music, being specifically anti-musical; the joke was that music was already dead, and we were just playing with the pieces. The joke was not that we were making ourselves musical sacrificial lambs, inviting the hate of our audiences with noise specifically designed to incite said hate; the joke is that we loved these broken shards we were tossing out at our audiences, and if we didn't necessarily think we were a great band, we thought at least, for small discrete moments in time, we made great sound.

So, we soldiered on with Casio keyboard beats, primitive driving basslines, and incoherent dual guitar hooliganism. After a short time, we picked up a drummer who loved jazz, and built his own drum kit out of a combination of discarded drum parts, steel barrels, and PVC drain debris. The band got bigger, the band got smaller. Around 1990, we joined forces with the only other people as forceful and knuckleheaded as we were, the Sick City Trio (first just Dan Willems and Heather Floyd . . . Chris Willems strayed along soon enough). Sometime around 1995, the band ended up in Louisville. Then, in May of 2006, the band stopped playing together.

It's not directly germane to the discussion, but that band was The Belgian Waffles!. I mention it mainly because 1) it's a little context for today's discussion; and 2) because the band involves three of the Sick City 4 in addition to your (not so) humble author.

* * * * *

I don't get out as much as I would like to anymore, but what the fuck? I'm fifty years old, and twenty-five-year-old me would have expected much less out of the fifty-year-old me. In any case, I do my best to see Sick City 4 whenever possible, and not just because they are my friends. They are, to my mind, not only one of the best bands around, but one of the few that will surprise you with each and every show . . . hell, each and every note. So, when the word of the last minute booking came my way via what the kids are calling SOCIAL MEDIA these days, I cleared the calender. It was a Friday, and I was off work at six, and back in on Saturday at eleven, and my new lower-stress job was making me feel a little bit more social, so I headed out for the gig.

I finished eating dinner around eight, and started killing time before the gig by flipping through the channels. At a couple minutes after nine, I was delighted to find a U of L game on ESPN. Five minutes later, I realized that it was a home game, and that there was no way in hell I was going to find parking anywhere close to Harley's Main Street Tavern, which is less than a block away from the annoyingly-named KFC Yum! Center, a.k.a. the arena in which U of L plays basketball. So, I got out, and after running a grid between Brook and Fifth Streets, from Main to Muhammad Ali, I finally just parked in the YMCA parking garage about six blocks away. When I strolled into Harley's and ordered a High Life, it was about ten.

The game was going on still, and it was a tight one. Not a good game, mind you, but an exciting game: low on basketball beauty and execution, high on drama. Unlike a lot of out musical junkies, I am a huge basketball fan, so I was enjoying the game, waiting for the SC4 to start tearing it up after the game was over.

Now, what I should have realized but didn't is just how much game traffic would end up inside the bar after the game. Like I said, it was an exciting game, and it took the Cards one overtime to dispense of Vanderbilt. As soon as the game was over, the sidewalks were immediately flooded with fans, and the streets were flooded with cars . . . horns were honking, people decked primarily in red were choking the sidewalks and screaming "C - A - R - D - S CARDS!" or some such nonsense. I was chatting out in front of Harley's with Dan and Heather while they were having a cigarette, just killing a couple of minutes before they went on. Bart was out there too, spelling out shit at the top of his lungs in a faux-euphoric sporting bonhomie.

At that point, I was starting to get an idea of what would be going down very soon. When I first showed up, the majority of Harley's current patrons were killing time, watching the game, waiting for the music to start. After the game let out, the straights (for lack of a better term - you know what I mean) started flooding in, ordering buckets of Miller Lite, and generally enjoying the hilarity of Louisville's one point OT win. Out on the sidewalk, Dan, Heather, and Bart were chuckling over the chaos streaming out of the Yum! Center (hereafter to be referred to as "the arena"), and it wasn't clear to me if they had any inkling as to the scene that was getting set up. Dan mentioned it was too bad I didn't bring my guitar to sit in for the set; at that point, one of the Opposable Thumbs very kindly offered me the use of his rig. I thought about it, I really did: but I also had a feeling that there could well be some audience issues, and I tend not to respond kindly to audience heckling (I generally turn up the amp to the point that I am the only one able to stand the volume), so I thought it best I didn't participate.

I've talked to Dan since the show, but I'm not sure to this day if he had the same premonitions about the crowd that I did.

So anyway, after a fair amount of time, SC4 stepped in and started their set, and almost immediately, the basketball revelers stage left started showing signs of consternation. First it was the mugging "wtf is this shit" kind of lampooning, then visible mocking of the band, then outright hostility. They were yelling at the band, gesticulating, plugging their ears, the whole routine. At a certain point, one woman who appeared to be in her mid-40's approached Dan's recording microphone, apparently thinking it was a PA mic. As she started to grab it, I moved toward her to shoo her away, and whether she saw me or realized that the mic was plugged into a recorder right underneath it instead of a PA, she quickly moved away*.

Now, as far as SC4 sets go, this was a somewhat tame affair . . . or, as Dan put it to me the next day, "we were lobbing softballs at them all night". Dan was playing the baritone sax, Heather was on trumpet, and Bart was on drums. Without Chris on guitar, the volume was reasonably low (not that he tends to play loud anyway), and a lot of the surface atonality of the set was gone: after all, two horns (two single tones) can be resolved by the average human ear, but getting that third (and fourth, fifth, sixth, etc.) tone is what really drives dissonance home. So while some of the horn lines may have been aggressive and ragged to more mainstream ears, there wasn't a lot of actual dissonance going on.

It is also important to note that the instruments were not amplified in any way. Not that you really need to amplify anything in that space; but again, I'm just making the point that it wasn't particularly loud.

As you were facing the front of Harley's, the band was set on the left side, with the front door to the right. Dan was on the left, the Bart in the middle, and Heather by the door on the right . . . which turned out to be an unfortunate place for her.

As is their wont, the band was playing mostly long, sprawling improvs. Even beyond their disgust with the music, the crowd was frustrated with the lack of song breaks during which they could register said disgust. As it became clear the band wasn't leaving the stage anytime soon, different things started happening. A couple people took it upon themselves to walk up to Heather during the set (while Dan was dueting with Bart) to tell her how much the band sucked. From what Dan told me, they went into detail with her about exactly how each member of the band were deficient on their instruments. Other people walked out with their fingers in their ears. Somebody behind me was tearing up a paper tablecloth and lofting spitballs at the band. Some guy thought he would lampoon the band by coming up to the stage and doing a really silly dance . . . though how his making an ass of himself dissed the band I don't know. One of the regulars walked up to Bart between songs and requested "Mony Mony" or "Bonie Maronie" or some such shit. And then, there was the lady who tried to grab the mic earlier: she decided to post herself right in front of the band on Heather's side, and make a slashing gesture across her throat to try to get them to stop. And, when I say "making a slashing gesture", I don't mean giving the high sign; I mean she was jumping up and down, stomping her feet, whipping her hand across her throat, and twisting her face into a writhing mask of rage. By that time, it was pretty clear all this was starting to get on Heather's nerves, so I walked over to her side of the stage and stood in front of the crazy lady so Heather didn't have to deal with her anymore. At about that point, crazy lady decided to join some of her friends outside, where she could continue to express her displeasure by radiating ugliness through the front window.

By this point, the bar was emptied of a fair number of people. Apparently, the owner's son came in, saw what was going on, and got pissed off that he was losing paying customers by the boatload on what should have been one of his busiest nights. He collared the bartender who booked the show, who valiantly held the owner's son off for as long as he could, trying to let the SC4 finish their set. Meanwhile, Heather was looking more and more stressed, Bart was looking more and more amused, and Dan was COMPLETELY OBLIVIOUS. He just kept pounding along, focusing on his horn. Between songs, he would huddle with Heather and Bart, discussing what to play next, while both of them increasingly looked at him like "you really want to keep after these people?" . . . he told me the next day that he heard a lot of noise between the songs, but that he mainly heard people clapping (and yes, there were a handful of people who were there to enjoy the bands), so he just kept going on as originally planned.

About thirty five minutes into the set, the SC4 had chased a whole bunch of people out, the bartender was struggling to keep them from being booted off stage, angry lady was out front being angry with other patrons less than pleased with the night's musical entertainment, and a few of us left were immensely enjoying the carnival surrounding the set. At about that time, the band kicked into "Chad's Organ", which was much less of a softball than most of what had gone down previously. It was at that point that angry lady decided to make one more entry: I laughed out loud as she walked in the door and Dan, almost as if he sensed her there, let rip with an aggressive, growling, Ayleresque line punctuated with barking squeals. Angry lady froze, petrified by her fury - I was reminded of that old David Lynch comic strip, "Angriest Dog in the World" - before stomping back out. As great as that solo was (and it was quite a solo), it was angry lady who made "Chad's Organ" for me.

A couple minutes into the set closer, "The Burrito Song", the bartender couldn't hold off his boss any longer. He came up to Heather and Bart and sheepishly told them that the SC4 would have to give up the stage for the evening. Heather, who by this point seemed frazzled by the whole scene, said "It's our last song, why don't you just let us finish?", while Dan, still oblivious, had no idea what had been going on. By the time the SC4 had left the stage, Harley's had been subjected to a 45 minute long circus. The bartender (very) apologetically explained the situation, Dan realized for the first time that the band had emptied a good chunk of the bar, a couple Opposable Thumbs came up to apologize as well, and Heather and Bart were just packing their crap to get the hell out of there. For my part, I finished my beer, said my goodnights, and hiked the six blocks back to my car to head home and get some sleep so I could work the next day. I found out the next day that the Opposable Thumbs ran their way through a raucously satisfying set a little later, after things had time to calm down a bit.

A good account of the evening, complete with some nice pictures, can be found at American Gloam.

* * * * *

As I alluded to, I've had my share of confrontational situations like this, and have been shut down by everyone from the police to angry bar owners**. I used to have a little fun with it back in the day . . . it gave us a bit of a rep.

Nowadays, however, I don't have time for petty confrontation. I want to play in front of a crowd that at least wants to be there. And while I certainly don't mind a bit of heckling, I've got no interest in tearing down a room like we used to occasionally do. And, in that regard, I'm probably no different than Dan, Heather, and Bart.

I've also got a fair amount of sympathy for the bar manager who shut the SC4 down. I would be frustrated too if I saw the amount of money walking out the door on what should have been a very profitable night for me. In his place, I would have shut the band down inside ten minutes, bought everybody in the band drinks for the rest of the night, and promised to bring them back on a Sunday or weekday night when U of L was playing out of town and the arena was dormant. And then I would have made very sure that the bartenders who booked the place realized that the primary purpose of a business is to make money, and that, like it or not, we have to cater to arena crowds. If you want to bring the freak scene on an off night, by all means do so. Just don't mess with my pocketbook.

As for the bartender, he probably didn't see that there would be a problem. We all tend to believe that if we like something, it should at least be tolerable to everyone else . . . of course, we can now see that's not the case. And, it should be said, he did his absolute best to buy the SC4 enough time to finish their set, and was very apologetic when they didn't. For that matter, the Opposable Thumbs folk were very nice too. I hope to see them soon when they aren't playing past my bedtime.

As for the people like angry lady, I have no sympathy. If I'm out, and I stop by my favorite watering hole to get a drink and a karaoke sing-along breaks out, I don't bitch: I move along. I hate karaoke with a passion, and I will leave any place that is doing karaoke, but I don't try to stop it, or bitch about it to the bartender or manager, and I certainly don't stand at the front of the stage making throat-slash gestures to the fake singers. Singer songwriters generally annoy the hell out of me, but I don't walk up onstage and tell them how lame their navel-staring is; I move along. If a Hank Jr. wannabe is rocking it out from the stage when I walk through the front door, I don't fret; I leave.

At the end of the day, I've got to thank angry lady for a whole new level of entertainment. Seeing you make an ass of yourself was a blast. Your crippling consternation was a great show, and it's nice to know it's still possible to offend people like you.

To the rest of you: see you at the next Sick City 4 show.

Sick City 4 can be heard here. If you're all very good, maybe Dan will put up a tape of the show under discussion.
____________________
* Ironically, something very similar happened to The Belgian Waffles! at a club called Sparks that was just a couple blocks east of the current Harley's location. It was in the late 90's, we were on stage, and some coked-up young miss grabbed the recording mic, yelled into it semi-coherently until she realized it wasn't going through the PA; whereupon she decided to get on stage and start yelling into the vocal mic which was temporarily abandoned. I'm not clear what she was yelling about, but it was kinda like Abby Hoffman at Woodstock during The Who's set, except nobody in our band whacked the cokehead diva off the stage with a guitar (we just turned up and kept rolling). The big difference between Sparks and Harley's is that Harley's was full of "straights", while Sparks was a dreadful "cutting edge" hipster joint. Just goes to show our ability to alienate does not discriminate. And yes, a recording does exist.

** Let's see: shut down more than once at Second Story, very pointedly told we would never play again at Flashbacks (a short-term incarnation of Uncle Pleasants in the late 90's), Twice Told Coffeehouse, Butchertown Pub, shut down by the police at almost every house party we played in Bloomington . . .

YouTube Spree!

2011-11-25T00:43:00.000-05:00

. . . over at the Tumblr. feed, notes toward everything. 20 choice slices of blues and jazz. Hey, you've got the internet on your TV, right? Fire it up!

I Am No Longer # 2362

2011-11-19T01:57:00.006-05:00

15 years with one company . . . I was employee # 2362. It started out at 0001. There were, like, 11 stores when I started. The employee numbers went all the way up to 9999, then started with letters (A0001, A0002, etc.). They've run through the alphabet for the first character, and now they're back to one with an alpha second character. I think now it is up to 1K01, or something like that.

They are now up to almost 200 stores. Chicago just opened up, St. Louis is next. The East Coast is more or less covered; at this point, the only thing stopping expansion seems to be the Mississippi River. It's a big company. It's a different world. 15 years ago I joined a company with a bunch of gunslinger salesman wearing suits, some cheap & some not, some refugees from car lots, some retail masters on their way straight to the top. The thing that impressed me immediately is just how good the store managers were, bold sort of FUCK YOU individualism applied to retail theory, the idea that there was theory, a sort of philosophical give and take . . . this was pretty much the top of the retail world, and the numbers showed that.

There will be time for full perspective on this . . . but right now, I'm celebrating with bourbon & sodas and dark (72% cocoa) chocolate. There is a book here, and I really need to write it. Zig Ziglar & Karl Marx. Death of a Salesman? Way too easy . . . but, it's here, and the microcosm expands neatly to the macrocosm, so it fits . . . (John Philip Sousa marches running across each other like Ives compositions, postmodernized with Americana darkness . . .) . . . yeah, I want to collapse this down, but, at the end of the day, it's the END OF A JOB, nothing more, nothing less.

I was 2362. When new employees got their number, they were like "2362? What's up with that? There are no letters in your number!" I was the "old guy" around, the guy that indoctrinated the newbies to the company philosophy . . .

The things I've done . . . school, 6 years. First marriage, 5 years. Second marriage, STILL ROLLING! First band, 20 years . . . thank God, the longest thing in my life is a band, not a job . . .

I am no longer 2362.

Colors are Transmissions

2011-10-31T03:03:00.002-04:00

“colors are transmissions”

you said

“transmissions from somewhere else”

you always crave transmissions

from somewhere else

shortwave radio broadcasts

rife with the chi of center earth

public access television

from deep in a rainforest

snippets of exotic musics

raining down

dust from the stars . . .

you sit tucked into a corner

your face pressed against a small window

wanting another street

magical, luminescent

other –

you would leave your room, go

down into that gray street,

have someone stake you bus fare,

if only you knew where to go

Untitled

2011-10-23T23:33:00.001-04:00

an audience recording of The Feelies

somewhere in

Germany

, sometime in ‘88

you hear air

distance

split

those kids singing in those accents

jangle like seltzer

bitter

broken disassociated split

at the back of your head like nostalgia

but not nostalgia, the gnaw cold

and the jitter, and the jangle

code deep

a face of vertigo

coming out, the other end of a

very long sentence that has

long ago abandoned recognizable

grammar, subjects and objects

cartwheel over each other

it was, at one time,

a happy reel, I suppose

Untitled Autumn Poem

2011-10-16T01:30:00.004-04:00

fragility of sun filtering

back through tall, weedy trees

made explosive by gold autumn

I will never see that light again

in exactly the same way . . .

at the same angle

with the same foliage

even now turning brown

& driven groundward by wind

the branch precariously balanced

since last winter stays, but the day comes

when it is thrown down

when even that which is permanent

is thrown down

- to come around again

different, or the same

a series of notes played the same

on a different piano

a keening harmony shifting

melody around it,

always coming back, the same

different and everything

with this day a point on the arc

The Steve Jobs Memorial iPhone App

2011-10-10T00:52:00.002-04:00

I was a bit taken aback by the outpouring of grief for Steve Jobs … I had no idea that so many people would take the loss so personally. And I had no idea that he would be cheered as such a “great American”. I wonder if Bill Gates will engender such a deeply personal reaction when he passes?

Now, don’t get me wrong: if you are a great believer in American capitalism, then Steve Jobs should be a hero to you. He is, unquestionably, one of the great capitalists of his generation.

And I understand that many people have a deep fondness for the gadgets he developed. I know many people who swear by Macs, and won’t even touch a PC unless it is absolutely necessary. I hear the testimonials about how the iPod changed the whole musical landscape, though I don’t buy that for one minute.* I see the people who fetishize their iPhones and iPads, and though I can appreciate them as cool little toys, they are far from “game changers” as far as I can see.

I do not own a single device that was created directly by Apple (though, not being a techie, I may have some devices with Jobs-developed tech in them and not know it). I never got a Mac because they were/are expensive and don’t play well with other computers. I never got an iPod because they have obnoxiously proprietary software, and they don’t play well with the online music sites I subscribe to (though, that aside, I do think they are the finest portable music devices currently made). I haven’t got an iPad because, frankly, given the amount of typing I do on a computer, it would be of much less use to me than a laptop, and you can get a pretty decent laptop for the price of an iPad. I do lust after an iPhone to a small degree, but the stupid phone that I currently have serves my needs well enough (plus I don’t have to pony up for a ridiculous plan just so I can check scores on my phone when I’m stuck at work).

Indeed, the proprietary nature of all of Jobs’s hardware seems anti-democratic (“If you want the cool stuff, you have to pay for the cool stuff, and you have to buy it from me. And you not only have to buy the hardware from me, but the software as well. And you’re going to have to pay extra, because this is, after all, the cool stuff.”). The proprietary nature of his tech was designed to create a self-sustaining market for his products. More than creating cool stuff, Jobs was interested in cornering a market by creating cool stuff. The cool stuff was not the end, it was the means, with market domination as its end. To me, he’s nowhere near being in the same league as whoever it was who introduced consumer-grade recordable media to the general public … now there was a guy/gal/team of folk who really changed things.

There is the air of hipness around Apple, an air of exclusivity. I don’t think it is a stretch at all to think of Apple products as fetish objects. And while I do appreciate that there is a level of high design to everything that Jobs touched, I don’t think that Apple products are held in the regard they are simply because of their quality: it’s all about fashion, and it’s fashion dictated by marketing. At the end of the day, Jobs’s real triumph was not in technology, it was in marketing.

Please do not take this as a criticism of Steve Jobs: I live with a designer, I have designers in the immediate family, I understand the value of design. Design was the cornerstone of his marketing, and even if marketing was his real triumph, design was essential to his marketing campaign. He was very, very good at what he did. The only problem I have is that I’m not sure all the eulogizing takes into account what he really did.

Again, Jobs was the consummate capitalist. I can admire him in the same way that I admire a consummate basketball coach … Bobby Knight, say. Furthermore, as far as I know, Jobs conducted his business in a relatively moral and forthright way, given the morality and rules of capitalism. I have no problem whatsoever with Steve Jobs as capitalist.

But I do have a problem with Steve Jobs as cultural icon. The kind of culture that worships Steve Jobs is a culture reduced to a glossy magazine ad. Or, perhaps more accurately, a culture reduced to a trendy lifestyle-enhancing iPhone app.

____________________

* That argument could be made for the faceless Japanese engineer/design team at Sony who invented the Walkman, thereby changing dramatically the role of music in our lives. The iPod, to me, is an updated Walkman with a big promotional campaign.

Thaddeus Russell's Dead Horse; or, Philosophizing With a Shotgun

2011-10-04T02:15:00.001-04:00

A Renegade History goes deeper. It goes beneath what the new "social history" portrayed as the bottom. It tells the story of "bad" Americans - drunkards, prostitutes, "shiftless" slaves and white slackers, criminals, juvenile delinquents, brazen homosexuals, and others who operated underneath American society - and shows how they shaped our world, created new pleasures, and expanded our freedoms. This is history from the gutter up. -- Thaddeus Russell, A Renegade History of the United States, from the Introduction.

So goes Russell's mission statement from the very first page of the book . . . and he sticks by it relentlessly, starting with a concept and slotting any and all facts at his fingertips to buttress this "radical" view of the world.

Nietzsche said he philosophized with a hammer. Russell, if he "philosophizes" at all, philosophizes with a shotgun. A sawed-off shotgun, to be precise. And like a sawed-off, no matter how much impact there may be up close, once you step back, it largely looses its effect.

In case it's not clear, it is Russell's thesis that the refuseniks of our culture are the ones who have defined our culture. Further, it is these refuseniks who have defined our freedom by stretching what is allowed by the dominant culture. All this by simply refusing to play along with the establishment. See how easy that is? So, maybe those Wall Street protests will work after all . . .

Seriously, though, it is something worth spelling out: how do the refuseniks, the underclasses, the renegades, the "bad" people, whatever you want to call them, create the America we live in right now? Russell clearly here is not taking the same tack as Howard Zinn; that is, he's not fitting them into a Marxist narrative as to what the history of the "people" is - it's clear that Russell's "people" aren't Zinn's "people", thought they are both, by and large, talking about the same people. And that is to Russell's credit, even if it isn't necessarily to Zinn's detriment.

There are two basic related problems to Russell's book: first, like Zinn, he's too quick to slot given people and events into his system, to interpret history for his own purposes. Like Zinn (even more so, I would say), he starts from the conclusion and works backwards. This, in and of itself, is not a problem: if the "facts" line up with the conclusion, and the conclusion is an interesting and/or useful one, then we could work with it.

That, unfortunately, leads to his second problem: what exactly is this system, this solution, that he is proposing? Well, as far as I can tell, he simply wants to posit that the common man defines history against the system, that man defines culture in opposition to civilizing (hegemonic mainstream) influences. He is, of course, defining the monolithic vision of the great American Individualist in frankly libertarian terms, and moreover, making that the centerpiece of American History . . .

. . . which, to me, far from sounding revolutionary, seems to be the same bill of goods we've been sold since the idea of an American state existed, even if Russell trades whores, queens, jazz musicians, and drug addicts for the farmers and industrialists of the original American myth. Like the idea of a new class of mainstream black capitalists as revolutionaries of race in America, it is not convincing . . . the names and faces have changed, but the song remains the same.

At the end of the day, there's no question that Russell's "renegades" have helped define current American culture; it's pretty self-evident, even beyond the whole "flap of a butterfly's wings causes a typhoon in China" sort of complex system dynamics. It is also self-evident that American culture is equally defined by the millions of people who do very ordinary mainstream things, like working a normal job, going to church, etc. And while it may be worth discussing exactly how this "renegade" dynamic works, Russell doesn't do it with any kind of insight that might be interesting. As a matter of fact, it's this lack of insight, accelerated to an unwillingness to even think through the topic that is practically anti-intellectual, that makes this book ultimately not worth reading. That, and the fact that he could have exhausted the thesis of the book in a short paper.

* * * * *

All that said, there are some interesting discussions here. I will (hopefully) pick up one or two of them before the Christmas retail season shuts everything else down. I do think there is some importance to understanding where and how Russell goes off track.

Music in Fiction

2011-09-29T03:31:00.000-04:00

We're used to opera, musicals, music in drama, music and dance. The soundtrack is recognized as an essential part of a movie, as important as the cinematography, the sets, the dialogue, and the acting. Some of the greatest composers of the 20th century, guys like Ennio Morricone, Nino Rota, and Bernard Herrmann, are primarily movie composers. Quentin Tarantino is brilliant in his use of pop music in film: he understands pop music not only in its vital soundtrack function, but he understands how pop music functions as cultural indicator, and how that can weave another level of meaning. It is this "cultural naming" function that is the primary value of music in fiction.

One of the things I do when I'm writing a character is to figure out what kind of music he/she listens to, and how music functions in his/her life. I may not necessarily bring it up in the story, but I usually know what my characters listen to. In a couple of cases, I've gone so far as to put together playlists or load up mp3 players with music for my main characters, and listen to that music while I am writing the story. It's a pretty easy way to define a character, since we (especially we Americans) have used music to define ourselves since the dawn of the jazz age; but it also can be very lazy shorthand.

Frank Bill doesn't use music in this way in Crimes In Southern Indiana, but he does make a mistake that bugs the hell out of me when I run across it: the bogus soundtrack provided by the radio. In this conceit, a character turns on the radio and a song is playing, and that song is meant to be the soundtrack for the scene. That, of course, requires that the reader be infinitely familiar with the song and/or artist . . . it is almost as if the writer plants the song in your head so he has a soundtrack. Now, if the music is tied into the characterization, I don't have a problem with that (if it's done right); but it's cheating just to use the song for backdrop, for atmosphere. Bill mentions specific music only twice in the book, so it's a very minor problem for him . . . but it is a problem. First of all, I think he's using it sketch atmosphere, and as I said, I think it's a cheat. Secondly, both times a character turned on the radio, and there was either a Johnny Cash or a Dock Boggs song on the radio. Okay, that's just not realistic: the only way you'll turn on the radio in Southern Indiana and hear either Johnny Cash or Dock Boggs is to pick up the Louisville public radio station on a Sunday night. There's no way a bunch of ultra-violent tweakers or tragically doomed redneck fishermen drinking Natty Lights out of styrofoam coolers tucked away in the front of their pickups are going to be cruising around Southern Indiana listening to Louisville public radio. Now, there is a spot on the dial down here that plays old-time country, but even then, the Cash songs are few and far between, there's no Dock Boggs whatsoever on that station. And again, the audience is either the folk who were old enough to hear the music first time around in the 50's, 60's, and 70's (and are probably much more interested in Jim Reeves or Eddie Arnold than Johnny Cash), or they are hipsters, not tweakers and rednecks. It throws a kink in the characterization, if you know what I mean. I can totally see where, at that point in the movie, a Dock Boggs song comes up on the soundtrack, but not on the radio. Lynyrd Skynyrd makes sense, not Dock Boggs.*

Like I said, not a huge problem for Bill. But look at this name-check pile that Elmore Leonard drops in Mr. Paradise:

I like to go to clubs and wave my arms in the air, thrash around, get down with the beat. I think there's more energy here than in New York, a working-class audience getting their release. You know what I mean? I've seen Eminem at the Shelter, in the basement of St. Andrews? Iggy at the Palace, back with the Stooges. Hush, white hip-hoppers, and the Almighty Dreadnaughtz at Alvins. Karen Monster, a cool chick, the Dirt Bombs, they're high-speed Detroit punk. The Howling Diablos any Sunday out in Berkley. There's a new band called the Go, kind of glam but they're okay. Aerosmith I love, they keep coming back to town.

Obviously, besides name dropping Iggy for, like, the hundredth time, it looks like all Mr. Leonard did was go pick up some free weekly rag in Detroit and drop a few names onto the page . . . Jesus, what a mess. Where to start?

Well, this little diatribe is meant to tell us something about the femme fatale of Mr. Paradise, Kelly Barr. It seems that Ms. Barr, in addition to being a music aficionado, is a fashion model best known for her appearances in the Victoria Secret catalogue (the novel opens with Kelly and her Playboy-bunny-high-dollar-escort-soon-to-be-murder-victim roommate Chloe having cocktails in a bar when Kelly is approached by the frumpy waitress who idolizes her for an autograph). Ms. Barr is twenty-seven. This novel was written sometime around 2002. So, let's start with Iggy: the final Stooges performance was indeed at the Palace, on February 9th, 1974. Which would have made young fan Kelly approximately . . . ready to be conceived. And even if we allow that she could be referring to the 2003 reunion, that show was at Pine Knob, not the Palace.

But it goes deeper than this kind of knit-picking. We are talking about music as a sense of identity, and even if you choose music of locality to be your marker, then you are still stretching. Who in the hell identifies with Aerosmith (a Boston band, by the way, which kind of throws a monkey wrench in the locality thing), the Dirt Bombs, and Eminem? The crossover there is extremely limited, and the musical taste demonstrated is democratic, to say the least, and doesn't define the character at all. But even more crucial is the language: this is not the language of a twenty-seven year old who is "hip" enough to be into the Dirt Bombs. "Get down with the beat?" Who under the age of fifty would say that? "Working class audience getting their release?" I would lay money that a Victoria Secrets model hasn't used the term "working class" outside of school . . . and even if this "chick" was "hip" enough to be down with the "working" "class", she wouldn't talk about the sweat and dank of a Detroit club being a "working class audience getting their release". Besides, there isn't much of the working class left in Detroit; there are the rich, and the wage slaves of the service industry, which qualifies as sub-working class.

It's not only music that gets this treatment - fashion, cars, pop culture, all are there to be misunderstood. Mr. Paradise is a dismal novel, and I say that as a Leonard fan. All it amounts to is a 291-page exercise in the misuse of pop-culture shorthand, as if it were written by a tragically square community college lit professor. It's a shame, because Leonard has produced some of the very cultural artifacts that any hipster should know.

And it's a shame because music can contribute a lot to fiction, if it is used with some intelligence.

_____________________
* I have only read Crimes in Southern Indiana once, and when I went back to find the two musical interludes in question, I was not able to find them. If I have misrepresented the circumstances in any way, please correct me in the comment section.

The Poverty of the Male Gaze [UPDATED]

2011-09-21T00:01:00.002-04:00

I've read a fair amount of Edward Abbey in my life, most notably in a tent pitched in the desert just outside Tucson on one of my Easter week trips somewhere between '98 and '03. Somehow I never got around to The Monkey Wrench Gang, an oversight I am now correcting.

Abbey gets all the characterization out of the way up front, in a very businesslike fashion: his main characters all get their own brief chapters right at the start, and then (I assume) we move on to the whole point of the story, the ACTION! Trouble is, Abbey is stubbing his toes a little bit when it comes to the characterization, especially when it comes to Bonnie Abzug, the woman of the crew at the center of the story.

The problem with Bonnie is this: 28 year old ex-dancer, spunky, heady enough to be aware of all the hip trends but too self-possessed to be sucked in (he lists her bookshelf only to go on about how the books are neglected), "sexy" (Abbey, in the narrator's voice, describes her as "half WASP", and then goes on to translate WASP as "white anglo sexy protestant"), and hard to get, but not unattainable . . . sort of like that Porsche you have to save up a long time for, but are able to afford by your mid 40's.

Frankly, it's kind of pathetic. It's the same problem that almost ruins Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy (The Girl With the Dragon Tatoo books): the liberated, sexual woman as imagined by the repressed middle-aged male libido. While Abbey's imagination at least seems to enable him to make characters like Hayduke and Sarvis a lot less annoying than Larsson's Blomkvist, the women are still a problem; Bonnie may be "liberated", but she sure as hell isn't liberated from the male gaze.

I had this idea knocking around my head tonight as I watched The Bourne Ultimatum on TV, when, lo and behold, a couple ads for new television series slotted themselves into the same thought: seems we are going to be treated to Mad Men riffs by the major networks in the form of two new series, one about Pan Am stewardesses, and the other about the Playboy club. I can just tell by the ads that these series, though they may be politically correct (as are Abbey and Larsson), that they too will be the product of some filtered, sanitized, and ultimately sexist libido . . . probably not exactly a middle-aged libido, but close enough. Mad Men, you see, for all the mid-century estrogen flowing from the tube, has a complexity about it that the repressed middle-aged (or, for that matter, mainstream commercial) libido does not recognize. There is no question that Mad Men sexualizes its characters, both male and female (indeed, that is one of the central themes of the show), but it also addresses the complexities and multivalences of its characters, which liberates it from the repressed middle-aged male libido, or any libidos that would contain it outside the libido that the characters transcribe for themselves.

Sexualization itself is not the problem: the problem is the poverty of the typical Western middle-aged male libido . . . or, to put it another way, the mainstream (white, Western) male has no sexual imagination. Hayduke is short and hairy, Sarvis is old and fat, Smith is skinny and gawky, but Bonnie is a nearly perfect specimen, with no human flaws to define her? Why does Bonnie have to be a dancer (that is a real hippie-60's/70's thing, by the way)? And, if she's a dancer, why does she end up having to be a stripper? And if she is a dancer/stripper, where is the erotic motivation for her? Or, if there is no erotic motivation, what are the socio-cultural forces that pushed her that direction? Where is Bonnie situated on this physical/sexual/cultural axis? These questions aren't answered for a simple reason: dancer/stripper is imagist shorthand for SEXY BABE . . . and here, "imagist shorthand" should read "stereotype". And it's not just the female characters who suffer in this scheme: Lisbeth Salander as a portrait sketched by the male libido was bad enough, but the whole Bomvkist-as-Don Juan thing almost destroys the novels. I'm not far enough into The Monkey Wrench Gang to find out if Bonnie Abzug is going to sink the novel, but I doubt she will, since I expect Abbey to focus on the ACTION, now that the annoying task of characterization is out of the way.

I understand that it is hard to write female characters, and I know from experience: the only interesting female character I have written so far is a six foot, two hundred pound, lesbian African American bodyguard, and I have written her so butch it barely counts. It is too much to expect every male writer to write perfect female characters; but, given the fact that these stories are our cultural narrative, it is important to understand them for what they are.

And now, back to The Monkey Wrench Gang.

* * * * *

UPDATE: Okay, I am going to let Abbey off the hook for this one.

First, while The Monkey Wrench Gang is narrated third person omniscient, the narrator is an unreliable one. Throughout the book, Abbey's own personality takes control of the narrative, from the descriptions of the desert, to the bias against "everything big" (government, business, military, police, etc.), to the obvious targets he sets up (among others: universities, "book larnin'", R. D. Laing & Buckminster Fuller - man, he really hates those geodesic domes), all the way down to sly, pointed one-liners in the voice of the narrator instead of one of the characters.

So why does he get (partial) absolution just because he is showing his hand more obviously than, say, Stieg Larsson? It is precisely this unreliability which makes him more acceptable: you either take him or leave him, essentially treating him like one of the characters in the book. This drawing down of the objective narrator into the subjective realm humanizes the narrator, asks you to overlook his flaws.

So why wouldn't you overlook Larsson's flaws in the same way? Well, because Larsson's narrator does not break the seal of objectivity in the same way that Abbey's does. The narrator remains essentially invisible in the Millennium Trilogy, which asks you to accept the narrative structure as fact. The male gaze undermines this narrative structure, calling everything within the narrative structure into question. This is especially problematic because the Millennium Trilogy is almost naively leftist, and if one of the pillars of Western Leftism (feminism) is questioned, then everything that extends from this leftist point of view is also called into question.

To me, it maps like this: Edward Abbey, narrator, is saying to the reader "I have a story. This is my story, and it has me in it. To hear this story, you will have to put up with me . . . but hang around, I promise it will be worth it." Stieg Larsson, on the other hand, is saying "Here is a story. It is true." How much more of a deficit will problems be for Larsson than for Abbey?

Second, Abbey is much more about ACTION than Larsson is. Both are dealing in culturally seismic milieus, but Abbey is painting the whole novel in broad strokes, like storms sweeping across the desert. Larsson, on the other hand, is taking a piece of thriller genre fiction and deepening it with a heady dose of cultural/political tension. You can forgive Abbey characters boldly painted because they serve a larger narrative. Larsson's characters, on the contrary, make a claim for more profundity at the precise point they are called into question (i.e., from a point of view that has come to be called "politically correct" around these here parts).

In the end, feminism may be problem for both writers, but I am much more willing to put up with Abbey the curmudgeon than Larsson the clueless middle-aged white liberal. Larsson's Millennium trilogy is fun reading, but The Monkey Wrench Gang is what the folks would call a ripping yarn.

Forget

2011-09-11T23:59:00.004-04:00

So, what is it that we a remembering now?

That we are not immune to the horrors of the world?
That we are capable, in extreme moments, of extreme sacrifice & extreme selflessness?
That, when allowed time to "think" about things, it is actually our fears & emotions that take over?
That the quest for justice can be perverted with disastrous, evil results?
That the world is awfully damned quiet when all the planes are grounded?
That our capacity for exploitation knows no bounds?
That people with the will to do harm can do enormous harm against very long odds?
That the enemy of our enemy is not always our friend?
That chickens come home to roost?
That people will come up with the most outrageous explanations to avoid that which they do not want to face?
That assassination and murder are the same thing?
That war by another name is terrorism?
That the ends justify the means?
That the ends don't justify the means?
That one horrible act can became an excuse for a lot more horrible acts?
That nothing is ever clear?
That almost nobody is right when it comes to this?
That myriad & endless eventual minutiae can be roped into the same narrative, robbing such event of meaning and substance, no matter how monumental said event was/is?
That those ah-rabs hate our freedom?
That there is a whole 'nother reality that we have only begun to be introduced to?
That bin Laden is/was Satan?
That bin Laden was a revolutionary?
That we helped create the very terrorist organization that is responsible for 9/11?
That our jingoism knows no bounds?
That, if Japan had nuked us instead of vice versa, this event wouldn't seem as monolithic?
That we really don't like it when the war is brought to us for a change?
That people running for office know no shame?
That there are people, ordinary people, who pay the ultimate price for things that happen far beyond their muster?
That this horrible act harmed not only innocent citizens of New York and Washington, but innocent citizens of Afghanistan and Iraq, not to mention collateral damage in Britain, Spain, Pakistan, India, Palestine, Israel, Syria, etc.?
That violence begets violence?

That the sun always rises in the morning?

In the mouths of far too many, "REMEMBER 9/11" is empty sloganeering. It is nothing more than lip service to a demographic, a bumper sticker that signifies your club. It is all about the speaker, not those about whom we speak.

In the mouths of far too many, "REMEMBER 9/11" is a call to war against that which they refuse to understand, an empty blanket of words to protect them from the OTHER.

Some will not be able to forget, as much as they want to. For the rest of us, given the "lessons" that we have "learned" from 9/11, amnesia would be better . . . an entirely appropriate moment of tribute for the innocent victims and the heroes (yes, I will use that word) who tried to rescue them has been swallowed by flag waving USA! chants.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: REMEMBER 9/11 is the victory of the people who brought down the towers. Their place in our fears is ultimately exactly what they hoped for.

The past returns to us like a ghost, haunts us . . . handcuffs us to a history that we can't escape, or believe we can't escape. To move forward, we must overcome the past, actively build our past into our own future . . .

. . . which indeed, is exactly REMEMBER 9/11 crowd are doing, but with disastrous results. It's one thing to write your past, but you must be responsible for it. The REMEMBER 9/11 crowd are handcuffing themselves to the ghost of burning buildings, to a future of vengeance and retribution. It is, indeed, an old specter, a film that has been running in a destructive loop almost since the beginning of remembrance, since the beginning of history. It is the haunting, the history we can't escape: it is the document of our extinction.

So let's turn our backs on all this jingoism. If we want to remember 9/11 at all, let's make it a Memorial Day for slaughtered innocents worldwide - not just here, not just then. Let's make it a day for those who are destroyed by forces of violence and repression everywhere. Not a victim's day, mind you, but a day to re-dedicate ourselves to the dreams of the lost, the dreams that perhaps they didn't even dare to dream. Let us make 9/11 a quiet memorial to the brotherhood of the common man.

In other words, let's forget 9/11.

Vacation, All I Ever Wanted

2011-08-02T01:32:00.005-04:00

I'm two weeks away from sipping a cocktail with the gentle lapping of the waves out the window behind me. And yeah, it's been warm (or, as the natives say, HOT) up there, but it's nothing compared to here. And even if it was, THERE'S A FREAKING LAKE RIGHT THERE.

My "beach" reading list (which, by the way, I'm entertaining the idea of reading on an actual beach once when I'm up there) is jam-packed with goodies. I should be done with Infinite Jest by then, but there's still plenty of stuff: I've been hauling around a copy of Zizek's Living in the End Times for a while now, & finally took it out of my backpack so I could fit the Wallace in. But, today I picked up a copy of his The Fragile Absolute at the Borders fire sale, along with a copy of Jean Baudrillard's The Transparency of Evil, so I may do that first.

(a brief aside here: since when is 20% off a real-deal bankruptcy sale? I mean, what's the big deal? Probably still more expensive than Amazon, and you know anything left over is going to be bought up by someone [probably Amazon] for, like, a penny on the dollar. Fortunately for me, the Philosophy shelf must be considered a real boat anchor, because everything there was marked down 30%, which is a little better, but still not exactly a fire sale, if you know what I mean. Of course, most of it is completely silly-assed shit like Lost and Philosophy, The Zen of the Simpsons, Postmodernism for Dummies, etc. Of course, Zizek being the current rock star, they have plenty of his stuff, so I'll probably pick up most of that if the discounts get deeper. And they have plenty of Nietzsche and Foucault, but I'm pretty well set there already.

But seriously, 20%?)

The real gem, the one I'll probably strap on first, is Thaddeus Russell's A Renegade History of the United States. That should be pretty fun. And, let's see, what else? I might drag along a copy of Freud's Civilization and It's Discontents, because I need to re-read that in the near future - there's something there that just may bridge some ideas in my mind. And of course, I'll drag along my Riverside Shakespeare in case I get in the mood, and I'm sure there's a new-ish Elmore Leonard joint I haven't read that I can rip through in a few minutes. I might have to see if there's any Faulkner left around the house I haven't read yet, though that's actually more appropriate for sitting on the back deck here at home, sweating into the pages. For poetry, I've been thumbing William Blake and Vicente Huidobro's Altazor recently, so I may take them both. Or maybe Mallarme or Jack Spicer instead . . . who knows?

Man, I'm already on vacation in my mind.

Reading on vacation is one of my favorite things in the world. The first full day I'm there, the day after the 10 hour drive, pretty much all I do is eat, drink, read, and sleep in the sun (and take a sunset cruise with dad and mom on the pontoon boat). Ever since I started really reading (which, for me, was pretty late - 18 or so), a big part of my vacation was spent with books. I remember certain summers by the books I read, like the summer I read The Stranger straight through without stopping, then immediately went back to the book store to buy a copy of The Fall, and did the same thing with it. Or the summer I read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and pretty much walked around in a daze for the rest of vacation. I commonly did the summer "beach read" (i.e., easier to zoom through) gig with crime novels, and that's when I fell for Elmore Leonard, Walter Mosely, James M. Cain, and Jim Thompson. Last year I did Stieg Larsson, and while I do have a few beefs with him, I've got to admit it was fun stuff, by and large. I also discovered that I would rather be reading John Fante whenever I have Raymond Carver in my hands. I remember reading all of Flannery O'Connor's short stories recently, and finding a nice Faulkner 4-in-1 at a used book store in Traverse City to follow it up. The reading is as much a part of the vacation as the water, and you can't take either away . . . especially now that Ernie Harwell is gone, and the Detroit Free Press is a mere shadow of its former self.

Vacation . . .

Oh, and GO TIGERS!!

Plato, the Poem

2011-07-11T17:15:00.001-04:00

shadows on the wall, he said

you don’t even see the thing

shadows of puppets in firelight

blink, rub your eyes, blinded

stare straight at the sun

feel the full burn of the light

until you can see, really see

then go back down

into the prison of night

swim through darkness, blind again

even the shadows are gone

even the consolation of the lie

is invisible

he said there are two phases

of blindness –

going from the dark up to the light

& going from the light down to the dark

before you call a man a fool

you best know

if his head is full of darkness, or light

Landscape: Weather Becoming Dolphy

2011-07-06T00:13:00.000-04:00

Hello friends. Hard to believe that it's almost all-star break already . . . need to crank up this summer a little bit for some fun. At least we haven't been getting hammered with heat like last year. Anyway, not much to write, so I thought I'd drop my favorite Eric Rensberger poem on y'all:

LANDSCAPE: WEATHER BECOMING DOLPHY

evidence of high wind

everything that gets so far off the earth

is returned to it thrown down

new growth starts up

the bones of what did tower

/and the animals get their backs and rumps roughed up from

bowing backward to the gale

/and the birds are made to skim an arm's length ahead of the

storm

/and the people are built with extra bracing, like houses

that expect the worst

and what's out there

the weather is the same as what's

in every human heart

bad trouble and energy

enough to make it real

/but over there on the edge of the earth is a black wood with

extra-human sounds in it

/and if the animals and the bent trees keep pointing in the

right direction

/and if only the wind can reach that far and then blow through

it and if

the right fingers appear

with their silver keys

unlocking faster and wider

than the wind can

slam shut the doors of

the wood, we'll finally hear

Dolphy before his head burst

playing how to live

between out and inward weather

and what's so beautiful about it

after all, what's so

important about someone

pulling melody after melody

out of his bountiful mouth

Damn, that's the shit, right there. Makes me think about the basement over on Gardner, punching amplifiers with horns and guitars, making them rage like wounded animals . . . or, even further back, the hollowbody Kay and the clarinet, the cramped apartment on the first floor of Rufer, we had to shut off the fan and close the windows during the take, then we ran outside with icewater just to get our body temperatures down after the take . . . or, all the way back to the decaying house on the ridge in Elletsville, bourbon flowing like water, Bob & Eric & me finding our way into the universe, howling like banshees . . .

You can find the poem here. You can get to the index of Eric's poetry site here. Maybe it's because I feel this stuff . . . but you should feel it too, because it's immortal.

Everything is swimming around, past images flashing like lightning . . . I'm feeling the need for a stiff drink right now . . . but cash is short, the liquor store across the street is closed, and morning is less than eight hours away. A little sonic cure will have to suffice: the Catkillers from '96 with me, Eric, and Rob Stockwell.

Wonderful World of Sound by billzink

Ah, that's the stuff.

Why Do You Think They Call It Noise?

2011-06-28T03:06:00.000-04:00

For the sake of context, I will point you to various musical projects I have been involved in, past and present. My band of 20 years has documentation here, my current band is represented here, and of course you can score some downloads at Bandcamp if you wish. An overview of what I do is at my Soundcloud page, which just happens to have a very sweet version of "Amazing Grace".

* * * * *

We called it noise when we started in the 80's; industrial noise, to be precise. But even then, what was called industrial noise was becoming restricted, reduced, and reterritorialized*. All these guys that were beating on metal together, I suppose it makes sense that, sooner or later, they grasped rhythm as the way to communicate. Or normalize, I would say. After a while it sounded like a hippie drum circle with tubes and sheet metal instead of hippie drums.

Punk rock came about when what was called "rock -n- roll" at the time became bloated and irrelevant. The Ramones (most visibly) stripped it down to three chords and a cloud of dust. But by the mid 80's, when we first showed up, punk rock had evolved (devolved?) into hardcore, there were rules to be followed, there was a club to join, there was a cannon to master. Punk rock was becoming daddy, and even if daddy had tattoos, leathers, and a funny haircut, he still wasn't essentially different from polyester cocaine dancer daddy, or long hair groovy judgmental-in-a-different-way daddy, or Mad Men daddy. Bands who wanted to be more creative, to move outside the strictures of punk rock, by and large moved back toward mainstream rock (creating "alternative" or "college rock"), which by that time began to look like a bastion of freedom compared to punk rock. And then there were the freaks.

So, noise was our punk rock. It was our way of breaking things down, similar to the way the Ramones broke things down . . . except instead of three chords and a cloud of dust, we just had the cloud of dust - no chords. First called industrial noise, the "industrial" faded away when the inherent rhythmic stupidity started heading ever closer to disco, and when it became more about lifestyle (which always seemed to me like clubbing with an attitude) than about breaking down music. "Noise" stripped of other connotations was much more elemental, much more primal. Historically, noise could collect non-industrial types like Einsturzende Neubauten, the Butthole Surfers, and even experiments by more rockish avant-garde bands like Pere Ubu ("The Book is On the Table"). It could reach back to the no wave of Mars, DNA, Red Transistor, and Lydia Lunch; back to the sixties free improvisation groups like AMM, to the free jazz of Coltrane, Coleman, Ayler, et. al., and to the non-idiomatic free players like Derek Bailey and Evan Parker who bridged that gap. It could reach back to Stockhausen, Xennakis, and Cage; it could reach back even to strictly regimented late 19th/early 20th Century composers who produced complex music that broke the rules of the time.

The elemental, primal aspect of noise also means it is irreducible. Like "music", "noise" is a subset of sound. These two subsets are generally thought to oppose each other, with music being a pleasing arrangement of sound, and noise being an anarchic and (to varying degrees) annoying occurrence of sound. They are not, however, totally exclusive of each other: the differences between music and noise have a strong cultural bias, and what is normally considered noise is often included in the arrangements of sound that make up music. But while music will stretch and change (which is, by the way, the beauty of music), noise remains outside, remains irreducible.

This whole rant came about because, recently, I've posted my band several different places online, and I've been asked to classify the band each time. I consider my band, Black Kaspar, a noise band. Now, you will see "noise" as a qualifier quite often when it comes to current music; I often had the choice of "noise pop", "noise rock", the old standby "industrial noise", and so on. I, for one, reject noise as a qualifier, because it's nothing more than an attempt to reterretorialize noise, to bring it back into the fold as a musical spice rather than the main course of sound.

Now, it's not the mainstream that is trying to reclaim noise, not by a longshot. It's the outsiders that crave acceptance, that crave recognition on some level no matter how small, that crave to cleave back to the hierarchy. It seems that an artist always wants to claim to be special, and there is nothing special about noise; one makes noise accidentally as soon as your feet hit the floor when you get out of bed in the morning. The artist always seems to need to claim a space for himself that is his own, so for him, "noise" is just too pedestrian, too normal, too . . . unmusical.

And that is why I choose "noise" for my tag. I certainly hold my music up against most of what gets made these days, but I don't claim any special expertise, I don't lay claim to any sort of cannon that needs mastery. I make NOISE, simply and irreducibly, and you can like it or not, but you can't tell me I'm doing it wrong, because there is no right way. I'll leave it to others to write clever songs; I'll continue to sculpt my sound. And when you ask me what makes my noise special, interesting, or worth listening too, I'll not bore you with conjured complexities: I'll just point at what I've done and say "there it is - you tell me". For me, the beauty of pure noise is that it is the anti-cult: join if you wish.
____________________
* Through no fault of the first industrial noise band, Throbbing Gristle, who showed up just a year or two after the Ramones. It was probably the Throbbing Gristle folk who coined the term "industrial noise".

2011 NBA Post Mortem

2011-06-20T16:45:00.002-04:00

I wasn't going to write anything more about this year's NBA season, but it was so swell, I couldn't help it. Plus, there seems to be an overload of dumbass narrative associated with the season, so it can't hurt to add some perspective outside of the 24 hour yak machine in Bristol. And yes, I know it's really late, but that's what happens when you try to keep three blogs, two musical projects, and a 45-hour-a-week day (and night and weekend) job.

The Mavs didn't win the title, the Heat lost it. Bullshit. First of all, that's a silly cliche on the surface of it: the Mavs won the title, the Heat lost it. BOTH THINGS HAPPENED. But seriously, too many people are characterizing this as a series the Heat gave away, which is ridiculous. In spite of the individual basketball awesomeness of LeBron, Wade, and Bosh, the ingredients weren't there for a good basketball team, at least not immediately, and not without some real work and sacrifice on everybody's part. This is a point that has been heavily discussed (both here and elsewhere), and yet so many still seem to be missing the point. The Heat may have had the better individuals, but the Mavs had the better team. That doesn't mean that the Heat will never be a good team - as a matter of fact, they made some pretty serious strides in the playoffs - it just means that the best players don't always make the best team, at least not right out of the box.
"Scoring the ball". I just have an image of some guy in carpenter's overalls whipping out an old-school pocket knife and cutting the surface of the basketball. Is there any way we could just lose this hideous phrase? Didn't think so.
LeBron isn't clutch; LeBron needs to become a killer, like Kobe Bryant. Let's deal with that last one first, because I have said that myself before: when the game's on the line, who would you rather have the ball, Kobe or LeBron? To the NBA fan, the answer would seem obvious, but it's not. Of all the players who took part in this year's playoffs, who would you hand the ball to? Kobe? Not so fast - according to stats compiled by True Hoop's Henry Abbott, the first guy you would give the ball to is Carmelo Anthony. No surprise there, the guy is probably the most lethal scorer in basketball, and that includes Kobe. So, okay, Kobe's next, right? Nope . . . how about Chris Paul, Shawn Marion (?!), Brandon Roy (no surprise there), Hedo Turkoglu (okay, leave him out after the brain farts he let out this year), and Mike Bibby (??!!)? If you say to me "Dirk Nowitzki", I say "no duh" after what he did this year, but this list was compiled before his coming out party. Then, how about Tim Duncan, Eddie Jones, and Raymond Felton? And next we have . . . LeBron James? Yup, the much-maligned King James is ahead of Kobe on this list, as is Ray Allen and Gilbert "Hibachi" Arenas. As a matter of fact, Kobe is only about 1.5 points better than the league average at clutch time, and just over 15 points short of Carmelo . . . so, don't believe everything you think you know. While LeBron did have a pretty serious drop off during the playoffs this year, I think it has to do with a lot more that "not being clutch", some of which we'll get into below.
LeBron James needs to work with a sports psychologist to cure his crunch-time woes. Jesus Christ. LeBron doesn't need a sports psychologist, he needs a midrange and post up game.
LeBron James needs to work with a sports psychologist to cure his crunch-time woes. The writer and editor in me wants to leave the pithy response above by itself, but this was seriously suggested by more than a few talking sports heads (the emptiest of all heads), so a longer response seems warranted. First of all, I think we really need to see that LeBron is not really that bad in the clutch, as noted above. And if he does tend to disappear, which he does sometimes, I think it has less to do with him than with his coaches. When he was with Cleveland, there was no question he was the man, and I think he did a much better job as a closer. But this year with Miami, having to share the court with another "legendary closer" (D. Wade), his role is much less clearly defined. I think it's this indecisiveness that showed this year, not some sort of mental block, or "yips". Better coaching will lead to more clearly defined roles which will lead to more decisive action in crunch time.
In spite of having a rough series, LeBron is still the best player in basketball. This one's hotly debated. I think that LeBron is potentially the best player in basketball, but right now I don't see him in the top five. Most of it, in my mind at least, has to do with the lack of a midrange and post-up game mentioned above. Nobody in the world can shut down LBJ one-on-one, but basketball, being a team game, means you don't have to. Right now, all you have to do is pack your defense down around the paint to keep Wade and James away from the basket, making sure most of all to always have someone in front of James, and you have a real chance at beating the Heat. There are three-point shooters on the Heat (Miller, House, Jones, occasionally Chalmers), so that's not the problem . . . besides, you can steal a game or two with the three, but you won't win a series. And James, for his part, is either driving in or tossing up a three; you stop him somewhere in the middle, and he's not scoring. Look at Carmelo or Durant: is there anywhere on the floor where they don't score? Or Dirk: not the most graceful or convincing drive in the league, but it doesn't have to be pretty to be effective; and right now, that fade-away jumper of his is among the most unstoppable scoring shots I've seen since Kareem's sky hook. The thing about LeBron is this: you can tell he's never really had to work on his game that hard. Unlike MJ, he wasn't cut by his freshman team. Unlike Bird, he could get by on his lightning reflexes, so he doesn't have to anticipate, he doesn't have to play the game two steps ahead of everybody else. Unlike any given little guy (say, Juan Jose Berea or, even better, Alan Iverson), he can count on his bulk and athleticism to get to the basket, so he didn't have to develop any kind of subterfuge to help him out. LeBron, being almost superhuman, always had that to fall back on. Problem is, once you get to the upper echelons of the game, there is always someone only slightly less superhuman than you ready to put out the extra effort to shut you down just when you need that basket the most. This, to me, is James's problem, and also the reason why this year's playoffs could turn him into the best player in the game. I have no doubt about his willingness to work, and his humility shouldn't be a question after this year's comeuppance; but now he needs some guidance, and he needs to show that he can improve his game, both mentally and physically.
LeBron is not living up to expectations. First of all, he's still relatively young. Secondly, I think that his ceiling is higher than any ceiling we've ever seen in the league, and indeed, he is already a very good player, but there seems to be a lot about the game that he has yet to understand. We see him as a physical specimen, not a basketball player, and when the elite physical specimen is considered as a not-always-elite basketball player, we are disappointed. At a certain point, we just have to admit that LeBron is not quite that good . . . yet.
The Mavericks had a good run this year, but next year they still have to be considered longshots. Really? You're still going to bet against the Mavs? I'll admit that, with the rise of the young teams in the West (the Thunder, and now the Grizzlies too), the whole playoff picture is getting murky. And if someone can step in and fix the Heat's offense, they have to be considered favorites. But, this win by the Mavs was not a fluke. They will be back in the picture, and I would count on them as much as I counted on the Lakers last summer. But of course, all bets are off until the new CBA gets inked, and that is turning into a very sticky problem.

Everyone, even the Heat's biggest critics, still have them winning a ring or three in the upcoming years, and I think that's about right, given the current state of the game. We can't, however, count on the current state of the game. Too many franchises are currently loosing money, and unless things are turned around, there will be a contraction in the league. Plus, I don't really see the owners looking past the sort of free-agent team building exercises that the Heat indulged in this year . . . though, if they did, that would probably be the biggest threat to a Heat dynasty (if Chris Paul ends up in New York or LA, all bets are off).

Meanwhile, the small market teams are in danger. Oklahoma City caught lightning in a bottle (or rather, Seattle did, then promptly lost the team), but they will only last as long as they can hold on to those young contracts. Indiana, the one ABA franchise that made money, has been struggling since the Malice at the Palace, and even though they had a strong finish to this year and a bunch of money to spend next year, they still hold out little hope of getting the players that will make them a real threat for the title. Even the Mavericks are losing money, though only as much as Mark Cuban is willing to lose.

The next CBA will determine the future of the sport. Here's hoping that one of the best NBA seasons that I can remember will help get everybody on the same page and pulling in the same direction. This isn't the same as football, where the players are on the short end of the stick and there is a ton of money to be spread around, if only nobody gets too greedy. Basketball needs both the owners and the players to team up and decide how this game can be run without bankrupting many of the people who put their fortunes on the line for our entertainment, and yet still not holding down the people who actually make this money for the owners. It's going to be a tough fall.

Untitled

2011-06-18T00:14:00.002-04:00

one of the things you know
is wrong
guess which one
laughing unmediated through
pages of old newspapers
pregnant with an ancient spirit guide
who does nothing but sit around
and smoke cigarettes
while your dread grows younger
& the man of your dreams
counts off the days on stubby fingers
(you don't know where the count
begins - or ends
the thing that is for sure
is that nothing is for sure
dancing like a prophet
singing like that last thought
that leaves your head
a dollar or two buys consolation
but your wallet is empty
and the sky closes around you
like a mistake

He Went All Parnell On Us

2011-06-07T00:50:00.002-04:00

With the pathetic revelations about Anthony Weiner’s online hobbies, we have yet another political “hero” brought down by personal failings. I am reminded of Joyce’s fixation with charismatic Irish nationalist Charles Stewart Parnell, and how Parnell’s personal failings set back the cause of Irish independence.

He was for Ireland and Parnell and so was his father: and so was Dante too for one night at the band on the esplanade she had hit a gentlemen on the head with her umbrella because he had taken his hat off when the band played God Save the Queen at the end.
Mr. Dedalus gave a snort of contempt.
— Ah, John, he said. It is true for them. We are an unfortunate priestridden race and always were and always will be till the end of the chapter
Uncle Charles shook his head, saying:
— A bad business! A bad business!
Mr. Dedalus repeated:
— A priestridden, Godforsaken race!
He pointed to a portrait of his grandfather on the wall to his right.
— Do you see that old chap up there, John? he said. He was a good Irishman when there was no money in the job. He was condemned to death as a whiteboy. But he had a saying about our clerical friends, that he would never let one of them put his two feet under his mahogany.
Dante broke in angrily:
— If we are a priestridden race then we ought to be proud of it! They are the apple of God’s eye. Touch them not, says Christ, for they are the apple of my eye.
— And can we not love our country then? asked Mr. Casey. Are we not to follow the man who was born to lead us?
— A traitor to his country! replied Dante. A traitor, an adulterer! The priests were right to abandon him. The priests were always the true friends of Ireland.
— Were they, faith? said Mr. Casey.
He threw his fist on the table and, frowning angrily, protruded one finger after another.
— Didn’t the bishops of Ireland betray us in the time of the union when bishop Lanigan presented an address of loyalty to the Marquess Cornwallis? Didn’t the bishops and the priests sell the aspirations of their country in 1829 in return for catholic emancipation? Didn’t they denounce the fenian movement from the pulpit and in the confessionbox? And didn’t they dishonour the ashes of Terrence Bellew MacManus?
His face was glowing with anger and Stephen felt the glow rise to his own cheek as the spoken words thrilled him. Mr. Dedalus uttered a guffaw of coarse scorn.
— O, by God, he cried, I forgot little old Paul Cullen! Another apple of God’s eye!
Dante bent across the table and cried to Mr. Casey:
— Right! Right! They were always right! God and morality and religion come first!

— James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

And so our leaders are done in by failings that have little if anything to do with their actual purpose in life. It’s a far stretch from Parnell to Weiner, but it’s the same at its core.

I remember thinking how foolish it was for Irish Catholics to abandon Parnell just because of his affair with Kitty O’Shea. And so, as annoying and pathetic as Weiner may be, there’s little point in turning our back on him … except, of course, besides little fits of pithiness toward his conservative colleagues, he hasn’t done anything worthy of support. It’s not like he’s Dennis Kucinich or Bernie Sanders, after all … so it doesn’t really matter if we turn on him or not.

I am much more concerned with the “morally upright” politicians who destroy our nation (Mitch McConnell), and I reject demagogues for more than their “moral” failings (Newt Gingrich, Donald Trump). In the end, I always considered John Edwards’s biggest failing not to be the fact that he fathered a child out of wedlock and lied about it; but rather, the fact that he concealed a secret that gave John McCain’s zombie ghost the chance to win an election that he would have no chance at winning otherwise. Say it with me now: Sarah Palin, a heartbeat away!

[UPDATE: This blog post (courtesy Suzy Bright's Facebook page) is hands down the best discussion of the Weiner scandal. Please read it.]

Notes Toward Everything

2011-06-03T19:07:00.002-04:00

I've just started a Tumblr blog called Notes Toward Everything. It will be a sort of public notebook, as opposed to this blog, which will feature more finished pieces. I will use it to publish shorter pieces, random pictures, videos, songs, etc. I'll probably move all the "In Rotation" posts there as well.

Never let it be said that I'm not contributing to information overload.

LeBron James as Unwilling Darth Vader, and Other Tales Ending in June; plus, In Rotation

2011-06-02T18:10:00.002-04:00

Welcome to June, where here at the homestead, we are wondering if the Tigers can stay close enough to the Indians to benefit from the inevitable Cleveland jinx, and if the ascendancy of the Royals and the Indians actually means a new day in the AL Central. Well, okay, we don't really spend much time thinking of that at all. We just hope the Tigers can stabilize their bullpen before August.

It's been a lovely NBA season, truly one of the most satisfying sports seasons in recent memory. We'll get to that in a minute; but first, a playlist:

In Rotation

Tyler the Creator: Goblin
Death Grips: Exmilitary
Dimitry Shostakovich: Symphony 14
Flipper: Generic and Gone Fishin'
The Germs: GI
The Fall: Dragnet
The Rolling Stones: Between the Buttons
The Flesheaters: Miss Muerta
Davie Allen and the Arrows: Bullseye
Glenn Gould: Brahms - Ballades, Rhapsodies, Intermezzi
Husker Du: Land Speed Record
Various: Hula Blues - Vintage Steel Guitar
Thurston Moore: Demolished Thoughts
Six Organs of Admittance: Asleep on the Floodplain
OWFGKTA: Radical
Big K.R.I.T.: Return of 4eva
Ornette Coleman: New York is Now
John Coltrane: A Love Supreme (Live)
Autechre: Confield

and from the Indiana Musical Family Tree Archives: Sick City 4, DeAndre Film Student, Dr. Ray, Bateu Futur, Mine., and a few more.

* * * * *

This sure has been an all-round fun NBA season. The story lines were all over: the final demise of the Phil Jackson Lakers, followed by the unlikely announcement of the next-generation Lakers under ex-Cavs coach (and perceived, though perhaps unfairly so, LeBron victim) Mike Brown. The Sixers and my Pacers show plenty of guts in losing causes in the first round of the Eastern Conference playoffs. The Pacers, in particular, impressed everybody as a pretty well made car that's just missing an engine (Charles Barkely: "You know, you take LeBron off those Cavaliers teams he was on, and put him on this team, and I think you see a different result in the finals.").

We also saw the re-invention (on the fly, I might add) of the Spurs, put to an untimely end by the rise of the Memphis Grizzlies. The Hornets, after giving the Lakers fits in their series, wonder if there is any way they are going to be able to hold on to Chris Paul . . . who, by the way, returned to his old form in a way that many of us didn't think was likely, or even possible. The perennially snake-bit Trailblazers, while pondering their own future, managed to give the Mavericks their only really competitive series before the finals. The Celtics look too old, the Thunder still too young, and we still wonder if the Grizzlies were a mirage, or if they are for real. And the only team that truly looked like chumps were the New York Knicks . . . so much for the dangerous Amare/Carmelo combo.

Derrick Rose was able to win one series almost singlehandedly, but not another. Kobe looked more and more human, though still dangerous. Garnett looked lost. Chris Paul looked around and saw young "pass first" PGs like Rajon Rondo and Mike Conley stepping up & decided he'd better do the same or risk becoming irrelevant. Carlos Boozer emerged as the most over-rated player, Marc Gasol as the most under-rated.

And then, the finals. Miami, who effectively transformed themselves from a likable blue-collar grind-it-out team to villains over the summer, got it together during the playoffs to actually become the team they are on paper. There is the suggestion that "The Decision", far from being the mistake that everybody including LeBron thought it was, was actually part of Pat Riley's master plan to raise the stakes and form a crucible that would forge the Heat into the great team Riles thinks they are. Dallas, on the other hand, played steadily and confidently throughout the season only to completely blow up in the first three rounds of the playoffs . . . to the degree that people are mentioning Larry Bird and Dirk Novitzky in the same sentence, and even Bird doesn't have a problem with it.

LeBron's marriage to the Heat has been great for basketball, even if it has been rough on his public image. The NBA needs bad guys and, unlike the Knicks of the 90's, it needs bad guys with rings.

So now here we are, with a real good guys v. bad guys final on our hands. Great end to a great season.

And then, the lockout starts.

Prelude: Plato

2011-05-22T01:12:00.000-04:00

"Then shall I explain first how timocracy changes into oligarchy?"
"Yes."
"Yet a blind man could see that," I said.
"How?"
"That storehouse full of gold," said I, "which every man has, destroys such a constitution. First they invent ways of spending for themselves, and neither they nor their wives obey the laws, but they pervert them to support this."
"That is likely," said he.
"After that," I said, "they observe each other and rival each other, and make the whole body of the people like themselves."
"Quite likely."
"By and by, then," said I, "they push ahead with their moneymaking, and the more they value money the less they value virtue; in truth, we may imagine riches and virtue as always balanced in scales against each other."
"Just so," said he.
"And when riches are honored in a city, virtue and the good people are less honored than the rich."
"That is clear."
"Now what is honored anywhere is practiced, and what is dishonored is neglected."
"Just so."
"Thus in the end they have become lovers of money and moneymaking and no longer aim at honor and ambition; they praise the rich man and admire him and bring him into places of government, and the poor man they dishonor."
"Certainly."
"So then they lay down a law of limitation in the constitution; they fix a sum of money, greater or less, according as the oligarchy is more or less complete, and proclaim that no one may share in the government unless his property comes up to the assessment. This they carry out by force of arms, or they have used terror before this to establish such a constitution. Don't you think so?"
"Yes, I do."
"Then that is how it is established, more or less."

-- Plato, The Republic, Book VIII
translated W. H. D. Rouse

" . . . in truth, we may imagine riches and virtue as always balanced in scales against each other."

Summertime!

2011-05-13T23:24:00.000-04:00

Chillin' at the bus stop a little after 6 p.m. today . . .

Well, "chillin'" is the wrong word to use.

Sitting at the bus stop this evening after work, the sun glowering down on me while I wait, shirt sleeves rolled up & sweat rolling into my eyes . . . it's summer, baby. 90 degrees.

Meh - I seem to be getting used to it. Gotta say the heat and the short (about a mile and a half) walk home actually can make me appreciate a really cold Miller High Life . . . though maybe ice water would have been even better.

Let's get a few shots from Up North:

Was around 65 up there, which, believe me, is a heatwave of an even higher grade than 90 down here less than halfway into May.

Let's scare up one from the neighborhood:

a little blurry, but it will do. This one's off the back deck, a nice quiet shot of the back of Schnitzelburg. Out front it's all about the Goss/Poplar Level traffic and the Kroger, but back here it's quiet.

I'll spare you the one of meat roasting on the grill - positively barbaric.

The livin' may or may not be easy, but it's summertime. Peace!

Coming up: hipsters, the Tigers, Osama bin Laden, and maybe some audio to get you through.

Why I Write Poetry; Plus, In Rotation (Poetry Bookshelf Edition)

2011-04-30T00:27:00.001-04:00

Well, well, 'tis the end of poetry month, and my serial reprinting of old scree has come to an end . . . temporarily, at least. No promises about how soon I'll drop another handful on ya . . .

Writing poetry is a damn site far from being cool these days. It ranks somewhere just below being a lipstick Republican and just above The Prairie Home Companion in the accounting of cool. Poetry still simmers under the surface in the form of hip hop-related wordplay and poetry slams, but that's about it. Even really lame college journal-writing mopey singer-songwriters get more play than poets. So what's the point of poetry?

I wrote a poem for a school assignment in third grade that got published. I don't remember it; all I remember is that I thought it was shit. I certainly wasn't inspired by that "success" for a life as a poet.

I started writing poetry for real in college. I got a poem published in the school literary 'zine the second semester of my senior year ("A Poem, or Almost One"); it was the only poem I wrote that was worth a crap until I was well into my thirties, though I wrote poetry almost constantly. Wait, did I say thirties? Hell, I was on the downside of thirty six before I started writing poems that didn't get destroyed.

After almost twenty years of writing poetry, I started to home in on a germ of an idea right around the turn of the millennium. I had written a handful of poems I could live with before then, but I didn't have clear ideas. It was an attic office peaking over the floodwall on Quincy that became my workshop, with a rasping computer as my forge, and I stayed up many late nights with a bottle of bourbon hammering away at my keyboard until I couldn't see straight.

At a certain point, I got rid of the bottle. Not permanently, but just when I wrote. I had to prove to myself I could write sober. It was actually touch and go for a couple weeks, but it turned out OK quickly enough.

After 10 years on Adams, we moved over to Goss . . . gone was the office, and the computer took a dump at about the same time. So, now it's primarily notebooks, even though I'm back online digital . . .

And, as always, poetry is a lonely venture. All writing is solitary, but poetry even more so, since so few people give a damn. Not that more should give a damn, really: most current poetry is so completely dreadful. But I digress . . . I still haven't even begun to answer the question.

* * * * *

Poetry is my interface with the world. Or, more accurately, words are my interface with the world (aren't they everybody's, really?), and poetry turns out to be the purest form of word. With words, I can build images, camera like, except with the plasticity of sculpture. For these words to truly reveal what they are beyond their craggy, worn faces, they must be scarred, cut up, rearranged. Fresh surfaces must be buffed out from underneath worn exteriors. Images must be radically critiqued, language must be broken, the very patterns of thought, stultified and stultifying, must be destroyed and discarded. Poetry is uniquely qualified to do this - in this respect, it is only rivaled by music (which is why I have such interest in both).

If you've been paying attention here at the death of everything, you can see theme coming out: reality as a whole is due for a reset, due for a cut up. If there is anything that the current American Political Morass (tm) puts into stark relief, it is just how seriously we need to destroy the current narrative(s). The larger school of thought must be blown the fuck up.

And so I write poetry, taking snapshots and scrawling over them with sharpies, writing philosophical treatises and covering them with cartoon window stickers of pissing Calvins. In general, taking words and beating them into new purposes.

* * * * *

Ah yes, that is the wonder of poetry to me. But, like music, poetry is rarely called upon for any kind of destructive/productive gesture.

And so I sit on the sidelines while we are fed bonbons of rhymed and clever irrelevance, verse fit for the smug enjoyments of summer days, for the self-absorbed loss of petty emotional wounding, for the boutique renderings of esoteric nonsense.

The day will come when I will expand on this exposition, but the hour is growing late, and it is time for me to rest up for my next encounter with the trivial. Have a nice day, and a sincere thank you for spending your valuable time reading my scribblings.

* * * * *

In Rotation: The Poetry Bookshelf
Antonin Artaud: Watch Fiends and Rack Screams
Basho: The Narrow Road to the Deep North
Basho: On Love & Barley - The Haiku of Basho
Wendell Berry: Selected Poems
William Blake: Selected Poems and Letters
Andre Breton: Selections
John Cage: M
Wanda Coleman: African Sleeping Sickness
Wanda Coleman: Heavy Daughter Blues
Robert Creely: Collected Poems 1945-1975
Edward Dorn: Hello, La Jolla
Edward Dorn: Gunslinger
T. S. Eliot: Selected Poems
Vicente Huidobro: Altazor
David Jones: Introducing David Jones
Erin Keane: The Gravity Soundtrack
Robert Kelly: The Loom
Jack Kerouac: San Francisco Blues
Yusef Kommunyaka: Dien Cai Dau
Yusef Kommunyaka: Magic City
Comte de Lautreamont: Maldoror (plus Complete Poems)
Robert Lowell: Lord Weary's Castle / The Mills of the Kavanaughs
Stephen Mallarme: Collected Poems
Todd Moore: Dillinger's Thompson
Charles Olson: Collected Poems
Willfred Owen: Collected Poems
Brett Ralph: Black Sabbatical
Eric Rensberger: Blank of Blanks
Rainer Maria Rilke: Duino Elegies
William Shakespeare: Complete
Patti Smith: The Coral Sea
Jack Spicer: Collected Books
Wallace Stevens: Collected Poems
Vergil: Aeneid
Walt Whitman: Leaves of Grass
William Carlos Williams: Selected Poems
William Carlos Williams: Patterson
Catherine Wing: Enter Invisible
Araki Yasusada: Doubled Flowering
Various: Contemporary American Poetry (1962) ed. Donald Hall
Various: Anthology of Mexican Poetry ( 1958) ed. Octavio Paz translated Samuel Beckett
Various: The New Poetry (1962/1966) ed. A. Alvarez
Various: Outlaw Bible of American Poetry (1999) ed. Alan Kaufman
Various: Poems for the Millennium Volume One (1995) ed. Jerome Rothenberg & Pierre Joris
Various: Poems for the Millennium Volume Two (1998) ed. Jerome Rothenberg & Pierre Joris

NUMBER 200 DOWN . . . THANK YOU AGAIN FOR READING the death of everything.

World As White Whale

2011-04-29T01:03:00.000-04:00

(Enter Ahab: Then, all.)

Over Descartian vortices you hoover, drooling

   idiot child. ruler of the world
   what you “know” is unknowable
   while your ignorance consumes libraries

that sucking sound you hear
is the sound of your nation
being flushed straight to hell

“And perhaps,
at mid-day,
in the fairest of weather,
with one half-throttled shriek
you drop through the transparent air into the summer sea,
no more to rise forever.”

and us with you

from WAR
written spring 2003

John Cage

2011-04-27T01:36:00.000-04:00

back in Kentucky, 3 am

Cheap Imitation

John Cage is the desert

a sip of bourbon

dim light by an open window

cars up on 64 outside

the notes flower

as the desert, after a shower

from Greetings From Tucson

written 2003

Untitled

2011-04-25T00:01:00.002-04:00

when shadows

spell, breaking

across blank

dismembered bodies

from behind clouds of code

& rhetoric

mommy-daddy-me

bought in currency of fear

. . .

the sun burns across the sill

take, pen in hand, and write

burning sun and driving rain

howling wind and bitter cold

sun burns today not tomorrow

break through, break through, not true

the pen is in your hand

write a new story

of birds on a wire

God on the mainline

watch it disintegrate before your eyes

and one small brick collapses

from the weight

March 2011

New Mexico, Easter Sunday, Late

2011-04-23T01:29:00.000-04:00

there’s desire

ringing incantations

cold

over horizons

hollow

(is there surface

on the crow’s wing

the desert bird

gone

like all meaning

There was a day, it’s been said,

there will be a day, when this all makes sense sense

no longer possible,

sense is surface shifting like a dune

is that too easy? well, the only good game is fixed

this

has always been a matter of conjecture

this

has always been a target

from Greetings From Tucson

written Spring 2003

Wilbur Wood

2011-04-21T01:15:00.002-04:00

I’m like

throwin’ fuckin’ junk

scraping the sides of the plate

fluttering across broken winged

accumulating insults

& lounging in stale air

I’m the junkballer

& from a few feet away

I look easy to hit

but, friend, understand

that the shit explodes

BOOM!

& it sure as hell ain’t where you thought it’d be

when you started that swing

& yr fury fans the air impotent

while my junk falls behind you, immaculate

from Spiel In the Face of Those Who Wish You Ill

written 1999

The Free Market Ain't Free

2011-04-20T00:01:00.043-04:00

So, Marxists are self-deluded utopians, right? Any Objectivist uber-capitalist will tell you that they are the ones who see the world with clear eyes.

Or do they? It seems that Objectivism relies on utopian self-delusion (or is that faith?) more than anyone is admitting.

Case in point: an open and freely competitive market will always result in the best products.

Oh really?

Three words: VHS versus Beta.

Three more words: Mac versus PC.

The only possible way you can judge VHS video systems or PC computer systems as superior products is if you consider advertising, market leverage, and distribution as part of product quality - in that sense, these products did prove superior. A capitalist accounting always takes into consideration the excess detritus that makes up the whole of the thing as it appears in the market (the thing + its production + its marketing + its initial position in the market as determined by the market strength of the entity that owns it), not simply the thing itself.

Since capitalism deals only with the quantitative, not the qualitative, the products cited are judged superior, since they are the ones that took over the market. This is the destructive reductive central aspect of capitalism: because it does not deal with the qualitative, it can not judge "good" in any meaningful way.

Sometimes the best product takes over the market. Sometimes it doesn't. That's a long way from the "cream always rising". It's a long way from the understanding that the Objectivist publicly projects about the market.

* * * * *

And what exactly is a "free market" anyway? Is it a market which is naturally allowed to evolve on its own without interference, or is it a competitive market?

"Unencumbered" markets (markets which are allowed to evolve naturally) tend toward monopolies. Strong corporations become stronger and more dominant in the market as markets become more complex and difficult to master. There are, of course, some markets which don't readily lend themselves to monopolies, but wherever monopolies are possible and desirable, they will occur unless there is interference from the outside.

Monopolies per se are not the problem; rather, it is the tyranny of the bottom line that is given primary importance by the capitalist system that causes the problem. Monopolies allow corporations the ability to focus solely on their own bottom lines without having to answer to competitive challenges . . . again, the primacy of the quantitative wins out, and in the case of a monopoly, the qualitative is wholly subservient to the quantitative. Monopolies are built to control markets; the production of goods is secondary.

American professional sports leagues are shining examples of the efficacy of regulated markets. The fact that amateur drafts are always ordered to place the worst teams first (except for the NBA, which has a [somewhat flawed] formula that theoretically orders the worst teams first without allowing teams to manipulate the system) shows how sports leagues value the outcomes of their systems over the mechanisms.

It can be argued that the competitive limitations leagues put on their teams actually hurts the quality of the product: what if the richest team, the "monopoly" team, were able to bid openly for talent instead of waiting in line for the draft, or dealing with some variation of a salary cap that allows less rich teams to bid for the best players? Theoretically they could buy the very best players at each position, and then stock their benches with the second and third tier players simply to keep them away from other teams. This team would, by any definition, be the best team available, and it most likely would dominate its league. In this case, the "monopoly" team would be the best not just in a quantitative sense, but in a qualitative sense.

This is an important point. Monopolies are not necessarily bad . . . they are as good as their goals. If your goal is to build a space program that will get you to the moon in a few short years, then a monopoly is not a bad idea. If your goal is to pool risk to lower the costs of medical coverage for an entire population, then a monopoly is not a bad idea. If your goal is to put together the most insanely talented football team ever, then a monopoly (no draft, no salary cap, just a wide open market) would be good . . . and not just good in a quantitative sense, but in a qualitative sense as well.

But what is the ultimate goal of "quality" in professional sports? It's not to have the best team, it is to have the best contest . . . and, to that end, the sports leagues have decided to heavily regulate their markets. It ranges from baseball, who will theoretically let you pay as much for your roster as you wish (but try to make the balance more competitive by taxing the living hell out of you if you spend too much, thereby making it prohibitive to spend above a certain amount), to NASCAR, who essentially makes everyone drive identical cars, who will change rules as soon as one team displays even the most minute of technical advantages, and even aren't afraid of changing rules on a race to race basis*. In this sense, the market regulations that the leagues have imposed have been successful, since they make the leagues competitive and interesting . . . and, importantly, despite the ebbs and flows of their incomes, wildly successful in the quantitative as well as the qualitative sense.

The simple fact that discussions occur on the qualitative level, whatever the final outcome may be, makes sports markets superior to financial and commercial markets. It also puts in sharp relief the question: what is a free market - the market which is most free in its mechanics, or the market which is most free in its access?

* * * * *

And, free or not, who went and made the market the final arbiter of all that is great? Oh, right. Ayn Rand did.

Please, next time you want to include Ayn Rand and Friedrich Nietzsche in the same sentence, remember the following quote:

Far from the market place and from fame happens all that is great: far from the market place and from fame the inventors of new values have always dwelt. -- Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra: First Part, "On the Flies of the Marketplace"

So you can just go to hell, John Galt.
____________________
* Does anyone else find it ironic that the sport most closely tied to the Tea Party is the most socialist of sports?

Easter 2003

2011-04-19T01:21:00.001-04:00

morning

7 am Tucson the

sun turns the

tent to an oven the

sun bright over another deathtrip

in another desert

on a gravel road in a Pontiac he

doused her in gasoline & lit her & ran

Chillin’ in a tent in the desert

the sun barely up

biding time with Edward Albee

cowboy stories surrounded

by flags, flags, flags

everyday is flag day everywhere these days

cross our

star spangled land

on a patriotic, god-fearing bender

& the stars -n- stripes

is the geometry of war

somewhere, out there,

some George Washington crosses a Delaware

he doesn't know, and

the mother of all bombs

won't douse hate

attracted to the Tikrit triangle

like metal shavings over a magnet

the desperation of the already dead

on a gravel lane somewhere outside Bloomington

and, this is it: Theresa’s dead.

She's blood

whistling past the graveyard . . .

the distant rumble in the background

the thunderhead on the horizon

always on the horizon

it's death, man,

among the flying flags

and burning cars.

the highway intersects

a Wednesday morning funeral

deep in the heart of New Mexico

Tony & Matt fluting the ruins

and going back . . .

become the darkness in Little Rock

shed your skin in the dawn of Roswell

Arkansas, Oklahoma, & Texas a howling tunnel of other

shades & delineations of nothing

Oklahoma City, Erick, Amarillo

Tikrit, Bagdad

Elletsville, Bedford, Bloomington

& how do we explain to the dead

that there was nothing there

how do we explain to the living

that there is never anything there

and that drinking tequila in the desert won't kill it

and that drinking whiskey in Louisville Kentucky won't kill it

and that drinking Bud Light in Bedford Indiana won't kill it

and that bowing to the east won't kill it

the horror creeping like a virus

exploding into murder fire jihad

& poets digging into the closets

of horrible darkness won't kill it

she was probably dead when he set her on fire

’cause you don’t just douse people in gasoline

& set them on fire

& burn them up in their cars –

he's charged with arson

’cause he burned her up

but not with murder

’cause she may have been dead already

we all die a little more every

hellbent day of this backward millennium . . .

guns in Baghdad

somewhere east of

the center of chaos

Southern Indiana deathtrip

swooping like a crow

the dead lay where they are

the living lay where they are

the flutes & drums of the Yaqui try to raise them

sacred ash and mariachi trills try to raise them

Easter Saturday on the rez by the casino

choking dust, burning masks,

purification by fire

a Pontiac burning on a Monroe County road

chapayeka drag burning under the Easter cross

a car bomb just outside the green zone,

another minister assassinated

another body for the dust

and, the choking dust of New Pascua

celebrates the resurrection

while the dead lie where they lay

in Iraq

in Bloomington

the funeral

goes on

without me

. . . and there are flags, flags, everywhere flags

yellow ribbons, red bumperstickers

the highway awash with patriotism

every SUV with a petrol-drunk V-8

every broke-down Ford with Tennessee plates

a crazy fool with delusions grand

again deals the penultimate hand

death reigns in another foreign land

and, in the cactus-scarred slopes of Arizona

and, in the inbred back roads of Indiana

another flag waves

another innocent dies

and, I’m here, another shot of whiskey,

another

morning

7 am Tucson the

sun turns the

tent to an oven the

sun bright over another deathtrip

from Greetings From Tucson

written spring 2003

The Ohio When It Rains (for Josh)

2011-04-17T01:10:00.000-04:00

I'm dreaming of floods again

here at the foot of the Ohio

The rain has stalled here

& the Kentucky is swollen

& houses are sliding down hills

out east in Harlan County

I'm driving through a dream at dusk

toward Indianapolis

in a Chevy the same color as rain

I can't see, and I can't connect

& the dream is waiting, you see

about

when is it time to move

when do the gates get slammed

across Adams

when is it time to grab the cat

& head for higher ground

when does dread move to threat

when does threat move to fact

when, finally, is it time for action?

I stand

in a hidden doorway

facing the floodwall

at the corner of Quincy & Adams

rain falling down like oppression

and long for the clear sun & heat of Tucson

from Spiel In the Face of Those Who Wish You Ill

written spring 2001

12/14/2003

2011-04-15T01:00:00.004-04:00

Saddam Hussein captured
12/13 outside Tikrit
disheveled, country Islam
they made sure we knew
he was in a rat hole

guess we won, right?

from WAR
written December 2003

A Poem, or Almost One

2011-04-13T01:36:00.000-04:00

Voices call me from the void, and I,

practiced at ignoring them, hear

only snatches. Oh, not that it matters,

for I know that they lie anyway. The

things that matter to me now are shells.

I am beyond feeling anything, beyond

making the necessary connections required

for emotion, beyond worrying about verb

tenses, unintentional sharps and flats,

missed cues, bad lines, incorrect exposures,

forced rhymes. I am beyond all that;

it is a sort of history, though not

history exactly. It (the history) is

buried like a time capsule. And as I

run past the fourteenth line (did Shakespeare

feel a pang at this point? Was it the

call of nature that he was heeding?)

I realize that it is gone, and no longer

does it exist in any accessible form.

No, check that, I am not even interested

in shells any more. I am only interested

in the moment, and only at the microscopic tip

of the pen, the moment rushing on, on,

to what? the end, I assume. To be truthful,

I am interested in only this, this and

nothing more, and my interest fades faster

than the ink can dry. For me, the sputtering

pen represents death, and I live as long as

the moment refuses to swallow itself.

from Oblivion

written Spring 1982

Ghosts

2011-04-11T01:40:00.003-04:00

the night the ghosts disappeared

it was quiet. really, really, quiet.

what happens when the noise shuts down.

. . . .

sucking out ghosts past Þ into

now

(sleeping, we are sleeping

. . . noise Þ dirt.

things become quiet

becalmed like

the Pequod in the Pacific

a loop of nothing. death

perhaps, is a loop of nothing

I sometimes feel I’m skating close

to the edge of nothing

bouncing off loops of nothing

counting nothing

from Oblivion

written 1999

Black Train One

2011-04-09T01:29:00.003-04:00

scheherazade rambles on

the guy in the corner just wants to drink his beer in peace

“wont that bitch just shut up”

he says

dodging the daggers of the spellbound

who sniff

“youre dyin too, you better come up with somethin soon”

and how cavalier

for him not to acknowledge

the stink of death

wafting in from the corners

like it’s not the air we breathe anyway

Beruit pumps the

blood

nothing quite

like an AK-47 a blackmarket Sidewinder and a strapped

seventeen year old

bombs away! indeed.

when death is fact

it is

no longer

crisis

you can’t talk yr way out of a car bomb

can ya, pal?

it may be oblivion, but it ain’t nothin’, is it

like,

all these motherfuckers

killin’ everybody, that's their story,

and if such equals

the babbling of scheherazade,

it makes murder

their ennui?

for Josh

from Oblivion

written 2004 (more or less)

Playoffs?!

2011-04-08T00:58:00.000-04:00

Well, it's been an ugly season . . . how ugly, you ask?

Just about that ugly. But then, no one said that basketball is a pretty sport. Well, actually someone did, maybe even a lot of people, but they weren't talking about Tyler Hansbrough. That's okay though, because sometimes ugly gets the job done. And this year, in spite of all the ugly, the Pacers are in the playoffs. And, really, that's all we wanted, right?

Three teams in the Western Conference will miss the playoffs with better records than the Pacers. Of those three, two of them (Houston and Phoenix) would have to be considered favorites in a series against the Pacers. The third (Utah) essentially imploded halfway through the year when they lost HoF coach Jerry Sloan and traded away perhaps the best young point guard in the league (Deron Williams). The Pacers could probably handle them right now, but it is worth noting that the Jazz stole one from the Lakers the other night.

They rally to play well against the good teams, occasionally even stealing a win or two, then turn around and play the dregs of the league like just another lottery hound. They started out the year as a legitimate defensive team, then clinch the playoffs by scoring 136 points while shooting almost 60% from the floor . . . all while giving up 112 to the lowly Wizards (at home, even!). So much for defense.

New coach Frank Vogel stands at 19 - 16, which is good enough for a solid handshake and a pat on the back, but probably not enough to keep him in the seat next year. I'm sure the front office will do what they can to keep him around, but not so sure that what they will do includes naming him head coach.

As for the rest of the team, everyone is valuable (in their own way), but everyone is expendable. They are a team of good role players without a leader. Someday, Danny Granger will be the best third scoring option in the league. Right now, he's a shaky first option. Roy Hibbert is a potential force in the pivot just looking for the confidence that will smooth out and reinforce his game. Hansbrough's coming on while McRoberts is fading . . . except on the nights where Hansbrough's fading and McRoberts is rising. And Collison looks for all the world like a young point still learning the game, which he is. The big question is if he ever will learn it, and that answer is not clear.

But, forget all that. The team plays hard, even when they are at their most confused. They give us some amazing stretches of basketball, even if they almost never put together a whole game. They are a bunch of good kids who are really easy to root for.

Forget the record - they're in the playoffs. Screw all the whining about lowered expectations: steal a game or two from the Bulls and we'll call this season a big success.

* * * * *

I wish Gordon Hayward would have stayed in college and helped Butler last night instead of kicking our butt. -- Phil Jackson, after the Lakers lost to the Jazz 86 - 84 behind Hayward's 22 points.

Oh, my Bulldogs sure missed young Mr. Hayward Monday night. And after a rough rookie season (though expectedly so), he broke out with a series of double figure scoring games to close out the year, capped by this game, where, matched up against Kobe for most of the evening, he managed to outscore him by a bucket.

Which led to another splendid example of Kobespeak. From J. A. Adande's True Hoop column:

Bryant said he was “very, very fond” of Hayward.
“He’s a very skilled, all-around player," Bryant said. "I think he’s going to have a very bright future in this league. He reminds me of a more talented Jeff Hornacek. Jeff couldn’t put the ball on the floor as well as he can.”

Which we shall now translate with our patented Kobespeak Translator:

Nice game, rook. You remind me of another guy who had a cup of coffee in the league . . . now what was his name? If you're still around when the Jazz play us again . . . which, I'd like to point out, won't be in the playoffs, 'cause you jagoffs didn't even make it . . . then I'm a gonna rip your throat out. If I even remember to be pissed at you. Wait, who am I kidding? I'll rip your throat out even if I don't remember to be pissed. 'Cause that's who I am. Kobe fucking Bryant. And, just who are you again? By the way: you're white.

Untitled Spring Poem

2011-04-07T00:55:00.004-04:00

weed greens in lot
jumbled with naked black sticks
river runs high
puddles on pavement
adjust to more light
more light

and so it turns
the bully plants bustin' out
the complex grasses yawn and stretch
toward sun closer

it will be farther
but now it's closer
near, far,
round and round

black mud at edge of asphalt
broken rock
spangled wet leftover leaves
there'll still be cold rain
but we stretch, relax, grasp the warm
to our cores
for the most part, it's here

March 2011

In Rotation: The Vinyl + Edition

2011-04-06T00:15:00.000-04:00

I'm back to almost exclusively purchasing my music on vinyl these days. I do it mainly because I like the objects involved: CDs were almost always inferior to vinyl records as objects, and the initial hype about the "superior sound quality" of digital media was quickly shown to be a lie. I don't have the high end audio equipment necessary to tell a first-rate vinyl pressing from a well mastered CD*, but vinyl is so much cooler as a package that I will easily spend the extra bucks for it.

However, I tend to forget there are still advantages to CDs . . . remember how excited we were with all Coltrane reissues because songs no longer had to be sliced up to fit on LP sides? Case in point: Tim Hecker's latest, Ravedeath, 1972. Composed to be one continuous piece divided into "songs", the Kranky double LP annoyingly has to chop everything up. The vinyl sounds great, but I'll be purchasing a download on this one.

In Rotation On Vinyl:

Tim Hecker: Ravedeath, 1972
Softcheque: Misericord
Flipper: Public Flipper Ltd.
Verdi: Requiem Mass (Strasbourg Philharmonic Orchestra, Alain Lombard, conductor)
Earth: A Bureaucratic Desire for Extra Capsular Extraction
Sun City Girls: Funeral Mariachi
Valley of Ashes: Cavehill Hunter's Attrition
Sapat: Mortise and Tenon
The Phantom Family Halo: Monoliths and These Flowers Never Die
The Phantom Family Halo: Music From Italian TV
Yoko Ono: Plastic Ono Band
John Cage: Concerto for Prepared Piano and Orchestra (Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, Lukas Foss, conductor)
Crime: San Francisco's STILL Doomed
Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band: It Comes to You in a Plain Brown Wrapper
John Cage: Cheap Imitation
Marion Brown: Afternoon of a Georgia Faun
Wipers: Over the Edge
Mark Stewart and the Mafia: s/t
Albert Ayler et.al.: New York Eye and Ear Control
Ennio Morricone: Film Music Volume 1
My Dad Is Dead: The Taller You Are, The Shorter You Get
Calexico: The Black Light
The Mothers of Invention: Burnt Weenie Sandwhich

and, in new-timey digital formats:
Wipers: Youth of America
Royal Trux: Cats and Dogs
Sick City Four: Complete MFT Recordings
Tim Hecker: Harmony in Ultraviolet
DJ Spooky: Creation Rebel
The Jesus and Mary Chain: Psychocandy
Kurt Vile: Smoke Ring for my Halo
Boris: Dronevil
Wire: Pink Flag
Tyvek: Nothing Fits
Earth: Earth 2
John Fahey: The Great Santa Barbara Oil Slick

as well as custom playlists by:
Jimi Hendrix
Giant Sand
David Bowie
Lou Reed
etc.

Next time, maybe I do another one of my mp3 players. I thought that was kinda a good idea. Kinda.
____________________
* Besides, most everything recorded today is recorded digitally, and even though everyone talks about the warmth of analog recording, most recording engineers won't prioritize analog recorders in the process . . . or at least substitute tube technology (or "valve" tech, for all you Brits) for solid state in the signal chain to try to liven up the proceedings. Digital media will reproduce digital recordings perfectly - that much we know. For that reason, I think the idea of vinyl as a "warmer" medium is beside the point, especially since no one would dare exploit the analog character of vinyl in the mastering process.

To All My Angry Friends

2011-04-05T00:01:00.002-04:00

Stand up and say, like the bastards ye are:

Hello Gomorrah,
the euthanasia of my soul stops here.
I signed no dying will
that permits you to steal my pain
& makes me safe for the rest of you.
Pain may or may not be life,
but it is mine,
& I claim it.
I claim the right to fight,
I claim the right to feel outside your prescription,
I claim the right to be other.

You told me many things as if they're important,
but I no longer listen.
The din of your ecstasy
is repulsive to me.
I will not share in your need to define
that which does not concern me.
I will not enable your need for approval
from those whom you oppress.
I will not be at the table to split the tab
when the final check comes.

I will always fight
the shape of your hatred.

You can bury me under piles of rationale;
I will swim through.
You will choke me with a steady diet of lies and venom;
I will starve before I match your corpulence.
You can label me, shun me, even kill me . . .

to me, death can come but once,

you will die always.

You are a salt pillar:
you spawn only desolation.
I am a rotting corpse:
my flowers are beyond your control.

from Spiel In the Face of Those Who Wish You Ill

written 1999

I Would Like to Humbly Point Out . . .

2011-04-04T01:58:00.000-04:00

. . . that later today, the Butler Bulldogs will be playing for the national championship. I came up with something I called the "Butler Theorem" a couple years ago, and I caught a little bit of flack for it back then. Please allow me to gloat.

Second championship game in two years? Maybe even a national championship? Can I get a witness?

Untitled

2011-04-03T00:37:00.005-04:00

from my hand
to your paper
as if that's all there is
your equivalences
are pale cold death,
shadows of value, not value

there are other ways to live
where the sun shines, and it is warm
and this warm is not the same as that warm
and this day is not the same as that day
and shadows fade instead of reduplicate
forever in the coal gray dawn
of greed and fear

you count this
one, two, three
as if that meaning is real
It isn't.
My one hits here, yours hits there
pale yellow instead of blue
It's not the same
It's not the same

March 2011

Okay, Fine, I'll Play Along

2011-04-02T00:28:00.000-04:00

So apparently it's poetry month. Wee-haw.

Suppose I'll post some verbiage, old and new.

To those who actually pay attention to my rantings, apologies in advance for the duplications.

The Duty of Civil Disobedience Part 2: Governance in the Larger Sense

2011-03-23T02:45:00.001-04:00

Thoreau wrote "Civil Disobedience" in 1848 and 1849. One of the main roots of Thoreau's discontent, America's invasion of Mexico, ran from 1846 to 1848. The spoils of that war were most of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California.

John Jacob Astor, the first American multi-millionaire, died March 29, 1848. The first American transcontinental railroad was started in 1863, and finished in 1869.

Apropos Thoreau's other prime example of American governmental immorality, John Brown helped jump start the American Civil War with the Pottawatomie Massacre in 1856 and the Harpers Ferry raid in 1859. In 1860, Abraham Lincoln was elected President, and on April 12, 1861, Confederate forces attacked a US military installation at Fort Sumter, South Carolina. Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox on April 9, 1865. Lincoln was assassinated five days later.

Thoreau himself died of tuberculosis in 1862.

Ireland's Great Famine, known here as the Irish Potato Famine, ran from 1845 to 1852. This famine was probably the source of the biggest voluntary migration to the United States, though one hesitates to call escaping starvation and death completely voluntary.

In January 1848, the very same month Thoreau began delivering a series of lectures that would become the basis of "On the Duty of Civil Disobedience", Karl Marx finished the Communist Manifesto.

I don't have a blackboard, but there are some connections here.

* * * * *

Modern industry has converted the little workshop of the patriarchal master into the great factory of the industrial capitalist. Masses of laborers, crowded into the factory, are organized like soldiers. As privates of the industrial army they are placed under the command of a perfect hierarchy of officers and sergeants. Not only are they the slaves of the bourgeois class, and of the bourgeois state; they are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine, by the overseer, and, above all, by the individual bourgeois manufacturer himself. -- Karl Marx, Manifesto of the Communist Party

With Marx and Thoreau, we have historic attacks on what can be called, at their most base and simplistic level (the level on which all public political discourse takes place in this country), both the public and the private sectors. Following the logic of current political thought, these theories are diametrically opposed, but they do have one thing in common: both are interested in attacking the structures that control and subjugate populaces.

How Marx and Thoreau came up with these ostensibly opposing positions is clear. Thoreau was living in a brand new country with seemingly limitless land, spaces, resources, and opportunities. America at the time was certainly capitalist, but since virtually nothing was scarce in the country, the conditions that would later foment Communist revolution worldwide were not yet obvious. There had been various recessions and depressions, but with the exception of the 1819 depression, most economic problems had been localized and diffuse. And while there were certainly rich (relatively speaking) men around, there was yet no super rich class (folks along the lines of the Astors), no robber baron class, no obvious gulf between the rich and poor (since most everyone still participated directly in the production of goods). No, the gods of capital had yet to wrest control of America; rather, it was the government that stood everyone in line and set the stone tablets of moral imperative for the country. Thoreau, finding that morality lacking, had a clear target. That target we call today, in our pre-digested and overly simplified way, the public sector.

Marx's target was older and more evolved, but just as clear. The morality he opposed was indeed dictated by governments, but these governments themselves are controlled by money. Monarchical and feudal privilege had by this time mostly disappeared and evolved into the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. Marx's Europe was fighting with all kinds of shortages, and in the production processes of the capitalist machine he located the dehumanization of its subjects. Marx certainly had a beef with governments, but the source of the problem was not there, but in the people who pulled the government's strings . . . and those people were very private. Or, as we say, the private sector.

And yet, does this public/private dichotomy even make sense? The forces of control are all public to the degree that they delimit our public sphere; and private to the degree that they are constituted at a level different than the one they occupy (here in America, by the ballot if you are an optimist, and by the checkbook if you are a realist). Think of governance in a larger sense: who runs your life?

In the end, the whole public/private debate is a red herring: we should think of governance as the monolithic structure that runs our lives. This structure has its public and its private aspects, and these aspects do not necessarily code out the way we normally think they do. There is, in this country, an absolute continuum between what we normally consider public and private*, and the struggle is between various ideas of morality, not between ways of executing this morality, which is all that "public" and "private" boil down to. It is time to dispense, once and for all, the idea that "public" sector and "private" sector oppose each other.

It is not my job here to reconcile Marx and Thoreau; rather, I think that an understanding of each can inform us on governance in the larger sense. Both Marx and Thoreau are concerned, at their very core, with dehumanization. And, at the end of the day, it doesn't matter how we fight against the dehumanizing forces we face: it just matters that we fight.

* * * * *

Sometimes, like I said, civil disobedience is a simple thing, if not an easy thing. It is simple for Libyans, Egyptians, Tunisians. Simple, but certainly not easy. On the other hand, it is easy for Americans, but extraordinarily complex. Is there a store that you can buy from which does not, in some way, diminish the rights of citizens somewhere? Is there a vote for a man or woman who is truly and always just? Can I breathe, eat, and live without diminishing the earth? Indeed, to paraphrase Thoreau, how can I make a living without standing on another man's shoulders?

The short answer: you can't. Failure is the end result of any action we take. And yet, (once again) from Beckett by way of Zizek, we can fail better. We can improve. We can always improve.

And that is the duty of civil disobedience.

____________________
* Two parts of that continuum are capital (money) and the masses (people, or the efforts of the people).

Ash Wednesday 2

2011-03-09T00:00:00.000-05:00

ashes fall
late
this year
"to dust you shall return"
as if, in deep cold dark
mortality
is somehow in question

wet
not much in the way of dust
windows rattle the howl
whistles down between trees
bungalows & shotguns
swirling animate
clacking stick trees
bone chilling
wet

clacking sticks
waving palms
broken body hanging from the tree
Ash Wednesday a taunt
from dust you came
to dust you shall return

____________________
Next post: one last visit with Thoreau. Or one more visit with Thoreau. Whatever.

Interlude: Thoreau

2011-03-04T23:57:00.001-05:00

They who know no purer sources of truth, who have traced up its stream no higher, stand, and wisely stand, by the Bible and the Constitution, and drink at it there with reverence and humility; but they who behold where it comes trickling into this lake or that pool, gird up their loins once more, and continue their pilgrimage toward its fountain-head. -- Henry David Thoreau, "On the Duty of Civil Disobedience"

The Duty of Civil Disobedience (Dedicated to Revolution in the Middle East)

2011-03-02T00:59:00.002-05:00

It's hard. God knows it's hard. It's hard to do; it's hard to even know what to do, or when to do it. It's hard to know when to take a stand, and when to let things pass. Civil disobedience is hard.

Knowing that the time had come was the easy part for the Tunisians and the Egyptians. The time had long passed; it was just waiting for opportunity, for critical mass. They had seen the crackdowns in Iran, they didn't want a repeat . . . but when the rumble started in Tunisia, it wasn't going to be stopped. Yesterday, Tunisia and Egypt, today Angola, Iran, and Libya, tomorrow . . . Saudi Arabia? Afghanistan? Outside of Israel, is anybody safe?

Sometimes knowing is the easy part. When things are fucked up, and I mean really fucked up (keep it to yerself, teapartier!), start throwing rocks. Of course, when the knowing is the easy part, the doing is the hard part, 'cause that means the bosses really have things on lockdown . . . it's a perverted equilibrium: when one thing's easy, the other is hard. Equilibrium is a funny thing. Funny, except nobody's laughing.

* * * * *

But, to speak practically and as a citizen, unlike those who call themselves no-government men, I ask for, not at once no government, but at once a better government. Let every man make known what kind of government would command his respect, and that will be one step toward obtaining it. -- Henry David Thoreau, "On the Duty of Civil Disobedience"*

Sometime, somewhere, you will hear some right-wing pseudo-intellectual start dropping lines from Thoreau to buttress his angst. Or someone from the talk-show left, for that matter. Do yourself a favor: read the essay, know the essay. Don't be lied to.

To start with, since I've already taken a poke at the right wing, let me be clear and unequivocal about one thing: Thoreau is a champion of exactly the kind of limited government the right wing says it desires (of course, as we have seen over and over and over again, what the populist right wing says it wants and what it really wants are two different things).

I heartily accept the motto, -- "That government is best which governs least;" and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which I also believe, -- "That government is best which governs not at all;" and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government they will have.

Or, again:

Government is at best an expedient; but most governments are usually, and all governments are sometimes, inexpedient. [. . .] The government itself, which is the only mode which the people have chosen to execute their will, is equally liable to be abused and perverted before the people can act through it.

It is clear, in the great wide open of the rise of America, that the government (for Thoreau, anyway) is primarily an impediment.

But where exactly does this anti-government impulse originate with Thoreau? In a word, conscience. Thoreau believes it is impossible for a government to have a conscience:

After all, the practical reason why, when the power is once in the hands of the people, a majority are permitted, and for a long period of time continue, to rule, is not because they are most likely to be right, nor because this seems fairest to the minority, but because they are physically the strongest. But a government in which the majority rule in all cases cannot be based on justice, even as far as men understand it Can there not be a government in which majorities do not virtually decide right and wrong, but conscience? -- in which majorities decide only those questions to which the rule of expediency is applicable? Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience, then? I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward. It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right. The only obligation which I have a right to assume, is to do at any time what I think right.

And, of course, conscience implies justice: for Thoreau, would-be godfather of the Tea Party, is not establishing his rights as an individual because he thinks taxes are too high**. He has as the subtext to his entire anti-government tract a deep revulsion to slavery and the Mexican-American war, and this is the very key to the transcendent legitimacy of his rebellion. Indeed, Thoreau-as-rugged-individualist is much more worried about the collective good than his own rights and comforts. That is why Thoreau speaks of the DUTY of civil disobedience: it is the duty of free humans to live by their consciences. This alone separates him from many modern champions of "rights", both liberal and conservative.

There's another thread that needs to be pulled out of the quote above: Thoreau does not equate majority opinion with greater good. As a matter of fact, civil disobedience has, at its core, the individual conscience's stand against the tyranny of the majority. It is the state that robs its subjects of their humanity ("The mass of men serve the state thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies. [. . .] In most cases there is no free exercise whatever of the judgement or the moral sense . . . ") and distances them from their own values. Civil disobedience is the individual's last beachhead against against the amorality of the state.

Not that Thoreau would have us all up in other people's moral business:

It is not a man's duty, as a matter of course, to devote himself to the eradication of any, even the most enormous wrong; he may still properly have other concerns engage him; but it is his duty, at least, to wash his hands of it, and, if he gives it no thought longer, not to give it practically his support.

We can't eliminate all the overt wrongs of the world, much less coerce our fellows into the life that we believe is just. It is not even necessarily our duty to eliminate wrong. What is our duty, however, is to make sure that we don't materially support a wrong, even if we do not actively work against it.

At the end of the day, Thoreau's concerns are moral ones, and not in the petty sense of good behavior/bad behavior that so many so easily get caught up in; but rather in the grander sense of good for all men. Like Marx, Thoreau has at the core of his doctrines a utopian vision for all of humanity, though Thoreau's is clearly of a different kind:

I please myself imagining a State at last which can be just to all men and to treat the individual with respect as a neighbor; which even would not think it inconsistent with its own repose, if a few were to live aloof from it, not meddling with it, nor embraced by it, who fulfilled all the duties of neighbors and fellow-men.

* * * * *

So, indeed, we have a duty to resist, or at least refuse material support, institutions that oppress our fellow man. As Thoreau observed about the culture that spawned his essay to begin with:

Practically speaking, the opponents to a reform in Massachusetts are not a hundred thousand politicians at the South, but a hundred thousand merchants and farmers here, who are more interested in commerce and agriculture than they are in humanity, and are not prepared to do justice to the slave and to Mexico, cost what it may.*** I quarrel not with far-off foes, but those who, near at home, co-operate with, and do the bidding of those far away, and without whom the latter would be harmless.

Thoreau focused his considerable rhetorical skill on a United States government that allowed slavery and an imperialist war against Mexico . . . but it's not just about government, or even capitulation to the government, is it? To put it another way, the Gaddafis and Mubaraks are clear targets, but are they the only targets?
____________________
* Sorry, no page numbers. I'm working with a twenty-year-old Signet Classics paperback edition of Walden with "Civil Disobedience" thrown in like a bonus track. I'm guessing there is no correspondence with the pagination of any current editions of Walden.
** Though Thoreau was jailed for not paying his taxes, paying taxes was not the issue he was protesting, but rather he was rebelling against the actions of the government that his taxes supported: "I have never declined paying the highway tax, because I am as desirous of being a good neighbor as I am of being a bad subject [. . .] It is for no particular item in the tax bill that I refuse to pay it. I simply wish to refuse allegiance to the State, to withdraw and stand aloof from it effectually." Elsewhere, he cites the bible passage where Jesus looks at a coin and, seeing Caesar's image on the coin, encourages his followers to "render therefore that which is Caesar's unto Caesar". Expanding on the theme, Thoreau makes it clear that whoever becomes rich in the currency of the kingdom owes the kingdom its tribute (i.e., taxes).
*** By the way: shame on those who decried the overthrow of Mubarak (while admitting that he was a tyrant) because it "wasn't in our best interests". They are the lowest form of politicians/commentators/idiots.

Prelude: Thoreau

2011-02-17T00:38:00.000-05:00

This American government, -- what is it but a tradition, though a recent one, of endeavoring to transmit itself unimpaired to posterity, but each instant losing some of its integrity? -- Henry David Thoreau, "On the Duty of Civil Disobedience"

As is ever the ultimate function of a system - to propagate itself. Are we really surprised that the Gingrich "revolution" abandoned term limits before the victory parties were even over?

The Horror!

2011-02-12T00:01:00.001-05:00

postcard courtesy C. E. Emmer

Arto Lindsay

2011-02-11T01:22:00.000-05:00

Getting in the mood for a guitar show this week . . .

Ich bin ein Packer

2011-02-06T09:43:00.001-05:00

What I think will happen? Steelers 28 - 21 over the Pack. What I want to happen? A SUPER BOWL VICTORY FOR THE PEOPLE'S TEAM!

Tuesday's Weather: Snowpocalypse Avoided!

2011-02-02T00:44:00.003-05:00

We here at the gateway to the South are on the clean edge of this mania pounding the Midwest right now . . . and when I say "edge", I mean cold, stark, edge. As I sit here and type, my little Weather Channel temperature gauge reads 50 degrees, down from 54 an hour and a half ago. But, run up to exit 4 in Indiana like I did earlier this evening, and the temperature drops seven degrees in that six mile span. It is probably no more than ten miles up that the rain starts freezing. And, by the time you get up around Seymour, it's a freaking mess. Seymour is the breaking point for most weather, right where the bodies of the systems that run up the Ohio River hit in their real glory.

You know who else dodged a bullet? Leland, MI. They've got some pansy-assed "Winter Weather Advisory" going right now (though their advisories are Louisville's snow emergencies). Seems everything is just north of us, and just south of Leland. That is some monstrous freight train of a storm, I tell you what . . . it takes me just under ten hours to drive that stretch in the hot, steaming summer (well, not quite, 'cause that includes a stop for lunch).

Ah, summer . . . can that run of brutal heat now really be a fond memory?

The cove cam pictures look relatively tame compared to the framed pictures in the shops that actually stay open in the winter. Here's a couple:

This would be Fishtown, Winter Wonderland version.

And this would be Lake Street, just above the Harbor.

Stay safe, everyone. Happy dreams of heat.

UPDATE: Thought it would be nice to include a couple daytime shots:

Fishtown; and

upriver from Fishtown. Enjoy!

In Rotation - The Samsung P3

2011-01-31T23:31:00.000-05:00

How about something a little different? Here's what's loaded on mp3 player #3 right now:

Various Artists: The Rough Guide to the Music of Pakistan
AMM: The Crypt
Bill Orcutt: A New Way to Pay Old Debts
Bud Powell: Jazz Giant
Deerhunter: Cryptograms and Halcyon Digest (Japanese Edition)
Cecil Taylor: Conquistador!
Duke Ellington: Masterpieces 1926-1949
Earth: Angels of Darkness, Demons of Light
Guanco +: Attar of Rose; Caves of Holy Light; and Sky Burials
James Blood Ulmer: Black Rock and Odyssey
Sun Ra: Space is the Place
Keith Rowe, Axel Dorner, & Franz Hautzinger: A View from the Window
Keith Rowe, Sachiko M, Toshima: ErstLive 005
Lester Bowie: All the Magic!
Masayuki Takayanagi New Directions Unit: Mass Hysterism In Another Situation
Matthew Herbert: Mahler X Recomposed and One Club
Max Neuhaus: Fontana Mix Feed 1965-68
Miles Davis: On the Corner
Paul Flaherty and Chris Corsano: Full Bottle
William Tyler: Behold the Spirit
Philip Jeck: An Ark for the Listener
Sick City Four: MFT downloads

As indicated above, I have two more mp3 players in rotation. If I don't get bored with the idea, I'll post the other two somtime in the near future.

Sorry, Wrong Question

2011-01-30T22:49:00.001-05:00

Seriously, the atheists are on my nerves as much as the fundamentalists are these days. Below is some crap that I've hashed out before, but it's a scab I can't help but pick.

In Anti-Oedipus, their infamous evisceration of Freud, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari run across the problem of atheism, and connect it to theories of the unconscious shared by Jung and Freud even after their split:

If the unconscious is thought to express itself adequately in myths and religions (taking into account, of course, the work of transformation), there are two ways of reading this adequation, but they have in common the postulate that measures the unconscious against myth, and that from the start substitutes mere expressive forms for the productive formations. The basic question is never asked, but cast aside: Why return to myth? Why take it as the model? [. . .] What we mean is that, starting from the same postulate, Jung is led to restore the most diffuse and spiritualized religiosity, whereas Freud is confirmed in his most rigorous atheism. Freud needs to deny the existence of God as much as Jung needs to affirm the essence of the divine, in order to interpret the commonly postulated adequation. But to render religion unconscious, or the unconscious religious, still amounts to injecting something religious into the unconscious. (Delueze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, pp. 57-58)

Freud is casting the unconscious at the level of the "edifying forces of myths and religions", so the function (D & G's "productive force") of the unconscious is essentially the same either way. D & G continue

Let us recall Marx's great declaration: he who denies God only does a "secondary thing", for he denies God in order to posit the existence of man, to put man in God's place (the transformation taken into account). But the person who knows the place of man is entirely elsewhere does not even allow the possibility of a question to subsist concerning "an alien being, a being placed above man and nature": he no longer needs the mediation of myth, he no longer needs to go by way of this mediation - the negation of the existence of God - since he has attained those regions of the autoproduction of the unconscious where the unconscious is no less atheist than orphan - immediately atheist, immediately orphan. (Anti-Oedipus, p. 58)

Removing the human from the framework of myth "orphans" it, cuts it loose . . . and, when myth is re-inserted, it is no longer "natural", but must explain itself. And again, it is this explanation that is important: the objective fact of God's existence is essentially irrelevant.

"Do you believe in God?" Sorry, wrong question. How about "Why do believe/not believe in God?" That answer is going to get much more to the point.

A Pacers Update . . . and It's Not Good

2011-01-28T02:34:00.000-05:00

It been fun "reading" Kobe Bryant lately - he has become such a master of saying things without saying things. For instance, when Jerry West called his Lakers "old" and critiqued their defense, implying that it wasn't getting any better, Kobe's measured response described how the Lakers had a complex team defense in which each player depended on the other, but not before he quietly declaimed "We're ranked like, what, third in the league in defense?". Translated: "Shut the fuck up, old man, and just do your job. We're doing ours."

Similarly, when asked if the Pacers were a playoff team after they came into the Staples Center and punched the champs in the mouth back on November 28, Bryant replied "Definitely." Translated: "Okay, now you have my attention. I will not overlook you again. Enjoy your moment in the sun, and look forward to the life of bitter pain you will be living for the foreseeable future." Indeed, a mere two-and-a-half weeks later, the Lakers came to Conseco and returned the favor 109-94.

And now, we are staring at a 5-15 record over the last twenty games. Not good.

Back in November, not long after my first Pacers post, the Pacers had beaten the Lakers and the Heat and had given OKC all they could handle. Only the Jazz (during their hot streak) kicked the Pacers to the curb like the old days. There was speculation that Indy had turned a corner anchored by the surprising rise of Roy Hibbert. Now, all that is gone. Hibbert has disappeared, the team is once again in disarray. Is this the same old Pacers, too crappy to make the playoffs, not quite crappy enough to climb up to the top of the draft lottery?

The main problem, as alluded to above, is that other teams started to take notice of Hibbert and the Pacers, and both shriveled in the heat of the spotlight. The Pacers-as-spunky-underdogs could hang with teams who were taking it easy (the Pacers representing the next best thing to a break in their schedule) and maybe steal one at the end. If they didn't, "well, at least they played them close". But when they took out the Lakers and the Heat early on, and generally started to look like a team that was on the verge of getting it together, teams stopped taking the night off. And, lo and behold, the Pacers can't step up and trade punches with good teams that are now paying attention . . . so, back to the bottom of the pack the P drift.

And then, there's Jim O'Brien's odd rotation (discussed with insight and detail, as always, at 8 Points 9 Seconds): with the exception of Danny Granger and Darren Collison, no one knows what his role on the team is supposed to be. It gets tough to prepare, mentally and otherwise, if you have no idea what you are preparing for.

O'Brien's excuse for the inconsistent rotation is simple: if the guy gets it, he plays. If he doesn't, he sits. There is a certain Darwinian logic to that, I suppose, but on a young team short on talent it's not the kind of atmosphere that breeds confidence . . . in fact, I think it's becoming clear that, as much as no longer being taken lightly by opponents, the P's recent issues stem from a crisis of confidence.

So, what do you do? O'Brien's methods are obviously counterproductive over the short run, and if things don't stabilize soon, then the Pacers can kiss the playoffs goodbye yet again. The logical course would be to just pick a rotation and ride it as far as it can take you - which, we all know, won't be any further than the first round of the playoffs at the absolute maximum - or just trash one more year auditioning players for next year's big money makeover. The problem is, trashing yet another year is not an option; it seems that O'Brien best have his rotation set within the next couple weeks at the latest. Will that actually happen? I'm afraid it doesn't look likely.

The Pacers are a small-market team horribly devoid of talent. The reason they are in this place is that they gambled and lost back in the early aughts, and it is only in this off-season that they will finally be out from under the onus of that gamble. I still harbor a small hope that there are enough spare parts to build a top notch team around one big-time free agent acquisition, but that in itself becomes a problem: what elite player can you get that, all other things being equal (money, championship opportunity, etc.), would actually choose to live in Indianapolis as opposed to, say, Chicago, South Beach, New York, LA, Boston, or even Denver, Portland, New Orleans, or Charlotte? The Pacers need one really big-time baller on the level of the LBJ's and D Wades and Kobes of the world. A Howard, D Will, Stoudemire, Durant, Anthony, Griffin or someone of that ilk is what is needed . . . and yes, the Heat aside, I think that one big-time player is all that is needed, because Granger could be back at his all-star level if he is no longer the number one option for the team (as I said before: great as Robin, not so hot as Batman).

But, until then, the Pacers need to improve enough to at least see the path to a championship, even if the free agent market ultimately doesn't pay off for them. At this point, the Pacers remain so far down they can't see up. The blue sky has just clouded over.

That'll teach me to write about basketball before Christmas.

Bulbous, Yes; Also, a Tin Teardrop

2011-01-17T01:58:00.003-05:00

The Captain Beefheart memorials have been outstanding, and there's little need for me to add to them. But I promised, didn't I?

As with most people, my entryway into the world of Captain Beefheart was through Frank Zappa. His vocals were featured on "Willie the Pimp" (Hot Rats), and he shared billing with Zappa on a live album called Bongo Fury . . . though, as I found out after listening to Beefheart for only a short while, that was far from a collaborative effort. As close as I could tell, he was another eccentricity in Zappa's little universe (a universe which, at the time, I found fascinating), so when I read that he had a new album out, I headed over to Sun Records by the Pizza King on 38th Street to pick it up. That record was 1978's Shiny Beast (Bat Chain Puller).

Musically speaking, by this time Beefheart had been to the edge, back again, and was heading back out. His masterwork Troutmaskreplica had been released in '69, followed by the earthier (but still equally out) Lick My Decals Off, Baby in '70. 1972 found Beefheart trying to win an audience by moving back towards the bluesy roots he had shown in his earliest work, without completely abandoning the "speaking in tongues" approach that had been so revolutionary on his two greatest records. Ted Templeman (Doobie Brothers, Van Halen) was brought in to sand the rough edges off Clear Spot, the most accessible album he had released since his early days.

Unfortunately, this "sell out" didn't quite work, so he fired the Magic Band, and went all in to try to get the stardom he so desperately desired: but alas, his two efforts in '74 lacked not only his well-established avant-garde edge, but also any hint of commercial potential. Unconditionally Guaranteed and Bluejeans and Moonbeams not only failed to find a popular audience, they didn't even match the sales numbers of his previous outside work: Bluejeans in particular is generally judged to be a complete disaster.

After some abortive attempts at recording with a new Magic Band, Beefheart finally came out from the cold with 1978's Shiny Beast. And that's where the story starts for me.

I read about Shiny Beast in some generic hi-fi mag in the Lapel Public Library. It was a positive review, speaking of a return to the Captain's musical brilliance of years past. By that time, I was in full-on Zappa crazy mode, and Zappa had, like, a million freaking albums to buy, but by that point I had picked up most of the titles that were available around town. Besides, I needed to have a little variety in the record collection. So, I headed out to Sun Records, picked up the LP, and cued it up on my turntable. And was immediately revolted.

I knew Beefheart was supposed to be "weird", but I was expecting the kind of weird that I heard on Bongo Fury. I was expecting Zappa weird. Instead, I got ragged and oddly-shaped music with lots of odd space and nothing to hold on to. Most of it sounded like goofy take offs on calliope music to me. And, worst of all, there was no power-drill style guitar brutality that I so loved on most all of the records I was listening to at the time. After a couple days listening to the record, "Owed T' Alex" and "Bat Chain Puller" started to slowly dawn on my consciousness (probably because of the guitars), but I still hated the album overall. Back in the day, when I hated an album, I took it back to the store and got another one. Besides, I knew that there would be another shipment of Zappa in soon, so maybe I could trade it in and chalk this up to experience.

Now, when I was returning records at the K-Mart, I would take a can opener, put a small but very deep gouge in the record, put it back in its sleeve, and take it back in. They would always frown at me, but I had a receipt, and I always got another record. I had never tried to return anything to Sun, but I figured it wouldn't be a problem, since they knew I was a regular customer and that I would be back. I figured that, this time, instead of gouging the record before returning it, I would just be honest. So, I roll up on the record store, take the album in, and give it to the hippie behind the counter. "Anything wrong with it?" he asked. "No, just not the record I expected. I just want to trade it in for credit." Well, that was the wrong answer. Turns out the whole can opener charade was hardly necessary at K-Mart, but would have served me well here. The hippie says "Nothing I can do for you man" and turned away without another word, leaving the vinyl sitting on the counter like a stinking pile of shit. Turns out the hippie did me the biggest favor anyone in a music store has ever done for me.

I took the album back home, and it grew on me. I never really grew to embrace it like I did the two albums that followed (Doc at the Radar Station and Ice Cream for Crow) - it didn't have the kind of attitude that really attracted me in my hormonal late-teen years - but I did like it. "Bat Chain Puller" especially I would play over and over again. I came to appreciate it as an interesting oddity, a nice little eccentricity that I could put on whenever I got sick of being pummeled by fuzzed-out guitars (which was pretty rare in those days). I still hold it in pretty much that same regard.

As a year passed, I grew fond of Shiny Beast, and I was still hearing about this monstrosity called Troutmaskreplica that Zappa had produced for Beefheart. I was still in big-time Zappa mode, and this was right around the time of the whole Lather fiasco, so that stuff was leaking out an LP at a time, but I was intrigued by the singular reputation that the Beefheart magnum opus had. One day, on Christmas break during my freshman year at ND, I was plugging my way through the stacks at Musicland in Mounds Mall with my girlfriend Ruth*, when there it was: the glaring red cover with a trout mask covering the face of some guy wearing a stove pipe hat with a badminton birdie on top. Troutmaskreplica. Now, I had no inclination of getting into Beefheart like I was into Zappa, or Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, Rush, Aerosmith, etc., before that, but I decided I wanted that album. Short on cash, I immediately moved the LP into the country music section under Johnny Cash so no one else would buy it, but I could find it again when I came back with the money. Two days later, I came back to buy the album; but alas, it was gone. I searched all the way through the country section, all the way through the Beefheart, miscellaneous C, miscellaneous B, Zappa, and anywhere else I thought it would be. I left, somewhat dejected, with yet another Zappa album.

Turns out my girlfriend Ruth, crafty gal that she was, noted how excited I was when I found the album, and thought it would be a good Christmas prank/present to buy it out from underneath me and give it to me for Christmas. So, the next day, I was at her parent's house with her, my best pal John, and her twin sister Mavis, and she springs it on me. I am thrilled to have it, as she is thrilled to have the Kansas album that I gave her for Christmas. Curious about what I was so excited about, she told me to go ahead and put it on the stereo. I demurred, knowing that she probably wouldn't like it, but she thought I was just being polite and insisted that I play it. I unfortunately replied "you won't like it", which she decided was an insult to her open mindedness, musically speaking. She was right, of course. And so was I.

Now, Ruth was a very sweet girl with a romantic soul who stayed up late at night listening to Billy Joel records and dreaming of blowing out of her one-horse town for the bright lights of her beloved New York City. I never questioned her affection for me, but she did think me somewhat the bumpkin and backward in the ways of the world. She was right, but as the Billy Joel fixation indicates, she wasn't too far ahead of me in that regard. She also found my arrogance about music somewhat annoying (as it was, is, and probably always will be!), since she considered herself more sophisticated musically . . . which, once again, her love of Billy Joel gives the lie to.

So, she was annoyed. She told me to put the record on, which I did. From the very first note, I was transfixed. Ruth, on the other hand, was furious: "This is the worst music I've ever heard in my life. This is terrible. I can't believe I actually paid for this record". My pal John only said "Holy shit."

And, I've never been the same.

Beefheart also figures in some of my other musical adventures with friends, but this post is already getting long, so I'll let you go to the other site to read about that.

I'm obsessed with music, and I've had all kinds of serious fixations over the years. They've come and gone and sometimes returned again: for instance, about five years ago, I went on a mini Led Zeppelin kick and realized it may have been almost twenty years since I had put on a Led Zeppelin record. Or, like my jazz favorites (Coltrane, Ornette, Cecil Taylor, Albert Ayler, Charles Mingus), there's a lot of music I will go for long periods of time without listening to much, then go on little mini-binges where I'll listen to little else for days. There are bands like Rush and Aerosmith, who evolved into horrible bands even though I still like their early stuff. Then there's Frank Zappa: he went from being almost my entire daily playlist to being someone whose music I hated. I'm now back to the point where I like the Mothers and his jazz fusion stuff, but I still hate his "social commentary" from about 1972 on.

Beefheart, on the other hand, has never been far away from my turntable, tape deck, CD player, mp3 player, whatever. From that very first needle drop on Troutmask at Ruth's house, I have been deeply hooked. To me, he had it all: soul, poetry, edge, vision. His output is easily my "desert island" music, no question. He is simply the best of his era; and I contend his music will outlast everything done in the rock era, including the Rolling Stones and The Beatles.

Goodbye, Captain.

__________________
* Names changed to protect those who don't necessarily want their shit up on the interwebs.

All artwork by Don Van Vliet, a.k.a. Captain Beefheart. If you are new to the Beefheart phenomenon, check out The Radar Station, an absolutely first-rate fansite, on of the best of its kind on the web.

Cloud of Sound; plus, In Rotation

2011-01-08T00:04:00.000-05:00

photo Alyssen Davis

I've created a profile on SoundCloud to dump off some of my music for your perusal . . . at this point, nothing that I haven't posted before in other places (including here), but it's a nice little sampler all pulled together in one place. So far it includes a couple duets I did with Bart Galloway (circa 2009 or so), several Hoosier Pete tracks, several Black Kaspar tracks, and a couple Catkillers tracks dating back as far as '94.

Hopefully, I will get some new stuff going this year. When I do, that is where the samples will be posted.

Enjoy!

* * * * *

Still in full-tilt Glenn Gould mania. Beethoven's piano sonatas are still the favorite, & I'm having fun doing compare and contrast between his Bach and his Berg/Schoenberg/Krenek. Otherwise,

In Rotation:

This Heat: complete
Slint: complete
Mahler: 9th (MTT/San Francisco)
Thin Lizzy: Jailbreak
Rory Gallagher: Deuce
Jeri Southern: Warm
Stan Getz: Quartets
Hoagy Carmichael: Playlist
Sir Richard Bishop: Soundcloud playlist
Das Racist: Shut Up, Man
The Body: All the Waters of the Earth Turn to Blood
Phantom Family Halo: Monoliths & These Flowers Never Die
Captain Beefheart: It Comes to You in a Plain Brown Wrapper
Crime: San Francisco's STILL Doomed
Mark Stewart + Maffia: Mark Stewart + Maffia

and, what the hell? Let's toss a reading list out as well:

Scott Tennent: Slint's Spiderland (33 1/3 series)
Slajov Zizek: In Defense of Lost Causes & Living In the End Times
Alain Badiou: The Communist Hypothesis
Herman Melville: Bartelby & Benito Cerino
Sigmund Freud: Civiliztion & It's Discontents
Henry David Thoreau: "On the Duty of Civil Disobedience"
Andre Breton: Selected Poems
The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States of America

not that I've gotten around to all of those yet, but I'll have them all done except the Badiou and the second Zizek book by the weekend.

"Clowns to the Left of Me, Jokers to the Right" . . .

2011-01-07T01:15:00.001-05:00

So, someone had the bright idea to "correct" Huck Finn by editing the word "nigger" out of the text . . . the idea being that, because the word showed up so frequently in the book, it was being dropped from school reading lists. Prof. Alan Gribben makes the following defenses of his decision to alter Twain's classic using more racially sensitive language:

–”Far more controversial than this reuniting of Twain’s boy books will be the editor’s decision to eliminate two racial slurs that have increasingly formed a barrier to these works for teachers, students, and general readers. The editor thus hopes to introduce both books to a wider readership than they can currently enjoy.”

–”We may applaud Twain’s ability as a prominent American literary realist to record the speech of a particular region during a specific historical era, but abusive racial insults that bear distinct connotations of permanent inferiority nonetheless repulse modern-day readers.”

–”I believe that a significant number of school teachers, college instructors, and general readers will welcome the option of an edition of Twain’s fused novels that spares the reader from a racial slur that never seems to lose its vitriol. Despite occasional efforts of rap and hip hop musicians to appropriate the term, and well-meaning but usually futile (from my own experience) endeavors by classroom teachers to inoculate their students against it by using Huckleberry Finn as a springboard to discuss its etymology and cultural history, the n-word remains inarguably the most inflammatory word in the English language.”

Christ, what a bunch of idiots. Twain is much more than a "prominent American literary realist", and he's up to more than that here. The language is very specifically a part of that. Huck Finn is, among other things, about a boy discovering and dealing with his own racism; "nigger" belongs there, and not just because it is an accurate picture of the vernacular. The word was as dismissive and demeaning then as it is now (even if it didn't face the same approbation), and Twain was very aware of that. He was a man whose insights and values regarding race are much more in line with our times than with his own: you can be sure if he used the word, he used it for a very specific effect. And yes, it should make us feel uncomfortable. It was meant to.

Anyway, I could go on, but my pal Angie's consideration of Huck Finn is much more on point, so you should go there and read it (including the comments).

* * * * *

"Political correctness" is one of those cudgels that conservatives always beat liberals with - often for good reason, as we see above - so how do they explain away editing their second most sacred text*, the Constitution of the United States of America, during today's ceremonial reading in the House of Representatives?

Oh yeah, that's right, they just skipped over the parts that were later amended . . . you know, cleaning up the mistakes:

“We’re reading the amended version with all amendments that are currently part of the Constitution,” said Kathryn Rexrode, a spokesman for Virginia Republican Rep. Bob Goodlatte, who spearheaded the reading. “It will not include any amendments that were in the original but later amended.”

Like the 18th Amendment, which outlawed booze, and was later repealed by the 21st Amendment. Or, most interestingly, that pesky "3/5ths Solution" in Article I, Section 2, which makes it clear that only free white men are full citizens of the country.

So, asked Jesse Jackson Jr. from the floor of the House, why aren't we reading the whole Constitution?

"The new Republican majority and their redacted Constitutional reading gives little deference to the long history of improving the Constitution and only seeks an interpretation of our Constitution based on the now, not the historic, broad body of law and struggle that it has taken to get there. It leaves out the need to continue to refine the Constitution so that we have a more perfect union. ...

Or, in other words, how convenient is it that a bunch of idiots who are always babbling about "the original intent of the founding fathers" choose to gloss over the fact that said intent includes the systematic dehumanization of a race of people?

Yes, we eventually "get it right" (or a lot closer to right than it started out being), but censoring the inconvenient bits of the Constitution is specifically meant to preempt the kind of arguments that people like me have been making against "original intent" to begin with: namely, "original intent" is not a useful requisite to judgement because the document had fundamental flaws at its inception. The Constitution is a starting place, not a goal.

It reminds me of the heated attacks that the Tea Party was making on (long dead and unable to defend himself) Justice Thurgood Marshall during the Kagan confirmation hearings: essentially, they wanted to paint the court in broad brush strokes of good (Antonin Scalia) and evil (Thurgood Marshall) because of the way Marshall supposedly deviated from the "Founding Father's Original Intent". Marshall, as was the case with almost every famous African American who crossed the color line in some important venue, never rose to the attacks of his critics, and he wouldn't have risen to this one had he been alive . . . but I always wanted to say on his behalf, "So, let me get this straight: I'm supposed to consider as gospel the wisdom of a bunch of crackers who owned my people, who didn't even consider folk like me fully human? You expect me to honor the intent of those fools? How about I weight their intent appropriately in my decision, like maybe . . . oh, let's say 3/5ths to their intent, and the other 2/5ths to all the crap they got wrong. I think thats more than fair, don't you, whitey?"

I swear to the heavens above, I don't know if these people are complete idiots, or if they think we are complete idiots. Either way, this must end.
____________________
* Unfortunately, I am not exaggerating here: there are Christian fundamentalists in the U. S. that consider the Constitution a divinely inspired text, just like the Bible.

Happy New Year Everyone

2011-01-01T00:01:00.001-05:00

Happy New Year, peeps . . . and I mean that sincerely, no equivocation, no F-bombs, no irony, no shit: Happy New Year to everyone who may be reading these words.

Now, I know there are historical/cultural precedents for where the Western nativity and new year fall on the calender, but I am not down with the specifics. I have, however, always felt the warmth of optimism radiated by the idea that the beginnings of everything (presumably everything good) are in the deepest, darkest days of winter . . . life in death.

People can be real shits sometimes; mostly they can't help it. All we can do is the best we can. All we can expect of others is the best they've got. At the end of the day, it is what it is, and what it is is the material of our tomorrows.

Happy New Year, and be good.

For All the Haters

2010-12-31T00:58:00.000-05:00

Okay, listen to this:

I MEAN IT. DON'T SKIP IT. LISTEN TO THE WHOLE SONG.

Now, go here for a discussion of American Idol and great female vocalists.

Do it.

Lots of cool YouTube video.

You won't be sorry.

And remember: Dionne Warwick rules them all.

Holly Jolly

2010-12-23T22:58:00.002-05:00

Whilst contemplating Jon Kyl's definition of the profanation of the nativity . . .

It is finally time. Here is your Christmas playlist, slightly modified from two years ago:

The Carpenters: "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas"
The Grinch (OST): "Trim Up the Tree"
Harry Connick: "It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas"
John Fahey: "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen Fantasy"
Johnny Mercer: "Winter Wonderland"
Andy Williams: "It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year"
Fats Waller: "Swingin' Them Jingle Bells"
Kitty Wells: "Away in a Manger"
Billie Holiday: "I've Got My Love to Keep Me Warm"
Dean Martin: "I've Got My Love to Keep Me Warm"
The Pogues: "Fairytale of New York"
Mariah Carey: "All I Want for Christmas is You"
Django Reinhardt/Stephane Grapelli: "Christmas Swing"
The Cats & the Fiddle: "Hep Cat's Holiday"
Sons of Heaven: "When Jesus was Born"
Mahalia Jackson: "Bless This House"
Oscar Peterson: "A Child is Born"
Ben Kaili: "Little Drummer Boy"
Leonard Bernstein/New York Philharmonic: "Carol of the Bells"
Dwight Yoakam: "Santa Claus is Back in Town"
Frank Sinatra: "Jingle Bells"
Jimmy Durante: "Frosty the Snowman"
Elvis Presley: "Santa Bring My Baby Back (to Me)"
Bill Evans: "Santa Claus is Coming to Town"
The Jackson 5: "Santa Claus is Coming to Town"
Rahsaan Roland Kirk: "We Free Kings"
Jimmy Smith: "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen"
The Brian Setzer Orchestra: "You're a Mean One, Mr. Grinch"
Louie Armstrong: "Cool Yule"
Louis Prima: "What Will Santa Say (When He Finds Everybody Swingin")"
Straight No Chaser: "Hark the Herald Angels Sing/Angels We Have Heard on High"
Willie Nelson: "O Little Town of Bethlehem"
Sister Rosetta Tharp: "O Little Town of Bethlehem"
Moya Brennan: "What Child is This?"
Blue Eyed Grass: "Oh Come Oh Come Emmanuel"
Country Gentlemen: "Silent Night"
Dinah Washington: "Ole Santa"
The Flaming Lips: "A Change at Christmas (Say is isn't So)"
Billy Eckstine: "Christmas Eve"
Roy Orbison: "Pretty Paper"
Billy May: "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer"
Peggy Lee: "The Christmas Song"
Mel Torme: "The Christmas Song"
The Pretenders: "2000 Miles"
The Choir of Westminster Abbey: "Good King Wenceslas"
Merle Haggard: "Silver Bells"
Bobby Helms: "Jingle Bell Rock"
Chuck Berry: "Run Rudolph Run"
Eartha Kitt: "Santa Baby"
Burl Ives: "A Holly Jolly Christmas"
Bing Crosby: "White Christmas"
Leo Kottke: "Accordion Bells"
Ella Fitgerald: "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas"

Go ahead, suspend disbelief, rock the playlist. 'tis the season, after all.

And remember, Chairman Mao says: SHUT THE FUCK UP!

The 50th Revolution

2010-12-19T23:40:00.000-05:00

Well friends, I don't mind telling you that this year has been a load of shit. I'm annoyed, annoyed, annoyed . . . and I don't want to get into it, at least not yet.

Now before you send me your well-meaning sympathies or concerned missives inquiring about my wellbeing, please bear in mind that 1) I believe my mood is pretty much completely under my own control, so if I walk around in a constant state of annoyance, it's my own damn fault; and 2) I don't think it's necessary, or even desirable, to drift along in a constant fog of "happiness". "If you're not getting pissed off, you're not paying attention", as they say.

In other words, I'm fine. Thanks for asking.

Over the last couple years our little family has had to deal with things. Fortunately, we are able to deal with these things together, and we're growing closer by the day. The future is always brighter; but that doesn't make the present less annoying.

Things are gestating, and the process has me a bit on edge. The future is unclear to me, but I have more confidence in my ability to strangle it with my bare hands than I ever have had before. And this little fit of annoyance? It seems like the gateway to something, though I swear I don't know what.

Well, there you have it. I'm not going to get personal, so y'all are left with nothing but murky generalities. The previous five paragraphs were pretty much a waste of your time - sorry 'bout that. I'll get back on the horse after the first of the year and start teasing out some of the angles that have been banging around in my head, then lay them down here for your reading pleasure (I really need to do a proper Beefheart memorial to start with).

Until then, I raise my cup of haterade and toast another year down the tubes. Onward into the fifth decade. Or is it that I'm already a year into the fifth decade? I never understood how those things work.

Fuck it. Happy New Year to everyone. Let's make this one better than the last.

RIP Captain Beefheart

2010-12-17T23:20:00.000-05:00

This man is the single most important musical influence in my life. I think he is the greatest rock musician ever, even though he arguably didn't "know" how to play an instrument.

I will write on this at a later time, when I really can approach the topic in the detail it deserves.